The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages [1 ed.] 9789048537174

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KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES

Copyright © 2021. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Edited by Clare Monagle

The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages

Monagle. The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages, Amsterdam University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2021. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages

Monagle. The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages, Amsterdam University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Knowledge Communities The Knowledge Communities series focuses on innovative scholarship in the areas of intellectual history and the history of ideas, particularly as they relate to the communication of knowledge within and among diverse scholarly, literary, religious and social communities across Western Europe. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series especially encourages new methodological outlooks that draw on the disciplines of philosophy, theology, musicology, anthropology, paleography and codicology. Knowledge Communities addresses the myriad ways in which knowledge was expressed and inculcated, not only focusing upon scholarly texts from the period, but also emphasizing the importance of emotions, ritual, performance, images and gestures as modalities that communicate and acculturate ideas. Knowledge Communities publishes cutting-edge work that explores the nexus between ideas, communities and individuals in medieval and early modern Europe.

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Series Editors Clare Monagle, Macquarie University Mette Bruun, University of Copenhagen Babette Hellemans, University of Groningen Severin Kitanov, Salem State University Alex Novikoff, Fordham University Willemien Otten, University of Chicago Divinity School

Monagle. The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages, Amsterdam University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,

The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages

Copyright © 2021. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Edited by Clare Monagle

Amsterdam University Press

Monagle. The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages, Amsterdam University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2021. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration: King Louis IX Carrying the Crown of Thorns Source: The Cloisters Collection, 1937 Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 593 3 978 90 4853 717 4 (pdf) e-isbn doi 10.5117/9789462985933 nur 684 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Communities of Learning – Constant J. Mews Clare Monagle

9

Section 1  Twelfth-century Learning 1 Carnal Compassion

25

2 From Wisdom to Science

43

3 Authority and Innovation in Bernard of Clairvaux’sDe gratia et libero arbitrio

63

4 Words of Seduction

83

5 The Emotional Landscape of Abelard’sPlanctus David super Saul et Ionatha

99

Peter Abelard’s Conflicted Approach to Empathy Juanita Feros Ruys

A Witness of the Theological Studies in Paris in the 1240s Riccardo Saccenti

Marcia L. Colish

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A Letter from Hugh Metel to Bernard of Clairvaux Rina Lahav

Carol J. Williams

Section 2  Sanctity and Material Culture 6 Dirty Laundry

131

7 Significatio and Senefiance, or Relics in Thomas Aquinas and Jean de Meun

147

Thomas Becket’s Hair Shirt and the Making of a Saint Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman

Earl Jeffrey Richards

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8 The Cult of Thomas Aquinas’s Relicsat the Dawn of the Dominican Reform and the Great Western Schism Marika Räsänen

171

Section 3 Theological Transmissions: Intellectual Culture after 1200 9 Food for the Journey

193

10 A Sense of Proportion

213

11 Utrum sapienti competat prolem habere?

227

12 Attuning to the Cosmos

249

The Thirteenth-Century French Version of Guiard of Laon’s Sermon on the Twelve Fruits of the Eucharist Janice Pinder

Jacobus Extending Boethius around 1300 John N. Crossley

An Italian Debate Sylvain Piron

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The Ethical Man’s Mission from Plato to Petrarch Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides

Section 4 Gender, Power, and Virtue in Early Modernity 13 The Miroir des dames, the Chapelet des vertus, and Christine de Pizan’s Sources

279

14 In Praise of Women

297

15 The Invention of the French Royal Mistress

317

Karen Green

Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti’s Gynevera de le clare donne Carolyn James

Tracy Adams

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Epilogue

337

Index

343

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Peter Howard

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Introduction Communities of Learning – Constant J. Mews Clare Monagle Abstract This chapter articulates a number of key contributions made by Constant J. Mews to the field of Medieval Studies over the course of his career. In particular, it focuses upon his expertise in Abelard and Heloise, his insights into musicology and musical communities, and his groundbreaking work in the study of women intellectuals in the Middle Ages. All of his scholarly work, the chapter argues, should be understood in the frame of his devotion to the communities of learning, both of the past and in the present.

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Keywords: Peter Abelard, Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen, Musicology, Communities of Learning, Constant J. Mews

When I first started working at Monash University in 2007, having just completed my doctorate, I found out that the institution had metrics called ‘Performance Targets’. Each staff member was expected to achieve a level of research funding, publish a designated amount of publications, and achieve a certain level of teaching competency as measured through student evaluations. The criteria were scaled according to academic level, with full professors seemingly being expected to scale Everest, cure cancer, invent lucrative patentable technology, as well as nurture a new generation of scholars who would also go on to scale Everest. I exaggerate, but the targets through which the performance of a scholar was to be assessed seemed to me at the time to be so unreachable as to be absurd. I confessed my shock to a colleague, who said, ‘Don’t worry, nobody in the entire faculty reaches those targets’. I breathed a sigh of relief, but then my colleague exclaimed ‘with the exception of Constant Mews’. I already knew Constant well, having studied with him as an honors and masters student. And having long been

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in awe of his intellectual energies, his erudition, his work ethic, and his deep knowledge of the medieval past, I was not surprised that of the myriad excellent scholars at Monash at the time, he was the one who was rumored to be climbing mountains. Of course, assessing the achievements of a scholar through the expectations of the contemporary university is a dubious exercise at best. As Constant has himself shown in his research, the University as an institution has always reflected the values, preoccupations, and desires of the community within which it lives, for better or for worse. The idea of ‘Performance Targets’ reflects a dominant culture obsessed with managing labor through the measurement of productivity, and with turning colleagues into competitors. The revelation of Constant’s myriad successes within that system should not be read as an endorsement of its values. In fact, Constant has always railed passionately against attempts to reduce the value of research to easily quantifiable but subjective data, to turn a person into a citation ranking, or to describe a journal with a letter grade to indicate its putative quality. As a stalwart member of the National Tertiary Education Union in Australia, Constant has stood on the picket line many times to protest managerialism and casualization in the Australian academy. But those caveats notwithstanding, I tell the story of Constant’s exemplary target-meeting reputation as it does point to just how prodigious Constant’s achievements have been in his career. He has excelled on a great many measures. To focus on Constant’s individual excellence, however, misses the most important point about his life and work. Constant’s career is characterized by a history of intellectual collaboration, generosity, and the building of scholarly communities. Constant has collaborated with scholars across the globe, and has mentored and supported the research endeavors of a great many graduate students and early career researchers. In his inaugural professorial lecture, which was given at Monash in 2011, Constant asked these questions about the institution of the University: Is it a community of learning, bringing together teachers and students or is it an institution, centrally directed from above? What is the relationship of the University to the Academy and to the town or city in which it exists? Did the University open up opportunities for education, fostering freedom of thought, or was it an ecclesiastically controlled structure that imposed theological orthodoxy and clerical authority?1 1

Mews, ‘Imagining University’.

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Introduction

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These concerns have been at the core of his work throughout his career. Constant has always encountered the University with nuance, criticism, and love. His work has repeatedly revealed that the University has, from its beginnings, reinforced the status quo by training its foot soldiers and rationalizing its ideology. But Constant’s work has also shown the University as a site of creativity, flourishing, and radical rethinking. His work, and his relationships, are testament to the possibilities of the scholarly space to generate wonder, collegiality, and new ideas. The existence of this volume testifies to the ‘Community of Learning’ established by Constant J. Mews over the course of his career.2 The various chapters that constitute this volume reveal the intellectual fruits of this community. Constant has always championed the necessity of understanding the nexus between learning and relationships, between ideas and their world, between intellectuals and their institutions. He has insisted that if we are to gain substantial historical knowledge in intellectual history, we must frame ideas within their world of creation, and the world that they go on to create. And as a scholar himself, he has always situated intellectual inquiry within friendship and collaboration. Just as Constant has maintained that investigation into the history of ideas should not be a deracinated and desiccated project, so too has he shown the necessity of friendship and community to the making of ideas in the present. Chronologically, this collection of essays covers the period between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern. Thematically, the essays are concerned with ideas of orthodoxy, gender, culture, ideas, language, pedagogy, and politics. There are contributions from historians, political theorists, musicologists, and literary scholars. Geographically, the essays consider texts from Northern France, Spain, the Rhineland, Italy, and England. Some of the contributions are rigorously philological, offering precise readings of particular word choices and syntactical structures, and reveal how paying such close heed to language opens up a world of meaning and context. Some essays are musicological, uncovering how theories about music are always yoked to ideas about divinity and the celestial in this period. Other contributions are concerned with cultural issues, mapping how a textual remnant of the past can help reveal the deep ideological structures inhering in a particular moment. And still more essays think about material culture, wondering what it meant to revere the bones or clothing of a saint, and relating these matters of substance to matters of theology. 2

On this formulation, see Mews and Crossley (eds.), Communities of Learning.

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The range of interests and capacities reflected in these essays directly mirror Constant’s record of teaching, research, and publication. Constant’s intellectual trajectory began with the study of the emergent schools in the twelfth century, paying particular heed to theories of language and of signification. He worked closely with manuscripts from that period, producing an edition of Abelard’s Theologia ‘Scholarium’ for the Corpus Christianorum series.3 Arguably, however, even more signif icant than the edition was his 1990 article in Exemplaria titled ‘Orality, Literacy, and Authority in the Twelfth-Century Schools’.4 The article drew on important recent work in Medieval Studies that had sought to find methods to track the importance of orality in medieval intellectual life, as well as to chart the consequences of the increasing codification of the written word after c. 1150.5 Constant’s article read against the grain in a number of Abelard’s works to argue that the classroom was where Abelard’s ideas were made, transformed, and made again. That is, where others had seen a closed system of an individual thinker, Constant revealed the interplay between Abelard’s ideas and the relationships within which they were soldered. In so doing, he refused, absolutely, a teleological story of scholastic theology within which one male genius bequeaths a coherent system to the next. He revealed Abelard’s ideas to be porous and changeable, in the best possible sense. A number of the essays in this volume respond to Constant’s groundbreaking work on Abelard, as well as the general intellectual context of the twelfth century. The first five essays of the volume consider the rich world of twelfth-century thinking, responding to Constant’s injunction to think about the period as one that is emotionally and sonically experimental, as well as intellectually innovative. Juanita Ruys’ contribution reads Abelard’s oeuvre to reconstruct his complicated, and conflicted, understanding of empathy. In so doing, Ruys unravels Abelard’s negotiation of the tension between Christian ideas of love and a Senecan repudiation of emotion’s destabilising effects. Riccardo Saccenti considers the shift from what he calls ‘wisdom to science’, as theological speculation became standardized in the aftermath of Lombard’s Sentences. Saccenti’s work offers new insight into the formalization of the theological curriculum, mapping significant changes between the eras of Abelard and that of Aquinas in terms of the disciplining of theology. What both chapters show, and in so doing reflect Constant’s vision of the twelfth century, is that the nascent schools were 3 4 5

Mews and Buytaert (eds.), Petri Abaelardi. Mews, ‘Orality, Literacy, and Authority. See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record and Stock, The Implications of Literacy.

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Introduction

13

engaged in theological inquiry that was open-ended and driven by a desire to make sense of the Christian subject’s relationship to his or her world. It is accepted in the history of scholasticism that it is not until Aquinas that theology offers a sweeping reading of the universe, that moves from the micro to the ontologically macro. Constant has shown, as Ruys and Saccenti do in his wake, that while twelfth-century thinkers were not as systematic as their thirteenth-century descendants, they were certainly deeply interested in holistic questions about the relationship between the Christian person and their universe. As a measure of Constant’s holistic vision of the twelfth century, he has always been every bit as interested in the schools’ putative nemesis Bernard of Clairvaux, as he is in the schoolmen themselves. Constant has revealed the limitations of a scholastic/monastic binary, arguing that there was significant intellectual exchange between the two worlds throughout the twelfth century. To that end, two of the contributors to this book take Bernard of Clairvaux very seriously indeed. Marcia L. Colish explicates Bernard’s theology of free will, which she argues he derives from an innovative and psychologically acute reading of Cassian. This Bernard is a sophisticated theologian in his own right, moving away from Augustine in a novel formulation. The point of the explication is not to ask whether or not Bernard’s views gained traction. Rather, Colish illuminates Bernard’s originality, and in so doing explores the particularly febrile pedagogical environment of the schools in the period before Lombard’s Sentences took hold. Rina Lahav’s essay explores letters written to Bernard of Clairvaux by the little-known Augustinian canon Hugh Metel. Hugh was a prolific letter-writer, who wrote to a great many luminaries, including Heloise. Lahav’s article gets to the heart of the means by which communities of learning were established and maintained, across time and place. Lahav performs a close-reading of one of Hugh’s letters to Bernard, revealing the registers of affect, spiritual seduction, and somatic intensity that informed epistolarity during the twelfth century. In so doing, Lahav follows Mews’ expert example in how to unpack the rhetorical genre of the letter, paying great heed to dictaminal convention while also reading against the grain for the original ideas contained therein. Of course, of his myriad achievements, Constant is most well-known for his own work on a different set of letters. It is to this work that Lahav gestures in her chapter. In 1999 Constant published The Lost Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-century France.6 The book 6 Mews, Lost Love Letters.

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was received with rapture, as well as strong criticism, and the debate rages about Constant’s attribution of the Epistolae Duorum Amantium to Abelard and Heloise. Sylvain Piron, Barbara Newman, and Stephen C. Jaeger have been among a number of eminent medievalists who have lent public voices of support to Constant’s claim that this corpus of letters comes from the styli of the famous lovers. John Marenbon and Jan Ziolkowski are among the eminent detractors. This is not the time nor place to rehearse or reprise those debates, although taken together the various responses to Constant’s book themselves offer a source to understand differences of method of approach among medievalists at the beginnings of the twenty-first century. What matters, however, for the purpose of this more general discussion of Constant’s work, is that the boldness of his attribution was a gift to the field of Medieval Studies. Constant’s attribution was controversial, and it aroused deep passions and engaged debate within the academy. The provocation of the attribution generated further knowledge about the letters, both philological and historical. Even more importantly, Constant’s book energized enormous public interest in Abelard and Heloise. In 2005, Constant’s work was cited in an article on the lovers in The New York Times, titled ‘Heloise and Abelard: Love Hurts’. Constant was interviewed in the major broadsheet papers in Australia. This publicity matters because Constant has always been determined that scholarly work on the Middle Ages should be accessible and meaningful to the public. Just as he has shown that Abelard did not emerge from, or live in, an ivory tower, nor should we as scholars be isolated from the world. Carol Williams’ chapter rounds out the first section of the volume. This essay looks at the relationship between Abelard and Heloise from a different perspective still, reading the emotional landscape of Abelard’s hymns. Williams performs a reading of Abelard’s Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha, looking at the hymn through the frames of emotion studies and musicology. In making sense of the precise formal aspects of the lament, Williams is then able to argue that the Planctus conveys an intense, almost overwhelming, emotionality. In making these arguments about the affective aspects of Abelard’s hymn, as you might expect, Williams draws closely on Constant’s work in The Lost Love Letters. She also draws a great deal from a book by the aforementioned Juanita Feros Ruys, The Repentent Abelard: Family, Gender, and Ethics in Peter Abelard’s Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus. Ruys sits alongside Constant as a leader in twelfth-century studies in Australia, and their work on Heloise and Abelard has been mutually constitutive. Williams’ essay is a lovely testament to this particular community of learning. The second group of essays in the volume concern saints and their remains. In Medieval Studies, generally speaking, scholars who work on

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Introduction

15

the history of ideas do not tend to the histories of bodies as well. Constant, of course, has not tolerated a crude distinction between mind and body in his work, and has insisted on the necessity for understanding the material lives of medieval subjects, as much as is possible. His work on music is a case in point. Constant, working with a team at Monash that includes Carol Williams and John Crossley, has edited, translated, and explicated a number of important texts in the history of medieval music. They have helped to enable access to the auditory world of the Middle Ages.7 They have used these texts to think about what medieval people heard, and what they made of it when they did so. Constant’s work on relics also enlists the emotions. He has looked at the case of the relics of Thomas Aquinas, in particular, to try to understand the affective meanings of the scholastic saint, and the purposes to which his bodily legacy was put. Three essays in this volume also look at the uses of saintly remains, or at least the stories told about them. Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman tell the story of Thomas Becket’s hair shirt, which he was apparently found to have been wearing at the time of his murder. The hair shirt served as a sign of Becket’s hidden monasticism, signalling that he had thoroughly repudiated earthly wealth and power. Bollermann and Nederman show how significant the hair shirt became in debates about Becket’s sanctity, and they track the escalation of the discourse into increasingly gory territory. Later accounts of the hair shirt, as they reveal, have it foul and besieged with vermin. Tellingly, among the authors that Bollermann and Nederman cite in their account of the hair shirt is John of Salisbury, a thinker about whom they are leading experts. In considering John’s deployment of the hair shirt, which he renders in lurid and passionate language, Bollermann and Nederman reveal the author’s entanglement in the rhetorical norms of his day. John of Salisbury is most famous as a political thinker, who theorised the tremendously influential metaphor of the body social. The John that describes the hair shirt, however, is concerned with a different sort of social body, one that reflects the aspirations and realpolitik of his day. Earl Jeffrey Richards looks at the implications of the theology of relics, particularly as expressed by Thomas Aquinas, for poetic practice in the thirteenth century. Richards focuses upon the work of Jean de Meun, and reads into his poetry the scholastic milieu within which he lived and wrote. Relics were, Richards argues, the subject of scholarly arguments in which key ideas of signification were negotiated. That is, relics are one category through which theology expanded its semiotic and semantic vocabulary. In 7

See, for example, Mews, et al. Johannes de Grocheio.

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the Roman de le Rose, Richards reads Jean De Meun’s playful deployment of scholastic ideas, in manners both dutiful and parodic. Richard moves from Latin to vernacularity, and from theology to poetry. He insists on locating the Roman de la Rose in the time and place of its creation and performs close textual analysis to show the world of the schools in the poetry on the page. Richards’ reading is deliberately earthy, placing Jean de Meun’s misogynistic bawdiness alongside the high theory of scholasticism. This combination reflects Constant’s concern in his work on the twelfth-century schools that they too be understood as located spaces, bounded and inhabited, places of play as well as learning. Finally, Marika Räsänen reconstructs the cultural and theological politics of the celebrations of Thomas Aquinas’ translatio, looking closely at the liturgy used to commemorate the day. Räsänen argues that the veneration of Aquinas’ relics, as well as the masses said in his honor, enabled him to be figured as a healer and an agent of reform. She suggests, in fact, that he comes to be projected as an Avignon saint, in a cult promulgated by Elias Raymundus of Toulouse. Räsänen shows how commemorative practices interwove to produce this reforming Avignon saint, particularly looking at hagiography, ritual and the display of relics. Taken together, it is possible to see a very particular type of Thomas emerge over the course of the fourteenth century, one to whom it was possible to pray for renewal and integrity. Fittingly, Räsänen’s contribution draws on the work of Constant and Richards on the relics of Thomas. This is another marvellous example of Constant’s skills in building scholarly relationship. Constant began as Räsänen’s PhD examiner, but the two now collaborate as colleagues, and draw on the work of other scholars in Constant’s networks, such as Richards. Constant has always enjoyed following ideas over time, as they shift and mutate to bear the demands of different historical moments. This is not, to be sure, a Lovejoyian fascination with detached concepts over time. Rather, Constant seeks to find out who deploys a concept at a given time, and how they make it work within their larger agenda. He charts how ideas tenaciously hold on over time, but also how they bend. For example, he has looked closely at how the reception of Cicero in the Latin West in the Middle Ages was integral to discourses of friendship and love, but also how Cicero was adapted to the key Christian concept of caritas. He has tracked ideas of virtue ethics over the entire Middle Ages, paying particular heed to how they are defined in relation to gender and to status. He has looked at the concept of poverty, and tracked how it is mobilized at different times for different ideological purposes across the Middle Ages. Finally, he has considered at length the implications of Hebraism for the making of scholastic knowledge. The

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Introduction

17

third section of essays in this volume all perform this type of contextually inflected intellectual history. This approach privileges neither Foucauldian genealogy nor Cambridge school contextualism. Instead, these essays follow shifting ideas in relation to the voices and institutions that deploy them. The first essay, by Janice Pinder, follows the reception of Guiard of Laon’s early thirteenth-century sermon on the Eucharist, as it was translated from Latin into French. Pinder points out that while Guiard’s theology has been overshadowed by the later work of Bonaventure and Aquinas on the sacrament, the earlier sermon is important as it reflects the emerging influence of mendicants. Pinder compares the Latin and the French texts side by side, in order to show how the translators emphasized certain ideas, and clarified others. In so doing, she reveals the porous linguistic world of the thirteenth-century schools, implicitly refusing the Latin/Vernacular distinction that obtains so strongly in medieval studies. John Crossley’s essay also focuses upon issues of translation and transmission. He considers the efforts by Jacobus de Ispania to revise Boethius within the frame of new techniques, particularly algorism. Crossley reveals the detail of Jacobus’ attempt to match Boethian musical theory to a series of calculations that prove its intellectual reliability, and provide a more solid basis for normative assumptions about the relationship between music and the spheres. Crossley articulates the necessary and implicit relationship between music theory and mathematics in the thirteenth century, and explains the intellectual processes through which they were bridged. Pinder and Crossley’s essays each reveal the necessity of rigorous close reading in order to see how ideas shifted and transformed within the Middle Ages in the West. Sylvain Piron’s essay moves from the world of Paris to that of Italy, and considers debates about the costs of marriage upon the work of a philosopher. He recalls Heloise’s famous injunction against the idea of marriage to Abelard, when she railed against the impact it would have upon his work. Piron considers how this type of conversation is transformed among the lay intellectuals of cities like Arezzo, Bologna, and Florence. Piron considers the conversations among a number of these men, whom some have called ‘pre-humanists’, about whether or not the philosopher should have progeny. Where Heloise’s concern was explicitly that of marriage, Piron shows that the emergence of lay intellectuals in Italy produced novel debates about the liabilities of children for the philosophical life. What is important about these debates, as Piron shows, is what they reveal about the affective and spiritual possibilities attached to ideas of fatherhood at the time. These notions of fatherhood combine with an increased interest in Aristotle’s Economics, and the articulation of the household as a political unit. From

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looking closely at these debates, Piron builds a larger cultural account of changing ideas of masculinity, intellectual life, and paternity in Italy at the turn of the thirteenth century. Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides also examines debates on the philosophical life, and its relationship to the bodily and the spiritual. Her analysis focuses on Petrarch’s Secretum, a text that stages a conflict between competing desires. On the one hand, Petrarch is gripped by his desire for words and for carnal love, which he folds together under the rubric of the temporal. On the other, following Augustine, Petrarch desires the eternal, which is attained by silence. Anagnostou-Laoutides offers a new reading of the Secretum, which places Petrarch’s quandary in the context of concurrent fourteenth-century theories of sound and music. Drawing upon Constant’s work on Boethian music theory in the Middle Ages, Anagnostou-Laoutides integrates discrete scholarly fields – those of classical studies, musicology, and the history of medieval thought – to make sense of the tensions animating thought in the Middle Ages. She reveals the inextricability of classical and Christian ideas in the Middle Ages for thinkers such as Petrarch, as well as highlighting one of the fault lines that made their reconciliation impossible. Eloquence or silence? Philosophy or meditation? Anagnostou-Laoutides reading of the Secretum explores this tension, and tracks its literary and theological antecedents. The final three contributions to the volume engage with women’s voices, and women’s authority in the late medieval and early modern periods. Constant’s work has always insisted on the necessity of gender as a category of analysis, but not in a way that segregates the voices of men and women into discreet discursive frames. Rather, his insistence that intellectual life be understood within communities has always made space for their myriad members. This has meant that he has not privileged, as so much work in the history of medieval ideas has tended to do, the canonical texts produced by the universities. Focusing solely on scholastic theological treatises implicitly reifies men’s voices as normative, as only men had access to the institutions of their production. But when the net is cast wider, into the world of communities, a great deal of women’s voices become apparent. In terms of the twelfth century, Constant was one of the key figures in medieval studies who read Hildegard and Heloise as serious thinkers. As his student in the early 1990s, I assumed that this approach was normal: of course a survey of twelfth-century thought should place Heloise and Hildegard at the centre. As I moved beyond Monash, I realised that this was not the case, and that Constant’s scholarly advocacy for these women had done much to bring them into the historiographical spotlight. And subsequent to that work, Constant has also worked with collaborators to produce important work

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Introduction

19

on Christine de Pizan and her world. He has, once again with collaborators, offered new formulations on the types of advice literature generated for, and sometimes by, women. Karen Green’s contribution reflects her long-term collaboration with Constant, much of which has focused upon women’s literature in the late Middle Ages. Notably, in 2008, Constant, Green, and Pinder edited and translated a new edition of Christine’s Book of Peace.8 Green’s essay continues this focus upon Christine, looking closely at her sources for her early work, the Othea Epistre. Green points out that it has been generally supposed that Christine was influenced by a text called the Fleurs de toutes vertues, as the Othea seemingly borrows a great deal from it. Green tests this assumption, widely accepted in the scholarship, by questioning why it has generally been assumed that the Fleurs predates the Othea. Green shows that there is little evidence that the Fleurs predated Christine’s text. Instead, deploying philological analysis, she shows that it is much more likely that the anonymous author of the Fleurs borrowed from the Othea. This matters a great deal. Green’s analysis of a scholarly snapshot, a seemingly small moment of attribution, reveals the way that ostensibly neutral editorial practices can betray gendered practices. In this example, it was easier to think that Christine had borrowed materials from an earlier source than it was to assign the ideas to her as originator. Green’s analysis of the Othea does not only further explicate the ideas of the text itself, but reveals something of the field’s blind spots when it comes to recognizing the originality of women authors. Green’s essay concerns a woman’s voice, and the processes by which aspects of her originality may have been missed in the scholarship. The following essay, however, looks at a little-known text written by a man that celebrates the role played by women in political life. Carolyn James’ contribution looks at a late fifteenth-century Italian text written in praise of powerful women of the recent past. Written by Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, this work explicitly followed Boccaccio in glorifying great women. Unlike Boccaccio, however, Arienti focused upon women of recent memory who had deployed influence and wielded authority in aristocratic households. His work name-checks a great number of women from powerful families of the Italian peninsula, praising their acumen, wisdom, and virtue. The text, as James points out, testifies not only to the political and diplomatic roles played by women in the recent history of Italy’s leading dynasties. His work also testifies to their ongoing influence, as Arienti’s text also seeks the approval of, and patronage from, women in these same families. But we 8

Green et al., The Book of Peace.

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should not over-reach, James suggests, and see this text as proto-feminist. James also reveals the typological imaginary within which these women are praised. She shows that the women are figured as temperate and prudent, and placed within the tradition of Marian piety. Their capacity to negotiate the thorny and complicated worlds of aristocratic governance is transformed, in Arienti’s hands, into beatific peace-making. James’ essay explores the power that early modern Italian noblewomen were able to wield, and also the limitations governing the interpretation and legitimacy of that power. Tracy Adams offers the final essay of the volume, considering the invention of the royal mistress in France, tracking the process by which the role of mistress became a tradition and position of authority within the court. Adams explicitly positions the essay alongside Constant’s work on Heloise. Adams points out that one of Constant’s achievements has been to show how Heloise skilfully and strategically deployed Ovid and Cicero to make her arguments about the nature of friendship and love. Heloise used their insights, and she furthered them for her own intellectual benefit. Adams, similarly, seeks to look at how classical ideas were transformed in the service of legitimising the mistress as a woman of authority. In particular, she considers how the mythological figure of Diana was used in tableaux and pageants to represent the mistress, and to authorise her location in the court. Adams argues that emergence of a mythological imaginary over the course of the sixteenth century in France, which to some degree replaced the identification of the royal family with the holy family, made space for different types of authority, as well as valourizing carnality. Mythology offered, Adams suggests, an alternative way of depicting power and its actors. There was no room for a mistress in the holy family, but there was space for her in the allegorical playground of myth. The final word belongs to Peter Howard, who worked alongside Constant for a great many years at Monash. In his epilogue, Peter testifies to the vivacity and engagement of Constant as a colleague, returning him to the community of learning in which he has flourished.

Conclusion Constant is a member of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He is a corresponding member of the Medieval Academy. He is a life member of the Australian Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS), as well as being a past-president of the organization. Constant has received every prestigious fellowship bestowed by the Australian Research Council. In

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short, his scholarship and his service have been well recognized already. We, myself and the contributors to this volume, hope this book also recognizes Constant’s achievements and that it is worthy of the task. It is very hard for words on a page to do justice to someone as vivacious, brilliant, and original as Constant. But these words, at the very least, can bear witness to communities of learning generated by Constant J. Mews, and the love and the esteem within which he is held. Finally, this book is for Maryna Mews as well. If we are to take seriously Constant’s injunction to bring life and ideas together, then we must recognize Maryna’s warmth, generosity, and enthusiasm as well. Her joie de vivre, curiosity, and openness to the world matches that of Constant. Anyone who knows Constant and Maryna knows the devotion and kindness that characterizes their union. None of this is to reduce Maryna to Constant’s orbit – – I would not dare. Rather, I mention Maryna in this context because it takes meaningful communities to produce meaningful scholarship, and the most important member of Constant’s community is, without doubt, Maryna. Congratulations Constant, for everything. gratias tibi ago

Bibliography

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Primary Sources Green, Karen; Constant J. Mews; Janice Pinder, ed. and trans. The Book of Peace by Christine de Pizan. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2008. Mews, Constant J.; John Crossley; Catherine Jeffreys; Leigh McKinnon; Carol Williams, ed. and trans. Johannes de Grocheio: Ars Musice. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011. Mews, Constant J. and Eligius Buytaert (eds.). Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica II. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 13, Turnhout: Brepols: 1987.

Secondary Sources Clanchy, Michael. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Crossley, John and Constant J. Mews, eds. Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.

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Mews, Constant J. ‘Imagining University: Communities of Learning, the Academy and the City’. Inaugural Professorial Lecture, given on 31 May 2011. Mews, Constant J. The Lost Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-century France. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Mews, Constant J. ‘Orality, Literacy, and Authority in the Twelfth-Century Schools’. Exemplaria 2, no. 2 (1990), 475-500. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

About the Author

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Clare Monagle is Associate Professor and Discipline Chair (Modern History) in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. She is a scholar of medieval thought, the history of emotions, and gender studies.

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Section 1

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Twelfth-century Learning

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Carnal Compassion Peter Abelard’s Conflicted Approach to Empathy Juanita Feros Ruys Abstract Abelard addresses the cognitive-affective concept of empathy (compassio) across a range of his writings. He questions its ethics in his philosophical writings, taking his lead from Seneca’s De clementia in viewing empathy as a femininized emotional response lacking in judgment. This Stoic-inspired understanding of empathy becomes more personal in his first-person life writing, the Historia calamitatum, where Abelard explores the negative impact of empathy on his own life as both feeling subject and recipient. Then in seeking to displace himself as the subject of Heloise’s sympathetic identification of suffering in favor of Christ and his Passio, Abelard conceptualizes the redemptive love of Christ that will infuse his theological writings, leading to a rejection of the ransom theory of the Crucifixion and presaging the affective piety of the later Middle Ages.

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Keywords: Peter Abelard, Compassio, Empathy, Heloise, Redemption, Scholastics, Seneca, Stoicism

Emotions do not feature largely in the writings of Peter Abelard (1079-1142). To a certain extent, he lived and wrote just prior to the affective turn that would energize his Cistercian and Victorine contemporaries, for whom the taxonomizing of emotions and consideration of the impact of emotions on the Christian person formed an integral part of their thinking.1 Abelard’s thoughts This chapter is an output of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (project number CE110001011). 1 See Juanita Feros Ruys, ‘Before the Affective Turn: Affectus in Heloise, Abelard, and the Woman Writer of the Epistolae duorum amantium’.

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do turn often to the caritas of God, but deal less often with the emotional complexion of the human believer. What makes Abelard’s approach to compassio, or empathy, so interesting, then, is the tension we can see between his desire to approach the emotion from the perspective of a Stoic philosopher and his need to encompass the infinite mercy of incarnated divine love within his worldview. It should not surprise us, perhaps, that a scholar who compiled the massive Sic et non with its dialectical readings should find himself able to comprehend the idea of empathy from a range of perspectives. Particularly interesting, however, is the generic contingency of Abelard’s understanding of the nature and function of empathy, as he considers the emotion from the point of view of ethics as a philosopher, in personal terms as a suffering human, and in relation to the Redemption as a Christian and theologian.

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Defining the Terms There is no term for ‘empathy’ as such in Medieval Latin. The term ‘empathy’ is a late-nineteenth-century invention that arises out of German aesthetic theory and is quickly taken up by the emerging practice of psychoanalysis. Empathy is a cognitive-affective complex, meaning that it includes, and is indeed prompted by, a cognitive component in which the subject willingly undertakes the perspective of another. This is then closely allied with an affective component, in which the subject uses the perspective of the other to consider his or her own likely emotional response should he or she be in the other’s situation and to feel those emotions in some form and to some extent – this feeling component can be termed ‘sympathy’. If this perspective-taking and co-feeling leads to action on behalf of the other, this constitutes altruism, but altruistic action is not necessarily attendant on the state of empathy per se (that is, one can take the other’s perspective and feel with/for the other without acting to ameliorate their situation).2 There are three key Latin terms which capture aspects of this cognitiveaffective complex: misericordia, clementia, and compassio. Misericordia (as also its cognate miseratio) translates most accurately as ‘pity’, and David Konstan has outlined the Ancient Greek tradition of pity, which was broadly adopted by the Roman Stoics, and which contains as fundamental the idea that pity must be merited. There can be no pity, for instance, for those who 2 I discuss the interactions of this complex more fully in Ruys, ‘Introduction: An Alternative History of Empathy’. For a briefer summary, see Cuff, Brown, Taylor, and Howat, ‘Empathy: A Review of the Concept’.

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deserve the situation in which they find themselves.3 Clementia tends to be used in a restricted sense to denote judicial clemency or mercy, bestowed by a judge or, in Christian writings, by God as Judge. Neither of these two terms fully captures the complex of ‘empathy’: both are hierarchical in that they are bestowed by one more socially powerful upon one less powerful. 4 In Medieval Latin usage, misericordia denotes feeling in spite of judgment, as when listeners are moved by the sad story of an evildoer but not rightfully so, such that the cognitive component of empathy is absent. Traditional etymology, rehearsed by Augustine and Isidore amongst others,5 derived misericordia from miseria plus cor, viewing the emotion as one in which our heart is moved by the sufferings of others, thus signifying sympathy rather than empathy. Meanwhile, clementia denotes a rationally determined act of mercy in spite of a judgment of culpability, such that the affective component of empathy, being moved by the other’s situation, is lacking. Of the three key Latin terms, only compassio captures the interaction of judgment and feeling entailed by the term ‘empathy’. Compassio is a democratic emotional state, in that it takes place between equals, who share (com-) the other’s suffering (passio), entering into this through a deliberate intention to see the other’s point of view and so experience vicariously their emotional state.6 The term entered Medieval Latin through Christian writings, and came into its own in the late medieval era of personal affective piety as the devout were encouraged to enter imaginatively into the Passion (Passio) of Christ and make it their own.7 The Scholastics, who particularly undertook to taxonomize the emotions, make explicit in their analyses that compassion necessarily requires both cognitive and affective components. Bonaventure argues: ‘The pain of compassion exists first in the reason, and from the reason it flows into the sense perception’ (‘Dolor vero compassionis primo erat in ratione, et ex ratione redundabat in sensualitatem’).8 Thomas Aquinas makes a similar point, distinguishing the feeling-only sympathy entailed by misericordia 3 Konstan, Pity Transformed, 30, 34, 39. 4 Konstan, Pity Transformed, 50. 5 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum Libri XX, Lib. X: ‘Misericors, a compatiendo alienae miseriae vocabulum sortitus est; et hinc appellata “misericordia”, quod miserum cor faciat dolentis alienam miseriam. Non autem occurrit ubique haec etymologia; nam est in Deo misericordia sine ulla cordis miseria’ (Migne, Patrologia Latinae (PL) 82.384C). 6 For a more detailed discussion of the Medieval Latin terminology, see Ruys, ‘An Alternative History of Medieval Empathy: The Scholastics and compassio’. 7 McNamer, Affective Meditation. 8 Bonaventure, Commentaria in quattuor libros Sententiarum, in librum III, D.16, a.2, q.3. Sourced from Brepols Library of Latin Texts.

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from the cognitive-affective complex of empathy: ‘Insofar as sympathy/pity bears compassion only towards another’s suffering, it is not a virtue, but pain/suffering; but insofar as it proceeds by the choice of the one having compassion, it is a virtue’ (‘misericordia secundum quod importat compassionem tantum ad miseriam alterius, non est virtus, sed passio; secundum autem quod importat electionem compatientis, secundum hoc virtus est’).9

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Compassion in Theory: Abelard’s Ethical Writings In the meantime, writing more than a century before Bonaventure and Aquinas, Abelard’s understanding of sympathetic feeling was strongly influenced by the Roman Stoic Seneca, and in particular by Seneca’s De clementia.10 Seneca’s treatise, written for his pupil, the Emperor Nero, appears in two books, the first of which constitutes a scathing attack on pity (misericordia), the second (which is incomplete), a praise of judicial mercy (clementia). The fundamental distinction between the two, according to Seneca, is that misericordia operates solely on sympathetic feeling, rendering it irrational, unjudicial, and feminized, while clementia discards feeling in the application of judgment, relying on reason alone. Seneca informs his charge that pity is a ‘defect of the mind’ (‘uitium animi’, II.4.4; elsewhere ‘the defect of a weak mind’, ‘uitium pusilli animi’, II.5.1),11 in that it allows itself to be moved by feelings that are not moderated by judgment, including the consideration of whether the suffering of another is in fact deserved. If the suffering is merited, then any feeling on behalf of the sufferer is necessarily immoral. By contrast, mercy – which is a characteristic of all good men (‘omnes boni uiri’, II.5.1) – allows a judge to make a rational choice to mitigate the sentence that could deservedly have been imposed (‘quae se flectit citra id quod merito constitui posset’, II.3.2). Clearly mercy cannot in this sense equate with empathy since it is a hierarchical virtue, a fact made explicit by Seneca when he describes it as ‘the leniency of a superior towards an inferior in determining fit punishment’ (‘clementia est […] lenitas superioris aduersus inferiorem in constituendis poenis’, II.3.1, my trans.). In constructing mercy in this way, Seneca refuses 9 Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis, Lib. 4, D.15, q.2, a.1, qc. 3, ad 2. 10 Abelard’s ethical and didactic writings show the strong influence of Seneca throughout: see my analysis of the impact of Seneca on Abelard’s Carmen ad Astralabium in Ruys, The Repentant Abelard, 26. 11 Latin text of Seneca, De clementia, cited from the edition by Braund.

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any identification between clementia (mercy) and compassio (empathy), the latter of which entails the sharing of pain between equals. This is deliberately done: in rejecting the emotional disturbances set in motion by empathizing with the troubles of others, the Stoic will be able to continue to live the desired life of equanimity. He (there being no concept of a female Stoic in Roman philosophy) does not pity, because pity cannot be felt without mental suffering (‘non miseretur quia id sine miseria animi non fit’, II.6.1). This is a consideration that will influence the Scholastics throughout the Middle Ages, becoming fundamental in explaining the concept of divine impassibility. Anselm of Canterbury theorizes as much in the late eleventh century in his Proslogion where he conceives God’s mercy as an effect (‘effectum’) that is felt by suffering humanity, but not motivated by any corresponding feeling (‘affectum’) in God himself. He concludes, addressing God: ‘Therefore you are both merciful because you save the sorrowful and pardon sinners against you; and you are not merciful because you do not suffer any compassion for misery’.12 Aquinas similarly declares: ‘Compassion is not in God in this way, because God is impassible and does not feel compassion, since compassion is pain/suffering taken up by someone on behalf of another’s tribulation’.13 More importantly, Seneca notes, by refusing empathy, the Stoic will be able to assist others more effectively from a position of dispassion or apatheia, since ‘sadness is useless in discerning facts, contemplating what is useful, avoiding dangers, and weighing out justice’ (‘tristitia inhabilis est ad dispiciendas res, utilia excogitanda, periculosa uitanda, aequa aestimanda’, II.6.1, my trans.). Further, his judgment will not be subject to what today are termed ‘cuteness effects’, where members of an in-group (and particularly the young, the attractive, and the wealthy) naturally arouse greater empathy than members of an out-group.14 By contrast, Seneca contends, the Stoic ‘will not turn his face or his heart from anyone who has a withered leg or from the old man, thin and in rags, leaning on his staff’ (‘uultum quidem 12 Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, ed. Davies and Evans, chap. 8, p. 91: ‘Et misericors es igitur, quia miseros salvas et peccatoribus tuis parcis; et misericors non es, quia nulla miseriae compassione afficeris’. 13 Aquinas, Super Psalmo 24 n. 8: ‘Hoc autem non hoc modo est in Deo, quia Deus est impassibilis, et non compatitur; quia compassio est cum alio in se assumpta passio de aliena tribulatione’. For the same reason, Aquinas notes that the good angels who were confirmed in grace following the fall of the bad angels: ‘compati non potest […] condolere non possunt’ (Scriptum super Sententiis, Lib. 2, D.11, q.1, a.5, ad 2). 14 On ‘cuteness effects’ see Prinz, ‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’ and Hoffman, ‘Empathy, Justice, and the Law’.

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non deiciet nec animum ob crus alicuius aridum aut pannosam maciem et innixam baculo senectutem’, II.6.3, my trans.). A feature of Seneca’s refusal of empathy that seems particularly to influence Abelard is his negative association of pity with the feminine. In describing pity as a ‘defect of the mind’, Seneca goes on to observe that it is particularly associated with the lowest sorts of people, old women, and womanly types (the term he uses is specifically intended to be denigrating – ‘mulierculae’, little womanly things). Such people are moved by the tears of the vilest criminals and would wish to break them out of prison if they could (‘anus et mulierculae sunt quae lacrimis nocentissimorum mouentur, quae, si liceret, carcerem effringerent’, II.5.1). Intriguingly, women also sit at the opposite end of Seneca’s empathy spectrum. In discussing clementia, he argues that its opposite is not severity (severitas), which is also a virtue (and a virtue cannot be opposed to a virtue), but crudelitas (cruelty, II.4.1). He sees this savage desire for revenge as particularly characteristic of women and wild beasts.15 Women are thus liable in Seneca’s thought both to excessive pity and excessive mercilessness, but are distant from the calm and reasoned moderation of clementia that the wise judge and Stoic practices. Abelard addresses these issues in a number of his didactic and ethical texts, with two instances appearing, interestingly enough, in texts addressed to women, the nuns of the Paraclete. Here the influence of Seneca’s De clementia is unmistakable. In her Problem 14 addressed to Abelard, Heloise asks a question about the beatitudes and whether the possession of a single blessing is sufficient for grace (which the biblical text seems to suggest), or whether all are required. Abelard addresses the beatitudes in turn and his discussion of ‘Blessed are those who hunger’ turns to the question of pity, mercy, and just punishment.16 Abelard argues that a human judge, mimicking the Heavenly Judge in this way, ought to combine justice (‘justitiam’) and pity (‘misericordiam’) in equal measures. In such cases, he adds, pity (‘misericordia’) ought to trump vengeance (‘vindictam’) so that the judge modifies through clemency (‘clementiam’) the punishment that is deserved. This brings Abelard to the need to distinguish ‘misericordia’ from ‘clementia’, and he explicitly cites Seneca (‘teste Seneca’) to explain the difference. He notes that the term ‘misericordia’ derives from ‘miseris’ so that ‘human compassion proceeds from the misfortunes of others’ (‘humana compassio est 15 Seneca, De clementia, ed. and trans. Braund, I.5.5: ‘muliebre est furere in ira, ferarum uero est ignauarum quidem praemordere et urguere proiectos. elephanti leonesque transeunt quae impulerunt; ignobilis bestiae pertinacia est’. 16 Abelard’s discussion of this beatitude can be found at Problemata Heloissae, PL 178.700B-701B.

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ex miseriis aliorum progressa’) – but such an emotion (since we are human) is prompted by our own feelings and our concern for them. This means that we wish to alleviate the sufferings of others not because we are virtuous (‘ex virtute’), but because we are weak-minded (‘ex infirmitate animi’), and do not wish to witness another’s sufferings, regardless of whether or not those sufferings are deserved. Abelard calls this emotional response (which may or may not have a rational component: ‘sive rationalis sit sive minime’) ‘compassio naturalis’ and aligns it with what Seneca has called ‘misericordia’. By contrast, what Seneca describes as ‘clementia’, Abelard describes as ‘rationabilis compassio’, through which we desire to see others receive what they deserve. Extremes on either side of clemency are to be avoided: justice without mercy is merely vengeance or cruelty (‘crudelis’), but pity without justice is lax or negligent (‘remissus’). Abelard repeats these ideas, almost verbatim, in the words he gifts to the Philosopher in the Collationes on the nature of justice. The Philosopher reminds the Christian that ‘misericordia’ is derived from the misfortunes of others (‘a miseris’) and far from being a virtue, is in fact a vice that springs from weak-mindedness (‘uitium potius et quandam infirmitatem animi’). By contrast, clemency (‘clementia’) is the product of a rational disposition (‘rationabili affectu’) which is moved not by what others suffer, but only by what they suffer unjustly. Indeed, ‘natural compassion’ (‘compassio naturalis’) cannot be a virtue, since a virtue is a habit of mind inculcated through study and application, not something that simply occurs naturally (‘uirtus habitus sit animi […] per applicationem uel studium magis quam per naturam haberi constat’). Moreover – and here we see the Stoic line of thinking in action – a virtue cannot be anything that subjects the mind to suffering (‘dolori animum submittere’) and disturbs it rather than calms it, as empathy does.17 Abelard gives these ethical critiques of compassion didactic weight when he applies them in his Letter 7 to the nuns of the Paraclete. Discussing the profession of widows to the monastic life, Abelard insists (in line with Paul in 1 Tim. 5:3-8) that widows must not abandon their family as a burden upon others, but equally they must not use the excuse of ‘carnal compassion’ (‘carnalis compassio’) for their children to stay in the world. This would be to defraud the wider community (‘de communi defraudet’) through the sacrilege (‘sacrilegia’) of looking back (‘retro respicere’) to the world.18 I have 17 Abelard, Collationes, II, § 128, p. 140. 18 All references to the letters of Abelard and Heloise are to The Letter Collection, ed. Luscombe; here Ep. 7, p. 304.

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written elsewhere of Abelard’s anti-familial rhetoric in this letter,19 but I would particularly draw attention here to the language he uses of the term compassio: it is carnal (human, fleshly, ‘carnalis’), it disturbs (‘perturbet’), it compels (‘cogat’), it drags (‘trahat’). Abelard thus constructs compassio as a dangerously proactive and compulsive emotion that can readily lead the pious astray. He makes clear this deadly potential of compassion in his Ethica where he gives the example of the mother who inadvertently smothers her small child. Abelard’s language in describing this situation is excessively emotive, so that he can make his point about the distinction between the arousal of our natural feelings of compassion and the demands of justice. A poor (‘pauper’) mother is breastfeeding (‘lactantem’) her very small child (‘infantulum’), which does not have sufficient clothing (‘nec tantum indumentorum habet’). And so, moved by pity (‘miseracione’) for her little one (‘infantuli’), she wraps him tightly in her own clothes, hugging him close out of her great love (‘amore summo’) for him. In the process, she inadvertently smothers him. Should she be punished for infanticide?20 Unfortunately, yes, she should. Abelard has come to this vignette from the perspective of justice and he wishes to illustrate his point that sometimes we need to punish those we know to be innocent, and that one must make an example for others. But although his intention may have been a discussion of justice, the story more tellingly reveals Abelard’s conception of empathy. As with the discussion in Epistle 7, Abelard invests the functioning of compassion with a sense of compulsion and disturbance: the mother is agitated (‘commota’) by her feelings of compassion, she is ‘overcome by the force of nature’ (‘ui naturae superata’), and so is compelled (‘cogitur’) to crush her young child. Interestingly, John Marenbon has recorded an earlier student reportatio of this vignette in Abelard’s teaching which reveals that the emotive language and the introduction of the idea of miseratio as the emotion at fault are later developments. In the earlier teaching example, the vignette is presented in less emotionally heightened terms, while caritas and dilectio rather than miseratio are the key emotions in play.21 Through a range of ethical, philosophical, and didactic treatises, then, Abelard has drawn a picture of compassion as a human frailty that can have unjust and even deadly consequences. 19 Ruys, ‘Quae maternae’. 20 Abelard, Scito te ipsum, ed. Ilgner, 1.24.3-4, p. 25. 21 Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, 68n.52.

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Performing, Demanding, and Refusing Empathy: Abelard’s Historia calamitatum and the Letter Correspondence with Heloise Nowhere is Abelard’s conflicted approach to empathy more evident than in his first-person life narrative and purported letter of consolation, the Historia calamitatum. This hybrid document demands compassion in its metatextual form, while denying and devaluing the concept in the text itself. The opening sentence of Abelard’s Historia functions as a definition of compassion: Abelard notes that examples can arouse and soothe human feelings (‘humanos affectus aut prouocant aut mitigant’), and accordingly he offers his experiences of misfortune (‘ipsis calamitatum mearum experimentis’, Ep. 1, p. 2) to his unnamed friend and correspondent, so that the friend can bear his own more readily. Abelard returns to this frame at the end of the letter, advising his friend that he has catalogued his own woes with those of his friend in mind, as sharing the troubles of others can minimize one’s own (p. 118). Scholars have generally agreed, however, that despite this ostensible causa scribendi, the letter actually constitutes a strategy on Abelard’s part to arouse the sympathy of his powerful friends in Paris, enabling him to escape what amounted to exile as abbot at St. Gildas in Brittany and to return to the Paris schools. At the macro level, then, the Historia offers a form of compassion to a friend (the sharing of passio or suffering) while also requesting an empathic response (and subsequent action) from others towards Abelard’s own sufferings. Yet as Abelard begins to rehearse the details of his supposedly empathyinducing life experiences, we find him repudiating empathy in undeniably Senecan terms. The two key instances in which Abelard has to ‘suffer’ the compassion of others are his castration and his condemnation for heresy at the Council of Soissons in 1121. The scene Abelard paints of the city of Paris the morning following his castration is one of unrelenting psychic horror in which the compassion performed by others on his behalf becomes one of the sufferings he has to endure. He makes this point explicitly, playing on the etymological construction of ‘compassio’ as a compound of ‘passio’, saying that he was hurt more by the compassion of others (‘multo amplius ex eorum compassione’) than by the pain of his physical wound (‘quam ex uulneris lederer passione’, p. 46). Just as he theorizes in his ethical writings, Abelard finds the application of compassion to be emotionally disturbing for all involved, and he describes how much the cries and laments of his followers irritated and afflicted not only him (‘quanto me clamore uexarent, quanto planctu perturbarent’), but even those who were feeling compassion for him (‘quanta se affligeret lamentatione’, pp. 44-46). To Abelard, the experience is

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crucifying (‘me […] cruciabant’). Worse, his male followers become entirely feminized in their performance of compassion: they weep, they wail, they even howl like women at a funeral: ‘lamentatione […] clamore […] planctu […] lamentis et eiulatibus’. I have argued elsewhere that the generic form of the planctus appears as a particularly feminine one in Abelard’s thought,22 but the howling cries indicated by the verb ‘eiulo’ are even more specifically associated with women, and also wild animals. Part of the pain Abelard suffers is due to the fact that while the knowledge of his distress can function as the spur to compassion in his friends, it also marks his public shame and humiliation; this he feels much more keenly than a physical wound: ‘plus erubescentiam quam plagam sentirem et pudore magis quam dolore affligerer’ (p. 46). His thoughts turn immediately to his reputation: it is one thing for public knowledge of a misfortune to arouse sympathy in nearby friends, but it also causes pain for family members who are more remote, and, worst of all, it breeds gleeful exultation in enemies at his levelling: ‘quanta laude mei emuli tam manifestam equitatem efferrent’. Abelard’s thoughts become focused on his public humiliation and how he will become the subject of pointing fingers and wagging tongues: ‘omnium digitis demonstrandus, omnium linguis corrodendus, omnibus monstruosum spectaculum futurus!’ (p. 46). It is to this negative aspect of public knowledge that Abelard reverts later in his Historia when he relates his condemnation for heresy and the burning of his book on the Trinity at the Council of Soissons. Then he declares that he wept more for the damage done to his reputation than he had previously for the wound to his body (‘longe amplius fame quam corporis detrimentum plangebam’, p. 72). Interestingly, Abelard not only critiques empathy in the Historia as its suffering object but also as its feeling subject. Describing the reaction of Heloise’s uncle and guardian Fulbert to his abduction of the pregnant Heloise from Fulbert’s home, Abelard declares that Fulbert went almost out of his mind (‘quasi in insaniam conuersus’, p. 32). The transports of grief and sorrow he suffered could be understood only by one who shared them – the definition of compassion (‘quanto estuaret dolore, quanto afficeretur pudore, nemo nisi experiendo cognosceret’). Accordingly, Abelard is moved to compassion (‘eius immoderate anxietati […] compatiens’) and in this state goes to Fulbert, begs his forgiveness, and offers to marry Heloise. As readers of the Historia know, this is a disastrous move that sets in train all the subsequent misfortunes, including Abelard’s castration and Heloise’s enforced entry into the monastic life. In other words, Abelard demonstrates 22 Ruys, ‘Planctus magis quam cantici’.

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through his personal experience his theoretical argument that compassion is an unreasoning state that can lead to disastrous consequences. When Heloise receives Abelard’s epistolary catalogue of his misfortunes, she immediately performs the work of compassion culturally expected of her. She mirrors his suffering in her own, drawing attention to its somatic expression by writing to him that no one could read his letter ‘dry-eyed’ (‘siccis oculis’). She notes that it both renewed her sorrows (‘dolores meos […] renouarunt’) in its account of the troubles of which she was already aware, and increased them by hinting at the new dangers that were now threatening him. Heloise declares that she and her nuns are therefore drawn to despair of his life (‘de uita tua desperare cogamur’) and begs him to write further so that all of them at the Paraclete can share his sorrows as well as his joys (‘doloris uel gaudii participes’, Ep. 2, p. 124) – a cogent definition of empathy. Abelard receives her words as an appropriate expression of compassion. He replies that he gives thanks to God for rendering Heloise and her nuns fellow sharers in his troubles (‘Deo autem gratias, qui […] afflictionis mee participes uos fecit’), noting that their work of compassion involves physical co-suffering (‘periculorum meorum sollicitudinem uestris cordibus inspirans’, Ep. 3, p. 142). Abelard’s response prompts Heloise’s next missive in which she reacts to his statements of suffering with extravagant rhetoric. In fact, the rhetoric of Heloise’s Epistle 4 is so extraordinary, it has rendered it one of the bestknown texts written by a medieval woman and has motivated centuries of misreading of Heloise, with generations of (male) scholars mistaking her expertise in artificial eloquence for the genuine outpourings of a woman’s heart.23 In her artfully exaggerated declaration of her fears and sorrows in the face of Abelard’s impending death, however, Heloise miscalculates. She tells him that his words have pierced her heart with swords of death (‘tanquam gladiis mortis nostras transuerberas animas’) and begs him to write no more of his suffering (‘Parce […] parce […] huiusmodi scilicet supersedendo uerbis’, Ep. 4, p. 162). She explains that if she is consumed with fear and anxiety for him, she will be unable to perform her monastic duties and devote herself to God’s service. But in emphasizing her own suffering and begging Abelard to mitigate this, she has in fact passed beyond what Abelard recognizes as compassion, a transgression he is quick to address. Cuttingly he points out in his next letter that she was the one who had asked him to share his sufferings with her in her Epistle 2 and demands to 23 This is best exemplified by Dronke, Women Writers; see Ruys, ‘Heloise, Monastic Temptation, and Memoria’ for an alternative analysis of the cultural and intellectual work the letter is doing.

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know: ‘When I am suffering in despair of my life, would it be fitting for you to be joyous? Would you want to be partners only in joy, not grief?’ (‘Numquid in tanta uite, qua crucior, desperatione gaudere uos conuenit? Nec doloris socie, sed gaudii tantum, uultis esse?’, Ep. 5, p. 190). This would be contrary to the definition of compassion. Abelard then launches into a disquisition on the desirability of his imminent death, which comes disturbingly close to an expression of suicidality.24 Here he takes his understanding of compassio to the limit: a person feeling true compassio for another will want what is best for that other, even if it is painful for the self. This includes death. Abelard is uncompromising on this point: those who truly feel compassion and experience fellow-suffering (‘uere compatiuntur et condolent’) will wish to see the sufferings of the other ended even at the cost of their own feelings. He offers a vignette to illustrate his point, and it is interesting to see him turn once more, as he did in his Ethica, to the case of a bereft mother, as though for Abelard maternal love always provides the ultimate or incontrovertible test case for human feelings. Thus Abelard declares that a mother will want a child who has been sick for a long time to die, even though this eventuality will be unbearable for her (‘Sic diu languentem filium mater etiam morte languorem finire desiderat, quem tolerare ipsa non potest’). He ends this aggressive analysis of the true nature of compassion with the querulous complaint: ‘I cannot see why you should prefer me to live on in great misery rather than be happier in death’ (‘cur me miserrime uiuere malis quam felicius mori non uideo’, p. 192). Heloise’s transgression of the bounds of compassion also gives Abelard the opportunity he has been looking for to reorient her attention away from himself and back towards God. He does so by focusing on the compassion she owes Christ, advising her to direct her empathic feelings towards the one who willingly suffered on her behalf (‘patienti sponte pro redemptione tua compatere et super crucifixo pro te compungere’, p. 206). This must be a true compassion that involves fellow-suffering: Heloise needs to experience genuine sorrow in feeling compassion towards the crucified Christ, while at the same time cultivating her compassionate feelings towards him through her act of grieving (‘compatiendo dole, dolendo compatere’, p. 208). Suffering and compassion are and must be commensurate and inextricable. It is true that Abelard has suffered, but he did so unwillingly (‘inuitus’, p. 210) and to no good end. By contrast, Christ willingly suffered the Passion on Heloise’s behalf in order to bring her to salvation (‘ille pro te sponte passus est qui passione sua omnem curat languorem’) and so it is to him that her true 24 Ruys, ‘He who kills himself’.

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compassion is due (‘In hoc, obsecro, non in me tua tota sit deuotio, tota compassio, tota compunctio’). Abelard thus ties together suffering (passio), Christ’s Passion (Passio), and the response of the devoted Christian to this (compassio) to produce a Christ-oriented definition of compassion.

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Refuting the Devil’s Rights: Compassion and Redemption It turns out to be this understanding of compassion, worked out for and articulated to Heloise in these letters, that allows Abelard to do something entirely new in his theology of Christ’s saving work in his Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, written in the early 1130s, contemporary with the Heloise correspondence.25 Sarah McNamer has written of the development of a piety of compassion in the later Middle Ages which she identifies as particularly female and vernacular. But it may be that the compassionate identification of the Christian with the Passion-work of Christ originated in another context entirely – in the high Middle Ages in the Latin writings of the early Scholastic and neo-Stoic Abelard. C.W. Marx has traced the history of the ‘ransom theory’ of the Devil’s rights over fallen humanity from its influential statement in various works of Augustine to its rejection by Anselm of Canterbury in his Cur Deus homo, written at the turn of the twelfth century. But Marx argues that Abelard goes further than Anselm in repudiating the idea that the Devil had any legal right over humanity, in the process producing ‘what amounts to an original interpretation of the doctrine’.26 Richard E. Weingart similarly contends that Abelard’s ‘understanding of the atonement is recognized as a distinctive contribution to the theological enterprise of the Christian community’.27 In his Commentary on Romans, Abelard dismisses the idea that the Devil could have gained any right (‘ius’) over humanity in the course of seducing it, and points out that the Devil only held the power he did with God’s permission (‘quantum ad permissionem Domini’). Abelard rejects absolutely the idea that the ransom of Christ’s blood could have been paid to God as our ultimate Lord, since it is cruel and iniquitous (‘crudele et iniquum’) to demand the death of an innocent person (‘ut sanguinem innocentis in pretium aliquod 25 Mews, Abelard and Heloise, 187. 26 Marx, The Devil’s Rights, 20. 27 Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, 120; for a detailed analysis of the place of Abelard in twelfth-century redemption theory, especially with regard to Anselm’s Cur Deus homo, see Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, 82-93.

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quis requisierit’). Interestingly, Abelard avers that God had no necessity to become a human in order to free humanity from the Devil’s grasp, since if he wished, he could have done so through divine mercy alone (‘Quae itaque necessitas aut quae ratio uel quid opus fuit, cum sola iussione sua diuina miseratio liberare hominem a diabolo potuisset?’).28 On the contrary, Christ took on our flesh, teaching us by word and by example (‘tam uerbo quam exemplo’), enduring to death, and binding himself to us through love (‘per amorem’) so that fired by this receipt of divine grace, our true love for God (‘caritas’) should fear to suffer nothing for its sake.29 The holy who died before Christ’s time were kindled by this love-in-potential, but everyone who lives after Christ’s Passion is now even more greatly fired by this love-completed. In conclusion, Abelard declares, our redemption is that supreme love (‘summa dilectio’) through the Passion of Christ by which we are set free and can now fulfil all things through love of him rather than through fear (‘amore eius potius quam timore cuncta impleamus’).30 Constant Mews has noted that ‘just as Abelard makes caritas the core of his ethical teaching’, so this interpretation of redemption sets ‘the revelation of divine love to humanity’ at the heart of the Incarnation.31 Intriguingly, the word miseratio which appears in this discussion, and which is very rare in Abelard, recurs later in the Commentary on Romans in Abelard’s discussion of the workings of grace. Here Abelard argues that God’s actions, which can appear to us as cruel, are in fact evidence of his great mercy (‘cum in his etiam in quibus maxime tibi crudelis uidetur, eius sit misericordia praedicanda’).32 He explains that as far as the evil of oppression abounds, the power of God’s mercy towards the oppressed abounds even further (‘quod abundant oppressionis militia, abundaret et in oppressis diuinae miserationis potentia’). In his own time, this aspect of Abelard’s theology was critiqued by the twelfth-century mystics and avant-garde of affective piety, Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St. Thierry. Thomas Williams has examined the claims of exemplarism and Pelagianism levelled by these Cistercian writers 28 Abelard, Commentaria, ed. Buytaert, II.III.26, pp. 116-17; Abelard, Commentary, trans. Cartwright, 166-67. 29 On the historical misunderstandings of Abelard’s argument of exemplarity, see Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, 202-03. 30 Abelard, Commentaria, ed. Buytaert, II.III.26, pp. 117-18; Abelard, Commentary, trans. Cartwright, 167-68. 31 Mews, Abelard and Heloise, 190. See also Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, 121-25. 32 Abelard, Commentaria, ed. Buytaert, IV.IX.22, p. 243; Abelard, Commentary, trans. Cartwright, 300.

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against Abelard’s theory of Atonement, and argues that they are misplaced because Abelard also recognizes ‘an objective transaction’ at play in the Redemption.33 Nevertheless, Abelard’s doctrine of Atonement remains based in a compassionate identification of the Christian with the Passion of Christ, since ‘the Passion accomplishes our reconciliation with God through its effect on the human heart’.34 Marx has described Abelard’s depiction of humanity’s love and gratitude towards Christ’s Passion as ‘the basis of the theme of Christ the lover-knight’ which ‘contributes to the emphasis on the suffering of Christ in later medieval art and literature’35 – precisely what McNamer has identified as the later medieval work of female vernacular affective piety.

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Conclusion Abelard’s understanding of the nature and function of empathy is conflicted by the competing traditions within which he is writing. On the one hand, he situates himself within the long philosophical tradition of Stoicism, so that his ethical and didactic writings reproduce Senecan understandings of misericordia as a feminized emotional compulsion that can have no good outcome, in contrast with clementia which connotes masculine judicial mercy. On the other hand, Abelard’s Christian theology places divine compassion at the heart of the Christian revelation in the Incarnation of Christ and our redemption through Christ’s Passion. Abelard’s struggle to define and place empathy becomes even more pronounced in his personal writings. He simultaneously demands and refuses empathy from the readers of his life narrative, the Historia calamitatum. He finds the suffering (passio) he feels through the compassion (compassio) of others almost impossible to bear, yet his letter is designed to arouse a sympathy in his readers that will result in positive concrete outcomes for him. Perhaps most interesting is the way he theorizes compassion in relation to Heloise, and the possible impact this has on his theology. In his letters to Heloise, Abelard insists on the shared nature (com-) of compassio, taking this to its logical extreme by arguing that one friend must wish for the death of another even at the cost of their own suffering, if death is what would make the other friend truly happy. Yet he 33 Williams, ‘Sin, Grace, and Redemption’, 260; Williams describes what this ‘objective transaction’ is at 261-63. See also Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, 125-27 on claims of Abelard’s Pelagianism. 34 Williams, ‘Sin, Grace, and Redemption’, 275. 35 Marx, The Devil’s Rights, 21.

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then demands that Heloise transfer these feelings of compassio from him to Christ, whose Passio she should rightfully be sharing. It is this developing sense of the human response to divine compassion that allows Abelard in his Commentary on Romans to reject once and for all the ransom theory of the redemption, positing in its place the compassionate identification of the believer with the suffering Christ. This conceptualizes a performative devotion of compassion that will flower into the influential and widespread affective piety of the later Middle Ages – but which, perhaps, at least to some extent, the neo-Stoic Abelard anticipates here in the twelfth century.

Bibliography

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Primary Texts Abelard, Peter. Collationes. Edited and translated by John Marenbon and Giovanni Orlandi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. —. Commentaria in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos. Edited by Eligius M. Buytaert. In Petri Abaelardi Opera theologica. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM) 11. Turnhout: Brepols, 1969. —. Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Steven R. Cartwright. Mediaeval Continuation 12. Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2011. —. Heloissae Paraclitensis diaconissae Problemata cum Petri Abaelardi solutionibus. In Patrologia Latinae (PL) 178.677-750. —. The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise. Edited by David Luscombe, translation by Betty Radice, revised by Luscombe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013. —. Scito te ipsum. Edited by Rainer M. Ilgner. In Petri Abaelardi Opera theologica. IV. CCCM 190. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001. Anselm of Canterbury. Proslogion. In Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and G.R. Evans, 82-104. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Aquinas, Thomas. Scriptum super Sententiis. In S. Thomae de Aquino Opera omnia. Edited by Enrique Alarcón. Accessed 20 July 2018. http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html. —. Super Psalmos. In S. Thomae de Aquino Opera omnia. Edited by Enrique Alarcón. Accessed 20 July 2018. http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html. Bonaventure. Commentaria in quattuor libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi, in librum III. Sourced from Brepolis Library of Latin Texts online: publication details given there as Bonauentura, Opera omnia, t. iii, edited by Patrum Collegii a S. Bonaventura. Ad Claras Aquas-Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1887.

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Isidore of Seville. Sancti Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum Libri XX, PL 82.73-728C. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. De clementia. Edited and translated by Susanna Braund. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Accessed online.

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Secondary Texts Cuff, Benjamin M.P., Sarah J. Brown, Laura Taylor, and Douglas J. Howat. ‘Empathy: A Review of the Concept’. Emotion Review 8, no. 2 (2016): 144-53. Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hoffman, Martin L. ‘Empathy, Justice, and the Law’. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 230-54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Konstan, David. Pity Transformed. London: Duckworth, 2001. Marenbon, John. The Philosophy of Peter Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Marx, C.W. The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995. McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Mews, Constant J. Abelard and Heloise. Great Medieval Thinkers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Prinz, Jesse. ‘Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?’. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 211-29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ruys, Juanita Feros. ‘An Alternative History of Medieval Empathy: The Scholastics and compassio’. In Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2, no. 2 (2018), 192-213. —. ‘Before the Affective Turn: Affectus in Heloise, Abelard, and the Woman Writer of the Epistolae duorum amantium’. In Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800, edited by Juanita Feros Ruys, Michael W. Champion, and Kirk Essary, 61-75. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. —. ‘“He Who Kills Himself Liberates a Wretch”: Abelard on Suicide’. In Rethinking Abelard: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Babette S. Hellemans, 230-49. Leiden: Brill, 2014. —. ‘Heloise, Monastic Temptation, and Memoria: Rethinking Autobiography, Sexual Experience, and Ethics’. In Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and LiteraryAnthropological Theme, edited by Albrecht Classen, 383-404. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.

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—. ‘Introduction to Interdisciplinary Forum: An Alternative History of Empathy’. In Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2, no. 2 (2018), 175-191. —. ‘Quae maternae immemor naturae: The Rhetorical Struggle over the Meaning of Motherhood in the Writings of Heloise and Abelard’. In Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, 323-40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. —. ‘Planctus magis quam cantici: The Generic Significance of Abelard’s Planctus’. Plainsong and Medieval Music 11 (2002): 37-44. —. The Repentant Abelard: Family, Gender, and Ethics in Peter Abelard’s Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Weingart, Richard E. The Logic of Divine Love: A Critical Analysis of the Soteriology of Peter Abailard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Williams, Thomas. ‘Sin, Grace, and Redemption’. In The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, edited by Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy, 258-78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

About the Author

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Juanita Feros Ruys is a member of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at the University of Sydney. She is a scholar of medieval Latin literature, as well as the history of emotions.

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From Wisdom to Science A Witness of the Theological Studies in Paris in the 1240s Riccardo Saccenti Abstract This chapter considers a number of introitus to Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which were delivered as lectures in the 1240s. The introitus offer an opportunity to track the deployment of the Sentences in theological training, in particular showing how Lombard’s systematic efforts were further systematised in the hands of his interpreters. In particular, the introitus reveal theorizing on the nature of theological knowledge, which posits the discipline as one of wisdom and science.

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Keywords: Peter Lombard, Mendicants, Theology, University of Paris

Between 1252-1253 and 1254-1255, Thomas Aquinas lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard as baccalaureus in Paris.1 Following a practice already developed in the faculty of theology of the University of Paris, after a first year of lecturing on a book of the Bible, Aquinas devoted his first teaching activity to the four books of Peter Lombard, which had become the veritable textbook for the study of theology in Paris.2 In introducing his lecture on the Sentences, the young Dominican friar offers a general introduction to the structure of the work as well as to its contents. In particular, Aquinas organizes his prologue as more than a general presentation of the Sentences: he devotes a 1 Oliva, Les débuts de l’enseignement, 187-253. On the figure of the baccaleureus, see Weijers, ‘Terminologie des Universités Naissants’, 269-71. 2 Glorieux, ‘L’enseignement au Moyen Âge’, 111-12. On the use of the Sentences within the teaching activity in Paris, see Angotti, ‘Les débuts du “Livre des Sentences” comme manuel de théologie’; Rosemann, The Story of a Great Medieval Book; and Boureau, ‘La méthode critique en théologie’. See also the series of essays offered in Rosemann, Mediaeval Commentaries on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard.

Monagle, Clare (ed.), The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789462985933_ch02

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quaestio of five articles to the examination of the nature of knowledge, which is accessible through the four books. It is in article three that the Dominican friar notes that the so-called sacra doctrina, that is, theology, can be called ‘science’. Theology has all the features required by the Aristotelian notion of science and thus plainly it has to be included within the system of disciplines.3 Aquinas’s argument on the nature of theology is a crucial witness to the direction taken by a debate whose roots went back to the decades before the arrival of the Dominican friar in Paris. 4 Several authors had devoted their attention to the definition of theology, especially in the 1240s. In the context of the Parisian faculty of theology, such a debate was stimulated also by the increasing role of Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the teaching practice of the masters.5 Several researchers show how the work of Peter Lombard was at the center of intellectual interest following its ‘publication’ between 1158 and 1160.6 The increasing number of glosses to the Sentences and the collections of questions, which originated from the lectures on the four books of Peter Lombard, are the fruit of the constant use the Parisian masters made of this work. Together with the analysis and exegesis of the biblical text, which remained the cornerstone of theological discourse, the lecture on the Sentences became one pillar of the teaching activity at the faculty of theology in Paris. Alexander of Hales’s lecture on Peter Lombard’s four books, around 1225, defined a practice which became common within the faculty of theology.7 From the 1230s, all the masters, both secular and mendicant, lectured on the Sentences. The nature, the structure, and the contents of the Sentences deeply influenced the development of discourse on theology as a discipline, and the masters used the analysis of Peter Lombard’s prologue as well as the general presentation of the four books, with which they started their lectures, to discuss their own discipline. The content of two manuscripts bears witness to this period in medieval history, namely, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, latin 15652 and latin 15702. It was Henri Denifle who first underlined the importance of 3 Oliva, Les débuts de l’enseignement, 32030 -321 47. 4 Saccenti, ‘L’evoluzione della theologia’. 5 Doyle, Peter Lombard and his Students, 257-66; Monagle, Orthodox Controversy, 113-38; Colish, ‘Scholastic Theology at Paris around 1200’, 2011; Colish, ‘From the Sentence Collection to the Sentence Commentary’. 6 For example, Marcia Colish, Clare Monagle, Stephen Young, and, more recently, Matthew Doyle. 7 Weber, ‘The “Glossa in IV libros Sententiarum” by Alexander of Hales’, 83-93; Sileo, ‘Il libro: forme d’insegnamento’, 560-61; Brady, ‘The “Distinctiones” of Lombard’s Book’.

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these manuscripts that transmitted several commentaries on the Sentences, dated around the 1240s.8 In the 1930s, Marie-Dominique Chenu, FrançoisMarie Henquinet, Victorin Doucet, and Polemon Glorieux offered more careful analysis of the manuscripts, establishing their deep interrelationship and their connection with the teaching activity of the Parisian faculty of theology.9 This chapter aims to reconsider some of the content of BnF, lat. 15652 and lat. 15702; in particular, five of the ‘introductions’ to the Sentences, which are preserved in the manuscripts, in order to examine the degree of consideration given to theological discourse throughout the 1240s. It focuses on the introitus of Peter the Archbishop, Stephen of Poligny, Odo Rigaud, John Pagus, and Albert the Great, which deal with the relationship between Scripture and Sentences, the epistemological issues connected with theology, and the doctrinal development of the discipline. The chapter examines the presentation of the Sentences with respect to the diverse historical frameworks within which they were composed. Thus it is necessary to examine the relevance of the group of masters and bachelors who were active in Paris in the 1240s, and to define the institutional context of the faculty of theology. In addition, this chapter considers the literary aspect of these texts, in particular their belonging to the genre of introitus or accessus, which had specific features. From these perspectives, it is possible to examine the five introductions to the Sentences and to evaluate their place in the development of theology as a discipline and a science.

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Historical, Institutional, and Literary Context The teaching of theology at Paris in the thirteenth century was the result of a long and complex process of evolution that started in the early twelfth century with the development of a new combination of teaching, thinking, and understanding centered on the biblical text. All through the so-called ‘renaissance of the twelfth century’, the biblical text remained the basis of any kind of religious discourse and there were different possible approaches to it.10 On the one hand, the content of Holy Scripture was considered as the 8 Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, I, 146, 172, 211. 9 Henquinet, ‘Eudes de Rosny’, 7-14, 33-45; Chenu, ‘Maîtres et bacheliers’; Englhardt, ‘Adam de Puteorumvills’, 61-67; Doucet, Prolegomena, cccxlv-cccliv; Glorieux, ‘Maître Adam’; Glorieux, ‘Les années 1242-1247’. 10 M.-D. Chenu, La théologie au XIIe siècle.

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46 Riccardo Saccenti

subject of wisdom, according to the idea of different exegetical levels of the divine word. It is a long and relevant tradition that goes back to patristic heritage, still widespread in the twelfth century. On the other hand, there was an approach to the understanding of Scripture that took advantage of the application of the rules of the liberal arts (mainly the trivium but also the quadrivium) to the analysis of biblical texts.11 The great masters of the twelfth century, such as Anselm and Raoul of Laon, Peter Abelard, Gilbert of La Porrée, and Peter Lombard contributed to the development of this second way of dealing with Scripture and also to the set of sources, mainly patristic, which were available as the product of the long exegetical tradition of the Christian churches. All through the twelfth century and the first decades of the thirteenth century, in the context of the Parisian university, ‘theological discourse’, that is, the understanding of divine realities and truths, was essentially based on the study, understanding, and teaching of the Bible, made using the instruments available through a classical education according to the liberal arts. It is within the context of the university that theological knowledge has to deal with other kinds of cultural tradition, mainly with the philosophical tradition and its epistemological discussion on the nature of science.12 From the 1230s, the need clearly emerges to reconsider the nature of theological knowledge, reframing the notions of wisdom and science to explain if and how theology can be considered as a scientific discipline and to define its status with respect to the other sciences. It is a matter which also clearly emerges from the contents of the famous Parens scientiarum of Pope Gregory IX, which represents the legal basis for the development of the faculty of theology both in terms of education practices and the epistemological definition of its domain.13 The texts available in the two Parisian manuscripts considered here reflect theologians’ awareness of these epistemological needs. The Parisian manuscript BnF, lat. 15652 is a composite collection of texts that includes excerpts from a Summa theologiae and from Augustine’s writings, as well as collections of quaestiones by different authors, notes from biblical commentaries, and from commentaries on the Sentences.14 The manuscript 11 Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard; Colish, ‘From Sentence Collection to the Sentence Commentary’; Luscombe, ‘Scholastic Theology at Paris around 1200’; Valente, Logique et théologie; Young, Scholarly Community at the Early University of Paris. 12 Young, Scholarly Community at the Early University of Paris, 20-63. 13 Bianchi, ‘Aristotle as a Captive Bride’; Young, Scholarly Community at the Early University of Paris, 64-101. 14 Chenu, ‘Maîtres et bacheliers’, 15-24; Doucet, Prolegomena, cccxlv-cccl.

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BnF, lat. 15702 contains notes taken by the same hand of manuscript 15652, which mainly concern Peter Lombard’s Sentences, whose text is also transcribed in the manuscript.15 The manuscript contains remarks on the general structure of the Sentences (fol. 2r-v), and in the margins of Peter Lombard’s text, it presents notes of the lectures of Bertrand of Bayonne, Albert the Great, Odo of Rosny, and John of Moussy.16 It also contains Peter of Lambale’s disputed questions and large excerpts from the Summa fratris Alexandri.17 As Chenu noted, manuscript 15652 is the result of the activity of a learned student of theology who attended the different lectures and disputes offered around 1240-1245 in Paris.18 The same is true for the content of manuscript 15702.19 The form and features of the two texts present us with a sort of personal reportatio, made by this student and not revised by the masters for publication.20 In this sense, the manuscripts are a key historical witness of the practices, activities, and doctrinal discussions of the Parisian theological milieu at a moment in which the mendicant friars finally acquired a lead position in the teaching of theology. When in 1229 Philip the Chancellor allowed the Dominican master Roland of Cremona to lecture on theology within the University of Paris, the mendicants, both Dominicans and Franciscans, acquired an increasing role in the intellectual life of the university and also started to influence the governance of this institution.21 They played a significant role in the development of the different passages of the cursus studiorum and facilitated the success of the Sentences as the point of reference for thirteenth-century theologians. Within this historical context, Peter Lombard’s four books became the basis on which it was possible to develop a detailed examination of the content of theology, so that they assumed a double role. The Sentences took a central role in the intellectual debate on the nature and features of the theological discipline and the prologues to the various commentaries on Peter Lombard’s work, presenting a similar preliminary discussion focused on the epistemological status of theology.22 The Sentences were also adopted 15 Book I, fols 4ra-55va; Book II, fols 55va-99va; Book III, fols 99va-140ra; Book IV, fols 144ra-186rb. 16 Doucet, Prolegomena, cccl. 17 Doucet, Prolegomena, cccli-cccclii. 18 Chenu, ‘Maîtres et bacheliers’, 24-25. 19 Doucet, Prolegomena, ccclii-cccliv. 20 Glorieux, ‘Les années 1242-1247’; Weijers, ‘Terminologie des Universités’, 267-69. 21 Wicki, Die Philosophie, 89, 123. 22 Borgo, ‘L’enseignement des “Sentences”’, 297-300; Oliva, Les débuts de l’enseignement, 256-68; Colish, ‘From the Sentence Collections to the Sentence Commentaries’; Sileo, Teoria della scienza

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as the basis for teaching activity at the faculty of theology, and their commentaries became a type of preparatory activity necessary to achieve the degree of Master of Theology. Thus, the 1240s saw the development of the distinction between the masters, that is, the teachers who held the chair of theology, and the bachelors, who were attached to a chair and whose duties included lecturing on the Bible and on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.23 The student who composed manuscript 15652 and the notes of manuscript 15702 attended the introitus of various bachelors and the disputations of some masters, in particular those of Peter of Lamballe, whose quaestiones are transcribed in both manuscripts.24 Between 1243 and 1244, the student attended the introitus of Peter the Archbishop, Stephen of Poligny, Odo Rigaud, John Pagus, Bertand of Bayonne, Albert the Great, Odo of Rosny, and John of Moussy. In addition, he attended the lectures on the Sentences of John Pagus (I and II Sent. up to distinction 29 and III Sent., dd. 1-2) and of Adam of Pouzzoles (II Sent., dd. 27-43 and III Sent.).25 Several of these bachelors became masters in 1245. Certainly, in that year, Odo Rigaud was in charge of the chair of theology of the Minor Friar, after the death of John of La Rochelle in that same year. Together with him, Peter the Archbishop, Stephen of Poligny, John Pagus, and Adam of Pouzzoles would have probably also become masters. Peter was certainly a master in 1247, when he preached on the occasion of the feast of the chair of St. Peter. In addition, Peter the Archbishop, Stephen of Poligny, John Pagus, Albert the Great, and Odo of Rosny were part of the council of masters that condemned the Talmud under the presidency of Bishop William of Auvergne on 15 May 1248.26 teologica, 1:65-95; Chenu, La théologie comme science, 22-26. 23 Weijers, ‘Terminologie des Universités Naissantes’, 271. 24 Chenu, ‘Maîtres et bacheliers’, 22; Doucet, Prolegomena, ccccxlix, cccli-ccclii. 25 Chenu, ‘Maîtres et bacherliers’, 18-22; Doucet, Prolegomena, cccxlviii-ccccxlix, cccl. 26 Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 1:209-10 (n° 178): ‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Exhibitis nobis auctoritate apostolica a magisteri Judeorum regni Francie quibusdam libris, qui Talmud appellantur, quod inspeximus et per viros discretos et expertos in talibus Deum timentes et zelum habentes fidei christiane fecimus inspici diligenter, quia eos invenimus errores innumerabiles, abusiones, blasfemias et nepharia continere, que pudori referentibus et audientibus sunt horrori in tantum, quod predicti libri secundum Deum sine fidei chrisrtiane injuria tolerari non possunt: de consilio bonorum, quos ad hoc specialiter duximus evocandos, pronunciamus predictos libros tolerandos non esse nec magistris Judeorum restitui debere et ipsos sententialiter condempnamus. De aliis vero libris nobis non exhibitis a magistris Judeorum, licet a nobis super hoc pluries fuerint requisiti, vel etiam non inspectis, plenius cognoscemus loco et tempore, et faciemus quod fuerit faciendum. Nomina autem illorum, de quorum consilio predicta sententia lata fuit, sunt hec: Venerabilis pater Willermus, Dei gratia Parisiensis episcopus, […] Et magistri theologie, videlicet: […] magister Petrus dictus archiepiscopus, […] frater Johannes

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Through the introitus, the reports on the lectures on the Sentences, and the quaestiones of the manuscripts 15652 and 15702, we have a clear image of the training of a new generation of masters, who were engaged in their activities as bachelors in the first five years of the decade and became masters in the second decade. It is interesting to note that, among these bachelors, there are not only secular but also mendicant authors, namely two Dominicans (John of Moussy and Albert the Great) and three Franciscans (Odo Rigaud, Bertrand of Bayonne, and Odo of Rosny). At the time in which these authors lectured on the Sentences, in the 1240s, it is thus clear that the mendicants had already stabilized their position at the University of Paris, with a chair of theology for the Dominicans and another for the Franciscans, and that the theological and legal controversy between mendicants and secular masters was just beginning.27 The presence of this plurality of chairs of theology is reflected by the variety of introductions to the Sentences present in the manuscripts. It is the time of the origin of the doctrinal developments of the discipline as well as of the first relevant crisis concerning the teaching material. After the great strike of 1228-1231, which opposed the royal court and Bishop William of Auvergne on one side, and the Chancellor of the University, Philip, on the other, there is a constant attempt to affirm the doctrinal control of the Bishop of Paris over the teaching of the university.28 In the very beginning of 1241, the chancellor of the university, Odo of Chateauroux, and the masters of theology listed ten ‘disapproved statements’ (articuli reprobati) taken from the works of a frater Stephanus, who is commonly identified with the Dominican Stephen of Vernizy.29 This doctrinal intervention appears to be an internal affaire within the faculty of theology, whose masters seem to have been responsible for the selection of the ten statements and of their doctrinal disapproval. Three years later, the Bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, formally condemned the ten statements with a solemn and official act.30 He used the list of 1241 and added a rebuttal to each proposition, making explicit provision for excommunication for those who taught those doctrines. Pungensasinum, frater Albertus Theutonicus’. See also Dahan, ‘Introduction: Textes et contextes’, 14-20; Tuilier, ‘La Condamnation du Talmud’, 65-67; Friedman, Connell, and Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud; and Young, Scholarly Community, 60-61. 27 Congar, ‘Aspects ecclésiologiques de la querelle’, 44-52. 28 Santi, ‘Guglielmo d’Auvergne’, 138-40; Wicki, Die Philosophie, 3-7. 29 Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 170-72 (n° 128). See also Doucet, ‘La date des condamantions’; and Bianchi, ‘Gli articoli censurati’, 158-59. On Stephen of Venizy, see Glorieux, Répertoire, 79-80 (n° 8). 30 Bianchi, ‘Gli articoli censurati’, 159.

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According to the manuscript tradition, this second formal condemnation was directed against the teaching of John Pagus, who in 1244 was one of the bachelors who lectured on the Sentences, as reported by MS 15652, and was attached to the chair of theology held by Peter of Lamballe.31

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The Introductions to the Sentences and the Idea of Theology The lectures reported in BnF, lat. 15652 and lat. 15702 follow a practice proper to the faculty of theology: the masters or bachelors devoted their opening lectures to the presentation of the text of Peter Lombard. In doing so, they offered an introduction to the Sentences, analyzing the features of the writing, namely the author’s intention, the content of the book, and its inner organization. Peter the Archbishop, Stephen of Poligny, Odo Rigaud, John Pagus, and Albert the Great organized their introitus or accessus or prologus according to some specific models that the Middle Ages, and particularly the ‘scholastic period’ (i.e. from the end of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries), inherited from Late Antiquity. Richard W. Hunt in 1948 offered a classification of four models of introduction to a work, identifying two kinds of introduction (A and B) that belong to the rhetorical tradition, and two other models (C and D) that come from the tradition of commentaries on philosophical texts and, specifically, from Boethius’s commentaries on Aristotle.32 These latter models go back to the Neoplatonic milieu of the Late Antique schools of philosophy and are used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to deal both with the theological texts and with the philosophical text, mainly the Aristotelian corpus. Hunt’s model C follows the example of Boethius’s commentary on the Ysagoge of Porphyry and includes an explanation of the aim of the text, its utility, its inner organization, the name of the author, the title, and its place in philosophy. In contrast, model D follows the paradigm that Boethius offers in the opening of his De differentiis topicis, where he notes that an introduction has to explain the genre and species of the art to which a text belongs, its object, its parts, and the ‘intellectual’ instruments used in the text, the work made by the author and his task and aim. Dealing with the Sentences, the Parisian bachelors of the 1240s focus mainly on models C and D, which offered the chance to analyze the structure and contents of the text, together with the author’s intention.33 More 31 On Pierre of Lamballe, see Glorieux, Répertoire, 325 (n° 145). 32 Hunt, ‘The Introductions’, 93-98. 33 Oliva, Les débuts de l’enseignement, 256-57.

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importantly, models C and D allowed for the positioning of the text and of its contents within the system of knowledge. The commentators on the Sentences thus have the opportunity to debate the nature and features of the discipline to which Peter Lombard’s work belongs. The bachelors who lectured on the Sentences organized their introductions, starting from the quotation of a biblical passage, whose exegesis offers the main element to deal with Peter Lombard’s text. It is a model that goes back to Peter Comestor’s analysis of the contents of the Sentences; it became the standard approach to the four books of the Magister Sententiarum.34 The idea that biblical exegesis can offer the key to understanding the Sentences is part of the tradition of glosses and commentaries on the four books and reflects the deep connection between Peter Lombard’s text and the lectures on the Bible, which remained at the center of teaching activity first at the school of Notre-Dame and later at the Parisian faculty of theology. In this sense, the introitus of Peter the Archbishop, Stephen of Poligny, Odo Rigaud, John Pagus, and Albert the Great are plainly part of a long and well-established tradition. At the same time, their analysis of the features of Peter Lombard’s work presents specific approaches. Peter the Archbishop, for instance, assumes the text of Ezekiel 3:1 (‘eat this book, and go speak to the children of Israel’) in order to explain the structure and contents of the Sentences.35 Peter notes: Ezechiel 4 (recte 3): eat this book etc., in this prophetic sermon four aspects have to be considered: firstly who is the author of these words, secondly what is the meaning of the term book, thirdly what does it mean eat, fourthly who are the children of Israel who are mentioned in the verse and go speak to the children of Israel. These four aspects designate the four causes which are involved in this work: the first is the cause of creation, firstly from the side of the author and secondly from the side of the instrument, that is the first is signified by God, while Ezechiel is the second. The first one, that is God, is properly named cause of creation since without him nothing can be done.36 34 See Saccenti, ‘The Materia super libros Sententiarum’, 187-202; Doyle, Peter Lombard and his Students, 172-75. 35 The biblical quotations are taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible, whose text is close to the Latin of the Vulgate. The text is available online at http://www.drbo.org. On Peter the Archbishop, see Glorieux, Répertoire, 333 (n° 151). 36 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, latin 15652, f. 32ra: ‘Ezech. 4 comede uolumen istud etc., in hoc sermone prophetico quatuor sunt consideranda: primum cuius sunt hec uerba, secundum etiam quid significet per uolumen, tercium de modo comedendi, quartum qui sint f ilii Israel de quibus dici “et loquere ad f ilios Israel”. Et in hoc designantur quatuor

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According to Peter’s description, understanding of the biblical passage requires establishing: 1) who says these words, 2) what is the meaning of the ‘book’ mentioned in the passage, 3) what it means to eat the volume, and 4) who are the ‘children of Israel’. These four points, notes Peter, exemplify the four causes (formal cause, efficient cause, material cause, and final cause) through which it is possible to deal with the Sentences. Peter uses this philosophical doctrine to analyze the features of Peter Lombard’s work and also to explain that its doctrinal content is part of a specific knowledge, identified by certain characteristics. In Stephen of Poligny’s introitus there is a similar use of the doctrine of the four causes as an effective instrument to determine the nature of theological knowledge.37 Starting from Exodus 25:26-27 (‘Thou shalt prepare also four golden rings, and shalt put them in the four corners of the same table over each foot, […] that the bars may be put through them, and the table may be carried’), Stephen explains that these biblical verses indicate the author of the Sentences, that is, the formal cause, and then the eff icient cause, the material cause, and the f inal cause. The master notes: Exodus 25, Moses says: and four gold rings, which thou shall put at the four corners of the ark. And thou shalt put them in through the rings that are in the sides of the ark, that it may be carried on them. In these words it is indicated who is the author, that is the efficient cause, of the book of the Sentences, where it is said: and the Lord spoke to Moses etc.; which is the formal cause with the words: four gold rings, which thou shall put, which is the final cause with the words: thou shall put at the four corners of the ark, and which is the material cause with the words: thou shalt put them in through the rings that are in the sides of the ark, that it may be carried on them.38 causas que concurrunt ad hoc opus; prima dicit causa creationis, una a parte auctoris, alia a parte instrumenti, idest prima Deus secunda per Ezechielem significat. Prima, idest Deus, bene dicitur causa creationis quia sine eo nihil poteret facere’. 37 On Stephen of Poligny, see Glorieux, Réperoire, 336 (n° 155). 38 BnF, lat. 15652, fol. 32rb: ‘Exodus 25, dicitur ad Moisem, Quatuor circulos aureos preparabis et pones etiam quatuor angulos mense per singulos pedes, ut mittantur uectes per eos et possit mensa portari, in his uerbis innuitur quis sit auctor uel causa efficiens libri Sententiarum, cum dicitur dixit dominus ad Moysen etc., que forma [ms.: materia], quatuor circulos aureos preparabis, que causa finalis, pones etiam quatuor angulos mense per singulos pedes, que causa materialis ut mittantur uectes per eos et possit mensa portari’.

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Stephen uses the philosophical doctrine of the four causes to define the nature of the knowledge that is contained in Peter Lombard’s work. According to Peter the Archbishop and Stephen of Poligny, theology is an autonomous discipline, which requires the use of a method that is consistent with the nature of its subject. The idea that theology is an autonomous discipline is supported by Odo Rigaud, a Franciscan bachelor who lectured on the Sentences in that same year.39 According to Odo, a f irst indication of the features of theological knowledge comes from a combination of Ecclesiasticus 1:6-7 and Proverbs 4:25. The passage from Ecclesiasticus says: ‘To whom hath the root of wisdom been revealed, and who hath known her wise counsels? To whom hath the discipline of wisdom been revealed and made manifest?’; in contrast, the quotation from Proverbs says: ‘Let thy eyes look straight on, and let thy eyelids go before thy steps’. According to Odo, these two passages suggest that in the analysis of a work, the evaluation of the intention must come first. Thus, when examining the Sentences, it is necessary to ask some questions: What are we looking for? Where can we f ind what we are looking for? How can we achieve what we are looking for? In answering these three questions the Franciscan bachelor develops his introduction to the Sentences and furthers his argument about theology. Quoting another biblical passage, namely Job 28: 12-13, 18, and 21, Odo qualif ies theological knowledge in terms of wisdom, that is, an understanding of the highest realities human beings can achieve only through divine revelation. The verses say: ‘But where is wisdom to be found, and where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is found in the land of them that live in delights’; ‘High and eminent things shall not be mentioned in comparison of it: but wisdom is drawn out of secret places’; and ‘It is hid from the eyes of all living, and the fowls of the air know it not’. In the ‘edited’ text of the Lectura super Sententias, which is the result of a careful revision and rearrangement of the lecture on Peter Lombard’s work, Odo Rigaud quotes the verses of the Book of Job to introduce the idea that wisdom, which concerns divine things, is a hidden knowledge, superior to human understanding that comes from science. The report of BnF, lat. 15652 shows that, differently from the Lectura, Odo Rigaud analyses the key terms of the quotations from the Book of Job. 39 Sileo, Teoria della scienza teologica, 1:85-95.

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54 Riccardo Saccenti Reportatio Paris, BnF, lat. 15652

Lectura super quatuor libros Sententiarum

To whom hath the root of wisdom been revealed and who hath known her wise counsels? To whom hath the discipline of wisdom been revealed and made manifest? And who hath understood the multiplicity of her steps? (Ecclesiasticus 1). Proverbs 4: thy eyelids go before thy steps. The word steps means the works, the word eyelids means the evaluation of the end and similar things; and this evaluation must precede the work. And there are three kinds of such evaluation: firstly we have to consider what we have to look for; secondly where we can find it; thirdly how we can achieve it. […] We ask where it is possible to find wisdom. Where we can find wisdom? Job 28: Where Job 28 says: Where is wisdom to be found, is wisdom to be found and where is the place and where is the place of understanding? Man of understanding?, and then follows: wisdom knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it is drawn out of secret places, and then: it is found in the land of them that live in delights, hid from the eyes of all living and the fowls of and then: wisdom is drawn out of secret places, the air (that is angels) know it not. And this is and then: it is hid from the eyes of all living. mostly true of the wisdom which concerns And saying the place of understanding, it divine things.41 uses understanding to indicate the capability to understand, and wisdom to indicate the capability to abstract, and them that live to indicate men, and then the flows of the air know it not, that is angels and men.40

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Brother Rigaud. Ecclesiasticus 1: To whom hath the root of wisdom been revealed and who hath known her wise counsels? To whom hath the discipline of wisdom been revealed and made manifest? And who hath understood the multiplicity of her steps? Because the eyelids go before the steps, Proverbs 4, that is the councils go before the works. Firstly here it has to be considered what we are looking for; secondly how and where it is possible to find what we are looking for; thirdly how we can find it. […]

40 BnF, lat. 15652, fol. 32v: ‘Frater Rigaud. Eccli. i. Radix sapientie cui reuelata est et astucias illius quis agnouit, disciplina sapientie cui reuelata et manifesta et multiplicationem ingressus illius quis intellexit, quia palpebre debent precedere gressus, Prou. 4, idest consilia debent precedere opera. Primo considerandum est hic quid querimus; secundo quomodo et ubi potest quod querimus inueniri; tercio qualiter attingi. […] Queritur sapiencia autem ubi inuenitur. Dicit Iob 28: sapiencia ubi inuenitur? Et quis est locus intelligentie? Nescit is pretium eius et nec inuenitur in terra suauiter uiuentium, et post: trahitur sapiencia de occultis, et post: abscondita est sapiencia ab oculis omnium uiuencium. Et dicit intelligencie locus, “intelligencia” quasi ad uim cognoscitiuam, “sapienciam” quasi ad astractiuam, “uiuencium” intelligit hominum, et post uolucres celi latet, idest angelos et homines’. 41 Odo Rigaldus, Lectura super quatuor libros Sententiarum, 2:77-78: ‘Radix sapientiae cui revelata est? Et astutias illius quis agnovit? Disciplina sapientiae cui revelata est et manifestata? Et multiplicationem ingressus illius quis intellexit? (Eccli. 1). Prov. 4: Palpebrae tuae praecedant gressus tuos. Per “gressus” opera, per “palpebras” vero considerationes finis et huiusmodi; quae considerationes debent praecedere ipsum opus. Et sunt specialiter tres huiusmodi considerationes: primo enim considerare debemus, quid est quod a nobis debet quaeri; secundo, ubi possint inveniri; tertio, quomodo ad illud possit attingi. […] Sapientia autem ubi inveniri potest? – Iob 28: Sapientia ubi invenitur? Et quis intelligentiae? et sequitur infra: Trahitur sapientia de occultis;

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The bachelor explains that the term intelligentia indicates the cognitive faculty, while sapientia refers to the abstractive capability of human knowledge; viventium indicates human beings and volucres, angels. According to the contents of the Parisian report, Odo’s idea is that divine wisdom, i.e. theology, is well beyond the capabilities not just of human beings but also of angels. It is a kind of knowledge that is achievable in consequence of divine revelation, which through the Scripture enables the subject to develop this discipline according to a proper method. Thus, theology has to be distinguished from the other disciplines. John Pagus, the fourth bachelor whose lecture on the Sentences is registered by the student of manuscript 15652, explicitly notes that Peter Lombard’s work contains a knowledge which is superior to all the other sciences because it concerns the Holy Scripture. 42 As for Odo Rigaud, Pagus also uses the quotation of Job 28:12-13 to examine the very nature of theology. Pagus notes:

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Job 28: where is the wisdom to be found etc. [in the line spacing: which is the place of intelligence? Man does not know its price nor find it sweetly in the land of the living etc.] Here it is considered the greatness of the Holy Scriptures and the excellence of the other sciences and in particular of this book. 43

This passage explains that ‘wisdom’, that is, theology, is a form of knowledge that does not properly belong to human beings and thus is superior to any other kind of science. It is certainly a discipline which can be considered as a science, but by contrast to all other sciences its subject has a divine origin accessible only through Holy Scripture. Albert the Great develops his analysis of the contents of the Sentences starting from Ecclesiasticus 24:5-6: ‘I come out of the mouth of the most High, the first born before all creatures: I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth’. 44 According to Albert, the words that et infra: Abscondita est ab oculis omnium viventium, volucres quoque caeli (id est angelos) latet. Et hoc maxime verum est de sapientia quae est de divinis’. 42 On John Pagus see Glorieux, Réperoire, 328-29 (n° 147). 43 BnF, lat. 15652, fol. 34ra: ‘Iob. 28. Spaientia ubi inuenitur etc. [supr.: et quis est locus intelligentie? Nescit homo pretium eius nec inuenitur in terra suauiter uiuentium etc.]. Hic perpendi potest immensitas Sacre Scripture et excellentia aliarum scientiarum et precipue huius libri’. 44 On Albert the Great and his commentary on the Sentences, see Senner, ‘Zur Wissenschaftstheorie’, 333-40; Weisheipl, ‘The Life and Works’, 21-28; and Anzulewicz, De forma resultante, 14.

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comprise these verses correspond to the issue that Peter Lombard discusses in the four books. The first pronoun, ‘I’, for instance, refers to the Son, that is, the second person of the Trinity, while the lemma ‘the mouth of the most High’ means the Father, and the relation between the Father and the Son is granted by the presence of the Holy Spirit. This brief exposition summarizes the whole content of the first book of the Sentences, which concerns the Holy Trinity. As for Odo Rigaud’s text, Albert the Great’s introitus in BnF, lat. 15702 is also the result of a reportatio by the learned student. Comparing it with the final version of the text, which the Dominican master revised and completed in 1249, the care taken to prepare a written text for dissemination is evident. Reportatio Paris, BnF, lat. 15702

Commentarii in primum librum Sententiarum

Ecclesiasticus 24: I came out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn of all creatures: I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth. In this authority four things are said which indicate the matter of the four books of the Sentences. In the first book the subject is the distinction of their persons and the procession from each other, where it is said: I came out of the mouth of the most High. I indicates the Son; out of the mouth of the most High means the Father, because he is the principle of the generation of the Son such as the mouth is the principle of the generation of the word.45

I came out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn of all creatures: I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth. According to the order of the text here are considered four things: from which comes the matter of the four books. In the first one is considered the distinction of the persons and their procession from each other, where it is said: I came out of the mouth of the most High. The word I means the wisdom that speaks; the word mouth means the Father that is the principle of the generation of the Son as the mouth is the principle of the generation of the Word. Neither the mouth comes out of the Word, nor the Word comes out without the Spirit: and thus the words mouth and word mean the procession of the Holy Spirit from both ‘the Father and the Son’.46

45 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, latin 15802, fol. 3rb: ‘Eccli. 24: ego ex ore altissimi prodiui ante omnem creaturarum ego feci in celis ut oriretur lumen indeficiens. In hac auctoritate dicuntur ibi quatuor in quibus notatur materia quatuor librorum Sententiarum. In primo de distinctione personarum et de processione unius ab alia cum dicitur: ego ex ore altissimi, “ego” dicit Filius, “ex ore altisismi” Pater, quia secundum quod ipse per generationem principium filii est ut est uerbum’. 46 Albertus Magnus, Commentarii in primum librum Sententiarum, ed. Borgnet, p. 1: ‘Ego ex ore Altissimi prodiui primogenita ante omnem creaturam: ego feci in celi ut oriretur lumen indeficiens, et sicut nebula texi omnem terram. Hic secundum ordinem tanguntur quatuor: ex quibus secundum Libri istius trahitur materia quatuor Librorum. In primo enim notatur distinctio personarum, et precessio unius ab alia, cum dicit: Ego ex ore Altissimi prodivi. Per ly Ego supponitur sapientia loquens: per ly Ore autem Pater secundum quod ipse per

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The notes on BnF, lat. 15702 reflect the lecture that the bachelor gave and appear as part of that practice of ‘private’ reportatio that is proper of the anonymous student who composed them.

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Conclusions The student who collected the notes of manuscripts BnF, lat. 15652 and lat. 15702 produced two precious witnesses to the intellectual life of the faculty of theology at the University of Paris in the early 1240s. As for the historical background, the manuscripts offer an image of the chairs of theology already organized around masters, with the bachelors who lectured on the Bible and on the Sentences preparing themselves to become masters. The manuscripts testify also to the coexistence of various bachelors who lectured on the Sentences at the same time. In addition, the lectures reported by the student show an already well-established teaching of theology by mendicant masters, namely Franciscans and Dominicans, besides the teaching of the secular masters. In this sense, the manuscripts allow us to understand the heterogeneous intellectual milieu which distinguished the Parisian faculty of theology in the 1240s and which was also the basis of the developing tensions and conflicts between secular and mendicant masters. In regard of the literary aspects of the texts, the Parisian manuscripts allow us to evaluate the differences between the lecture that a bachelor or a master gave in front of his students and the text which he prepared for official publication. The lectures of Odo Rigaud and Albert the Great are examples of the long and complex process that started with teaching activity and ended with the editing of the text of the Lectura. The bachelor used his own notes and those taken by some reportatores in order to refine the official text, making the lecture clearer and more fluid. Finally, from the point of view of their doctrinal content, the introductions to the Sentences show that theology, as a discipline, is clearly distinguished from the other kinds of human knowledge. Using biblical language, it is defined in terms of wisdom and is unique with respect to ‘all other sciences’, that is, any other kind of knowledge that can be achieved by rational beings, both humans and angels. The authors of these introductions focus their attention on the need to explain the specific features of theology and to generationem principium Filii est ut est Verbum. Nec os autem unde Verbum procedit, nec ipsum Verbum est sine Spiritu: et ideo in ore et in Verbo signif icatur processio Spiritus sancti ab utroque’.

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define its position within the system of knowledge, which is used in the university. The use of the doctrine of the four causes, which is appropriate to the philosophical approach and of the scientia, suggests that they considered theology not just a matter of wisdom, but a structured and organized knowledge, with its own method of research. This chapter is part of the research project ‘Authority and Innovation in Early Franciscan Thought (c. 1220-1245)’. It has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement 714427.

Bibliography Primary Sources

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Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis. Edited by Henri Denifle and Emile Chatelain. 4 vols. Paris: Delalain, 1891-1899. Odo Rigaldus, Lectura super quatuor libros Sententiarum. In Teoria della scienza teologica: ‘Quaestio de scientia theologiae’ di Odo Rigaldi e altri testi inediti (1230-1250). Vol. 2, edited by Leonardo. Sileo. Romae: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1984. Saccenti, Riccardo. ‘The Materia super libros Sententiarum Attributed to Peter Comestor: Study of the Text and Critical Edition’. Bullettin de philosophie médiévale 54 (2012): 155-215.

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im lateinischen Mittelalter. Von Richards Rufus bis zu Franciscos de Mayronis, edited by Ludger Honnefelder, Rega Wood, Mechtild Dreyer, and Marc A. Aris, 777-94. Münster: Aschendorff, 2005. Bianchi, Luca ‘Gli articoli censurati nel 1241/1244 e la loro influenza da Bonaventura a Gerson’. In Autour de Guillaume d’Auvergen (†1249), edited by Franco Morenzoni and Jean-Yves Tilliette, 155-71. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Borgo, Marta. ‘L’enseignement des “Sentences” pendant la première moitié du XIIIe siècle’. In Les Débuts de l’enseignement universitaire à Paris (1200-1245 environ), edited by Jacques Verges and Olga Weijers, 295-314. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Boureau, Alain. ‘La méthode critique en théologie scolastique. Les cas des commentaires des “Sentences” de Pierre Lombard (XIII-XIV siècle)’. In La méthode critique au Moyen Âge, edited by Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan, 167-80. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. Brady, Ignatius. ‘The Distinctiones of Peter Lombard’s Book of “Sentences” and Alexander of Hales’. Franciscan Studies 25 (1965): 90-116. Chenu, Marie-Dominique. ‘Maîtres et bacherliers de l’université de Paris v. 1240. Description du manuscrit Paris, Bibl. Nat. Lat. 15652’. Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale du XIIIe siècle, 11-39. Paris: Vrin; Ottawa: Inst. D’études médiévales, 1932. —. La théologie au XIIe siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1957. —. La théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1969. Colish, Marcia L. ‘From Sentence Collection to the Sentence Commentary and the summa: Parisian Scholastic Theology, 1130-1215’. In Manuels, programmes de cour, techniques d’enseignement dans les universités médiévales, edited by Jacqueline Hamesse, 9-29. Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d’étude médiévales, 1994. —. ‘Scholastic Theology at Paris around 1200’. In Crossing Boundaries at Medieval Universities, edited by Spencer E. Young, 29-50. Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 36. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Congar, Yves. ‘Aspects ecclésiologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et séculiers dans la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle et le début du XIVe’. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 36 (1961): 35-151. Dahan, Gilbert. ‘Introduction: Textes et contextes de l’affaire du Talmud’. In Le brûlement du Talmud, 1242-1244, edited by Gilbert Dahan, 7-20. Paris: Cerf, 1999. Doucet, Victorin. ‘La date des condamnations parisiennes dites de 1241. Faut-il corriger le Cartulaire de l’Université?’. In Mélange Auguste Pelzer: Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale de la Scolastique médiévale offerst à Monseigneur Auguste Pelzer, Scriptor de la Bibliothèque vaticane, à l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire, 183-93. Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’université et Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1947. —. Prolegomena. In Alexandri de Hales O.M. Summa theologica. Ed. P. Quaracchi 4 vols. Rome: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1924-1948), IV.

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Doyle, Matthew. Peter Lombard and his Students. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016. Friedman, John, Jean Connell Hoff, and Robert Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013. Engelhardt, Georg. ‘Adam de Puteorumvilla. Un Maître parisien proche d’Odon Rigaud. Sa psychologie de la foi’. Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 8 (1936): 61-78. Glorieux, Palémon. Répertoire des maitres en théologie de Paris au XIIIe siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1933. —. ‘Les années 1242-1247 à la Faculté de Théologie de Paris’. Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 29 (1962): 234-49. —. ‘Maître Adam’. Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 34 (1967): 262-70. Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 1242-1244. Edited by G. Dahan. Paris: Cerf, 1999. —. ‘L’enseignement au Moyen Âge. Techniques et méthodes en usage à la Faculté de Théologie de Paris au XIIIe siècle’. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 35 (1968): 65-186. Henquinet, Francois-Marie. ‘Eudes de Rosny, O.F.M., Eudes Rigaud et la Somme d’Alexandre de Hales’. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 33 (1940): 3-54. Hunt, Richard William. ‘The Introductions to the “Artes” in the Twelfth Century’. In Studia Mediaevalia in honorem admodum reverendi padri Raymundi Joseph Martin O.P., 85-112. Bruges: De Tempel, 1948. Mediaeval Commentaries on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard. Vol. 1, Current Research. Edited by Gillian R. Evans. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Mediaeval Commentaries on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard. Vol. 2. Edited by Philipp W. Rosemann. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Mediaeval Commentaries on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard. Vol. 3. Edited by Philipp W. Rosemann. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Luscombe, David. The School of Peter Abelard: The Influence of Abelard’s Thought in the Early Scholastic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Monagle, Clare. Orthodoxy and Controversy in the Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’ and the Development of Theology. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Oliva, Adriano. Les débuts de l’enseignement de Thomas d’Aquin et sa conception de la ‘sacra doctrina’, avec l’édition du prologue de son Commentaire des ‘Sentences’. Paris: Vrin, 2006. Rosemann, Phillip W. The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004. Saccenti, Riccardo. ‘L’evoluzione della nozione di theologia negli scritti dei magistri parigini fra gli anni ’20 e ’40 del XIII secolo’. In Scientia, Fides, Theologia: Studi di

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filosofia medievale in onore di Gianfranco Fioravanti, edited by Stefano Perfetti, 173-92. Pisa: ETS, 2011. Santi, Francesco. ‘Guglielmo d’Auvergne e l’ordine dei Domenicani tra filosofia naturale e tradizione magina’. In Autour de Guillaume d’Auvergne (†1249), edited by Franco Morenzoni and Jean-Yves Tilliette, 137-53. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Senner, Walter. ‘Zur Wissenschaftstheorie der Theologie im Sentenzenkommentar Albert des Großen’. In Albertus Magnus Doctor Universalis. 1280/1980, edited by Gerbert Meyer and Albert Zimmermann, 323-43. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1980. Sileo, Leonardo. Teoria della scienza teologica: ‘Quaestio de scientia theologiae’ di Odo Rigaldi e altri testi inediti (1230-1250). 2 vols. Romae: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1984. —. ‘Il libro: forme d’insegnamento e generi letterari’. In Storia della teologia nel Medioevo. Vol. 2, La grande fioritura, edited by Giulio D’Onofrio, 551-601, Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1996. Tuilier, Andre. ‘La Condamnation du Talmud par les maitres universitaires parisiens’. In Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 1242-1244, edited by G. Dahan, 59-78. Paris: Cerf, 1999. Valente, Luisa. Logique et théologie: Les écoles parisiennes entre 1150 et 1220. Paris: Vrin, 2008. Weber, Hubert Philippe ‘The “Glossa in IV libros Sententiarum” by Alexander of Hales’. In Mediaeval Commentaries on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard. Vol. 2, edited by Philipp W. Rosemann, 79-109. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Weijers, Olga. ‘Terminologie des Universités Naissantes. Études sur le vocabulaire utilisé par l’institution nouvelle’. In Soziale Ordnungen im selbstverständnis des Mittelalters. 1. Halband, edited by Albert Zimmermann, 258-80. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979. Weisheipl, James A. ‘The Life and Works of St. Albert the Great’. In Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays. 1980, edited by James A. Weisheipl, 13-51. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980. Wicki, Niklaus. Die Philosophie Philipps des Kanzlers. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 2005. Young, Spencer. Scholarly Community at the Early University of Paris: Theologians, Education and Society, 1215-1248. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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About the Author

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Riccardo Saccenti teaches in the Department of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Bergamo. He researches in the area of medieval thought, particularly of the schools of Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

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Authority and Innovation in Bernard of Clairvaux’s De gratia et libero arbitrio Marcia L. Colish

Abstract Twelfth-century scholastics are renowned for their willingness to reassess and to criticize patristic authorities, with monastic authors typically understood as far more conservative in this regard. Bernard’s treatise revises that view. It reflects Bernard’s willingness to depart sharply from the late Augustine on grace and free will and to invoke a patristic-age monastic authority, John Cassian, in so doing. Bernard’s own position, accenting the liberty of our postlapsarian free will and its full collaboration with divine grace, displays both his uses of, and departures from, these two authorities.

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Keywords: Bernard of Clairvaux, Scholasticism, Divine Grace, Free Will

‘The Magisterium has proposed no definitive positive teaching on the precise relationship between divine causality and human free choice’.1 So writes Robert J. Matava in 2016, surveying the debates from Augustine to latter-day neo-Thomists. Matava’s survey does not include Bernard of Clairvaux. Yet, Bernard’s De gratia et libero arbitrio (c. 1128) contains a robust defense of the will’s freedom from necessity. Exercised along with grace, it yields freedom from sin and freedom from misery in the next life. While Bernard’s three freedoms became a standard item in the scholastic inventory, his account of freedom of choice, the theme of this chapter, is distinctive, in itself and in the light of his available authorities. 1 Matava, Divine Causality, 2-7, 18-36 for the survey; quotation at p. 6. See also Weaver, Divine Grace, who notes at p. ix that this is ‘a debate for which the church has never found a satisfactory answer’.

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Marcia L. Colish

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Thus far, scholars have contextualized De gratia in various ways. Some read it in continuity with philosophical traditions such as Platonism and Neoplatonism, 2 Aristotelianism,3 Stoicism, 4 Thomism,5 late medieval voluntarism,6 or even with thinkers as recent as Descartes and Nietzsche.7 More typically, scholars treat it as the work of Bernard as a mystic or a neo-Augustinian ‘last of the Fathers’.8 Those who consider more recent sources have settled on Anselm of Canterbury. The De gratia reflects both agreement with Anselm and departures from him. Far less attention has been paid to John Cassian, an author cited as a patristic authority in the early Middle Ages, recommended in the Rule of St. Benedict, and familiar 2 Tracking Platonic and Neoplatonic themes in Bernard, largely in the form of motif-research, are, for example, Déchanet, ‘Aux sources’, 56-77; Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1:175-76, 189-98; Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-même, 1:258-72, 279-81, 3:720-21. 3 The presumed context here is Aristotle’s doctrine of akrasia, although it was not available in Latin until the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics in the 1230s and excited much interest after that time. Framing Bernard on the will in this light is Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux sur la faiblesse de la volonté’, 147-72. On Aristotelianism available in Bernard’s day see Nederman, ‘Aristotelian Ethics’, 55-75; Nederman, ‘Nature, Ethics, and the Doctrine of Habitus’, 86-110, both reprinted in Nederman, Aristotelianism, chap. 1 and 16. 4 Beyond material in the church fathers, school tradition authors, and florilegia, the key source here is Seneca, on which see Nothdurft, Studien zum Einfluss Senecas, 82, 86, 121, 137n.4, 138, 144; Reynolds, Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters, chap. 6 and 9; Reynolds, ‘Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Dialogues’, 353-73; Lapidge, ‘Stoic Inheritance’, 81-112; Smiraglia, ‘Presenza di Seneca’, 265-82; Carron, ‘Sénèque’, 307-33; Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux et l’infléxion’, 47-50; Hayward, ‘Earls of Leicester’, 328-55. These Stoicizing elements are more pointed than Bernard’s largely decorative references to classical authors noted by Gilson, Mystical Theology, 8-13; Delhaye, ‘La conscience morale’, 215-16; Delhaye, Le problème de la conscience morale, 35-38; Leclercq, Love of Learning, 116-24, 132-34, 139-41; Callerot, Introduction to her trans. of La grâce et le libre arbitre, 201; Colish, ‘Abelard on Theology’, 1:12nn.23-24, reprinted in Colish, Studies in Scholasticism, chap. 7; Mews, ‘Cicero’, 369-84. 5 Venuta, Libero arbitrio; Faust, ‘Bernhards “Liber de gratia”’, 34-41; and Dingjan, Discretio, 133-45. 6 McClusky, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’, 297-17; Perkams, ‘Bernhard von Clairvaux’, 1-32. 7 Trottmann, ‘Le libre arbitre’, 455-63; Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux, Aelred de Rievaulx’, 36; Trottmann, ‘Volunté et infinie liberté’, 29; seconding Trottmann is Müller, Willensschwäche, 453-55. The most extreme statement of this position is Marion, ‘L’image de la liberté’, 52-60. 8 Rousseau, ‘S. Bernard’, 34-58, 70-71; Lottin, ‘Libre arbitre et liberté’, 1:19-20, 218; Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1:175-76, 189-98; Javelet, ‘La réintroduction de la liberté’, 1-34; Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-même, 1:258-72, 279-81, 3:720-21; McGinn, ‘Freedom, Formation, and Reformation’, 91-112; McGinn, introduction to On Grace and Free Choice, trans. O’Donovan, 5, 9-12; DiLorenzo, ‘Dante’s Saint Bernard’, 497-513; Callerot, Introduction, 172-79, 184, 217-18; Corbin, La grâce et la liberté, 20-25, 50-54, 61-93; Boquet, ‘Le libre arbitre’, 181-82, 185-91; Rydstrøm-Poulsen, ‘The Augustinian Bernard of Clairvaux’, 301-19; Müller, Willensschwäche, 449-95, 708-9; Casey, ‘Reading Saint Bernard’, 94-97, 99-102; Pranger, ‘Bernard the Writer’, 222-26; Leclercq, ‘Liberté et destinée’, 135-45, reprising his ‘last of the Fathers’ view in Leclercq, Love of Learning, 114-15.

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to all in the Benedictine tradition.9 As this chapter argues, it is largely from Cassian’s Collations that Bernard derived his strategy for defending the will’s freedom from necessity, against Augustine, Anselm, and Cassian himself. There is no consensus on Anselm’s influence on Bernard. Some scholars see him as merely shifting Anselm’s attention from the ends of moral choice to its beginnings, or as reprising Anselm but in more detail.10 Some see Bernard as more Augustinian than Anselm,11 others as less Augustinian than Anselm.12 The latter positions may not be mutually exclusive, given Eileen Sweeney’s judgment that Anselm on free will holds the line between the anti-Manichean and the anti-Pelagian Augustine.13 Anselm views freedom of choice as restricted in fallen humanity but with limits less severe than those envisioned by the late Augustine. For Anselm, moral agents are fully free only when unable to sin. Lacking the non posse peccare in this life, we are freer when we choose rectitude aided by grace than when we sin by rejecting grace. We are not forced either to sin or to be virtuous. While we can do, or accept, things we do not want to do, we cannot sin against our own will. Difficulties and temptations do not cancel our freedom of choice. Nor is grace irresistible. The will is its own efficient cause.14 Although God foreknows how we will respond to his grace and he preordains and accomplishes what he wills, God does not will to compel us, or to prevent us from exercising our free choice. The merits we gain thereby rightly belong to us and we can take them with us into God’s kingdom. 9 The Rule of St. Benedict 42.3, 42.5, 73.7, ed. and trans. Venarde, 144-45, 128-29. On this recommendation, see de Vogüé, ‘Les mentions des oeuvres de Cassien’, 275-85. On Cassian in Benedict’s Rule and Cassian’s early medieval reception, see Diem, Das monastische Experiment, 12-29, 112-13nn.413-15. Among the few modern scholars noting the influence of Cassian on Bernard, Gilson, Mystical Theology, 18-19, 28, 31 sees the connection as mysticism and asceticism; Callerot, Introduction, 178-79 sees it as the synergy between grace and free will; Mews, ‘Cicero’ sees it as the doctrine of friendship. 10 Simonetti, Introduzione to his trans. of Liber de gratia et libero arbitrio 1:349-56; see also Faust, ‘Bernhards “Liber de gratia”’, 42-43; Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1:175-76, 189-98; Callerot, Introduction, 219; Corbin, La grâce et la liberté, 17-21, 28. 11 For example Lottin, ‘Libre arbitre et liberté’, 1:19-20, 218. 12 For example Venuta, Libero arbitrio, 17-18, 21-28, 160-64; Vanni Rovighi, ‘Notes sur l’influence de saint Anselme’, 55-56; Vanni Rovighi, ‘Libertà e libero arbitrio’, 281-85; Faust, ‘Bernhards “Liber de gratia”’, 36-38, 42-43, 48-51; Simonetti, Introduzione, 1:335, 349; Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux, Aelred de Rievaulx’, 36; Trottmann, ‘Volonté et infinie liberté’, 29-35, 44-45; Colish, ‘Error’, 548-50, 552. 13 Sweeney, Anselm, 196-239, 346-67. Also useful are Vanni Rovighi, ‘Libertà e libero arbitrio’, 271-85; and Müller, Willensschwäche, 381-413, superseding Lottin, ‘Libre arbitre’, 1:12-14, 217. 14 Anselm of Canterbury, De casu diaboli 27, ed. Schmitt, 1:275.

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In contrast with Anselm, Bernard’s De gratia ignores the anti-Manichean Augustine’s rationale for free will.15 Rather, targeting the anti-Pelagian Augustine, it launches a stealth attack borrowed from Cassian. With Cassian, Bernard uses the authority of St. Paul against the St. Paul manipulated to serve Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, original sin, and irresistible grace. Neither Cassian nor Bernard invokes the shifts in Augustine’s position on free will across his career, as his Pelagian opponents did.16 Cassian’s tactic is to expose Augustine as a provincial and idiosyncratic thinker, whose followers in southern Gaul misrepresented his teaching as accepted orthodoxy. Indeed, in historical fact, Augustine’s position, and theirs, was far from normative. As Brent Shaw notes, frustrated by his decade-long failure to dislodge the Donatists, Augustine’s effort to ‘reposition himself in the marketplace’, rebranding himself as a defender of the faith against Pelagianism, had little impact elsewhere.17 As Eugene TeSelle reminds us, at this time, ‘many regions were unacquainted with the doctrine of original sin’,18 not to mention Augustine’s belief in its corrupting effects. And, Augustine’s monocular use of 1 Cor. 4:7: ‘What have you that you did not receive?’ as his theme song, trumping other, competing, biblical texts, suggested that his grasp of biblical theology was as shaky as it was limited. As his legacy, this anti-Pelagianized St. Paul, ‘arguably Augustine’s invention’, as James Wetzel remarks,19 had fewer immediate heirs than Augustine might have hoped or than some modern scholars imagine.20 Here, we are far from the Augustine later viewed as an authority with a capital ‘A’. This brings us to Cassian and the debate on his alleged Pelagianism, traditionally if anachronistically called the Semi-Pelagian controversy.21 15 Compare on this point Ventura, Libero arbitrio, 24; and Callerot, Introduction, 172-79, 184, 217-18. 16 These changes are mapped by TeSelle, Augustine, 135-38, 144-45, 156-65, 176-82, 258-66, 278-97, 313-38; see also his excellent swift reprise in TeSelle, ‘The Background’, 1-13. 17 Shaw, Sacred Violence, 311-15; quotation at p. 313. 18 TeSelle, ‘The Background’, 6. For this and other Augustinian doctrines queried as nontraditional or unacceptable in his day, see Weaver, Divine Grace, 4-35, 38-39, 49-69, 116-239; Wetzel, ‘Snares of Truth’, 124-41; Bonner, Freedom and Necessity, 3-4, 6, 9, 11, 14, 17, 25-26, 73, 81-82; Leyser, Authority and Asceticism, 3, 7-8, 18-61; Leyser, ‘Augustine in the Latin West’, 454-55; Teske, ‘1 Timothy 2:4’, 14-34; Hwang, ‘Pauci perfectae’, 35-50; and Pereira, ‘Augustine, Pelagius’, 180-207. 19 Wetzel, ‘Snares of Truth’, 139 n.20; see also Bonner, Freedom and Necessity, 3-4, 6, 11, 81-82; Pereira, ‘Augustine, Pelagius’, 183-86. 20 Compare with Müller, Willensschwäche, 208-42, 301-66, who sees this late Augustinian position as dominating medieval thought until the reception of Aristotle. 21 Scholars continue to use this term, although it was not coined until the sixteenth century, as noted by Backus and Goudriaan, ‘Semipelagianism’, 25-46.

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The dismissal of Cassian’s alleged position at the Second Council of Orange of 629 after a century-long debate did not prevent his followers’ teaching from remaining ‘the operative theology of the church’, as Rebecca Harden Weaver puts it.22 Then, and now, discussion of this debate has focused on Cassian’s Collation 13. Scholars agree that its goal was to refute the charge of Pelagianism and to validate the ascetic praxis of the monks for whom Cassian wrote, in line with Greek theology and the tradition of the Desert Fathers.23 But this text should be read in the context of the broadly conceived theology of grace and free will found throughout the Collations,24 important in its own right, as well as for Bernard’s reaction to it. Cassian has a psychology of sin that draws on both Greek philosophy and monastic theology. With Plato and Aristotle he holds that we have three mental faculties, the rational, the irascible, and the concupiscible. He names these faculties in Aristotle’s Greek, reflecting the culture he expects in his audience. Each faculty is vulnerable to our wayward passions, yielding its own particular vices.25 Cassian diagnoses these vices and prescribes their remedies. He presents his monks as able to take their medicine of their own free will. Vices may also derive from diabolical temptation, with some demons possessing their own specialties. These temptations do not 22 Weaver, Divine Grace, ix. On the weaknesses of Cassian’s opponents, see also Pollmann and Lambert, ‘After Augustine’, 174-83; Casiday, Tradition and Theology, 6-12. 23 Accounts focusing only or mainly on Collation 13 include Chadwick, John Cassian, 109-38; Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed., 110-36; Stewart, Cassian, 77-88; Leyser, Authority and Asceticism, 34, 35, 48-49; Wetzel, ‘Snares of Truth’, 126-28; Bonner, Freedom and Necessity, 85, 106-7; Casiday, Tradition and Theology, 16-160, 259-63; TeskeTeske, ‘1 Timothy 2:4’, 30-32; and Hwang, ‘Pauci perfectae’, 36-37. For earlier bibliography on the interpretation of this text, see Ramsay, Introduction to his trans. of Conferences, 463. 24 Excellent in this regard are Weaver, Divine Grace, 38-39, 71-116, 235-36, 238, who also discusses the dating issues surrounding Collation 13 at pp. 93-97; Ramsay, ‘John Cassian and Augustine’, 114-30; and Ramsay, Introduction, 10-11, 23-24, 461-63; see also Hwang, ‘Pauci perfectae’, 37; on issues of biblical exegesis, see Pereira, ‘Augustine, Pelagius’, 184. 25 John Cassian, Collationes XXIII 24.15.1-24.17.6, ed. Petchenig, pp. 690-93; quotation at 24.15.4, p. 691: ‘Eodem modo de visibilibus ad invisibilia transeuntes animae nostrae partibus atque ut ita dixerim membris vim cuiusque vitii inesse credamus. Quam cum sapientissimi quique tripertitae definiant esse virtutis, necesse est ut λογικόν, id est rationabile, aut ϑυμικόν, id est irascibile, aut ἐ πιϑυμητικόν, id est concupiscibile eius aliquo conrumpatur incursu. Cum ergo aliquem ex his adfectibus vis noxiae obsederit passionis, pro illius corruptione etiam vitio nomen imponitur. Nam si rationabilem eius partem vitiorum pestis infecerit, cenodoxiae, elationis, invidiae, superbiae, praesumptionis, contentionis, hereseos vitia procreabit. Si irascibilem vulneravit sensum, furorem, inpatientiam, tristitiam, acediam, pusillanimitatem, crudelitatemque parturiet. Si concupiscibilem corrumperit portionem, gastrimargiam, fornicationem, filargyriam, avaritiam et desideria noxia terrenaque generabit.’ Here and in other Latin quotations I capitalize words beginning sentences and use ‘v’ for ‘u’.

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force us to sin. They can be overcome, whether by our own free will, our personal asceticism, or by some combination of grace and human effort.26 Cassian cites biblical worthies and Desert Fathers as frequent examples of all these alternatives. Since it is just as susceptible to vice as our other faculties, reason is not a privileged moral guide. We should not trust our own judgment but submit humbly to the judgment of our elders. Cassian states this advice expressly in Collation 227 and illustrates it in the overall structure of the Collations, cast as dialogues in which junior monks seek the guidance of senior monks with more experience, deeper holiness, and a greater command of Holy Scripture. From them the juniors learn how to attain balance in the monastic life and to deal with biblical contradictions.28 Cassian also advocates balance by pairing his odd-numbered Collations, outlining his moral desiderata, with his even-numbered Collations, arming monks in the struggle to achieve them.29 The Pauline texts he cites, and the particular correlations between grace and free will they anchor, reflect the specific issues addressed in each Collation. Cassian’s approach is thus multivalent and practical, not abstract or formulaic, ‘a common-sense one that seems to fit neatly into the structure of human behavior and responsibility’, as Boniface Ramsay observes.30 Thus, the St. Paul cited in the even-numbered Collations is the Paul who accents the all-importance of grace. For instance, in Collations 4, 20, and 22, Cassian quotes Rom. 7:15-25, where Paul famously laments the tension between what he wants to do and what he is able to do and its resolution by grace, buttressing the point with other Pauline texts in the same vein.31 Alternatively, in the odd-numbered Collations, the Paul quoted is the Paul who supports the human role in the acquisition of virtue and salvation, 26 Brakke, Demons, 160, 243. In addition to the loci flagged by Brakke, see Collationes 1.20.2-1.22.2, 2.2.2, 2.2.5-2.7.2, 2.9.1, 3.20.1, 5.6.1-5.7.1, 7.8.1-3, 7.12.1-7.13.2, 7.15.1-7.21.1-4, 7.32.1-4, 8.8.1-8.11.2, 8.19.1-3, 13.6.5, 20.1.5, 23.6.4, 23.12.2, pp. 30-34, 44-48, 92-93, 124-28, 189-90, 191-93, 194-99, 210-12, 223-27, 235-36, 368, 555, 650, 657. On the will’s freedom to resist diabolical temptation see Collationes 7.8.3, pp. 189-90; for successful resistance via asceticism illustrated by Desert Fathers see 2.2.5-2.7.2, 20.1.5, pp. 44-47, 555; for the union of grace and human effort see 5.15.2-4, 8.19.1-3, pp. 139-40, 267-68. 27 Collationes 2.9.1-2.11.4, pp. 47-50. 28 Collationes 2.16.1-2.26.3, pp. 59-65. Cassian stresses that the avoidance of extremes should not be confused with the sin of lukewarmness at 4.12.1-6, pp. 106-8. As is often noted, some of these elders are historically documentable Desert Fathers. 29 Noted by de Vogüé, ‘Understanding Cassian’, 108; and Ramsay, Introduction, 12-13. 30 Ramsay, Introduction, 22. 31 Collationes 4.5.1, p. 100; amplified with additional Pauline citations at 4.12.1-4.16.2, 20.12.3 and with references to 1 John 1:8 and 1 John 1:10 at 22.8.13, pp. 116-21, 568-69, 627-28.

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with attention to free will and good works, as in 1 Cor. 4:7, where the Apostle advises patience, and in 1 Tim. 17:18, where he notes that our good deeds in this life will pay off in the life to come.32 The senior monk in Collation 3 affirms that it is up to us to make use of the opportunities we are granted.33 It is far from incidental that the only odd-numbered Collation in which Cassian cites St. Paul on the divided will is Collation 23.34 This text deals with a problem to which Cassian adverts repeatedly, the problem of chastity, including erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions.35 He regards these experiences as blameworthy although they are unbidden. But we cannot be forced to assent to them or to dwell on them. For, as Paul says in 2 Cor. 11:29, chastity and other virtues can be gained by nature as well as by grace.36 God did not revoke the freedom of will with which he endowed all rational creatures when Adam and Eve fell.37 Still, peccadillos of the type discussed must be repented. We have the capacity to strive night and day against them and to pray without ceasing, as Paul urges in 2 Thess. 3:8 and 1 Thess. 5:17.38 Cassian’s envoi to Collation 23 is the Apostle’s message of confidence in Rom. 8:1: ‘There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ’.39 Cassian distills this range of views in Collation 13, multiplying biblical citations and examples on all sides of the grace and free will issue. With a nod to James 1:17: ‘Every good endeavor and every perfect work is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights’, the pro-grace interlocutor presents 32 Collationes 3.9.3, p. 81. 33 Collationes 3.12.1, 3.19.1, pp. 81, 91. 34 Collationes 23.1.1-2, 23.12.1, 23.10.2, 23.13.4, pp. 638-39, 655, 656, 659-60. Here and elsewhere this particular use of St. Paul when Cassian treats chastity is noted by Weaver, Divine Grace, 99-100, 114; Casiday, Tradition and Theology, 101-3; and Ramsay, ‘John Cassian and Augustine’, 130. 35 See, e.g., Collationes 5.4, 5.12, 7.1-2, 11.8, 12 (entire), 20.12, 22 (entire), pp. 122-24, 179-81, 320-22, 339-60, 568-70, 615-36. 36 Collationes 23.2.1-2, pp. 640-41; quotation at 23.2.2, p. 641: ‘Multa enim novimus bona, quae beatum apostolum omnesque illius meriti viros et habuisse per naturam et adquississe per gratiam negare non possumus’. For more on this topic and the scholarship treating it, see Leyser, Authority and Asceticism, 50-53; and Diem, Das monastische Experiment, 99-111, who notes Cassian’s appeal to classical medicine and philosophy as well as his anti-Augustinian theology. 37 Collationes 23.12.1-6, pp. 656-58; quotation at 23.12.4, p. 657: ‘Sed quia omnibus rationabilibus creaturis arbitrii libertatem creator indulserat, eos, qui se contra fas edacis concupiscentiae transgressione vendiderant, invitos ad ingenitam libertate revocans non debuit. Abhorret siquidem ab illo iustitiae ac pietate auctore, quidquid bonitate aequitatique contrarium est’. 38 Collationes 23.4.1-12, pp. 643-48; with citations of 2 Cor. 3:10, 2 Thess. 3:8, and 1 Thess. 5.17 at 23.4.3, 23.5.4, 23.5.9, pp. 644-45, 646, 648. 39 Collationes 23.13.1-3, pp. 658-59; citation of Rom. 8:1-2 at 23.12.3, p. 659.

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a collage of Pauline texts, among which is his money shot, 2 Cor. 12:9: ‘My grace is sufficient for you’. 40 The interlocutor supporting free will recalls the Apostle’s recognition that natural virtue is a generic human option in Rom. 2:14-15: ‘When the Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts’. Further, affirming in 1 Tim. 2:4 that God wants all to be saved, St. Paul enjoins us, in Phil. 2:12, to ‘work out your salvation in fear and trembling’, and observes, in Rom. 2:6, that God ‘will render to every man according to his works’. 41 The interlocutor defending free will adds some two dozen passages that bolster the same points. 42 Collation 13 then deals expressly with how to make sense of these biblical contradictions. The interlocutors arrive at the following conclusion: God provides for the salvation of the human race in numberless different manners and inscrutable ways. He inspires some, who wish it and thirst for it, to a greater ardor, while some others, who do not even wish it, he compels against their will. Sometimes he helps to accomplish the things that he sees we desire for our own good, and at other times he inspires the beginning of that holy desire and bestows both the commencement of a good work and perseverance in it. 43

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Here, as elsewhere in the Collations, Cassian maintains that some of us can be made virtuous and be saved even unbeknownst to us and against our will. 44 The poster child for this possibility is none other than St. Paul, 40 Collationes 13.1 for the thesis statement, 13.3.5 for the James 1:17 citation, 13.3.5 and 13.6.5 for the 2 Cor. 12:9 and other Pauline citations, pp. 362, 364, 368. 41 Collationes 13.12.3, pp. 378-79: ‘Cum enim gentes, quae legem non habent, naturaliter ea quae legis sunt faciunt, hi legem non habentis ipsi sibi sunt lex, qui ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis, testimonium reddente eis conscientia et inter se invicem cogitationibus accusantibus aut etiam defendentibus, in die qua iudicabit deus occulta hominum’. Other Pauline citations to this point occur at 13.9.2 and 13.12.8, pp. 378, 381. 42 Collationes 13.10.1-13.18.5, pp. 374-96. 43 Collationes 13.17.1, pp. 392-93: ‘Per haec igitur exempla quae de evangelicis protulimus monumentis evidentissime poterimus advertere diversis atque innumeris modis et inscrutabilibus viis deum salutem humani generis procurare et quorundam quidem volentium ac sitientium cursum ad maiorem incitare flagrantiam, quosdam vero etiam nolentes invitosque conpellere, et nunc quidem ut inpleantur ea quae utiliter a nobis desiderata perspexerit adiuvare, nunc vero etiam ipsius sancti desiderii inspirare principia et vel initium boni operis vel perseverantiam condonare’. Trans. Ramsay, p. 488. That, for Cassian, God saves some people against their will is also noted by Casiday, Tradition and Theology, 101. 44 Collationes 7.8.2-3, p. 190: ‘nos etiam invitos et ignorantes adtrabat ad salutem’; 11.8.3, p. 321: ‘In illo enim voluntarium bonum est, in isto velut coactum et tamquam nolente violenter

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converted on the road to Damascus ‘unwillingly and opposed’.45 Individual cases differ, as Cassian’s array of examples relates. Although he states in Collations 2, 7, and 20 that we cannot be forced to sin, he also states in Collation 11 that we can commit minor sins of thought, word, and deed not just out of ignorance, forgetfulness, surprise, or will but also ‘by necessity’.46 Necessity also accounts for a major sin he treats in Collation 22, St. Peter’s denial. Cassian sees two distinct denials recounted in the Gospels. Peter first committed a sin of ignorance when he denied that Christ had to suffer, for which the Lord rebuked him. Then, in the high priest’s courtyard, ‘out of fear he was forced to deny the Lord three times’. Still, Peter at once repented. The Lord forgave him, restored his righteousness, and did not dismiss him as his chief disciple. 47 There is a larger message in Cassian’s use of these two prime examples of Peter and Paul. Even if we succumb to unworthy passions under extreme pressure, Peter’s case shows us that God’s forgiveness is ever-present if we repent. What we learn from Paul’s case is not to read the part for the whole. Paul’s experience of grace was valid for Paul. But it scarcely exhausts the ways in which grace and free will may interact in the Christian life. As Cassian sums up his position, equated with that of ‘the Catholic fathers’, God gives us three gifts of grace. The first is our desire for the good, given ‘in such a way that the choice of free will faces each alternative fully’. The second makes efficacious our exercise of virtue, ‘but in such a way that the possibility of choice be not extinguished’. The third is perseverance in the virtues we thus acquire, ‘but not in such a way that a submissive freedom is taken captive’. Thus, while God is all in all, we retain the freedom of choice with which he created us. 48 extortum vel metu suplicii vel cupiditate praemiorem’; 13.6.5, p. 368: ‘etiam inviti ad salutarem perseverantiam reservemur’. 45 Collationes 13.5.2, p. 389: ‘invitum ac repugnantem adtrahit Paulum’. Trans. Ramsay, p. 486. 46 Collationes 11.9.6, p. 324: ‘Inpossibile namque est quemlibet sanctorum non in istis minutiis, quae per sermonem, per cogitationem, per ignorantiam, per oblivionem, per necessitatem, per voluntatem, per obreptionem admittuntur, incurrere’. My trans. 47 Collationes 22.13.3-5, pp. 632-33; quotation at 22.13.5, p. 633: ‘Quid illo etiam tempore, numquid ruinam manifeste negandus est pertulisse, quo inminente persecutorum metu ter dominum negare conpulsus est?’ My trans. 48 Collationes 13.18.4-5, pp. 395-96: ‘hoc ab omnibus catholicis patribus definitur, […] divini esse muneris primum ut accendatur unusquisque ad desiderandum omne quod bonum est, sed ita ut in alterutram partem plenum sit liberae voluntatis arbitrium: itemque etiam secundum divinae esse gratiae ut effici valeant exercitia praedicta virtutum, sed ita ut possibilitas non extinguatur arbitrii: tertium quoque ad dei munera pertinere ut adquistae virtutis perseverantia teneatur, sed ita ut captivitatem libertas addicta non sentiat. Sic enim universitatis deus omnia in

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Bernard of Clairvaux is often seen as a quintessential monastic theologian, digesting what nourished him from the Fathers and ruminating on the Bible, rather than addressing the contradictions in his authorities or citing them as proof-texts.49 This description does justice neither to Bernard’s De gratia nor to its model in Cassian’s Collations. Both cite many proof-texts, assigning the heavy lifting to St. Paul, and wielding their own St. Paul against the late Augustine’s St. Paul.50 In other respects, Bernard takes his own line. Instead of a dialogue in which master and disciple share the honors, a genre also used in some works by Anselm, Bernard opens with a mini-dialogue that he swiftly abandons in favor of a treatise. Answering an unspecified interlocutor who poses the question, he forecasts the theme developed in De gratia. Our salvation requires grace and free will, acting ‘together, not individually, simultaneously, not one by one. It is not as if grace does part and free choice does part; rather, they work together in a single operation, each making its own contribution’. For, as St. Paul affirms in 1 Cor. 3:8-9, ‘Each shall receive his wages according to his labor, for we are God’s fellow workers’.51 Bernard replaces Cassian’s variegated approach to salvation with this sweeping generalization. He also rejects the idea that we are ever saved by necessity. Freedom of the will, he asserts, is a fundamental endowment ‘of all rational creatures, good and bad, equally and in the same way’. No internal or external factors abridge this freedom, as is illustrated by the fall omnibus credendus est operari, […] non ut auferat quam semel ipse concessit arbitrii libertatem’. Trans. Ramsay, p. 490. 49 Compare with Leclercq, Love of Learning, 76-93, updated by Pranger, ‘Sic et non’, 1:182; at p. 187 Pranger sees Bernard as ‘bombarding the reader’ with multiple biblical texts making the same point, designed to achieve an ‘incantational’ effect. See also Pranger, ‘Bernard the Writer’, 225-26. Pranger does not include the De gratia in these discussions. 50 Noted correctly by Simonetti, Introduzione, 1:335-36, 338-42, 349-56. Other scholars, such as Venuta, Libero arbitrio, 22-24, 126-30 and McGinn, Introduction, 5, 15 have merely catalogued the Pauline references in De gratia without analyzing how Bernard uses them. Still others, while viewing the work as critical of the anti-Pelagian Augustine in some respects, do not connect that insight with his use of St. Paul, as with Faust, ‘Bernhards “Liber de gratia”’, 35-51; Corbin, La grâce et la liberté, 50-54, 61-70, 220; Müller, Willensschwäche, 449-68; Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux, Aelred de Rievaulx’, 36; and Trottmann, ‘Volonté et infinite liberté’, 29-33. 51 Cited in this chapter will be Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de gratia et libero arbitrio, ed. Gastaldelli, 1:356-60. For the unidentified interlocutor (‘unus ex circumstantibus’) and Bernard’s brief response to him, see 1.2, 1:358; Bernard’s larger conclusion is at 14.17, 1:416: ‘ut mixtim, non singillatim, simul, non vicissim, per singulos profectus operentur. Non partim gratia, partim liberum arbitrium, sed totum singula opera individuo peragunt […]’ The 1 Cor. 3:8-9 reference is cited at 13.45, 1:414. Translations of De gratia are mine. The De gratia is also available in Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. Leclercq, 3:165-203.

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of the devil, on which he agrees with Anselm.52 Otherwise, Bernard treats the devil not as the external tempter of such interest to Cassian, but as a metaphor for our own bad choices.53 The capacity to make both good and bad choices inheres in humankind both before and after the Fall. Unlike other human attributes such as sensation, appetite, memory, and natural aptitude (ingenium), our will is free from necessity of any kind.54 It is not diminished by original sin. In De gratia Bernard boldly brackets original sin as irrelevant to his thesis: ‘Where there is no freedom, there is neither merit nor blame, apart from original sin, which is clearly a different matter’,55 one receiving no further mention in this work. While Bernard agrees with Anselm on the independence of the will, he puts the point in his own words and, unlike Anselm, analyzes its operation in relation to our other mental faculties. He substitutes his own threefold psychology for Cassian’s. Bernard views consent of the will as ‘an intrinsically free attribute of the soul’. The will itself is a spontaneous motion of the mind, governing sensation and appetite. Whichever way it turns, it always has reason at its side as its comitem et quodammodo pedissequam. It does not always act ex ratione but sometimes absque ratione. So, it may do many things by reason against reason that oppose it, as if by means of reason but against its counsel and judgment.

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Indeed, neither vices nor virtues exist in us ‘except per rationem’.56 Scholarly assessments of the meaning of this claim vary, depending on how these 52 De gratia 4.9, 1:370: ‘Verum libertas a necessitate atque et indifferenter Deo universaeque, tam malae quam bonae, rationali convenit creaturae’. The same point is made at 5.5, 1:378. On the Devil’s fall, see 4.9, 7.22, 10.33, 1:370, 386-88, 398. 53 See, for example, De gratia 6.18, 1:382. 54 De gratia 2.5, 1:364: ‘Proinde universa quae hominis sunt, praeter solam voluntatem, ab utroque [i.e judgment and merit] sunt, quia sui libera non sunt: vita, sensus, appetitus, memoria, ingenium, et si qua talia sunt, eo ipso subiacent necessitate, quo non plene sunt sed subdita voluntati’. See also 1.2, 2.3, 2.5, 3.6, 4.9, 4.10, 1:360, 362, 364, 366, 368, 370 for more on sensation and appetite and the will’s freedom from any necessity. 55 De gratia 2.5, 1:364: ‘ubi libertas non est, nec meritum, ac per hoc nec iudicium, excepto sane per omnia originali peccato, quod aliam constat habere rationem.’ Bernard insists on the postlapsarian retention of this freedom, at 8.24, 1:388: ‘Manet ergo, etiam post peccatum, liberum arbitrium, etsi miserum, tamen integrum’; and without lessening, at 8.25, 1:390: ‘sine diminuatione perduret […]’ This key point is noted by Faust, ‘Bernhards “Liber de gratia”’, 38-42; and Corbin, La grâce et la liberté, 220. But compare Appleby, ‘Bodily Need Is a Kind of Speech’, 128-31, for whom the will, in this work, is free but weakened by the Fall. 56 De gratia 1.2-2.3, 1:362; quotations at 1.2: ‘Est enim habitus animi, liber sui’; and at 2:3: ‘Verum consensus, nutus est voluntatis spontaneus; […] voluntas est motus rationalis, et sensui

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key terms are translated.57 Whether Bernard sees reason as the superior, the equal, or the inferior of the will, reason has been given to us ‘for the will’s instruction, not its destruction’. Bernard supports this notion with an allusion to 1 Cor. 2:15: ‘The spiritual man judges all things but is himself judged by no one’.58 Reason possesses our moral norms. It discerns good and evil. Counsel applies these norms to concrete cases. Even if our norms are correct – and Bernard does not explain how we obtain them – the applications advised by counsel may be inappropriate. Whether counsel’s advice is sound or not, the will is free to accept or reject it. Here Bernard alludes to 2 Cor. 9:7: ‘Each must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion’.59 Bernard envisions two exceptions to the will’s freedom from necessity and to the moral responsibility entailed by its use. Neither merit nor blame is imputed to children, to the insane, or to dormientibus, since they cannot exercise informed free choice.60 Bernard’s dormientes are akin to the comatose, unable to profit from sacraments requiring the recipient’s knowledge and consent, rather than to Cassian’s monks plagued by erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions. Bernard’s second exception also departs from Cassian. It applies to acts of the mentally competent, performed when we are tired, distracted, confused, upset, or forgetful. Since these acts occur praesidens, et appetitui. Habet sane, quocumque se volverit, rationem semper comitem et quodammodo pedissequam: non quod semper ex ratione, sed quod numquam absque ratione moveatur, ita ut multa faciat per ipsam contra ipsam, hoc est per eius quasi ministerium, contra eius consilium sive iudicium [….] Neque enim prudentia seu sapientia inesse creaturae potest, vel in malo, nisi utique per rationem’. It is recognized that, for Bernard, habitus simply denotes what the human mind has, without the acceptation of any particular school of philosophy. See, for example, McGinn, Introduction, 15-16. 57 On comes and pedissequa, see, among scholars cited in this chapter, Lottin, ‘Libre arbitre’, 1:19-20 (compagnon); Boquet, ‘Le libre arbitre’, 182-83 (compagnon); Callerot, Introduction, 185 (servante ou de suivante); Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux, Aelred de Rievaulx’, 35 (suivante); Perkams, ‘Bernhard von Clairvaux’, 4 (Begleiter); Müller, Willensschwäche, 451 (Richter); DiLorenzo, ‘Dante’s Saint Bernard’, 508 (attendant and handmaiden); O’Donovan, trans. of On Grace, 58 (its mate, one might even say its follower); Ventura, Libero arbitrio, 48 (compagna e socia). Simonetti, trans. of De gratia, 1:363 (ad accompagnarla e in qualche modo seguirla) avoids using nouns altogether. McGinn, Introduction, 16-23 thinks Bernard’s terminology is confusing but proposes, as reason’s role, judging the will’s choices after, as much as before, the fact. 58 De gratia 2.4: 1:362: ‘Et ratio data voluntati ut instruat illam, non destruat’. 59 De gratia 4.9, 4.11, 5.14, 5.15, 6.17, 10.35, 1:370, 373, 376, 378, 380, 400; the Pauline allusion is at 10.35, 1:400. 60 De gratia 2.5, 1:366: ‘Hinc est quod insanis, infantibus, itemque dormientibus, nihil quod faciant, vel bonum, vel malum, imputatur, quia nimirum sicut suae non sunt compotes rationis, sic nec usum retinent propriae voluntatis, ac per hoc non iudicium libertatis’.

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without our deliberation and conscious choice, they are morally neutral,61 an ethical category that is Bernard’s own. Absent these exceptions, we are all fully responsible for our moral choices. With Anselm, Bernard holds that we can be forced to do something we do not want to do. But the will cannot be divided against itself: ‘It is impossible for the will to disobey itself. No one can either not will what he wills, or will what he does not will’. What the will can do is to choose among its options and to shift its commitment from one option to another, without losing its freedom.62 Bernard’s test case for this doctrine is St. Peter’s denial, which likewise rings a change on Cassian. Bernard frames this event with a distinction between passive and active compulsion. In passive compulsion we are forced to do or to suffer something that contravenes our values. We cannot escape the force that compels us. But, since we do not consent inwardly, no blame applies. In active compulsion – a rather unhappy term – since we yield internal consent to the force that compels us externally, we are culpable. Pace Cassian, just as God does not save us against our will, so, ‘however much we are beset by internal or external temptations, the will always remains free with respect to choice’.63 Peter’s denial in the high priest’s courtyard was a case of active compulsion. Like everyone else, Peter had a single will. He was not deluded. He was fully aware of the two options his will confronted. He was free to tell the truth about his status as Christ’s disciple, and he was free to lie. He chose to lie, fearing for his own safety. Unlike Cassian, whose Peter was forced to lie, Bernard’s Peter ‘was not compelled, but consented, not to an external force but to his own will’.64 Despite the covert anti-Augustinianism that animates De gratia, 61 De gratia 2.5, 1:366: ‘Cum igitur voluntas nil liberum habeat nisi se, merito non iudicatur nisi ex se. Siquidem nec tardum ingenium, nec labilis memoria, nec inquietus appetitus, nec sensus obtusus, nec vita languens, rerum per se statuunt hominem, sicut nec contraria innocentiam, et hoc non ob aliud, nisi quia haec necessarie ac praeter voluntatem posse provenire probantur’. 62 De gratia 2.4-5.1, 1:364-66; quotation at 2.5, 1:364: ‘Ipsam vero, quia impossibile est de seipsa sibi non oboedire, – nemo quippe aut non vult quod vult, aut vult quod non vult –, etiam impossibile est sua privari libertate’. See also 6.16, 1:378. Compare with the claims for a two-will psychology in this work made by Venuta, Libero arbitrio, 74-80; Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux et l’infléxion’, 60-61; Trottman, ‘Volonté et liberté’, 33-35; and Trottman, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux, Aelred de Rievaulx’, 36-38. 63 De gratia 12.40, 1:406 on the two forms of compulsion; quotation at 11.36-37: 1:402: ‘non salvet invitos; […] non aufert libertatem [….] At vero quantislibet quis intus forisve tentationibus urgeatur, libera profecto semper, quantum ad arbitrium spectat, voluntas erit’. 64 De gratia 12:38-41, 1:404-9 for Peter’s whole story; quotation at 12.39, 1:406: ‘immo non compulsus est, sed consensit, et non alienae potentiae, sed propriae voluntati […]’ The best commentaries on Bernard’s St. Peter are Faust, ‘Bernhards “Liber de gratia”’, 47; Simonetti,

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Bernard agrees with Augustine’s stigmatization of all lies, untruths told with the intention to deceive, as intrinsically sinful, whatever the provocation. Bernard also agrees with Ambrose of Milan: Peter sinned against himself. What he chose to deny was not Christ’s theological claims but his own status as an adherent of them.65 Commentators on free will in De gratia typically end here. But, for Bernard as well as for Cassian, Peter’s story continues, and we have more to learn from it. For Peter at once acknowledged his sin. He freely repented and was graciously forgiven.66 Thus, we too should have confidence in God’s mercy. When we confess our own sins, we too can make a fresh start, especially those of us in the cloister who are renewed from day to day by our fasting, abstinence, continence, wakefulness, prayer, and other virtues. Thus exercising our freedom of choice in conjunction with grace, we will accrue the merits that are ‘seedbeds of hope, incentives of charity, tokens of a hidden predestination, anticipations of future happiness, and the way to the kingdom’.67 This single allusion to predestination in De gratia is a hapax legomenon. Bernard takes the opportunity offered by Peter’s denial to consider the biblical passages that seem to challenge his insistence on the will’s freedom from necessity. He explains how they are to be read. When St. Paul says in 1 Tim. 2:4 that God wants all to be saved, this does not mean that God forces salvation on anyone. Bernard’s answer to the Augustinized Paul’s ‘What have you that you did not receive?’ in 1 Cor. 4:7 is that the gift in question is our will’s freedom from necessity.68 Where Cassian uses Peter and Paul to highlight the particular but far from exhaustive ways that God saves some of us, Bernard uses Peter to undergird the universal conditions of the salvation of all which he professes throughout De gratia. Withal, having Introduzione, 1:345-47; Corbin, La grâce et la liberté, 217-38; Boquet, ‘Le libre arbitre’, 183; and Müller, Willensschwäche, 449, 463-64. Compare with the claim that Peter succumbed to selfdeception in the references to Trottmann cited in note 62 and in Trottmann, ‘Bernard de Clairvaux et la faiblesse de la volonté’, 147-72; followed by Müller, Willensschwäche, 468. 65 For Augustine on lying, see his De mendacio and Contra mendacium, ed. Zycha; for some medieval responses to it, see Colish, ‘Rethinking Lying’, 155-63, reprinted in Colish, The Fathers and Beyond, chap. 15. Compare with Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 10.86, ed. Andriaen, p. 370: Peter ‘maluit videlicet se negare quam Christum’. 66 De gratia 12.40, 1:408: ‘Sane infirmitas eius a seipsa est; sanitas non a se, sed a Domini Spiritu. Sanatur autem, cum renovatur’. The importance of Peter’s repentance is noted by Simonetti, Introduzione, 1:345-47; and Corbin, La grâce et la liberté, 317-38. This point, too, reprises Ambrose, Exp. secundum Lucam 10.88-93, pp. 371-72, where both Peter’s tears of repentance and the Lord’s pietas effect his forgiveness. 67 De gratia 14.47-51, 1:414-22; quotation at 14.51, 1:422: ‘spei sunt quaedam seminaria, caritatis incentiva, occultae praedestinationis indicia, future felicitatis praesagia, via regni […]’ 68 De gratia 11.36, 1:402; on this same reading he also cites John 6:44 and Luke 14:23 at 14.48, 1:416.

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learned much from Cassian on how to arm and conduct an oblique attack on the anti-Pelagian Augustine, Bernard offers his own sturdy defense of free will, one that is notably independent, as his salient contribution to the ongoing debate on its interaction with grace.

Bibliography

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Bonner, Gerald. Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Boquet, Michel. ‘Le libre arbitre comme image de Dieu: L’anthropologie voluntariste de Bernard de Clairvaux’. Collectanea Cisterciensia 6 (2003): 179-82. Brakke, David. Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Carron, Delphine. ‘Sénèque, exemplarité et ambigüité exemplaire’. In Exempla docent: Les exemples des philosophes de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance, edited by Thomas Ricklin et al., 307-33. Paris: Vrin, 2006. Casey, Michael. ‘Reading Saint Bernard’. In A Companion to Saint Bernard, edited by Brian Patrick McGuire, 62-107. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Casiday, Augustine M. Tradition and Theology in St. John Cassian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian: A Study in Primitive Monasticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. —. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Colish, Marcia L. ‘Abelard on Theology’. In Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy. Vol. 1, 1-13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Colish, Marcia L. ‘Error as Acting against Conscience in Bernard of Clairvaux’s De gratia et libero aribitrio’. In Irrtum – Error – Erreur, edited by Andreas Speer and Maxine Mauriège, 543-54. Miscellanea Mediaevalia 40. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. —. The Fathers and Beyond: Church Fathers between Ancient and Medieval Thought. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. —. ‘Rethinking Lying in the Twelfth Century’. In Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century, edited by István P. Bejczy and Richard G. Newhauser, 115-63. Leiden: Brill, 2005. —. Studies in Scholasticism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Corbin, Michel. La grâce et la liberté chez saint Bernard de Clairvaux. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2002. Courcelle, Pierre. Connais-toi toi-même de Socrate à Alain de Lille. 3 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1974-1975. Déchanet, Jean-Marie. ‘Aux sources de la pensée philosophique de S. Bernard’. In Saint Bernard théologien: Actes du Congrès de Dijon, 15-19 septembre 1953. Rome: Tipografia Pio X, 1954, 56-77. Delhaye, Philippe. ‘La conscience morale dans la doctrine de S. Bernard’. In Saint Bernard théologien: Actes du Congrès de Dijon, 15-19 septembre 195. Rome: Tipografia Pio X, 1954, 209-23. —. Le problème de la conscience morale chez S. Bernard étudié dans ses oeuvres et dans ses sources. Namur: Éditions Godenne, 1957.

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Diem, Albrecht. Das monastische Experiment: Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Enstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007. DiLorenzo, Raymond D. ‘Dante’s Saint Bernard and the Theology of Liberty in the Commedia’. In Bernardus Magister, edited by John M. Sommerfeldt, 497-513. Cistercian Studies Series 135. Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1992. Dingjan, François. Discretio: Les origines patristiques de la doctrine de la prudence chez saint Thomas d’Aquin. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967. Faust, Ulrich. ‘Bernhards “Liber de gratia et libero arbitrio”: Bedeutung, Quellen, und Einfluss’. Analecta Monastica 6th ser., 35-51. Studia Anselmiana 50. Rome: Herder, 1962. Gilson, Étienne. The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard. Translated by A.C.H. Downes. London: Sheed & Ward, 1955. Hayward, Anthony. ‘The Earls of Leicster, Sygerius Lucanus, and the Death of Seneca: Some Neglected Evidence for the Cultural Agency of the Norman Aristocracy’. Speculum 91 (2016): 328-55. Hwang, Alexander Y. ‘Pauci perfectae gratiae amatoris: The Augustinians in Marseilles’. In Grace for Grace: The Debates after Augustine, edited by Alexander Y. Hwang, Brian J. Matz, and Augustine Casiday, 35-50. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Javelet, Robert. Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille. 2 vols. Chambéry: Letouze et Ané, 1967. —. ‘La réintroduction de la liberté dans les notions d’image et ressemblance conçue comme dynamisme’. In Der Begriff Repraesentatio im Mittelalter: Stellvertretung, Symbol, Zeichen, edited by Albert Zimmermann, 1-34. Miscellanea Medievalia 8. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. Leclercq, Jean. ‘Liberté et destinée de l’homme selon Bernard de Clairvaux’. Cîteaux 63 (2012): 135-45. —. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, translated by Catherine Misrahi. New York: Fordham University Press, 1962. Lapidge, Michael. ‘The Stoic Inheritance’. In A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy, edited by Peter Dronke, 81-112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Leyser, Conrad. ‘Augustine in the Latin West, 430-ca. 900’. In A Companion to Augustine, edited by Mark Vessey, 450-64. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. —. Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Lottin, Odon. ‘Libre arbitre et liberté depuis saint Anselme jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle’. In Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Vol. 1, 11-389. 2nd ed. Gembloux: Duculot, 1957. Marion, Jean-Luc. ‘L’image de la liberté’. In Saint Bernard et la philosophie, edited by Remi Brague, 49-72. Paris: PUF, 1993.

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About the Author

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Marcia L. Colish is Frederick B. Hartz Professor of History emerita at Oberlin College, and Visiting Professor and Lecturer at Yale University. She has published widely on the history of medieval thought generally, and scholastic theology particularly. In 1998 she received the Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America.

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Words of Seduction A Letter from Hugh Metel to Bernard of Clairvaux 1 Rina Lahav Abstract The first and longest letter in the collection left by Hugh Metel (d. c. 1150), an Augustinian canon of St. Léon, Toul, in the region of Lorraine, to Bernard of Clairvaux, promotes our understanding of geopolitical, religious, and social dynamics between Burgundy, Rome, and the Holy Roman Empire in the first half of the twelfth century. Based on this lengthy letter, Hugh Metel proves himself to be a self-aware writer, well-versed in the epistolary and social developments of his age, and engaged in the same social milieu as Albero of Montreuil and Bernard of Clairvaux and much more involved in the political and religious milieu of the mid-twelfth century than his relative obscurity today might lead us to believe.

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Keywords: Hugh Metel, Bernard of Clairvaux, Albero of Montreuil, Epistolary Epistemology, Religious Politics

Hugh Metel (d. c. 1150), an Augustinian canon of St. Léon, Toul, in the region of Lorraine, has left us a collection of 55 letters and several poems. They are preserved in a manuscript belonging to the Benedictine abbey of SaintArnoul, Metz, copied sometime in the second half of the twelfth century.2 This manuscript, transferred to the Collège de Clermont in the seventeenth century and now in Berlin (B Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Phillipps, 1694), 1 Constant J. Mews, to whom I am indebted for the pleasure of editing the letters by Hugh Metel, has been my supervisor, mentor, and guide for over a decade. From my first steps into medieval scholarship, he encouraged me to hear the music of the Latin language and taste the sweetness of theological discourse. It gives me great pleasure to participate in this volume in his honour. 2 Mews, ‘Hugh Metel, Heloise, and Peter Abelard’, fn 3.

Monagle, Clare (ed.), The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789462985933_ch04

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provided the basis for what is still the only printed edition of the letter collection as a whole, published by Charles Louis Hugo in 1731 within the second volume of his Sacrae Antiquitatis Monumenta.3 Hugo’s edition was unknown to abbé Migne when he reprinted Mabillon’s edition of just four letters of Hugh Metel, as an appendix to the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux within the Patrologia Latina. 4 Given the rarity of the 1731 edition, it is not surprising that Hugh Metel is largely unknown to literary and historical scholarship, a fact that Constant J. Mews and I are now working to rectify.5 Relatively unknown today, Hugh Metel was very well-connected to major religious men of his time and he strove diligently to widen his networks through his letters. The two main avenues he pursued were correspondence with influential men and involvement in contemporary issues, which he pursued with his remarkable rhetorical abilities and knowledge. Although he vehemently objects to rhetoric and language virtuosity, he seems to enjoy them in his own writing. The list of his correspondents and his rhetorical abilities prove him to be very well versed in the biblical, patristic, and classical sources and in dealing with administrative, spiritual, and highly theological matters. He was a man of his age and knowledgeable in the ideas of spiritual love and its expression in letter writing. Letters were not as spontaneous and private as we understand them today, but rather highly formulaic, self-conscious, publicly aware literary documents, often written with an eye to future collection and publication.6 What reads as highly 3 Mews, ‘Hugh Metel, Heloise, and Peter Abelard’, footnote fn 3; Sacrae Antiquitatis Monumenta Historica, Dogmatica, Diplomatica, ed. Hugo, 2.312-412. Hugo reports that he relied on a transcription undertaken by Dom Charles Saulnier (1690-1728) from two manuscripts: the codex antiquior (B Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, MS Phillipps 1694, fols 139ra-185rb), dated to the twelfth to thirteenth centuries by Valentin Rose, Verzeichniss der lateinischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, 1:397-408, no. 180; and the codex recentior (G Paris, Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève, MS 242), copied from B in the second half of the seventeenth century. This manuscript also contains a letter from Père Grillot (1682), prior of Saint-Léon, with brief notes about Hugh Metel, as well as a note from Hugo, giving the manuscript back to Sainte-Geneviève in 1734. Kohler, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1:147-51. Saulnier relied mainly on G, but noted occasional readings in B, when there were significant differences (i.e. 2.349). 4 Mews, ‘Hugh Metel, Heloise, and Peter Abelard’, fn 4. From Mabillon’s 1687 edition, Migne reprints four letters of Hugh Metel (the beginning of Letter 1 and Letter 10 to Bernard; the beginning of Letter 26 to William of Saint-Thierry; Letter 33 to Master Gerland), in Patrologia Latina (PL) 188.1269D-76B. 5 Mews and I are currently working on a critical edition and translation. The following references mention HM, number of letter, and paragraph as in our forthcoming edition and H, for the published edition of Charles Louis Hugo (1731). 6 Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, 11.

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intimate love letters were indeed part of a culture where mutual professions of love and friendship became the standard public social discourse between people who hardly knew each other, or even between strangers. This chapter looks at the formulation of friendship between Hugh Metel and Bernard of Clairvaux, based on the first letter in the series, and other social connections between the two men, as they appear in Hugh’s letters. Hugh Metel lived in Toul, at a junction of the Moselle River (where it divides just outside the town into the river proper and the Moselle Canalisée) and on the road from Rome, Burgundy, and Paris to Trier. He did not start his career there, but rather was a late convert. The story of his conversion appears in many of his letters as a significant turn after many years of misguided preoccupation with the classics and subsequent moral struggles. This detailed description appears in Letter XXI to Embrico, bishop of Wurzburg (consecrated 1128-d. 1147), in which he speaks of their past friendship and time together as students, before Hugh’s crisis of faith which led him to study under Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) and subsequently join the Augustinian canons regular.

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With Aristotle, I sweated out the days and nights, and with him I sought to square the circle; and with Tully I uselessly practiced public speaking. At last noticing my wretched weakness, and thirsting with Tantalus in the midst of the waters, I returned to myself and to my country from exile, and with deliberate step I sought Laon, where for a short time I studied the New and Old Testament under Master Anselm.7

Anselm of Laon started teaching around 1080, when he had moved back to his place of birth and was teaching at the cathedral school of Laon, with his brother Ralph. Around 1109, he became dean and chancellor of the cathedral, and in 1115 he was one of Laon’s two archdeacons. His school for theology and exegesis rapidly became the most well known in Europe. Famously, in 1113, he expelled Peter Abelard from his school. This suggests that Hugh started his academic career as a secular scholar, probably in Paris, where he remained for quite some time, before moving to Laon sometime before 1117, where he had met Abelard and probably many people who will have become important players in the twelfth century.8 Sometime between 1136 and 1141 Hugh wrote to Pope Innocent II, encouraging him to crush 7 HM 21:5-6, H 353. 8 Assuming a normal human lifespan as about 80 years, and the fact that Hugh died sometime in the early 1150s, it was probably after 1110.

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Abelard and taking a strong stance in defense of Bernard of Clairvaux, he also wrote a very angry letter to Abelard on his astonishing heresy.9 We do not know when Hugh Metel met Bernard of Clairvaux, but we do know he knew him quite well. Hugh’s Letter X is a letter of recommendation he sends to Bernard on behalf of and accompanying Hugh’s own abbot travelling to meet the great man. Another important figure and Bernard’s acquaintance is Albero of Montreuil, Archbishop of Trier (1132-1152). Two letters in Hugh’s collection are addressed to him, the first shortly after he commenced his archiepiscopal duties, the second closer to Hugh’s own death. In the second letter (XXX) Hugh hints at his sharing with Albero a common mother, Hugh through nature and Albero ‘through benevolence’, which implies that Albero grew up in Hugh’s house, presumably as his adoptive brother. In the first (Letter VI) he admonishes the newly elected archbishop for not performing his duties to the benefit of the people entrusted to him. Addressed to Albero, ‘venerable bishop of Trier’ and also a papal legate, the letter urges him to ‘“wake up” and do his job’.10 Interestingly, as part of his criticism of Albero’s way of life as an archbishop, Hugh mentions his silk cushions and ivory bed.11 Albero’s own biographer mentions that he arrived at the Church Council at Rheims (1148) ‘borne between two horses in a sedan chair made of leather, befittingly covered on the inside with linen cloth, which was marvellous for all to behold’.12 The tone of the two letters points to an intimate connection between the two men and more than likely to Hugh’s presence at the council of Rheims, where he may have seen the ‘vehicle’ transporting the archbishop. Albero was involved in church reform, imperial politics, and territorial rule through his entire career. He often worked with Pope Innocent II, Pope Eugenius III, and Bernard of Clairvaux.13 Bernard wrote a number of letters to Albero over a long period, as well as to Pope Innocent II.14 He visited the 9 HM 4 and 5 respectively. 10 HM 30:1, H 369, ‘Mater equidem mea, mater et vestra, mea per naturam, vestra per beneuolentiam, hoc apud vos promeruit, que ut subleuaret necessitatem vestram, se ipsam euiscerauit’; HM 6:4, H 336, ‘Te electo, te consecrato, sperabamus delectari in multitudine pacis, frustrati sumus […] Surge itaque venerande pater, salua pace tua loquor, surge qui dormis, et illuminabit te Christus’. 11 HM 6:7, H 336, ‘nunc langues in lecto eburneo et pro herba emollit te culcita serica’. 12 Balderich, A Warrior Bishop of the Twelfth Century, 65. 13 Balderich, A Warrior Bishop of the Twelfth Century, 2. 14 Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistulae, epist. 30 (To Albero, before 1131 when he was still primicerius of Metz); 178-180 (To Innocent II in 1136 on behalf of Albero’s interests in Metz, Toul, and Verdun); 510 (to Albero as archbishop of Trier sometime after 1132); ed. Leclercq (Rome, 1957-77), Sancti Bernardi Opera (SBO), 7:84-85, 397-402, and 8:468.

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region several times, for councils and debates, and passed through Toul in 1146/47, on his way to preach the Crusade in Germany.15 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was the founding abbot of Clairvaux abbey in Burgundy and one of the most commanding Church leaders in the first half of the twelfth century, as well as one of the greatest spiritual masters of all time and the most powerful propagator of the Cistercian reform. Bernard’s spiritual writing as well as his extraordinary personal magnetism began to attract many to Clairvaux and the other Cistercian monasteries, leading to many new foundations. On several occasions he acted as an advisor and mediator for the ruling powers of his age, and he helped to bring about the healing of the papal schism that arose in 1130 with the election of the antipope Anacletus II. He laboured for peace and reconciliation between England and France and among many lesser nobles and when his spiritual son was elected pope in 1145, he preached the Second Crusade and sent vast armies on the road toward Jerusalem. In Bernard’s last years he rose from his sickbed and went into the Rhineland to defend the Jews against a savage persecution. He wrote and spoke against the teachings of Peter Abelard, Gilbert of La Porrée, and Arnold of Brescia. Although suffering from constant physical debility while governing a monastery that soon housed several hundred monks and regularly sent forth groups to found new monasteries, he was able to compose many spiritual works. Bernard’s masterpiece, Sermons on the Song of Songs, was begun in 1136 and was still in composition at the time of his death.16 One of Bernard’s main concerns was the question of how, in practice, one could live out the ideal of love within the context of the monastic life. Whereas scholastic theology was concerned with the analysis of doctrines, Bernard was brought up in an environment that valued examination of the self.17 From the outset of his literary career Bernard adapted familiar texts in the light of his own experience. While his basic theme – that spiritual progress is measured in terms of growth in humility – is shaped by Benedict, Bernard integrates this into reflection on the working of the trinity, through the example of humility provided to us by Christ.18 In his De gratia et libero arbitrio, Bernard states that human capacity to love has been damaged by sin. Only through the incarnation of divine wisdom in the person of Christ can we fully achieve our true identity as children of God. Starting with a 15 16 17 18

Geoffrey of Clairvaux, Vita prima 5.1 and 6.17, PL 185.351B-355C and 409C-410B. Pennington, ‘Saint Bernard of Clairvaux 1090-1153’. Mews, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard and Heloise on the Definition of Love’, 638. Mews, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’, 638.

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letter to the monks of La Chartreuse and continuing in his De diligendo Deo, Bernard ultimately develops a four-stage progression: from love of one’s flesh for its own sake, through love of God for one’s own sake, to love of God for God’s sake, to love of self for God’s sake alone.19 This idea of progression of the human soul to God through love culminates in his last and most famous work, Sermons on the Song of Songs. In it Bernard adopts the language of desire in the imagery of the Song and uses it to create a new metaphor for the spiritual life of the soul. His teaching on this aspect is revolutionary. Instead of vilifying all desires of the flesh, or discussing them only in contemptuous terms, he adopts the language and sentiment of the Song, proposing to use them for a spiritual aim: the journey of the human soul to God. Preaching his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard used images of loving intercourse of the human, or more accurately monastic, soul and God. Every aspect of this intercourse is described in an allegorical sense, featuring not actual, but imaginary actions of the meditative soul, instead of the actual activities of a young woman, called the bride. If in the Song, ‘kiss’ means meeting of lips, in Bernard’s sermon, it means a meeting of spirit to spirit, human spirit to God’s spirit.20 Physical closeness of the bride is supplanted by the feeling of closeness a meditating monk can achieve, or aim to achieve, of his spiritual essence to the essence of God. The touching of the breasts is interpreted in a spiritual rather than physical sense. The sermons of this prolific author on the Song of Songs appeared in a natural progression. If love is the most elegant and noble of feelings and if love connects humans to a loving God, consummation of that love, as described in the Song of Songs, is the ultimate aim of the monastic life, according to Bernard. The yearning for a physical connection is supplanted by a spiritual sense; instead of the sensation of the body, we yearn to leave the body behind, disconnected from its worldly constraints, and quite literally unite in the spiritual world with God, who is spirit alone. Bernard introduces two big ideas in his sermons: first, progression of intimacy between soul and God in steps, from preliminary kisses on the feet and hands to the ultimate kiss on the mouth; and second, Christ as the kiss.21 Bernard relates to the frustration of the ancient fathers who yearned for the ‘real’ kiss. The prophets did not satisfy these yearnings, because the 19 Mews, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’, 644. 20 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, especially sermons 2-4, SBO 1:5-19, and 8 SBO, 1:36-42. 21 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, especially sermon 2, par. 9, SBO 1:13.

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prophets themselves were not the direct kiss, they were intermediaries between God and man. As intermediaries, they lacked the perfection of God in them. He mentions imperfections such as the lack of eloquence in Moses, lack of purity in Elijah, and so on. They all yearned only for the kiss of the one who received the kiss of life from God the father, the only begotten. They prayed ‘give me the kiss of the kiss of your mouth’, that is, give me Christ, who alone can satisfy my yearnings. In the second significant idea, having established that Christ is the kiss, Bernard explains that the monks need to work on becoming worthy of receiving it, by making preliminary spiritual steps. It is a journey of a three-stage progression, from a kiss on the feet, through a kiss on the hand, to a kiss of the mouth. The kiss on the feet signifies the monk’s confession of sins. Metaphorically he would prostrate himself at the feet of the Lord, abased, and renounce his sins. The second is a dedicated life of avoiding sin; a dedicated work on oneself. Only after the monk achieved a pure spiritual life, the kiss of the kiss might be given to him. Bernard warns that aiming for the kiss will not bring it to him. Only the ones who aim to become worthy of the kiss might be chosen to receive one, and having experienced it once, they will yearn for another all their lives. This theology was presented to the monks as ‘reading in the book of experience’.22 The experience Bernard referred to was not necessarily a private experience as we understand it. His monks were practicing loving friendships with similar souls both in person and in letter-writing long before the sermons were preached. The Cistercians’ Carta Caritatis (1098), for instance, expressed a new vision of monastic communities united, wherever they were, by permanent ties of love. Corresponding with the currents of the day, this was an articulation of a new ideal of spiritual friendship in which human relationships became part of the ascent to God.23 Therefore the experience Bernard described was common to the Cistercian monks, prescribed by their rule and practiced throughout their lives. It was perhaps the monastic version of ‘courtly love’, which was thought of and practiced to such an extent as to provide a point of reference for the mystical teachings of Bernard. In this environment, it is hardly surprising that Hugh Metel addressed his longest and most loving letter to Bernard of Clairvaux, choosing it to become the first letter of the collection. The letter can be roughly divided into eight parts (see Table 1). Hugh first describes his admiration of the great abbot, then speaks about his own misgivings and subsequent conversion. A 22 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, 3.1, SBO, 1:14: “Hodie legimus in libro experientiae.” 23 Haseldine, ‘Monastic Friendship in Theory and in Action in the Twelfth Century’, 351.

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Table 4.1 Part one

1–5

Praise of Bernard

… Your word is “oil poured out” [Cant. 1:2] … The law of clemency is in your word. You proclaim mercy, indulgence for sinners, solace for the desolate, and hope and counsel for the desperate, as you pour out this oil. You struggle with those sweating out in the gymnasium of God, and by your honeyed eloquence restore those sinking down from too much effort, as you drink from a milky fountain, and anoint with sweet words, you pour out this oil. Your word is dripping dew, in which the sprouting seed rejoices. It is an uncontrolled torrent, multiplying seeds. As you sift by close scrutiny the honest from the dishonest and distinguish the useful from the useless, you filter out the oil in the oil-press from the dregs and separate the chaff from the grain by winnowing …

Part two

5–7

Proclamation of love and desire

… I, the least among the young maidens, also love you. I who hear what is said about you, who speak of you when you are absent, who greet you from afar, I prefer to greet you from close by, and prefer to receive from your mouth, the kiss … I shall run, drawn by the fragrance of your ointments, and through fragrance I shall arrive at taste: for you will introduce me into your cellars where there are dishes of diverse kinds and prepared cups of different types, with which—overflowing and intoxicated—I am introduced into the chamber of the eternal King, where I may rejoice forever …

Part three

8–15

Hugh rebuking his own mistakes

A little before I spoke of my desires, I considered not the sort of person I am, but the kind of person I wished to be. I wished to be the very best … But wishing lies beside me and languishes just as the recumbent paralytic, namely the seed of good, that does not perish in man…

Part four

15–23 The story of Hugh’s conversion

I was a man, having undertaken a girdle of worldly military service, “I shook off a human mind, and put on a bestial one with Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon” [Dan 4:30] … I was a soldier for a long time under it. I was nourished daily by the misfortunes of others, I filled myself with the dishonor for good things. I served Pharaoh in the mud and straw … At last I fell headlong into Babylon, and there I was liberated. At last in Babylon I was spun down in a broken ship, and with a face contorted by much shame, I sought God [Job 40:21] … Truly already with the hawk little by little I begin to unfold wings to the south wind, and step by step become feathered. For my thoughts, having been revealed to the Holy Spirit, to the sweet south wind, I begin to sprout seeds of virtues, and turn my back to the north, and to “hear the voice of the Lord with hearing ears” [Psal. 17:45].

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Part five

24–34 On contempt of the world

“Do not”, says the Lord, “love the things which are of the world” [I John 2:15] … “Vanity of vanities, said Ecclesiastes, and all is vanity” [Eccle 1:2] … Does not the glory of the world please, as all the delight of the world? … Does not the appearance of the human body please? … Does not wisdom please? … Does power not please? … Do not friends please? …

Part six

34–39 Apology and justification for writing to advise such a great man

Let it not move you, my Father, if I have given advice to you, to do well, and to speak well, If I have admonished you, a nobody to somebody, a little man to a man, one mute to one eloquent, undiscerning person to the wise … Therefore, rise up, speak, place your speech in the balance, rouse them, rekindle them, announce the cost of barrenness, preach the danger of silence, commend voluntary poverty, which prepares for abundant riches in the kingdom of heaven, preach contempt for the world, in which is the true sabbath, which philosophers once embraced with love, whose praise the writings have commended, and have transmitted to posterity …

Part seven 39–52 Praise of Bernard and … In the above part of the letter, good Father, I have commended you in simple talk, indeed yourself as a his community bestower of all good things, it remains that I should praise your associates whom you have enclosed with you; it remains that I should commend their works with worthy praise in a [G 33] succinct manner. For you have enclosed simple animals with you in the stable of the Lord, having more of honey than of gall, chewing on the hay of the Lord, having the cleft hoof, whom you have collected at the right time, like wheat as fodder, in the garden of the Lord, just as the most prudent bees collect the most multi-colored flowers, white from virginity, red from constancy and purple from the contrition of heart …

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Part eight

52–54 Instructions to the carrier of the letter and a poem

When you have come to the one you are sent, see if he is healthy, if he is happy, if his face is noble and bright, and if he greets you with open eyes. When you discover this, hand over to him our letter with bent head, and bent knee, and suggest these few things. Say, the one who sent me to you, wishes you to be well, wishes you to be strong [G 39] in body and heart.

discussion of contempt for the world follows, with encouragement to do good works, after which Hugh returns to praising Bernard and his community. He explains his reason for the letter, and appends a charming verse for Bernard. Writing to a person like Bernard of Clairvaux was not an easy task. Arousing his desire for an ongoing communication was even harder. On the one hand, it required maintaining the power imbalance between the men, to avoid appearing insolent; on the other, the writer had to maintain the interest

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of his readers. Hugh does just that. Using Bernard’s own interests in the Song of Songs and his connection of this to the love of human soul for God, Hugh engineers an intellectual seduction. His self-consciousness about possible accusations of flattery was not unwarranted. In the lengthy first part of the letter, Hugh describes his high esteem for the abbot with such enthusiastic praise as to make himself uneasy, for which he apologizes at the end of the letter. This first part is a meditation on the phrase ‘Your word is oil poured out’ [Cant. 1:2]. All the reader’s senses are employed to appreciate the light, fragrance, and taste of the oil flowing abundantly from the press. Bernard’s works, his speech, his eloquence are described as generously overflowing for the benefit of everyone, near and far. The light that shines from his saintly life illuminates far and wide. The oil’s scent of burning spices benefits so many with its delicious fragrance. The description is highly sensual, mixing spiritual with earthly pleasures to wake an appetite for such delights. The second part touches on other earthly delights in a spiritual sense. Drawing from the sermons On the Song of Songs, and especially the sermons on the kiss, Hugh describes his yearnings for Bernard. He uses all his mastery of language and knowledge to appeal to Bernard’s perceived interests and eloquence. The urgency of the yearning and desire and the power imbalance are reproduced from the original Song: the bride yearns for the bridegroom and he comes to her; she proves her worth and he decides when she is worthy. Hugh describes himself as the bride, yearning for Bernard and his kiss. There is no reciprocity implied or required. Hugh tries to prove his worth, so he may receive a kiss from Bernard. Mirroring the sermons on the Song of Songs Hugh describes himself as unworthy to receive a kiss from Bernard’s own mouth. Nevertheless, he yearns for it and hopes to receive it. The spiritual kiss Bernard instructs his monks to yearn for becomes the spiritual kiss Hugh yearns for, but in his case the one to bestow this kiss is Bernard. Instead of Bernard’s prophets and books, the intermediaries become his writings and sermons; the letters themselves embody the intimacy of friendship Hugh hopes to exchange with Bernard. The original metaphor interprets the human soul as the bride; Hugh casts himself as the yearning bride. There is only one place in which Hugh hints that he does not actually love the one he speaks of, but the one signified, that is, God, though this hint comes almost as an afterthought, only as another metaphor. He does it with the example of Solomon, whom the queen of the south praised not on his own account, but on that of whom he signified.24 Hugh leaves this unexplained, providing no connection to the 24 HM 1:47, H 323.

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previously detailed written love-making he enacted for Bernard. There is nothing blasphemous, however, in Hugh’s metaphor. Bernard used similar vocabulary writing to his friend, greeted simply as ‘suo W’: I shall hold him, and let no one take him from me, until I bring him into the house of my mother and into the room which bore me.25

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Echoing his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard accords a special grace to his friend by bringing him into the inner chamber, where the bride is escorted by the bridegroom alone. The meaning that Bernard and his contemporaries gave this language was not of sacrilegious comparison to God, rather of becoming immersed in divine love and receiving special grace. For instance, Aelred of Rievaulx, with Bernard’s special encouragement and support, to whom Aelred dedicated his work, created a framework in which the earthly language of love and intimacy came to be identified with universal divine grace and public declarations of divine love.26 Parts three and four of the letter, speaking about Hugh’s own misgivings and subsequent conversion, serve as a lengthy introduction. Soliciting intimacy from the great man, the writer describes his own journey into devoted life, his realization of the worthlessness of his worldly pursuits, and his miraculous conversion. Hugh uses this opportunity to produce a piece that reads like an epic poem, with images appearing in quick succession and painting a vivid picture of a tormented traveler thrown from peril to peril, just to be rescued at an unlikely place, the shore of Babylon. This part overflows with metaphors and extracts from Jerome, and Gregory the Great, as well as Cicero, Horace, and Bernard’s own works, showing Hugh’s mastery of sources as well as oratory. At last coming back to myself, I began to lament aloud with Jeremiah, ‘I cause my belly pain.27 I cause my belly pain’ [Jer. 4:19], because where there had been soothing innocence, pain entered within, begetting torments. ‘At length after Charybdis, after the dogs of Scyllaean, after the song of the sirens, after I had longed for the incantations of Circe when I saw the shore, I sighed again when I saw the harbor’.28 25 Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistolae, epist. 506 SBO, 8:464, ‘tenebo eum nec dimittam, donec introducam illum in domum matris meae et in cubiculum genitricis meae’. 26 Haseldine, ‘Monastic Friendship in Theory and in Action in the Twelfth Century’, 359. 27 Gregorius Magnus, Registrum epistularum 7.25, ed. Norberg (Turnhout, 1982), CCSL 140:480. 28 HM 1.17-18, H 315; cf. Hieronymus, Epistulae, epist. 108, par. 7, line 12, ed. Hilberg (1912), CSEL 55:312; cf. Ouidius, Metamorphoses 7.62, ed. Anderson (Teubner, 1981), 148.

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In the spirit of literary seduction, Hugh proceeds to his version of contempt for the world, a familiar theme in monastic circles and appropriate for this letter. The things that should not please a man in this world, because they are vain and fleeting, are glory, the human body, wisdom, power, and friends. The irony of this theme in a letter aimed at attracting the attention and friendship of a famous man in this world, using metaphors of the body and its pleasures, demonstrating wisdom and rhetorical excellence to gain prestige by association, perhaps did not occur to the writer. In the last part of the letter, Hugh explains that he writes in the hope of creating a personal and intimate connection with the man he admires. He lives in a community of men who appreciate the value of intimate friendships, both spiritually and politically, and understand writing to an admired person to create them. Therefore, addressing Bernard and his own community, Hugh explains his motivation for writing:

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What I have written, father, I have written primarily so I might praise you. I have written secondly so that through your praise I might recommend myself to you. Thirdly that I, who lay hidden without a name among a vast crowd of fools, should be noticed through this because I dared to write to such a great man.29

Although friendship and love are recurrent motifs in the literature of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries – and our dichotomy of genuine adoration and affection versus pragmatic aims was not perceived as such – Hugh takes pains to justify his letter to Bernard of Clairvaux in the second letter in the collection. In it Hugh addresses critics of his letter and justifies his choice of language and approach. His use of an extract from Bernard’s own letter should not go unnoticed here: What I have observed about these things about the venerable abbot, I have observed not by flattery, not by selling oil, I have written, simply, not with duplicity, but truly, not falsely.30

29 HM 1:41, H 321, ‘Que scripsi, pater, primo ut te laudarem scripsi. Secundo ut per laudem tui me commendarem tibi. Tertio ut qui inter infinitam insipientium turbam sine nomine latebam, per hoc apparerem quod tanto uiro scribere auderem’. 30 Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistolae, epist. 372, line 8, SBO 8:333, ‘Non sum ego venditor olei: non enim habeo nisi parum olei, quo ungar in palaestra huius saeculi; verumtamen laudes christi silere non possum’.

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Conclusions Based on his lengthy letter to Bernard of Clairvaux, which moves smoothly between personal adoration, common struggles of conversion, the display of knowledge, and the ability to engage in the era’s significant debates, Hugh Metel proves himself to be a self-aware writer, well versed in the epistolary and social developments of his age, and engaged in the same social milieu as Albero of Montreuil and Bernard of Clairvaux. Just like these men, Hugh considered friendships and epistolary connections a valuable and legitimate way to engage with the world around him and especially with powerful people in it. His choice of themes, language, and social conventions places him on an equal level in a society of religious men of high standing. Taken together with his intimate connection with Albero of Montreuil, it seems that Hugh Metel was much more involved in the political and religious milieu of the mid-twelfth century than his relative obscurity today might lead us to believe. Personal connections, like those cultivated by Hugh Metel, Albero of Montreuil, and many others, had the power to influence regional and political structures in the Holy Roman Empire, which lacked a centralized power between the reigns of Henry V and Emperor Frederic Barbarossa. The local nobility, including church prelates, became central figures in the land and were able to expand their own power and authority. As such the archbishops were honoured with the highest places at the royal court, as arch-chancellors of the three chief kingdoms of the Empire: Mainz for Germany, Trier for Burgundy, and Cologne for Italy.31 Conventionally, the archbishop of Mainz was considered the senior German prelate, but with the approaching death of Emperor Lothair, the papal curia saw the need for a strong and friendly hand in Germany; Albero of Montreuil’s close relationships with popes, prelates, and other ecclesiastical officials placed him in the right place at the right time.32 Reportedly, papal pressure overcame his reluctance in accepting his election as archbishop of Trier, but perhaps this was the conventional depiction of a worthy character. Once consecrated as archbishop in 1131, Albero received papal charters confirming the privileges of his see and his own great authority, far more than his predecessors. Pope Innocent II made Albero the papal legate for Germany as a special mark of favor in recognition of their close connection. In turn, Albero’s acquisition of the honor boosted the power and prestige of 31 Arnold, Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany, 81. 32 Balderich, A Warrior Bishop of the Twelfth Century, 13.

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Trier against his rival Rhenish archbishops and ensured him a significant role in mediating between the papacy and the German royal court at the time of King Conrad’s election in 1138. If we accept Hugh Metel’s obscurity as a historiographical oversight, his letter collection can add to our understanding of geopolitical, religious, and social dynamics between Burgundy, Rome, and the Holy Roman Empire in the first half of the twelfth century. Moreover, his detailed theological discussions can add to our understanding of the major theological debates at a time when theology was the ‘language’ that overcame distance and united religious men and women. His letters are, therefore, an invaluable resource for historians trying to piece together a more detailed narrative of that time.

Bibliography

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Primary Sources Bernard of Clairvaux. Epistolae. n Sancti Bernardi opera. Vol. 8. Edited by Jean Leclercq. Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1977. —. Sermones super Cantica Canticorum I, n Sancti Bernardi opera. Vol. 1. Edited by Jean Leclercq. Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957. Geoffrey of Clairvaux. Vita prima. In Patrologia Latinae (PL) 185. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1860. Gregorius Magnus. Registrum epistularum. Edited by D. Norberg. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140. Turnhout: Brepols, 1982. Hieronymus. Epistulae 71-120. Edited by I. Hilberg. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) 55. Vienna: Tempsky, 1912. Hugo, Charles Louis, ed. Sacrae Antiquitatis Monumenta Historica, Dogmatica, Diplomatica. 2 vols. Etival-St Die, 1725-31. Ouidius, Metamorphoses. Edited by W.S. Anderson. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1981.

Secondary Sources Arnold, Benjamin. Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Balderich. A Warrior Bishop of the Twelfth Century: The Deeds of Albero of Trier. Translated by Brian A. Pavlac. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008. Constable, Giles. Letters and Letter-Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 17. Turnhout: Brepols, 1976.

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Haseldine, Julian P. ‘Monastic Friendship in Theory and in Action in the Twelfth Century’. In Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse, edited by Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, 349-94. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. Kohler, Charles. Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. 2 vols. Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit, 1893-1898. Mews, Constant J. ‘Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard and Heloise on the Definition of Love’. Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 60, no. 3 (2004): 633-60. Mews, Constant J. ‘Hugh Metel, Heloise, and Peter Abelard: The Letters of an Augustinian Canon and the Challenge of Innovation in Twelfth-Century Lorraine’. Viator 32 (2001): 59-92. Pennington, M. Basil OCSO, ‘Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 1090-1153’. Accessed 25 July 2016. http://www.osb.org/cist/bern.html. Rose, Valentin. Verzeichniss der lateinischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin. Vol. 1, Die Meermann-Handschriften des Sir Thomas Phillipps. Berlin, 1893.

About the Author

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Rina Lahav is Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University. She has published in the fields of medieval mysticism and theology.

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5

The Emotional Landscape of Abelard’s Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha Carol J. Williams

Abstract In Abelard’s Letter 16 addressed to ‘Héloise, sister to be revered in Christ and loved’, he refers to a set of six planctus or laments written in the voices of a number of Old Testament characters The last of these, Planctus 6, in which David laments for Saul and Jonathan, is probably the most famous and is the only one for which a reliable, original music setting survives. The laments are all in the f irst person and provide a deeply personal reflection on the tragic events which inspired them; they are virtuosic in language and almost shockingly intense in emotional range. This study examines Planctus 6 considering the link between Abelard’s language and the expression of specific emotions and, wherever possible, examines how music serves to intensify that expression.

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Keywords: Abelard, Heloise, Planctus, Lament, Hymn, Sequence

Peter Abelard (1079-1142), the pre-eminent French philosopher and theologian of the twelfth century, was also a fine poet and musician.1 Perhaps best known to his contemporaries for his contentious and litigious means of discussion, the modern audience generally remembers him for his tragic love affair with Heloise, and the wonderful letters between the two lovers.2 While it may not be essential to understand the nature of this relationship in an examination of Abelard’s philosophical and theological works, it 1 There is an enormous literature evaluating Abelard, chief among them: Mews, Peter Abelard; Luscombe, Peter Abelard; Mews, Abelard and his Legacy; and Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard. 2 The love affair is perhaps best dealt with in Mews, Abelard and Heloise; and the letters with Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard; and Luscombe and Radice, The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise.

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is essential to include it when considering his musical activity since it is almost all bound up with Heloise; the love poems were for her, the hymns and sequences were commissioned by her and it is likely that the planctus were dedicated to her. It was this tumultuous relationship which inspired Abelard’s production of a treasury of song. There seem to be two phases of musical activity: 1) the period of his love songs, around 1116-1118; and 2) the period of his sacred song writing, 1130-1135. The early love songs were the product of new and developing love, but after the discovery of their affair, the birth of their son Astrolabe, the secret marriage between the two, and ultimately his castration, Abelard spent many years distancing himself from Heloise. A turning point occurred with the dissemination of his autobiographical Historia Calamitatum (1132?).3 Heloise responded to this work in a strongly worded letter not only to set the record straight, but to serve as a corrective to his defiant and defensive tone. With this, the epistolary relationship between the two was renewed and a new, emotionally explicit style of writing emerged. Abelard was again inspired to write songs for Heloise, but now they were sacred songs, celebrating a different kind of love. Situating Abelard’s musical activity within his overall trajectory as a scholar is problematic because the songs, sequences, hymns, and planctus derive from the deep concerns of his personal life and reflect on his relationship with Heloise, past and present; they are run through with emotional expression. It is not hard to find connections to his autobiography in almost all his musical works though almost impossible to do this with his philosophical or theological works. It is almost as if he was using these songs and hymns as distraction from his principal philosophical and theological concerns. The sort of expressive writing found in the songs was neither characteristic nor acceptable in the three broad categories of his works:4 1 Dialectic: works concerned with logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. 2 Ethics: see Ethica seu scito te ipsum5 particularly; this category could also include Carmen ad Astralabium.6 3 Theology: see the various Theologia,7 as well as a range of commentaries. 3 Abelard, The Story of Abelard’s Adversities. 4 A good summary of Abelard’s works as well as a summary list of the best editions available appears in King, ‘Peter Abelard’, accessed 16 September 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2015/entries/abelard/. 5 Luscombe, Peter Abelard’s Ethics. 6 See Ruys, The Repentant Abelard, 93-142 (Latin text), 143-68 (English translation). 7 Buytaert and Mews, Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica 3 Theologia ‘Summi Boni’ Theologia ‘Scholarium’.

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Theological questions of a more practical type were raised by Heloise and are addressed in Problemata Heloissae cum Petri Abaelardi solutionibus.8 Practical issues are also addressed in his sermons, hymns, the planctus, and other songs. So, if we are to position his song anywhere within his oeuvre it would be here under theology, practical theology. Apart from his own reflections on his songs and Heloise’s responses to these there is almost no surviving contemporary public response to Abelard’s songs. This oeuvre included some early love songs, now probably lost; the Carmen ad Astralabe;9 four long liturgical sequences;10 a proper set of hymns for the Paraclete;11 and a set of six planctus.12 That Abelard himself thought his early love songs noteworthy is remarked on in the Historia Calamitatum: If I was able to create songs, they were love songs – not the secrets of philosophy. As you know most of these songs are still popular, and are sung throughout the country especially by those who like the sort of life I was living then.13

In conf irmation of this, Heloise praises Abelard for his poetry and compositions:

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I confess, you did have two divine gifts with which you were able to readily conquer the heart of any woman: the gift of poetry and the gift of song. 8 A list of 42 questions about the Bible that Heloise posed to Abelard in her capacity as abbess of the Paraclete. See Cousin, Jourdain, and Despois, Problemata Heloissae cum Petri Abaelardi solutionibus. 9 A good edition and translation is to be found in Ruys, The Repentant Abelard. 10 The sequence, also known as prosa, was a category of Latin chant particularly popular in the twelfth century. They were sung at Mass after the Alleluia, which itself served as a conclusion to the gradual and a preamble to the Gospel as an addition to the proper of the mass. Significant features of the sequence include that the text is set syllabically and constructed in couplets of isosyllabic lines with each pair sharing the same melody. 11 The hymn is a strophic composition, sung in the Divine Office with a metrical poetic text and a mainly syllabic melody. 12 The planctus was found in several different styles and forms; they were all songs of lamentation. 13 Though known as Historia Calamitatum, the original title is that of a letter Abaelardi ad amicum suum consolatoria. The relevant passage is ‘Quem etiam ita negligentem et tepidum lectio tunc habebat, ut iam nichil ex ingenio sed ex usu cuncta proferrem, nec iam nisi recitator pristinorum essem inventorum, et si qua invenire liceret, carmina essent amatoria, non philosophie secreta; quorum etiam carminum pleraque adhuc in multis, sicut et ipse nosti, frequentantur et decantantur regionibus, ab his maxime quos vita similis oblectat’. See The Latin Library, accessed 2 May 2017, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/abelard/historia.html.

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[…] With these gifts, you have […] composed quite a number of metrical14 and rhythmic love songs. By virtue of their great charm and sweetness in language and music they were often repeated such that your name was on everyone’s lips, so that the soft attractiveness of the melody obliged even the unlettered to think of you.15 For just this reason women sighed their love for thee. And since most of these songs told of our love, they quickly made me well known in many regions and filled many women with burning envy of me.16

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None of these early love songs have survived, though a case has been made for a memory of one in the Carmina Burana collection, Hebet sidus laeti visus, which involves a pun on Heloise’s name in the second stanza.17 The Carmen ad Astrolabe has no melody, though it is called a song. It is dedicated to Abelard’s son Peter Astrolabe and in it the father offers the son general ethical guidance on the nature of women as well as practical advice on his studies. It survives as a collection of sententiae in elegiac couplets.18 The fact that the Carmen ad Astrolabe is a song without a melody underlines the difference between the medieval understanding of song and the modern one. The song element for a medieval poet lies primarily in the musical elements of the lyric verse – its meter and rhythm and rhyme. Medieval verse was not an object for the eyes to appreciate by reading but was sounding art for the delight of the ears. The song was first and foremost the lyric; if melody was also present, it was subordinate to the text and served to project the text rather than draw attention to itself. The liturgical sequences are Epithalamica, for Easter,19 Virgines castae, on the feast of Saint Lucy,20 De profundis, for All Souls’ Day, and Eia karissimi, 14 The metrical love songs may have been classical quantitative Latin verse. 15 This suggests that the rhythmic love songs were in Latin, since the ‘unlettered’ could only access the songs through the melody. 16 ‘… pleraque amatorio metro vel rhythmo composita reliquisti carmina, quae prae nimia suavitate tam dictaminis quam cantus saepius frequentata tuum in ore omnium nomen incessanter tenebant ut etiam illitteratos melodiae dulcedo tui non sineret immemores esse.’ From Epistola II, Migne, Patrologia Latina (PL) 178.185-186. 17 See Dronke and Orlandi, ‘New Works by Peter Abelard?’, 141. See also Wulstan, ‘Novi Modulaminis Melos’, 1-23. 18 The use of couplets seems to have been a favorite structuring tool for Abelard and is the principal formal device of both the sequences and planctus. 19 Waddell, ‘“Epithalamica”’. See also Bell, ‘The Paraclete Abbey Bridal Tapestry’, 69-73; and Flynn, ‘Letters, Liturgy, and Identity’. 20 Iversen, ‘Pierre Abélard Et La Poésie Liturgique’; and with translation in Bell, Peter Abelard after Marriage, 16-20.

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for St. John the Evangelist.21 They are listed by their incipits in the Paraclete Ordinary and Breviary22 and thus served specific liturgical functions.23 They are relayed with musical notation in a late twelfth-century manuscript from Nevers, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, nouveaux acquisitions latin 3126,24 where they accompany Abelard’s Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha though there is no suggestion of a liturgical function for this work. That the planctus is included in this collection of sequences suggests that when the manuscript was compiled, this planctus, Dolorum solatium, was considered to be a sequence. Certainly, it fits quite well amongst the sequences in that it is an extended work designed along the same formal lines consisting of a series of rhyming couplets each having two isosyllabic lines sung to the same melody with each couplet differing from the preceding in both melody, verse structure, and rhyme. Abelard also wrote a full set of hymns for the Paraclete community. These were constructed as a collection of three libelli each with its own preface and found in Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 10147-58, fols 81r-96v.25 The prefaces document the evolving relationship between Heloise and Abelard and provide us with some insight into his views on poetry and music. The first libellus provides a complete cycle of Sunday and weekday hymns [1-29]. Within the preface, Abelard makes extensive reference to the commissioning words of Heloise, and quotes her critique of the available hymnal as saying that in some hymns ‘the inequality in syllable count is often so great that the songs can hardly accommodate the 21 All Abelard’s sequences, without their melodies unfortunately, are found in Dreves, Blume, and Bannister, Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi [in German and Latin]: Epithalamica (1890), 8:45-47; De profundis (1891), 10:54-55; Virgines castae (1915), 54:133-35; Eia karissimi (1904), 44:163-64. Most now available online, accessed 3 May 2017, http://archive.org/search.php?%20query=analecta%20 hymnica%20AND%20collection%3Atoronto. Another sequence, Parce continuis, has been attributed to Abelard on the basis of some shared lines. This is not the place to argue one way or the other; for this see Meyer, ‘Zwei mittellateinischer Lieder’, 149-66; Raby, ‘Amor and Amicitia’; Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2:559-610 (text of poem); and Stock, ‘Parce Continuis: Some Textual and Interpretative Notes’. 22 Waddell, The Old French Paraclete Ordinary, Epithalamica, 145; Virgines castae, 180; De profundis, 296; Eia karissimi, 183. 23 There has been a consideration of Heloise’s creative contribution to several of Abelard’s works, particularly some hymns and sequences; see Wulstan, ‘Novi Modulaminis Melos’, but issues of contested authorship lie beyond the scope of this article. 24 For details on this manuscript see Huglo, ‘Un Nouveau Prosaire Nivernais’; van Deusen, Music at Nevers Cathedral; also, her ‘The Sequence Repertory of Nevers Cathedral’; and Fassler, Gothic Song. 25 For a description of this manuscript, see Silvestre, ‘Le ms Bruxellensis 10147-10158 (s. xii-xiii) et son Compendium artis picturae’.

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melody, without which there can be no hymn since its purpose is the praise of God with song’.26 This is probably related to the fact that the earliest hymns, examples of the quantitative principles of Latin classical poetry, could not be aligned easily to melodies which relied on the regular accent and predictable syllable count of the Latin accentual verse most commonly used for hymns. Abelard’s response was to demonstrate careful attention to the predictability of the prosodic elements of all his exemplary hymns. The second libellus provides a hymn cycle for feasts of the Lord including Pentecost and the Dedication of a Church [30-60], and the preface, while introducing the contents of the second, reflects on the innovations of the first. Abelard explains that the ferial hymns were divided into two prosodic types, one for the nighttime hymns27 and one for the daytime hymns,28 so with extraordinary economy he reduced to only two, the required melodies for Book 1. ‘You should know that these were composed in such a way that their song is of two types, as is also their rhythm; and there should be one melody common to all the nighttime ones and another for the daytime ones, and so too one rhythm’.29 In these there is close match in syntactical terms between the prosodic shape of the hymn and the melody in terms of the number of melodic phrases matching the number of hymn lines and the number of melody notes within each phrase matching the syllable count. This leaves the singer and listener free to ponder the semantic meaning of the hymn only limited by the rather clever element that the nighttime hymns have nocturnal content and function and the daytime hymns deliberate in some way on illumination and function within the daylight hours. O quanta qualia, the last hymn of Book 1, is deservedly famous and preserves the model melody for all the daytime hymns.30 The preface to the third libellus, which presents a series of hymns for the saints, both proper and common [61-105], adds little to Abelard’s articulation of his thinking on song.31 The surprising restraint in melodic variety and the repetitive metric schemes demonstrated in this collection force the mind to focus on the 26 ‘Tanta est frequenter inaequalitas syllabarum, ut vix cantici melodiam recipient, sine qua nullatenus hymnus consistere potest, cuius description est laus Dei cum cantico’. 27 Nighttime hymns have a four-line verse structured a8 a8 b11 b11 with caesuras after the fourth syllables in the eleven syllable lines. 28 Daytime hymns have a four-line verse structured a12 a12 b12 b12 with caesuras in all lines after the sixth syllable. 29 ‘Quos ita compositos esse cognoscatis, ut bipartitus sit eorum cantus sicut et rhythmus, et sit una omnibs nocturnis melodia communis atque altera diurnis sicut et rhythmus.’ 30 Stäblein, Hymnen. (I): Die Mittelalterlichen Hymnenmelodien des Abendlandes, No. 590. 31 There have been several editions of the hymns: Abelard, ‘Hymnarius Paraclitensis’; Dreves, Lateinische Hymnendichter Des Mittelalters, 48:142-223; and Migne, PL 178.1771-1774.

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single changing element, the content and meaning of the text. This may well have been Abelard’s intention. In a letter to Heloise, serving as preface to the first sermon on the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Abelard says:

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In this little book of hymns and sequences recently completed in response to your request, venerated in Christ and beloved sister Heloise, as well as several little trifles of sermons equally at your request, … I made haste to write according to our custom.32

Though the ‘little book’ no longer survives, the hymns and sequences contained within it almost certainly do. I think it is unlikely that by ‘hymns’ he was referring to the rather grand tripartite collection of hymns for the liturgical year described above. Perhaps he had collected together a handful of hymns trialing various approaches to addressing the shortcomings, as he and Heloise saw them, of the Cistercian hymnal available at the Paraclete.33 Though by ‘sequences’ he could have been referring to the liturgical sequences mentioned above, it is also possible that he was referring to the set of six planctus since they are sequences in formal terms.34 The word planctus, simply meaning lament, though featured frequently in Abelard’s later writing, is never used by him to refer to specific works. We do not know what Abelard called these impressive works. On the other hand, the unique manuscript for the series of planctus, Rome, Vatican, fonds Regina Latin 288, provides rubricated titles for each of the planctus, which suggests direct transmission from a source close to Abelard.35 The fact that the use of specific titles for musical works at this time was extremely rare, provides further support for this proposal. Abelard’s planctus is a set of six elegiac laments voiced in the first person and providing a deeply personal response to the tragic events which inspired them. They survive without an accompanying dedication, but it 32 ‘Libello quodam hymnorum vel sequentiarum a me nuper precibus tuis consummato, veneranda in Christo et amanda soror Heloissa, nonnulla insuper opuscula sermonum, juxta petitionem tuam, tam tibi quam spiritalibus filiabus tuis in oratorio nostro congregatis, scribere praeter consuetudinem nostram utcunque maturavi.’ Migne, PL 178, cols 379-80. 33 The critique of the hymns available at the Paraclete is expressed in the preface to the first of the three libelli of hymns, where Abelard puts the complaints in the voice of Heloise. See Dreves, Lateinische Hymnendichter des Mittelalters, 48:142-44. 34 For the contrary view see Wulstan, ‘Novi Modulaminis Melos’, 3, where he says ‘despite contrary assumptions the libello quodam hymnorum vel sequentiarum a me nuper precibus tui consummato does not refer to his planctus’. 35 For further on this manuscript, see Wilmart, Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae, vol. 2, codices 251-500.

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is hard to imagine that they were devised and sent to anyone other than Heloise and the nuns of the Paraclete. They are virtuosic in language and almost shockingly intense in emotional range. The structuring form is the sequence or double versicle (couplet). They fall into sections, each of which has a different form and therefore different music, with each section connected to the whole by its internal structure. This internal structure is the rhyming couplet, rhyming in both music and text. Forms like these where the structuring logic is primarily musical rather than textual, represent attempts at continuous extended musical composition readily comparable with later abstract music forms.36 Abelard’s planctus demonstrate a closer interweaving of musical and textual structuring than is generally found in Latin song of either chant or secular monophony. His planctus are compact with a clarity of design which is deftly matched to the cadence of the text. All six are built on powerful Old Testament stories and are Planctus Dine filie Jacob (the lament of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob), Planctus Jacob super filios suos (the lament of Jacob over his sons), Planctus virginum Israel super filia Jepte Galadite (the lament of the maidens of Israel over the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite), Planctus Israel super Samson (the lament of Israel over Samson), Planctus David super Abner filio Ner quem Joab occidit (the lament of David over Abner the son of Ner whom Joab killed) and Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha (the lament of David over Saul and Jonathan). The six are presented as a set, in Rome, Vatican, Reg. Lat. 288, fols 63va-64vb, with accompanying music notation consisting of unheighted neumes above the lyric line thus providing a melody which is at best mnemonic, that is, serving only to remind the reader of a melody already known.37 That these works were notated using mnemonic notation more than a century after the establishment of pitch accurate staff notation is puzzling.38 Though accurate pitch notation was already in use in some places by the middle of the eleventh century its spread and availability was uneven across Europe. As well, the application of precise melodic notation was often avoided for repertoires where there was a strong tradition of devotional song performed from memory by 36 For more on the balance between musical and textual logic in formal structuring of song with particular reference to sequence type works, see Stäblein, ‘Die Schwanenklage: zum Problem Lai – Planctus – Sequenz’, 491-502; Stäblein, ‘Zur Frühgeschichte der Sequenz’, 1-33; Handschin, ‘Über Estampie und Sequenz’, 113-1032; and Spanke, ‘Zur Geschichte der lateinischen nichtliturgischen Sequenz’, 367-82. 37 This important manuscript has finally been fully digitized and is available at DigiVatLib, accessed 17 November 2017, https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Reg.lat.288. 38 Staff notation was primarily the work of Guido of Arezzo around 1028-1035. See Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory.

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heart as prayer. It seems that Abelard’s song was caught by these two tides. The final work of the set, Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha,39 however, is preserved with music notation in two further manuscripts. Still mnemonic, though with less guesswork, is its transmission in BnF, n.a. lat. 3126, fols 88v-90v, which features heighted neumes around a red fixed pitch line on F. Fortunately one further manuscript transmission of this work, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 79, fols 53v-56, provides the certain key, in that it is notated in square notation on a four-line staff and is thus pitch accurate. Because there is melodic certainty for this work I have chosen to examine it in detail. However, while the pitch is fully prescribed by the staff notation none of the rhythmic features including meter and tempo are transmitted. In order to properly hear this work, the rhythmic character of both the words and the music needs to be understood and some consideration of the performance possibilities undertaken. This issue has been considered many times by musicologists of early music over the last century and a half and though there are a large number of vigorously defended theories, the performers of this repertoire have largely determined that an isosyllabic approach is both effective and does least violence to the poet-composer’s intention. 40 This approach allows for an oratorical style of delivery where the equal syllable principle can be nuanced for expressive effect.41

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Planctus VI The story behind Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha is the announcement of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan to David. 42 The messenger delivers Saul’s crown and armband to David and relates that the mortally injured Saul was on Mount Gilboa being pursued by chariots. His death was certain and in order to choose his own death Saul asks the young messenger, an enemy Amalekite, to ‘Stand here by me and kill me! I’m in the throes of death, but I’m still alive’. The young man does so. On receipt of this news David and all 39 Hereafter Planctus VI. 40 See Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages, where in Chapter 15 ‘Words and Music: A Balanced Relationship’, 492-504, the principal theories are presented and some practical outcomes are examined. Stevens’s preference is for an isosyllabic approach where each syllable of the line has approximately the same duration, a duration tempered by careful consideration of the oratorical design of the whole line. 41 For a thorough examination of the options, see Weinrich and Marshall, ‘Peter Abaelard as Musician’, 479-81. 42 See 2 Samuel 1:1-16.

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his men tore their clothes and mourned and wept and fasted till evening for Saul and his son Jonathan, and for the army of the Lord and for the nation of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword. More significant structurally, however, is the biblical lament detailing the same story. 43 David’s Lament for Saul and Jonathan 17 David took up this lament concerning Saul and his son Jonathan,18 and he ordered that the people of Judah be taught this lament of the bow (it is written in the Book of Jashar): 19  ‘A gazelle lies slain on your heights, Israel. How the mighty have fallen! 20  ‘Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines be glad, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised rejoice. 21  ‘Mountains of Gilboa, may you have neither dew nor rain, may no showers fall on your terraced fields. For there the shield of the mighty was despised, the shield of Saul – no longer rubbed with oil. 22  ‘From the blood of the slain, from the flesh of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan did not turn back, the sword of Saul did not return unsatisfied. 23 ‘Saul and Jonathan – in life they were loved and admired, and in death they were not parted. They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. 24  ‘Daughters of Israel, weep for Saul, who clothed you in scarlet and finery, who adorned your garments with ornaments of gold. 25  ‘How the mighty have fallen in battle!  Jonathan lies slain on your heights. 26 ‘I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women. 27  ‘How the mighty have fallen! The weapons of war have perished!’44

This study considers the link between Abelard’s language in Planctus VI and the expression of specific emotions and, wherever possible, examines how his music serves to intensify that expression. A form of descriptive analysis is used which exposes the extraordinary originality Abelard develops in crafting this planctus. 45 43 See 2 Samuel 1:17-27. 44 Taken from Bible Gateway, ‘2 Samuel 1:17-27’, accessed 15 May 2017, https://www.biblegateway. com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel%201:17-27. 45 The text has been edited many times, but here I am using the very reliable edited text and translation made by Juanita Feros Ruys. The accompanying notes have also been invaluable in

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There are four approaches that I will take to examine how the lyric and the melody work together. The first of these is STRUCTURAL and is transparently formal in that it considers the syntactical match between the formal element of both the lyric and the music. The second is PROPORTIONAL and concerns the number of melody notes there are to each syllable. Syllabic style, one note to each syllable, presents a lot of text in real time and is often used for narration and declamation; it is the predominant style in this work. In a syllabic section where the delivery of the syllables will be relatively close to normal speaking rate, the meaning of the text is grasped immediately as it is delivered. As the rate of delivery is increased so increases the sense of urgency. Rap music provides a good example where the sometimes almost inhuman speed of delivery makes for extraordinarily increased tension in the listener. In melismatic style passages where one syllable might be expressed in several melody notes, the rate of pickup of meaning is delayed or suspended as you are often waiting (particularly in Latin) for a word ending to make sense of what you have stored in memory. Offering more time to the ear and the mind to absorb the lyric, it is often associated with reflection, introspection, and rhapsody, perhaps because the balance of interpretation goes to the melody. Melismatic word setting style has traditionally been associated with the expression of emotion as, for example, in the alleluia, which is in essence a shout of joy. The word setting style between the two extremes of syllabic style and melismatic style is called group or neumatic style and is generally the most common. The third analytic approach I will call INTERVALLIC and this examines the association of specific intervals that are associated with words or syllables or concepts and whether this has meaning. An example of this is the tritone, that is the three tones, for example the interval F-B, comprising the tones F-G, G-A, A-B. This was called by medieval theorists diabolus in musica because it resisted rational acoustic explanation and was the most dissonant interval across the entire range. There is a tradition of using this interval in cries of grief. Extramusical associations with the acoustically rational fifth, fourth, and octave amongst other intervals have a documented history certainly from Boethius and probably earlier. 46 The fourth approach, called SPATIAL (modal) examines what part of the musical space the melody is occupying, or what mode the work is in, and enriching my appreciation of this work and I have drawn on them throughout the analysis. See Ruys, The Repentant Abelard, 254-56, 264-66, 290-94. 46 See Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, particularly 1.28-32 (pp. 47-49) on the nature of consonance, where he reviews how the ancients considered intervals.

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Figure 5.1

whether there are significant notes that provide melodic focus, and have meaning. Structural pitches of a mode should articulate musical syntax just as the levels of grammar – commas, colons, periods – articulate language. As example, the figure below summarizes the range and focal points of modes 7 and 8, the Mixolydian and Hypomixolydian, the modal area used for Planctus VI. 47 The most significant pitch here is G. Called the final for both mode 7 and 8 it is used to delineate important structural cadences and, as its name suggests, is the final pitch of any work written in these modes. The high G, while retaining some of the terminal significance of the final, is used only occasionally and usually for a sense of climax. Much of the melodic activity will circle around the reciting tone or dominant, D for mode 7. This overlay of melodic syntactical shaping is essential for prosodic chant where it directs the ear and mind of the listener to the shape of the meaning of the text and enriches the semantic value of the fusion of word and tone. However, something else happens in verse, as with this planctus, where musical syntax is already decided to a certain extent by rhyme, rhythm, and meter, the musical elements of the lyric. Since the melody transparently follows the clues to syntax provided by the musical elements of the lyric, the listener is free to pay closer attention to the melody’s role in structuring the modal space. 47 The mode is a way of proceeding through the musical space. It is a hierarchized series of pitches with notes of primary and secondary importance, the remaining pitches providing pathways to and from them. In the medieval period there were four pairs named modes 1 (Dorian) and 2 (Hypodorian) on D; modes 3 (Phrygian) and 4 (Hypophrygian) on E; modes 5 (Lydian) and 6 (Hypolydian) on F; modes 7 (Mixolydian) and 8 (Hypomixolydian) on G.

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Analysis The work falls into six sections based on the patterns in the verse and manuscript indications such as the use of capitals and intentional line breaks. Words of strong emotional content are marked in bold face in the Latin text. So as to present a relatively uncluttered song line, I have only set the first verse in each section; the music-lyric match in the remaining verses can easily be derived from this. Section I: Expository (V.1)

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(V.2)

Dolorum solatium Laborum remedium Mea michi cithara Nunc quo maior dolor est Iustiorque meror est Plus est necessaria

(V.3)

(V.4)

Strages magna populi Regis mors et filii Hostium victoria. Ducum desolatio Vulgi desperatio Luctu replent omnia.

STRUCTURE – There are four verses, each of three, 7-syllable lines rhyming a a b in each verse. The third line of each verse shares a rhyming syllable ending – cithara, necessaria, victoria, omnia. The melodic structure matches the lyric structure in that it too is a a b in shape with lines 1 and 2 sharing a melody and line 3 providing a contrast to it. PROPORTION – This is in group or neumatic style with groups or three and two notes to a syllable. INTERVALLIC – The opening melodic gesture setting Dolorum (of sorrows) embeds the augmented fourth from B down to F as an opening cry of grief. This same interval is repeated in line 2 to laborum (of labors) and here, besides confirming the grief of the opening line prefigures the motif of the harp or cithara which is properly introduced with the same fateful interval in the following line. The cithara is a plucked string instrument, possibly a psaltery or harp such as David may have played. Perhaps the use of this dissonant interval signals that the harp is out of tune; it is certainly out of tune with its player. 48 Almost every line has a powerfully emotive word within it; the predominant emotion is sorrow. SPATIAL – Each of the three lines has a downward caste; lines 1 and 2 have focal notes G – D – G outlining the lower fourth of mode 8 while line 3 steps down through C – B – A – G, almost outlining its upper fifth. 48 Plucked string instruments in Abelard’s time could not tune in a B flat to sweeten this interval and, in any case, there was no B flat strictly available to modes 7 and 8.

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Figure 5.2

[A4 = augmented fourth or tritone] Solace of sorrows, respite from my labors is my harp to me. Now the greater the suffering and more fitting its lamentation, the more necessary it is. The great slaughter of the people, the death of the king and his son, the victory of our enemies. The desolation of the leaders, the despair of the people, fill all things with mourning.’

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Section II: Narrative (V.1)

Amalech invaluit Israel dum corruit infidelis iubilat Philistea dum lamentis macerat se Iudea.

(V.3)

(V.2)

Insultat infidelibus Infidelis populus In honorem maximum plebs adversa In derisum omnium fit divina.

(V.4)

Insultantes inquiunt “Ecce de quo garriunt Qualiter hos prodidit Deus suus Dum a multis accidit diis prostratus. Quem primum his prebuit Victus rex occubuit Talis est electio Dei sui Talis consecratio vatis magni!

STRUCTURE – There are four verses each of four lines with the first and second lines having seven syllables and the third and fourth establishing an antecedent-consequent pattern of seven plus four syllables confirmed by the rhyme pattern a a (b+c) (b+c). The melodic structure matches the lyric structure with lines 1 and 2 sharing a melody, as do lines 3 and 4 with a contrasting melody. The melodic linking of the nations Amalech and

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Figure 5.3

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Amalech prevailed while Israel fell; faithless Philistia rejoices while Judea steeps itself in laments. A faithless people reviles the faithful; the hostile race raised to greatest honor, the holy people made the scorn of all. Taunting they speak: ‘Behold how their own God, about whom they prattle, betrayed them. When he fell, laid low by many gods. That king whom he first offered them lies conquered: this is the one chosen by their god, this is the one consecrated by the great prophet!’

Israel at the openings of lines 1 and 2 is balanced by the melodic linking of Philistea and Judea at the close of lines 3 and 4. PROPORTION – A mixture of syllabic and group style with two and three note groups. INTERVALLIC – The opening two lines repeat waves of melodic descent in mainly stepwise motion. Lines 3 and 4 repeat small upward leaps of a third and a fourth which nonetheless do not stop the generally descending shape of the line. There is a concentration of emotionally loaded words with the predominant emotion being anger. SPATIAL – lines 1 and 2 occupy the upper region of mode 8, though never quite stretching down to the focal pitch, the final, G. On the other hand, lines 3 and 4, while still working the upper range of mode 8, particularly focus on the final note of mode 8, G.

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Figure 5.4

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Saul, mightiest of kings, unconquered valor of Jonathan, he who could not conquer you was permitted to slay you. As though he had not been consecrated by the Lord’s own chrism, his throat is slit in battle by the sword of an accursed hand. More than a brother to me, Jonathan, with me in a single soul. What sins, what crimes have sundered our innermost parts? Mountains of Gilboa may you be devoid of dew and rain, let not the first-fruits of your fields nourish your inhabitants!’

Section III: Descriptive (V.1)

(V.2)

Saul regum fortissime Virtus invicta Ionathe Qui vos nequivit vincere Permissus est occidere. Quasi non esset oleo Consecrates dominico Sceleste manus gladio Iugulatur in prelio

(V.3)

(V.4)

Plus fratre michi Ionatha In una mecum anima Que peccata que scelera Nostra sciderunt viscera? Expertes montes Gelboe Roris sitis et pluvie Nec agrorum primitive Vestro succurrant incole!

STRUCTURE – There are four verses each with four octosyllabic lines and it is this consistent eight syllable line that confirms that Saul is pronounced in two syllables and Ionatha in three. The rhyme pattern is a a a a, in each verse, and a case might be made that the rhyming syllable of verse 4 has identity with

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that of verse 1. The melodic structure as in section II is in couplet design in that lines 1 and 2 share a melody and lines 3 and 4 share a contrasting melody. PROPORTION – The word setting is completely syllabic, underlining the almost sensationalist drama of the text. The emotionally charged words underline feelings of shock, intense sorrow, and revenge. INTERVALLIC – Lines 1 and 2 present an essentially stepwise descending line with lines 3 and 4 shadowing the melodic outline while contracting its range and producing two shallow descents. SPATIAL – Lines 1 and 2 reach one note beyond the range of mode 8 which both emphasizes that top D and hints at the transition to mode 7, before outlining, in descent once more, the upper fifth of mode 8 or perhaps the lower fifth of mode 7. Lines 3 and 4 are relatively static and stress the final pitch, G. Section IV: Hortative (V.1)

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(V.2)

Ve, ve tibi madida Tellus cede regia Qua et te mi Ionatha Manus stravit impia. Ubi christus Domini Israelque incliti Morte miserabili Sunt cum suis perditi.

(V.3)

(V.4)

Planctus Syon filie Super Saul sumite Largo cuius munere vos ornabant purpure. Tu michi mi Ionatha Flendus super omnia Inter cuncta gaudia Perpes erit lacrima.

STRUCTURE – There are four verses of four lines each of seven syllables. The rhyme pattern is a a a a in each verse, and as in section III the rhyme in verse 4 matches that of verse 1. The so far consistent pattern of repeated melodic couplets is broken here with each line having its own distinct melody. PROPORTION – The word setting is entirely syllabic and fashioned for the most direct delivery of text meaning. Emotionally charged words in quick succession evoke anger, wretchedness, hopelessness, sorrow, and lamentation. INTERVALLIC – Line 1 demonstrates gentle wave motion with an overall ascending contour. Line 2 conf irms the ascending shape with leaps of descending thirds and a rising fourth, though the directional change is ultimately minimal. Line 3 returns to the descending line commencing from the highest note heard to this point, while line 4 inversely mirrors line 1 in its wave motion but uses the dynamic activity of rocking thirds to push the line to its final. SPATIAL – The opening three lines emphasize in turn, the final G, the affinal49 D, and the highest note, top G, convincingly marking the shift to 49 Second most important note in the hierarchy of pitches of the Mixolydian mode 7.

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Figure 5.5

Woe, woe to you earth soaked in royal bloodshed upon which, my Jonathan, an impious hand also cut you down. This is where the Lord’s anointed and the glorious flower of Israel were destroyed along with their men by wretched death. Daughters of Zion, take up your laments over Saul, through whose generous gift the royal purple used to adorn you. But for me, my Jonathan, it is you who is to be lamented most of all; among all my joys there will be everlasting tears.

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the Mixolydian mode 7. Line 4 directs attention once again to the G final. Having introduced the upper fourth of the range of mode 7 the ground is prepared for the climax of the next section. Section V: Climax (V.1)

(V.2) Vicem amicicie Heu cur consilio Vel unam me reddere Adquievi pessimo Oportebat tempore Ut tibi presidio Summe tunc angustie Non essem in prelio? Triumphi participem Vel confossus pariter Vel ruine comitem Morerer feliciter Ut te vel eriperem Cum quid amor faciat Vel tecum Maius hoc non occumberem habeat Vitam pro te finiens Et me post te vivere Quam salvasti tociens Mori sit assidue Ut et mors iungeret Nec ad vitam anima Magis quam Satis sit dimidia disiungeret.

(V.3) Infausta victoria Potitus interea Quam vana quam brevia Hinc percepi gaudia Quam cito durissimus Est secutus nuncius quem in suam animam Locutum superbiam Mortuis quos nuntiat Illata mors aggregat Ut doloris nuntius Doloris sit socius

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Figure 5.6

Alas why did I consent to that worst of counsel so that I was not a garrison for you in battle? Else, likewise pierced, I would happily have died, since what love may do has nothing greater than this, and for me to love on after you is to die repeatedly, nor is half a soul sufficient for life. To make at least one return for your friendship was fitting for me then in that time of greatest distress, a partner in your triumph or a comrade in defeat, so that I should either snatch you back or fall to my death with you, ending for your sake a life which you saved so often, so that death might even unite us rather than separate us. Unpropitious victory won in the meantime, how empty, how brief the joys I took from it! How swiftly that most unfeeling messenger followed, whom having spoken pride in his heart, death bearing down upon him adds to the dead whose names he calls, so that the messenger of sorrow should become the companion of sorrow.

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STRUCTURE – In this section the verses have twelve lines of seven syllables each. The rhyme scheme establishes the subdivision into three parts – [a a a a] [b b c c] [d d e e], consistent for both the first and third verse. The second verse presents a subtle variation which can be summarized schematically thus – [a a a a] [b b b b] [c c d d]. The melodic structure conf irms the tripartite substructure and develops an intricate pattern of melodic repetition and reference, incorporating much of section IV. Using letter identity to mark repeats, the melodic scheme of section V might look like this x y x* y / IV(1) IV(1*) IV(3*) z / IV(1) IV(1) IV(3*) z.50 This structural interlacing of the two sections, IV and V, amplifies the lyric content of IV, introducing David’s sorrow at the death of Jonathan, with the explosive grief of section V where David directs attention to himself and takes the blame for his beloved friend’s death. The specific detailed matching of the first line of section IV (IV/1) and its variant (IV/1*) recalls the anguish of the memory of the blood-soaked earth and operates as a remembered counterpoint to these lines in the climactic section where David explains that ‘to live on after you is to die repeatedly’ and regrets that he was not at Jonathan’s side at the end. PROPORTION – The text setting is predominantly syllabic with the only exceptions occurring in lines 1 and 3. This is in keeping with the urgency of the delivery of the text; there is no space for reflection here. Strongly contrasting emotions are evoked in this section – love and death, friendship and distress, triumph and regret, along with bitterness, remorse, and self-reproach. INTERVALLIC – The opening on Heu (alas!) with the top note G is both striking and dramatic. Lines 1 to 4, with the persistent hammering of the highest note of the work and consistent descending phrases falling from it, marks the climax of the whole work. Lines 5 to 8 and 9 to 12 are closely related to each other such that of each, the first two lines show an overall gentle ascent with the last two lines returning to the falling phrases consistent throughout the whole work. SPATIAL – Lines 1 to 4 repeatedly run down from the top note, the final G to the affinal D of the Mixolydian mode 7. Lines 5 to 8 and 9 to 12 confirm the final G in the first two lines, the upper fourth from G down to D in the third lines and the lower fifth from D down to the final G in the final lines.

50 Using letters from the end of the alphabet is usual for marking melodic identity while those from the front of the alphabet are traditionally used to signal textual rhyme. The asterisk marks slight melodic variation.

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Figure 5.7

[P4 = perfect fourth; A4 = augmented fourth or tritone] I give rest to my harp. I would wish also to my laments and were it possible to my tears. With hands wounded from strumming with voice hoarse from keening my spirit also fails.

Section VI: Coda

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(V.1)

Do quietem vellem sic possem

fidibus ut et planctibus et fletibus

(V.2)

Lesis pulsu Raucis planctu Deficit et

manibus vocibus spiritus

STRUCTURE – The three lines of seven syllables each is a structural reference to the opening section I, though here, at the end, the rhyme scheme is a a a with identical two syllable (ibus) rhymes. PROPORTION – The word setting is a mix of syllabic and melismatic with telling melismas on planctibus [laments] and fletibus [tears] painting them effectively with a descending phrase. This same effect is achieved in the repeated verse with vocibus [voices] and spiritus [spirit]. The emotionally charged words include, tears, weeping, lamentation, and sorrow suggesting that the anger has gone and only weeping remains. INTERVALLIC – Line 1 outlines a mild descent with line 2 showing a gentle wave that evades direction and finally line 3 giving two waves of descent. The dissonant tritone interval, B down to F, is stepped through and positioned in exactly the same spot as it occurred in the opening section.

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There it set the word cithara (harp), here it sets the word fletibus (tears), thus connecting the harp with lamentation and supporting the dramatic fiction of David singing to his harp of his love and sorrow throughout this planctus. SPATIAL – This section works the core of Mixolydian mode 7, the fundamental fifth from the final G to the affinal D. Line 1 descends to the final G, line 2 rocks between the median B and the affinal D, and the final line outlines that fundamental fifth twice in descent. SUMMARY – This section, the singer’s farewell to his instrument, had been prepared at the outset with the opening six lines of section I. There is a satisfying sense that the composition has come full circle. At the opening David picks up his harp seeking solace for his sorrows. At the end, he lays the harp down, his fingers bruised from plucking and strumming; his search for solace has come to nothing as there seems no end to his laments and tears. As he puts down his harp, the interval outlined to the word fidibus and manibus (plucked instrument; hands) is a resigned and hollow perfect fourth. The restless tritone associated with cithara and necessaria (harp; necessary) at the opening has retained its position at the end but now accompanies fletibus and spiritus (tears; spirit). The closing is musically a kind of inverted mirror of the opening.51 The following example shows the melodic focus of the planctus and makes clear its modal design. Sections I to III are Hypomixolydian (mode 8) while the final three sections IV to VI are emphatically Mixolydian (mode 7). There is such modal clarity here that it is almost text book.52 Clearly Abelard wanted there to be no doubt about the melodic space that this planctus occupied. But does this have specific meaning for this work? I think so. Music theorists 51 For more on the significance of this, see Dronke, Sources of Inspiration, 291. 52 We know that Abelard communicated with Bernard of Clairvaux about musical matters. (See Waddell, ‘Peter Abelard’s Letter 10 and Cistercian Liturgical Reform’, 75-86.) We also know that Bernard of Clairvaux was responsible for supervising a thoroughgoing revision of the Order’s liturgical books. (See Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Prologus in Antiphonarium’, ed. Leclerq 3.511-516, pp. 151-62.) As part of this he had commissioned Guido Augensis to establish a set of rules for determining constrained modal regularity in application to both newly composed and traditional chant. For the theoretical background of the Cistercian chant reform see Marosszeki, Les origins du chant cistercien. See also Maître, La Réforme cistercienne du plain-chant, which at pp. 108-233 holds the Regule de arte musica by Guido Augensis. The surprising modal regularity of this planctus may be the result of Abelard’s acquaintance with Augensis’s work. A further study extending modal examination to the other reliably notated works of Abelard, the sequences and hymns, is needed to conf irm this interesting possibility.

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Figure 5.8

and philosophers from Aristotle and Plato, through Augustine, Martianus Capella, and Boethius and, leaping across four centuries, to Guido of Arezzo, have considered the ethos of the modes when discussing the power of music to affect behavior. Though they rarely agreed on matches between specific emotions and particular modes, it seems that the tradition that Abelard was familiar with is that same tradition which was developed so clearly in the early fourteenth century work of Guy of Saint-Denis. He had this to say of the Hypomixolydian53 or mode or tone 8:

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.

Now the melodic qualities of the […] 8th tone seem to incite towards sadness more, or to sorrow and grief; this may be because of a certain slowness that there is in its progression or motion, also because of a certain hardness and severity that it seems to have in its construction. And hence the 8th tone is depicted as holding a drawn sword in its right hand.54

This seems to be highly appropriate for the first shorter half of the planctus, which includes in its section III reference to the sword as the weapon that slit Saul’s throat in battle. It seems that Abelard was drawing on this understanding also. 53 For a range of reasons, Guy of Saint-Denis used the archaic term Hypermixolydian rather than the satisfyingly consistent Hypomixolydian. 54 ‘Armoni[e] vero […] octavi toni ad tristitiam magis vel merorem et luctum incitare videntur. et hoc forte propter quandam tarditatem quam in sua progressione vel motu necnon propter duritiem quandam et asperitatem quam in sua compositione videntur habere. Unde […] octavus tenet in manu dextera nudum ensem. que profecto signa sunt non letitie sed magis tristitie et meroris.’ Guy of St Denis, Tractatus de tonis 1.4.19.

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Guy of Saint-Denis has this to say of the Mixolydian or mode 7:

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But the melodic quality of the 7th tone, which the Philosopher […] calls the Mixolydian on account of the great height that it has in pitch […] recalls or draws back the spirit from exterior things to interior ones in some way. It does not dispose towards rapture or audacity or anger, but rather to mercy and compassion. And hence that tone is depicted as […] winged and armed. Winged indeed in that […] it immediately begins as if flying […] Armed indeed since sometimes it sounds harsher and graver, just like a warrior, sometimes indeed speedier and more carefree, other times indeed higher and as if mournful…55

The applicability of this understanding of the Mixolydian mode to the material of the second half of the planctus is, I think, evident. Here we find the warrior David who regrets his absence from Jonathan’s side in battle as well as the swiftness of the delivery of the unfeeling messenger. We can perhaps summarize the Emotional Landscape of Abelard’s Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha in modal terms with this schema: As conclusion, I would like to develop the theory that these planctus, and this planctus in particular, were designed as love songs for Heloise. As a start, though love songs are sung from the heart and inevitably use the first-person singular, this is rare in other repertoires and particularly in the Latin laments. In this sense Abelard’s planctus are exceptional. The use of the first-person singular, ‘the singing I’, is very powerful and to hear it used unflinchingly in this planctus is striking and invites the interpretation that it might be a love song from Abelard to Heloise, using the screen of the biblical story to loosely veil their identities. The kind of love being addressed is also integral to the argument. The love between David and Jonathan, amicitia rather than amor, is the core of planctus 6. The early love letters between Abelard and Heloise relentlessly toss back and forth the pros and cons of love (amor) and 55 ‘Armonia vero septimi toni quam philosophus ubi supra mixolodistam appellat. licet propter magnum acumen quod habet in vocibus […] ab exterioribus ad interiora aliqualiter spiritum revocet vel retrahat. […] et ideo non ad raptum aut audaciam seu iram. sed potius ad misericordiam et compassionem disponit. Nam secundum philosophum ubi supra. propter huiusmodi retractionem spiritus ab exterioribus ad interiora. planctivi per eam eff iciuntur homines et quasi contracti. Unde et iste tonus ubi supra alatus depingitur et armatus. alatus siquidem, eo quod in sua origine et in versibus responsoriorum quasi volare statim incipit vel quasi volando incedere. […] Armatus vero, eo quod quasi preliator aliquando durius et gravius. aliquando vero velocius atque securius, nunc vero altius et quasi planctuosus ut dicitur ibidem sonat in modulis.’ Guy of St Denis, Tractatus de tonis 1.4.17.

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Figure 5.9

friendship (amicitia). Can the planctus be seen as a late response to these? One of the strongest declarations of the deep bond between David and Jonathan is found in line 33: ‘in una mecum anima’ (‘you are one in soul with me’), a sentiment reflected throughout the early letters.56 Discussions of this kind were certainly in the air; see, for example, Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), who uses the story of David and Jonathan as an exemplum in his De spirituali amicitia.57 Another work concerned with the nature of amor and amicitia, and using the story of David and Jonathan as illustration, is the anonymous sequence Parce continuis, sometimes attributed to Abelard.58 By rejecting verse 26 from the biblical lament where David refers to Jonathan as ‘beloved beyond the love of women’, Abelard steadily rejects any sense that the love between the two men is homoerotic.59 Instead Abelard develops a thoughtful examination of the nature of the deep friendship, amicitia, between two people connected by love. Perhaps Abelard is demonstrating to Heloise by exemplum, the model of how their relationship might proceed; that in place of the earlier erotic amor there could be an intense amicitia between them.60 56 See Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. 57 See Hoste and Talbot, ‘De spirituali amicitia’, 279-352; and Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, trans. Laker. 58 For a fascinating discussion on the nature of this sequence and the attribution of authorship to Abelard, see Meyer, ‘Zwei mittellateinischer Lieder’, 149-66; Raby, ‘Amor and Amicitia’, 599-610; Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2:559-610; and Stock, ‘Parce Continuis’, 164-73. 59 ‘doleo super te frater mi Ionathan decore nimis et amabilis super amorem mulierum’, Biblia Sacra Vulgata at Bible Gateway, accessed 17 November 2017, https://www.biblegateway.com/ passage/?search=2+Samuel+1%3A17-27&version=VULGATE. 60 See Ruys, ‘“Ut Sexu Sic Animo”’, 15.

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Bibliography

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Primary Sources Abelard, Peter. ‘Hymnarius Paraclitensis’. In Peter Abelard’s Hymnarius Paraclitensis, edited by Joseph Szoverffy. Albany: Classical Folia Editions, 1975. —. The Story of Abelard’s Adversities. Edited and translated by J. T. Muckle. Mediaeval Sources in Translation. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1964. Aelred of Rievaulx. Spiritual Friendship. Edited and translated by M. E. Laker, Cistercian Fathers Series 5. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1977. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Prologus in Antiphonarium’. In S. Bernardi Opera, 8 vols. In 9, ed. J. Leclercq, C.H. Talbot, H.M. Tochais (Rome: Editiones Cisterciensis, 1957-77), 3.511-516. Boethius. Fundamentals of Music. In Music Theory Translation Series, edited and translated by Calvin M. Bower. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Buytaert, Eloi Marie, and Constant J. Mews. Petri Abaelardi Opera theologica 3: Theologia ‘summi boni’ Theologia ‘scholarium’ [in Latin]. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM) 13. Turnholt: Brepols, 1987. Cousin, Victor, Charles Jourdain, and Eugene Despois, eds. Problemata Heloissae cum Petri Abaelardi solutionibus. In Petri Abaelardi Opera. Paris: A. Durand, 1849. Dreves, Guido Maria, ed. Lateinische Hymnendichter des Mittelalters. Vol. 48, Hymnographi Latini in Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, 142-223. Leipzig: O.R. Reisland, 1905. Dreves, Guido Maria, Clemens Blume, and Henry Marriott Bannister. Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi [in German and Latin]. 55 vols. New York: Reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corp. Most now available online. Accessed 3 May 2017. http:// archive.org/search.php?%20query=analecta%20hymnica%20AND%20 collection%3Atoronto. Dronke, Peter, and Giovanni Orlandi. ‘New Works by Peter Abelard and Heloise?’. Filologia mediolatina 12 (2005): 123-46. Guy of St. Denis. Tractatus de tonis. Edited and translated by Constant J. Mews, Carol J. Williams, John N. Crossley, and Catherine Jeffreys. TEAMS Varia Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. Hoste, Anselm, and C.H. Talbot, eds. ‘De spirituali amicitia’. In Aelredi Rievallensis. Opera omnia, 279-352. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 1971. Luscombe, D.E. Peter Abelard’s Ethics [in Abelard’s text in English and Latin]. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Luscombe, David E., and Betty Radice. The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise [in Letters in Latin with parallel English translation]. 1st ed. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Silvestre, Hubert. ‘Le ms Bruxellensis 10147-10158 (s. xii-xiii) et son Compendium artis picturae’. Bulletin de la Commission royal d’histoire 119 (1954): 95-140. Stäblein, Bruno, ed. Hymnen. (I): Die Mittelalterlichen Hymnenmelodien des Abendlandes. Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi 1. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1956, No. 590. Waddell, Chrysogonus. ‘“Epithalamica”: An Easter Sequence by Peter Abelard’. The Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1986): 248-52. —. The Old French Paraclete Ordinary, Paris, Bibliothèque, Ms Français 14410 and the Paraclete Breviary, Chaumont, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms 31. 3 vols. Cistercian Liturgy Series. Trappist, KY: Gethesmani Abbey, 1983. —. ‘Peter Abelard’s Letter 10 and Cistercian Liturgical Reform’. In Studies in Medieval Cistercian History, II, edited by John R. Sommerfeldt, 75-86. Cistercian Studies Series 24. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976. —. ‘Prologue to the Cistercian Antiphonary’. In The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux: Treatises I, 151-62. Cistercian Fathers Series 1. Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1970. Wilmart, Andreas. Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae: Codices manu scripti recensiti; Codices Reginenses Latini. Vol. 2, Codices 251-500. [Città del Vatican]: Bibliotheca Vaticana, 1945.

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Secondary Sources Bell, Thomas J. ‘The Paraclete Abbey Bridal Tapestry: A Socio-Rhetorical Analysis of Peter Abelard’s Sequences Virgines Castae and Epithalamica’. PhD thesis, Emory University, 1999. —. Peter Abelard after Marriage: The Spiritual Direction of Heloise and her Nuns through Liturgical Song. Cistercian Studies Series 211. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2007. Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. —. Sources of Inspiration: Studies in Literary Transformation: 400-1500. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1997. Fassler, Margot Elsbeth. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris. Cambridge Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Flynn, William T. ‘Letters, Liturgy, and Identity: The Use of Epithalamica at the Paraclete’. In Sapientia et Eloquentia: Meaning and Function in Liturgical Poetry, Music, Drama, and Biblical Commentary in the Middle Ages, edited by Gunilla Iversen and Nicolas Bell, 301-48. Disputatio 11. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Handschin, J. ‘Über Estampie und Sequenz’. Zeitschrift fṻr Musikwissenschaft 12 (1929-1930), 1-20; 13 (1930-1931), 113-32.

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Huglo, Michel. ‘Un Nouveau Prosaire Nivernais’. Ephemerides liturgicae 71 (1957): 3-30. Iversen, Gunilla, ed. ‘Pierre Abélard Et La Poésie Liturgique’. Paper presented at the Pierre Abélard: Colloque international de Nantes, 2003. King, Peter. ‘Peter Abelard’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Summer 2015 Edition. Accessed 16 September 2017. https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/abelard/. Luscombe, David E. Peter Abelard. General Series – Historical Association 95. London: Historical Association, 1979. —. The School of Peter Abelard: The Influence of Abelard’s Thought in the Early Scholastic Period. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Maître, Claire, ed. La Réforme cistercienne du plain-chant: Étude d’un traité théorique. Beernem, Belgium: Brecht, 1995. Mengozzi, S. The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory: Guido of Arezzo between Myth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mews, Constant J. Abelard and Heloise. Great Medieval Thinkers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. —. Abelard and his Legacy [in English and multiple languages]. Variorum Collected Studies Series. 1 vol. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. —. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in TwelfthCentury France. 2nd ed. The New Middle Ages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. —. ‘Peter Abelard’. In Authors of the Middle Ages. Vol. 2, nos. 5-6, Historical and Religious Writers of the Latin West, edited by Patrick J. Geary. Aldershot, UK: Variorum; Ashgate Pub. Co., 1995. Meyer, Wilhelm. ‘Zwei mittellateinischer Lieder’, In Studi letterari e linguistici dedicati a Pio Rajna nel quarantesimo anno del suo insegnamento, 149-66. Milan: Hoepli, 1911. Raby, F.J.E. ‘Amor and Amicitia: A Mediaeval Poem’. Speculum 40, no. 4 (1965): 599-610. Ruys, Juanita Feros. The Repentant Abelard: Family, Gender, and Ethics in Peter Abelard’s Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. —. ‘“Ut Sexu Sic Animo”: The Resolution of Sex and Gender in the “Planctus” of Abelard’. Medium Aevum 75, no. 1 (2006): 1-23. Solutor Rodolphe Marosszeki, Les origins du chant cistercien. Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 8. Rome: Tipographia Vaticana, 1952. Spanke, H. ‘Zur Geschichte der lateinischen nichtliturgischen Sequenz’. Speculum 7 (1932): 367-82.

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Stäblein, B. ‘Die Schwanenklage: zum Problem Lai – Planctus – Sequenz’. Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by H. Hüschen, 491-502. Regensburg: Bosse, 1962. —. ‘Zur Frühgeschichte der Sequenz’. Archiv fṻr Musikwissenschaft 18 (1961): 1-33. Stevens, John. Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance, and Drama, 1050-1350. Cambridge Studies in Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Stock, Brian. ‘Parce Continuis: Some Textual and Interpretative Notes’, Mediaeval Studies 31 (1969): 164-73. Van Deusen, Nancy. Music at Nevers Cathedral: Principal Sources of Mediaeval Chant. 2 vols. Musicological Studies 30. Henryville, PA: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1980. —. ‘The Sequence Repertory of Nevers Cathedral’. Forum musicologicum 2 (1980): 44-59. Weinrich, Lorenz, and Robert L. Marshall. ‘Peter Abaelard as Musician – II’. The Musical Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1969): 479-81. Wulstan, David. ‘Novi Modulaminis Melos: The Music of Heloise and Abelard’. Plainsong and Medieval Music 11, no. 1 (2002): 1-23.

About the Author

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Carol Williams is a member of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. She is a scholar of medieval music theory.

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Section 2

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Sanctity and Material Culture

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6

Dirty Laundry Thomas Becket’s Hair Shirt and the Making of a Saint Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman Abstract The study of the events surrounding the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the side altar of Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 has focused primarily on the significance of the assassination itself as confirmation of his saintliness. As the body was finally being prepared for burial, the surprising discovery was made that underneath his stately vestments, Becket wore (and had long worn) a hairshirt, crawling with lice, maggots, and other vermin. All lingering suspicions that Becket’s ‘conversion’ from worldly courtier to spiritual archbishop had been a pretense, a fabrication designed to bolster his claim to authority against King Henry II, fell away. It was the hairshirt, and not the murder, that made the martyr.

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Keywords: Thomas Becket, Canterbury, Twelfth Century, England, Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, King Henry II

The documentary reconstruction of the history of the life and martyrdom of Thomas Becket of Canterbury has proven among the most vexing challenges for historians of twelfth-century Europe. Contemporary reports (those composed within fifteen or so years of the archbishop’s fateful murder on 29 December 1170) abound, including accounts by his intimates and other participants in key events of Becket’s career. But these voices speak in a bewildering and exasperating cacophony, as might be expected by the sheer number of vitae, as well as letters and other important pieces of evidence, available to the modern reader.1 At the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin 1 See Robertson, Materials (we shall henceforth follow the standard practice of referring to these volumes as ‘MTB’). It might be noted that Robertson did not include the major metrical French biography by Guernes (Garnier) of Pont-Sainte-Maxence. Also, Duggan, Correspondence.

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Abbott, in his masterful attempt to collate the multitude of accounts of one crucial moment in Becket’s career – the few hours surrounding his actual death – stated with evident frustration that examination of the extant narratives shows ‘how even eye-witnesses may have been misled, and may have misled others, as to important details, and also how easy and natural it was for the miraculous to intrude, even within five years of the Martyrdom’.2 Yet, recent scholars have doggedly sought to separate the wheat from the chaff so as to create a single coherent tale about Becket’s procession from birth to afterlife, applying the critical tools of the modern historian to the rich body of evidence afforded by the many reports of the saint’s deeds and words.3 There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with attempting to judge among various sources in order to construct the best or most plausible history of Becket’s storied life. There is a sense, however, in which such a project does violence to the documents on which it must rely in order to build its case. The testaments that the modern historian employs in order to weave a coherent account – the vitae, letters, and so forth – were themselves fashioned with a variety of rhetorical agendas and audiences in mind, a fact that is generally acknowledged now only negatively, as when a scholar wishes to dismiss some inconvenient assertion that conflicts with his or her vision of historical verisimilitude. It must be kept strictly in mind that the authors of these twelfth-century texts were men who possessed varying degrees of literary talents, whose allegiances were by no means uniform, and who were often more concerned with promoting an agenda than with relating facts. As a result, the application of modern historical methods to such materials readily leads to a failure to attend to what Clifford Geertz famously termed ‘thick description’, that is, details and nuances that reflect the richness and diversity of human experience but that are often internally inconsistent. 4 In the present chapter, we propose to illustrate the significance of precisely such diverging narratives of Becket by examining one element of his behavior that has long since passed into the realm of the mythical, namely, how his personal sanctity was alleged to be reflected by his choice of clothing – in particular, by his donning of hair garments – once he became archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. Although even well-tutored schoolchildren across the ages could probably declaim the ‘fact’ of Becket’s uncomfortable underwear, the full story of the martyred saint’s ‘dirty laundry’ is far more complex 2 Abbott, St. Thomas, 1:7. 3 For example, O’Reilly, ‘Double Martyrdom’; Barlow, Becket; Duggan, Becket; Staunton, Biographers. 4 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.

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and unsettled than has been credited. We begin with two authors who are commonly held to be the earliest sources for Becket’s life and death: Edward Grim and John of Salisbury. We shall investigate the ways in which their texts present somewhat disparate accounts of the archbishop’s vestments, as well as the context in which he was said to have adopted them and the later public revelation of their existence. This will lead us to reflect on the larger rhetorical issues posed by the divergent treatments of Becket’s garb found in the works of Grim and John. This investigation, in turn, will enable us to propose a more precise dating of these two earliest accounts, as well as a hypothesis about their relationship to each other. Both our revised dating of and the resulting relationship between these texts hold significant implications for the standard scholarly genealogies of the extant Becket vitae.5 Thereafter, we shall trace how these two initial representations of Becket’s sartorial choices shaped the ways in which other contemporary writers conceived their own visions of the saint. We hope to demonstrate that the ‘facts’ about how and why Becket dressed as he did matter far less than the varying significance attached to his garments by those engaged in the project of ‘making’ and then embellishing his sanctity. We close our chapter with discussion of a third – and essentially non-political – representation of Becket’s dress by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence composed with a popular, rather than clerical, audience in mind.

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Edward Grim and the Personal Account For a number of reasons, Edward Grim would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the role of Becket biographer; that he was the first is even more surprising, as we shall see. Grim, a clerk who had apparently been deprived by English King Henry II of his rectorship of Saltwood, Kent, around 1163-1164, had spent a number of years in exile in Normandy and had only returned to England in late 1170. Although Herbert of Bosham, in his much later Life of Becket, counted Grim among Becket’s so-called eruditi, this status claim must have been purely ‘honorary’, since there is no independent evidence that the clerk was among the archbishop’s inner circle of advisors and supporters.6 Rather, Grim’s presence at Canterbury on the day of Becket’s martyrdom seems purely coincidental, and the two men likely did not know each other well. Yet, while John of Salisbury and 5 Staunton, Biographers, 7-11; Guy, Becket, 353-58; Barlow, Becket, 3-9. 6 Barlow, Becket, 77.

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most of Becket’s other associates hid themselves from the assassins,7 Grim remained with the archbishop and, in attempting to protect Becket, was rewarded for his effort with a deep sword cut to his arm.8 Having been a true eyewitness to the murder, Grim soon dedicated himself to offering written reportage about Becket. Indeed, we hypothesize that Grim was the author of a hitherto anonymous letter, clearly produced immediately after the martyrdom and addressed to Pope Alexander III, that recounts the last moments of Becket’s life.9 (Regardless of its authorship, we opine that this missive is truly the first extant written record of the death of the archbishop.) Somewhat later (though, for reasons we discuss below, likely not much later), Grim composed a complete biography of the man whose life he had tried and failed to save. Grim’s narration takes considerable cognizance of how Becket chose to dress. According to Grim, Becket’s consecration occasioned a transformation in his appearance from the bright garb of a royal chancellor to the more appropriate ‘habit of a regular canon’.10 But the monks of Christ Church, over whom Becket had become abbot by virtue of his archiepiscopal office, were not pleased by this change of wardrobe, murmuring that it was ‘contrary to custom for him to be frequenting the choir in secular vestment’.11 Grim says that the monks complained, ‘“Woe be to this chancellor […] lest he without delay exchange his habits; for if he disdains to do so, then he will know misfortune all the days of his life.”’12 Grim reports that Becket was greatly saddened when news of the monks’ wrath reached him and was deeply troubled by how to respond in a suitable manner; indeed, Grim ascribes to the archbishop a long self-meditation, in which he wracks his soul for a solution.13 Ultimately, by ‘the inspiration of divine grace’, Becket resolved 7 MTB, 1:133-34. 8 MTB, 4:176-77. One assassin (probably William de Tracy) claimed incorrectly that he ‘had cut off John of Salisbury’s right arm’, a bit of hearsay mentioned by Guernes, La Vie, line 5600. 9 MTB, 7:436-37. 10 MTB, 2:368. 11 MTB, 2:368. 12 MTB, 2:368 (emphasis added). This passage requires a few further observations. First, one might posit a possibly deliberate ambiguity in the use of the term ‘habits’, noting that it is plural. ‘Habits’ might refer equally to Becket’s ‘clothing’ and to his ‘customary behavior’, both of which were likely offensive to the monks. Also, the monks call Becket ‘chancellor’. Was he in fact still chancellor, or had he already resigned that post? There seems to be some lack of clarity about precisely when Becket renounced his position as chancellor; see Duggan, Becket, 21-32. It may be that the monks’ reference to Becket’s secular office title reinforces their displeasure with his ‘habits’ (i.e., conduct), in addition to his dress. 13 MTB, 2:369-370.

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to wear monastic garb beneath his canonical vestments and, moreover, ‘he exchanged his soft clothes for a rough hair-shirt’.14 Thus, on Grim’s account, the impetus for Becket’s alteration in dress, and for his newly found sanctity more generally, was initially external to him – the result of his having been remonstrated by the Canterbury monks, rather than of a purely inner change of heart. Grim implies, however, that Becket never revealed this change of dress to those who had bemoaned the unsuitability of his clothing, as can be seen from the utter indifference (and, at times, outright hostility) that members of the monastic community evinced toward their abbott and archbishop, even immediately after his assassination; perhaps he was not seen to have changed his behavior either. The monks’ initial attitude seems well-reflected in a statement that Grim ascribes to one of their number – namely, that Becket ‘ought not to be regarded as a martyr, having been slain as the reward for his own obstinacy’.15 Such an opinion seems to have been entirely erased, on Grim’s recounting, by the post-martyrdom discovery of the sartorial signs of Becket’s holiness. Grim explicitly reports that the Canterbury monks, in preparing the archbishop’s body for burial, found ‘under his habit of the canon regular, the habit and order (ordine) of a monk’, which ‘had remained unknown to his familiars’.16 More shocking still, upon removing this monastic garb from Becket’s body, the monks encountered, next to his flesh, ‘a hairshirt covered in little creatures (bestiunculus)’ and then, ‘what we have never known among previous holy men, hair breeches’. Furthermore, Grim reports, ‘Under the seams of the hair garments, little vermin [were] gushing up.’17 At the sight of Becket’s layers of garments and evident self-mortification, the monks were moved to proclaim: ‘Behold, behold, […] here is a true monk, and we did not know it!’18 With groans, sighs, and tears, the Canterbury monks acknowledged that the archbishop had truly lived a ‘holy life’ and had submitted himself to ‘penitence of unusual rigor’, which no one ‘except for a small number of his familiars’ had known.19 What is unclear is whether the revelation of Becket’s monastic habit was sufficient to engender this declaration of his holiness, or whether the monks were reacting more to the vermin-infested hair garments. In any case, Grim reports that no one thereafter dared to doubt that Becket in life, as well as in death, deserved 14 15 16 17 18 19

MTB, 2:370. MTB, 2:439. MTB, 2:442. MTB, 2:442. MTB, 2:442. MTB, 2:442.

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to be acclaimed a martyr and a saint.20 On Grim’s account, Becket had already performed his first miracle by changing so dramatically the hearts and minds of members of Canterbury’s monastic community, who not only had disapproved of their abbot’s apparel at the assumption of his office, but who had been among his fiercest opponents during the course of his struggles with Henry II and attendant long exile.

John of Salisbury and the Political Account

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The arc of John of Salisbury’s career in many ways closely parallels and reflects that of Becket.21 Much of John’s correspondence and other literary output, not to mention his ecclesio-political engagement, was intimately tied to the twists and turns of Becket’s reputation, both before and after the martyrdom. For immediate purposes, consideration must be directed to John’s Letter 305, which is often – incorrectly – deemed to be the first written report of the events of 29 December 1170, and to John’s slightly later Life of Becket, which concludes with an edited version of the original missive.22 Letter 305, although in our view not the earliest account of Becket’s martyrdom, relates, in language similar to Grim’s, the shocking discovery of the future saint’s garb on the day of his death. In the midst of the preparation of Becket’s body for burial, John says, it was found (what very few even of his household had known) that it was wrapped in a hair-shirt (cilicio) crawling with lice and worms, and furthermore (what was entirely unknown among our people before), his underclothes, right down to his knees, were made of hair-cloth. He wore his outer garments according to the fashion, following the wise man’s injunction: ‘Let your exterior conform, while all within is at variance with the populace.’ [Seneca, Letters 5] Who can tell the groans, the floods of tears of the gathering of the holy men (sanctorum) present when piety so kept in the shadow was made known?23 20 This conclusion about Becket’s life comports with the widely held belief that a true saint lives a life of ‘white’ martyrdom, regardless of any demise in ‘red’ martyrdom. See O’Reilly, ‘Double Martyrdom’. 21 The nature of the relationship between the two men is addressed in detail by Bollermann and Nederman, ‘John and Becket’. 22 For a thorough discussion of the dating of Letter 305, the Life of Becket, and John’s use of the former in the latter, see Bollermann and Nederman, ‘John and Becket’, 81-85. 23 John, Letters, 734-35 (emphasis added). The italicized portions are those that strongly echo the relevant section of Grim’s text.

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While we know that John was not physically present as a witness to the murder, he apparently came out of hiding soon after the act.24 While he may have been describing what he himself saw or at least heard from those present at the disrobing, the many narrative echoes to Grim’s account suggest that it was the source for this portion of John’s missive. Broadly speaking, John’s recitation comports closely with Grim’s, especially in the following respects: that Becket wore two hair garments (a hair shirt and hair breeches), that it was not widely known that the archbishop wore such garments, that the hair breeches were an extreme oddity, and that those who made this discovery were overcome with emotion. On the other hand, unlike Grim, John does not precisely identify who was involved in preparing Becket’s body for burial, referring only to ‘holy men’. Additionally, John informs us that Becket’s external garb was entirely conventional and à la mode. This leads John to attach somewhat greater significance than does Grim to the discovery of the underwear, signaled by his inclusion of the quotation from Seneca: Becket appeared ‘normal’ in dress to those who observed him, while underneath he engaged in an ongoing act of ‘pious’ self-mortification, marked by the hair garments and their vermin-ridden condition.25 John returns to this topic in his Life of Becket, commonly dated to 11711172; the evidence, however, supports a dating of late 1172-early 1173.26 The Life’s discussion of the archbishop’s manner of dress repeats and extends, but also reconfigures and prunes, the account found in Letter 305, all the while playing with the tension between the realms of external appearance and inner reality as represented by Becket’s clothes. For John, the garb Becket selected was a reflection of a fundamental transformation of spiritual outlook occasioned by his consecration as archbishop. Drawing on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, John says that Becket ‘immediately “put off the old man” and put on the hair-shirt and the monk, crucifying his flesh along with his vices and concupiscences’.27 In John’s view, Becket’s move from royal chancellor to English primate was a profoundly conversional experience, an opportunity for him to renounce his decadent past and to 24 See Bollermann and Nederman, ‘A Special Collection’, 65-70. 25 This focus on the disjunction between Becket’s outer and inner lives reflects a decades-long theme in John’s work. See Nederman and Bollermann, ‘“The Extravagance of the Senses.”’ 26 For this dating, see Bollermann and Nederman, ‘John and Becket’, 85. Duggan, ‘Becket is Dead!’, 27 finds our dating ‘not convincing’ without offering a shred of contrary evidence or argumentation. 27 John, Life of Becket, 79. But see Bollermann and Nederman, ‘John and Becket’, 92-93 concerning John’s rhetorical agenda in the Life, including this statement as proleptic.

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dedicate himself wholly to the service of the church, as reflected in his new wardrobe. Yet, according to John, Becket did not wish to flaunt his nascent spiritual commitment, and so, ‘lest vainglory diminish his merits, he carefully concealed the soldier of Christ under the beauty of his vesture, so that his appearance might be agreeable to the people, according to the edict of a wise man [Seneca again], although inwardly almost everything would be different’.28 John sustains this focus on the inner/outer dichotomy throughout the Life: ‘Wearing lavish garments, he was a pauper in spirit’;29 Becket was ‘the one who had for a long time shown himself to be a living victim, holy and pleasing to God; who had crucified his flesh, along with its vices and desires, in […] the use of a rough hair shirt’.30 (Interestingly, John never returns to the hidden monastic habit he reported Becket to have donned.) These passages (obviously proleptic, since John himself had no knowledge, at the time, of Becket’s transformation) in turn frame the exposition, at the end of the Life, of the ‘discovery’ of Becket’s undergarments while his body was being prepared for burial. This material is lifted, with minimal editing, directly from Letter 305, with the exception of the excision of the last sentence quoted above concerning the ‘groans’ and ‘tears’ of ‘the holy men’ who observed his vermin-infested hair garments.31 We ought to dismiss Frank Barlow’s protestation that John – whom he otherwise regards as ‘an excellent witness’32 – ‘must be rejected’ for ‘a projection back […] of the interpretation of the garments [Becket] was supposed to have worn on the day of his martyrdom’.33 Barlow is surely right that John indulged in a ‘rhetorical claim’,34 but that is precisely the point.

Fashion Forward: The Clothes Make the Martyr A cursory comparison of Edward Grim’s and John of Salisbury’s respective reports of Thomas Becket’s manner of dress points to a few common features: the archbishop adopted a monastic habit and hair clothing at some point soon after his consecration; Becket’s donning of hair garments was a closely 28 John, Life of Becket, 79. 29 John, Life of Becket, 80. 30 John, Life of Becket, 91. 31 John, Life of Becket, 94. 32 Barlow, Becket, 65. 33 Barlow, Becket, 75 (emphasis added). 34 Barlow, Becket, 75.

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guarded secret during his lifetime; the use of hair breeches was remarkably unusual, even unheard of; the under-apparel was ridden with vermin; and, those who made this shocking discovery were overcome with emotion. Beyond these broad similarities, the authors’ accounts share little. Grim’s narrative foregrounds an external cause for Becket’s wardrobe decisions – the protests of the Canterbury monks – leading to the archbishop’s reevaluation of his lifestyle. Thus, the monastic habit and the hair garments are set more on an equal footing by Grim. It is the post-mortem revelation of both sets of clothes beneath Becket’s outerwear that leads Canterbury’s cloistered to proclaim him to have been ‘a true monk’. By contrast, John’s version emphasizes how Becket effected his change of garb as one token, among many, of an immediate and profound inner transformation that accompanied his elevation to Canterbury. Becket’s adoption of the monk’s habit is mentioned only once, in passing – an intimation of its relative unimportance in John’s mind. Rather, it is the presence of the hair garments that stand out for John, as evidenced by their public discovery just prior to the martyr’s burial. Additionally, Grim is clearly concerned to identify the monks as the discoverers of the archbishop’s sartorial secrets, since this completes a narrative arc that commenced with the reasons for Becket’s initial determination to clothe himself in this fashion. John is less specific about the identity of those who prepared Becket’s body. Nor do the divergences between Grim and John on these points reflect trivial quibbles. In our view, they are indices of each author’s unique rhetorical context, reflecting not only the author’s intended audience and agenda for writing, but also revealing each text’s likeliest date of composition. Grim’s intended audience for and purposes in composing his Life seem to be somewhat parochial or, at any rate, local. As Grim himself acknowledges, the Canterbury monks had been downright hostile to Becket prior to his martyrdom. And, once reports of miracles associated with the archbishop began to emerge, the monks expressed suspicion about their veracity and evinced a strong desire to suppress word of them.35 The monks perhaps held the not unreasonable fear that Canterbury would draw the further wrath of King Henry, or at least of those of his household who were involved in the assassination or were otherwise hostile to the See and its now-deceased incumbent.36 While it is uncertain whether Grim himself stayed on at Canterbury following the martyrdom (though, in light of the serious wound 35 See Koopmans, Wonderful, 139-80. 36 Barlow, Becket, 249-50 notes the threats to Canterbury in the period immediately after the martyrdom. See also Benedict of Peterborough’s Life, MBT, 2:15-16.

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he had sustained during the attack, he likely remained there recovering for some period of time), the church of Saltwood, whose rectorship he had lost, was in the region, and so he had strong local connections. In view of these factors, it seems plausible to us that, among Grim’s aims in composing his Life of Becket, was the desire to solidify the loyalty of the Canterbury community, and especially its monks, to the cause of the martyr. How better to accomplish this than to stress the role played by the monks themselves in encouraging the newly consecrated archbishop to redirect his way of life, symbolized by his dress, along a more saintly path? Moreover, Grim’s detailed narration of the post-mortem discovery of, first, Becket’s monastic garb and, then, his vermin-infested hair garments, seems clearly designed to remind the Canterbury monks that they had, in the shock of the moment, embraced the dead archbishop as truly one of their own. The force of such rhetorical flourishes suggests to us that Grim intended to reinforce to those closely connected to the events surrounding Becket’s murder their particular responsibility for upholding and embellishing the sanctity of the martyr, rather than bowing before whatever political pressure might be exercised upon them to quiet and damp down fervor for his holiness. This narrow intended audience and specific rhetorical agenda could only make sense if Grim composed his Life in the first half of 1171. By mid-1171, Benedict of Peterborough had begun compiling, under the official auspices of the Canterbury community, his (eventually vast) collection of Becket miracles. The monks had, by this point, not only accepted Becket as their martyr, but were already actively promoting his cult and ‘distributing’ his relics.37 Thus, the only time when Grim would have written a Life whose principal aim was to rally Canterbury around the figure of their fallen leader is between early- to mid-1171. John’s Letter 305, which we maintain dates to late 1171-early 1172, and his later Life of Becket, into which his letter was incorporated and which we date to late 1172-early 1173, reveal a quite different intended audience and agenda than those of Grim’s Life. Letter 305 was addressed to John’s old friend John of Canterbury, bishop of Poitiers; it was recopied and distributed throughout Europe. Likewise, his Life of Becket, ultimately used as an introduction to Alan of Tewksbury’s collection of correspondence related to the archbishop’s conflict with Henry II, seems to have circulated both widely and independently.38 We propose that the way in which John deploys the story of Becket’s dress suggests something of the purpose behind his 37 On the monks’ initial ambivalence, see Koopmans, Wonderful, 141-42. Guy, Becket, 331-32, refers to the eventual roaring Becket trade at Canterbury as a ‘cash cow’. 38 See note 21 above.

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Letter and Life: to establish the archbishop’s sanctity, and hence worthiness for sainthood, to those on the Continent who could influence the process.39 It is worth keeping in mind that the canonization of a prospective saint depended on the presence, in some measure, of three elements: proof of a righteous life, evidence of a pious death, and confirmed miracles associated with the holy person. By late 1171 or early 1172, when John wrote Letter 305, miracles attributable to Becket were beginning to be reported in great numbers at Canterbury, all across England, and even in Plantagenet territories on the Continent; moreover, the manner of the archbishop’s violent death had also become widely known.40 What perhaps remained in some doubt was Becket’s reputation both before and after his consecration as Canterbury’s archbishop. By focusing, in Letter 305, on the self-mortification signified by the hair garments discovered after death, and by specifying, in the Life, how Becket chose to wear this garb in secret immediately after he became archbishop as an expression of his inner transformation, John lent support to the case for the righteous life expected of a true saint.41 John leaves aside the monastic context highlighted by Grim because it is wholly extraneous to – indeed, might distract from – his overarching project of convincing his fellow churchmen on the Continent to lend the weight of their offices in support of Becket’s canonization (an event that ultimately occurred in February 1173). In sum, then, whereas Edward Grim’s (early) Life may be read as an effort to stitch together a unitary vision of the martyr around which support for his sanctity could be rallied on the home front, John of Salisbury’s (later, perhaps derivative) writings were tailored to promoting Becket’s cause on the larger stage of Latin Christendom. Our rhetorical interpretation of their respective works comports well with the quite different ways in which Grim and John, separately, aired – at what time, to which audience, and for what purpose – Becket’s dirty laundry.

The ‘Best’ Dressed Martyr of Christendom The specific rhetorical contexts that we have identified behind Grim’s and John’s discussions of Becket’s secret dress proved to be ephemeral. Once the Canterbury community had become firmly supportive of their late archbishop’s sanctity and Becket had achieved canonization – the 39 Bollermann and Nederman, ‘John and Becket’, 83-85. 40 A fact John himself mentions in Letter 305; Letters, 726-27. 41 As addressed by O’Reilly, ‘Double Martyrdom’.

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former of which was evident by mid-1171, and the latter of which occurred in early 1173 – the immediate significance of how Grim and John had each represented his clothing faded away. Yet, the stories of Becket’s hair garments and their discovery persisted – indeed, were greatly embellished – in accounts by later authors. These tales passed from rhetorical tropes designed to further specific agendas into the stuff of popular legend that grew in the recounting. Perhaps not surprisingly, the preponderance of biographers followed Grim’s more robust – and also, as demonstrated above, first – version over John’s rather minimalistic (later, perhaps even derivative) account of Becket’s garb. Of the roughly contemporaneous (though clearly later) vitae we have surveyed, the most elaborate reports of Becket’s archiepiscopal sartorial style – those by William FitzStephen, Anonymous I (sometimes identified as Roger of Pontigny), and Herbert of Bosham – follow closely in Grim’s footsteps. 42 By contrast, Benedict of Peterborough, the fragmentary Anonymous III (Lansdowne), William of Canterbury, and Anonymous IV adhere to John’s muted narration. 43 The extent to which the story of Becket’s layers of clothing moves beyond a narrowly rhetorical context and into the popular imagination may be gauged from Le Vie de saint Thomas Becket by Guernes of Pont-Sainte-Maxence. Writing in French verse, rather than Latin prose, Guernes’ audience is evidently non-clerical. Guernes makes no claim to have been an eyewitness to the events of 29 December 1170. Instead, he explicitly states in his prologue that the work was the product of four years research and composition, including a trip to Canterbury to interview Becket’s friends and associates.44 In contrast with every other account of Becket’s apparel, whether an adaptation of Grim’s or of John’s version, Guernes presents a ‘minutely described’45 – some might say, voyeuristic – appraisal of the archbishop’s clothing that suggests the appeal of a somewhat more lurid recounting of the archbishop’s life (and especially death) to a secular public. Guernes recounts that, upon Becket’s ascension to Canterbury, the monks ‘often grumbled about the way he came into the choir with his tunic trailing down to his feet’.46 Soon, it was reported to the archbishop with rebuke that God ‘had appeared to a certain monk as he slept and said, “Go immediately to the chancellor [NB] and tell him that I order him to start wearing a monk’s habit and let him do this without delay. 42 MTB, 3:27, 147-49; MTB, 4:19-20, 78; MTB, 3:193-97, 521-22. 43 MTB, 2:17; MTB, 4:154; MTB, 1:10; MTB, 4:188. 44 Guernes, La Vie, lines 147-48. 45 Abbott, Becket, 2: 243. 46 Guernes, La Vie, lines 536-37.

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Should he fail to do so, I will always stand in the way of whatever he does, and for the rest of his days he will suffer the consequences.”’47 Thereafter, Guernes describes a three-way tussle between the monks, who said that ‘since he was their master and their father […] he should dress and act accordingly’;48 the canons regular, who claimed that monastic garb ‘is not suitable for any prelate’;49 and the clerks, who asserted that a man in his condition ought to ‘dress as clerks do’.50 Guernes informs us that, after consultation with a trusted cleric, Becket resolved to clad himself in the clothes of a canon regular, atop a monastic costume, atop his hair garments – a sartorial combination that Guernes explicates and justifies at great length.51 Guernes returns to the hair shirt and hair breeches, describing the extent of their coverage over Becket’s body in considerable detail:

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he lay down to sleep on the bare ground in the same clothes as he had worn during the day, for his habit was not to change them. No one, high or low, realized quite what sort of life he led. He wore rough goat-hair underwear [i.e., breeches] that was coarse and itched, and the rest of his body, including his arms below the elbows, his stomach and his back, was completely covered in a hair shirt. Patches of this were crawling with masses of lice and fleas which never gave his flesh a moment’s respite.52

Guernes furthermore explained how Becket bathed and changed these garments every 40 days,53 swapping them for a different set while his servant laundered them. Indeed, according to Guernes, only Becket’s servant and his confessor, Robert of Merton, were privy to the knowledge of the composition of the archbishop’s multilayered undergarments.54 Finally, Guernes treats us to a lavish description of the monks’ disrobing of the martyr, during which they discover the full manner of his dress; this includes not only the alreadydiscussed canon’s garb, monastic habit, and hair garments, but also several 47 Guernes, La Vie, lines 541-45. 48 Guernes, La Vie, lines 561-63. 49 Guernes, La Vie, line 569. 50 Guernes, La Vie, line 573. 51 Guernes, La Vie, lines 576-90. 52 Guernes, La Vie, lines 3932-40. 53 Guernes, La Vie, lines 3971-75. This must surely be tropological, referring both to the Old Testament story of the forty days in which the Hebrews wandered toward the Promised Land and to the New Testament account (on which the season of Lent is based) of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Both are periods of testing. Guernes’s report of Becket’s forty days of wearing hair garments thus suggests a biblically inspired period of suffering. 54 Guernes, La Vie, lines 3946-50.

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additional layers of clothing that are nowhere else reported.55 Guernes’ account, totaling over 30 lines of verse, provides elaborate information about the color and design of all these items, as well as a thorough recounting of the vermin and how they impacted Becket’s flesh, before drawing to a close with the inescapable conclusion that ‘the martyrdom he suffered when he was alive was much more painful than when he was killed in the church’.56 Such hyperbole surely indicates the measure of Guernes’ effort to emphasize to a lay audience the tortures that Becket imposed upon himself. By the time Guernes’ La Vie de saint Thomas was completed, the story of Becket’s martyrdom and the miracles that the dead archbishop and his relics had accomplished was known far and wide, not merely in England but on the continent, too.57 Doubtless, the archbishop’s ‘dirty laundry’ had emerged in popular awareness as a substantial and important token of his sanctity. Other biographers may have attended to Becket’s vermin-infested hair garments with less relish and more circumspection than Guernes, but it is evident that the nature and condition of the martyr’s secret clothes had gone a very long way toward confirming his saintly status in the minds of many of his admirers. The evidence of Becket’s sartorial self-flagellation offered a useful solution to the problem, previously mentioned, of his ‘white’ as well as ‘red’ claim on canonization. What had perhaps commenced as one sign, among a large number, favoring Becket’s worthiness for sainthood ultimately became a defining feature of his life and death, to the extent that the hair shirt has been, for many centuries, an iconic element in the popular narrative of his sanctity.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Duggan, Anne, ed. The Correspondence of Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, 1162-1170. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence. La Vie de saint Thomas Becket (A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse). Edited and translated by Ian Short. Mediaeval Sources in Translation 56. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2013. 55 Guernes, La Vie, lines 5777-810. 56 Guernes, La Vie, lines 5811-12. 57 The extent of the rapid spread of miracles ascribed to Becket is well documented by the studies contained in Foreville, Thomas Becket.

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John of Salisbury. Anselm & Becket: Two Canterbury Saints’ Lives. Translated by Ronald Pepin. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2009. —. Letters. Vol. 2, The Later Letters (1163-1180). Edited by W.J. Millor, S.J. Brooke and C.N.L. Brooke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Robertson, J.C., with J.B. Sheppard, eds. Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 7 vols. London: Longman & Co., 1875-1885.

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Secondary Sources Abbott, Edwin A. St. Thomas of Canterbury. 2 vols. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1898. Barlow, Frank. Thomas Becket. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986. Bollermann, Karen, and Cary J. Nederman. ‘John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket’. In A Companion to John of Salisbury, edited by Christophe Grellard and Frédérique Lachaud, 63-104. Leiden: Brill, 2015. —. ‘A Special Collection: John of Salisbury’s Relics of St. Thomas Becket and Other Holy Martyrs’. Mediaevistik: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Medieval Research 26 (2013): 163-81. Duggan, Anne. ‘Becket is Dead! Long Live St. Thomas’. In The Cult of St. Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World c.1170-c.1220, edited by Paul Webster and MariePierre Gelin, 25-51. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2016. —. Thomas Becket. London: Arnold, 2004. Foreville, Raymonde. Thomas Becket dans la tradition historique et hagiographique. London: Variorum, 1981. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Guy, John. Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel. New York: Random House, 2012. Koopmans, Rachel. Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Nederman, Cary J., and Karen Bollermann. ‘“The Extravagance of the Senses”: Epicureanism, Priestly Tyranny, and the Becket Problem in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus’. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, 8 (2011): 1-25. O’Reilly, Jennifer. ‘The Double Martyrdom of Thomas Becket’. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1985): 185-247. Staunton, Michael. Thomas Becket and his Biographers. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2006.

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About the Authors Karen Bollermann is an independent scholar who specializes in Old English literature and the culture of the early Middle Ages. With Cary J. Nedermann, another contributor to this volume, her most recent book is Thomas Becket: An Intimate Portrait (2020).

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Cary J. Nederman is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University. He is a scholar of political theory in the Middle Ages in Europe, having published widely on myriad topics in political thought in the west.

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7

Significatio and Senefiance, or Relics in Thomas Aquinas and Jean de Meun Earl Jeffrey Richards

Abstract This chapter asks whether Jean de Meun’s references in the Roman de la Rose to relics as a euphemism for genitals actually allude to a much larger debate in Paris between 1250 and 1280 about significatio in general, and about the religious and political significance of relics in particular, a debate in which Thomas Aquinas played an important role. Scholars have noted the influence of Ovid and Alain de Lille upon the Roman de la Rose, but have not tended to consider Jean de Meun’s scholastic sources, particularly his deployment of the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Keywords: Thomas Aquinas, Jean de Meun, Relics, Roman de la Rose, Significatio

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Constant Mews’ research on relics1 and on Abelard and Heloise2 intersect in the second part of the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun. Mews discusses specifically how Jean de Meun refers to an exchange of letters between the famed lovers where Heloise, in declaring her love for Abelard, affirms that she would rather be his whore (meretrix) than the empress of Augustus (imperatrix).3 Jean’s allusion to this passage later assumed particular 1 Constant Mews, ‘The Historia translationis sacri corporis Thome Aquinatis of Raymundus Hugonis, 257-284. 2 Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 28, 35, 42, 81, 96: and his study Abelard and Heloise, 152 3 Joseph T. Muckle, ‘The Personal Letters between Abélard and Héloïse, 47-94; also in Lettres d’Abélard et Héloïse, ed. Eric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau (Paris, Livre de poche, 2007), 144: ‘Carius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix’ (‘it would seem to me more valuable and more worthy to be called your whore than his [the Emperor Augustus’] empress’).

Monagle, Clare (ed.), The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789462985933_ch07

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148 Earl Jeffrey Richards

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prominence during the late fourteenth-century quarrel over the Roman de la Rose. 4 It is, however, first useful to turn the clock back a century from the translation of Thomas’ relics in France in 1368-1369 to the 1270s, when Jean de Meun appears to have written his continuation of the Roman de la Rose, to a time and place when both Thomas and Jean took up the question of relics themselves, admittedly from very different perspectives. The intersection between Mews’ work on relics and on the fortune of Heloise’s and Abelard’s correspondence (which Jean de Meun also translated5) leads to the underlying question of this chapter in Mews’ honor: did Jean de Meun’s references in the Rose to relics as a euphemism for genitals actually allude to a much larger debate in Paris between 1250 and 1280 about significatio in general, and about the religious and political significance of relics in particular, a debate in which Thomas Aquinas played an important role? After all, the opening of Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the Rose proclaims that dreams contain significance (v. 16, ‘songes est senfiance,’ which also can mean ‘a dream is a sign’), and Jean de Meun spends thousands of lines repeatedly promising, but never delivering, the glose of this dream.6 4 Guillaume de Lorris/Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, v. 9159-60: ‘Toutes estes, serez ou fustes, / De fait ou de voulentez putes’ (‘In deed or in intent all of you [women] are, will be or have always been whores’). 5 La vie et les epistres Pierres Abaelart et Heloys sa fame, traduction du XIIIe siècle attribuée à Jean de Meun avec une nouvelle édition des textes latins d’après le ms. Troyes Bibl. mun. 802, ed. Eric Hicks (Geneva: Slatkine / Paris: Champion, 1991); and Li abregemenz noble honme Vegesce Flave René des establissemenz apartenanz a chevalerie, traduction par Jean de Meun de Flavii Vegeti Renati Viri Illustris Epitoma Institutorum Rei Militaris, ed. Leena Löfstedt (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia [Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia / Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae], 1977). During the quarrel over the Rose, Christine remarked writing to Pierre Col, Le débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 146: ‘Tu ressambles Helouye du Paraclit qui dist que mieux ameroit ester meretrix appellee de maistre Pierre Abalart que estre royne couronnee’ (‘You resemble Heloise of the Paraclite who said she would prefer to be called the whore of master Peter Abelard than to be crowned queen’). 6 For the importance of senefiance in the Roman de Rose, see: Daniel Poirion, ‘De la signification selon Jean de Meun’, in: Archéologie du signe, ed. Lucie Brind’Amour and Eugene Vance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 165-185; and Armand Strubel, ‘Écriture du songe et mise en œuvre de la ‘senefiance’ dans le Roman de la Rose de Guillaume de Lorris’, Études sur Le Roman de la Rose de Guillaume de Lorris, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Champion, 1984), 145-179. For the scholastic discussion contemporary to Jean de Meun, see: Elizabeth J. Ashwort, ‘Signification and Modes of Signifying in Thirteenth-Century Logic: A Preface to Aquinas on Analogy’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 1 (1991): 39-67; and Claude Panaccio, ‘From Mental Word to Mental Language’, Philosophical Topics 20:2 (1992): 125-47, who observes that Duns Scotus († 1308) referred to a magna altercatio among contemporaries on the issue of significatio (cf. John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio 1.27.1-3 n.83, in Opera omnia 6, ed. Commissio Scotistica [Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis, 1963], v. 6, p. 97).

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At the same time, Mews’ analysis of Jean de Meun’s allusion to Heloise as meretrix resurrects the larger question of the French poet’s use of Latin sources, a topic previously noted by earlier scholars.7 Although Jean’s Latin culture was profound (after all, he also translated Vegetius and Boethius8), the question of Latin sources for the Rose has historically turned largely on the distinction drawn between Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the poem as a largely Ovidian-inspired treatise on the art of love and Jean de Meun’s portion as a series of extended and digressive speeches on a vast range of topics, indebted mostly to Alain de Lille. Langlois makes only vague connections to scholastic philosophy, and, it must be noted, he devotes roughly the same space to Guillaume’s 4000 lines of the poem as he does to Jean’s 20,000. At the very least, research on the Latin sources of Jean’s portion remains incomplete, despite the extensive notes in Félix Lecoy’s edition of the Rose – although, happily, Jonathan Morton has recently revived the discussion of Latin philosophical sources for the Rose.9 To the best of my knowledge, in the search for philosophical sources, theological sources have largely been overlooked (even by Robertsonian critics) so that no one has hitherto attempted to connect these two thirteenth-century contemporaries.10 Although Jean de Meun’s sympathies for Guillaume de St.-Amour and his struggles in the Faculty of Arts at the Sorbonne have been well studied (research motivated by a certain anticlerical tendency among French medievalists), it would seem that Aquinas’s discussion of relics provides an interesting and unsuspected connection between the two authors, which turns out to be highly probable in light of Jean de Meun’s possible links to Thomist thought and the theological faculty at the Sorbonne (Jean’s house supposedly was located close to the entrance to the Grand Couvent Saint-Jacques; legend has it that he would wave to the Dominican monks entering the convent where Thomas Aquinas held his lectures). At the same time, there seems to be an unsuspected connection between Jean de Meun and the discussion of the term vit (‘cock’, from the Latin term vectis, ‘crowbar’) in medical circles of contemporary Paris. 7 Langlois, Origines et sources du Roman de la Rose. 8 Dedeck-Héry, “Boethius’ De Consolatione, 165-275. 9 Morton, The Roman de la rose in Its Philosophical Context. 10 I have examined this question in my essay ‘Les contraires choses: Irony in Jean de Meun’s Part of the Roman de la Rose and the Problem of Truth and Intelligibility in Thomas Aquinas’, in: Nouvelles de la Rose, Actualité et perspectives du Roman de la Rose, ed. Dulce Mª González Doreste and Maria del Pilar Mendoza-Ramos (La Laguna: Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de La Laguna, 2011), 375-390.

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Given the political meaning assigned to Aquinas’s own relics a century after his death, it is perhaps ironic that the Angelic Doctor in life was himself more concerned with what might be termed the semiotic importance of relics: their ability, through their sanctity, to ‘conf igure to the body of Christ’. The distinction here between the political and the semiotic goes back to the difference between how meaning is projected onto an object and how an object itself may create meaning independent of changing political contexts, whether objects possess innate or ‘essential’ significance, a kind of natural inferentiality.11 Roughly contemporary to the remarks on honoring relics in the Summa theologiae (III, q. 25: ‘Sexto, de adoratione reliquiarum sanctorum’), in a famous passage in the Roman de la Rose about the referentiality of words, Jean de Meun has his allegorical figure Raison claim that she could just as soon refer to testicles (‘coilles’) as relics, a particularly colorful way of illustrating significatio ad placitum, roughly ‘meaning subject to what pleases [the outside observer]’. Is there an underlying connection between Aquinas’s arguments on holiness of saints’ relics configuring to the body of Christ and Jean de Meun’s claiming an interchangeability between relics and testicles? A close inspection of the sources and their immediate contexts shows that there is at the very least a thematic connection, hitherto unsuspected, largely because no one has seen a connection between Aquinas and Jean de Meun.

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Thomas Aquinas: Configuring a Saint’s Relics to the Body of Christ At the outset, Aquinas’s reflections on relics need to be seen in the context of the semiotics of medieval reliquaries: the utter magnificence of reliquaries, which nevertheless usually show the saint’s bones through a small rock-crystal window, juxtaposes the magnificence of the saint’s heavenly body with the paltry remains of the earthly body. This semiotic structure is a far-cry from the grisly arrangement of martyrs’ bones from 1643 in 11 The interpretation here differs somewhat from that proposed by Marmo, ‘Bacon, Aristotle (and all the others) on Natural Inferential Signs’. Marmo argues that Bacon emphasized that a sign is only potential when it is not interpreted by an intelligence. See also Marmo’s careful study, ‘De virtute sermonis/verborum’, where he points out that Bacon distinguished between the intention of the text (intentio operis), the intention of the author (intentio auctoris, a concept coined by Aquinas), and the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris). While these distinctions apply to texts, they do not apply to the referentiality of relics, which do not fall under Bacon’s standard distinction between natural signs and arbitrary and conventional signs.

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the famous Goldene Kammer at the church of Saint Ursula in Cologne. Aquinas will come to argue that reliquaries, as sacred vessels, merit the kind of adoration assigned to the sacraments. In one sense, both are a visible sign of invisible grace. It might be recalled that the standard definition of a sacrament was sacramentum est invisibilis gratiae visibilis forma, a definition which Thomas modified in the prologue to In IV Sententiarum to ‘sacramentum enim proprie dicitur, quod ita signum est gratiae Dei, et invisibilis gratiae forma’ (‘for a sacrament can properly be said that in this manner it is a sign of the grace of God, and a form of invisible grace’).12 This 12 An inspection of the attestations given in the Brepols Library of Latin texts reveals that this terse formula is first recorded in the Rescriptum contra Lanfrancum (also called De sacra coena), written c. 1050 by Berengar of Tours. During a dispute on transubstantiation on whether Christ’s celestial body was identical to his terrestrial body present in the Eucharist, Berengar invokes Augustine in Contra Faustum (c. 400): ‘est enim sacramentum prescribente beato Augustino invisibilis gratiae visibilis forma, et contra F[austum]: non sunt aliud quaeque corporalia sacramenta nisi quedam quasi verba visibilia, sacrosancta quidem sed tamen mutabilia et temporalia’ (‘for the sacrament, as Saint Augustine taught in his reply to Faustus, is the visible form of an invisible grace: ‘for every bodily sacrament is nothing but a kind of visible speech, most sacred to be sure, but changeable and transitory all the same’). Berengar cites verbatim Augustine in Contra Faustum, Book 19, p. 513. For the consequences of the Berengarian controversy, see: King, ‘The Origin and Evolution of A Sacramental Formula, 21-82. Thomas comments extensively on the connection between sacramentum and res, and he seems to be responsible (and not Augustine) for the formula Sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum (‘there is the sacrament as such, the material object and the sacrament, and the material object as such,’ that is, there is a triple distinction between the grace of the sacrament as such, then the union of the material object and the sacrament, and the material object as such, separate from the sacrament), a formula based on a passage In IV Sententiarum, dist. 9, qu. 1: ‘in hoc sacramento sunt tria; scilicet id quod est sacramentum tantum, id quod est res et sacramentum, et id quod est res tantum’). For the Augustinian origins of this scholastic notion of sacrament, see Henri-Marie Féret, ‘SACRAMENTUM RES dans la langue théologique de S. Augustin,’ Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 29:2-4 (1940): 218-243, ‘on ignore plus encore par quel biais le terme de sacramentum, qui primitivement n’était en rien synonyme de signum, en est venu à sa présente signification théologique où prime le symbolisme.’ Féret finally concludes (p. 243) that Augustine in discussing the relationship of res and signa in De doctrina christiana eventually posits the equivalence of sacramentum and signum, but adds that ‘[cette] distinction [n’avait pas] encore le point exact d’application que lui donnera l’avenir’. The Contra Faustum passage invoked by Berengar is cited c. 1150 by Peter Abelard in Sic et non, ed. B. Boyer and R. McKeon (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976-1977), qu. 118, sententia 113, and by Thomas Aquinas in the 1260s in the Summa, II, qu. 60, art. 6. More importantly, a century after Berengar, Gratian’s Decretum repeats (and thus enshrines once and for all in doctrinal terms) the formula: ‘Sacramentum est inuisibilis gratiae uisibilis forma’ (Decretum magistri Gratiani [Concordia discordantium canonum], ed. Emil Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici, 1 (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879), pars 3, De consecratione, dist. 2, canon. 32, p. 1324. From a didactic perspective, it gained above all popularity in the late 13th-century widely read teaching manual, the Rotullus pugillaris by the Dominican Augustinus of Dacia († 1285) – the same manual that popularized the well-known jingle about the fourfold

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combination of forma and signum will also merit further consideration. The question in essence boils down to what relics ‘signify’ and how do they ‘signify’? The crucial subtext here, which has hitherto largely been overlooked in the discussion of medieval semiotics, comes from Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians 3:21, a text frequently quoted in medieval sermons. There Paul, in speaking of Christ’s Transfiguration, says that Christ ‘will re-form the body of our humility, con-figured to the clarity of His body’ (‘qui reformabit corpus humilitatis nostrae, configuratum corpori claritatis suae’). The terms re-form and con-figure suggest that Paul wishes to recast the understanding of forma/ figura within the context of the Transfiguration, into one of re-forming and con-figuring, as though there were a system of sacred semiotics, in which form/figure and meaning were inseparable, opposed to a natural one where meaning was arbitrary and conventional – significatio ad placitum. Thomas followed the Scholastic distinction between signa naturalia et arbitraria, natural and arbitrary signs (groans, or dog’s barking vs. human speech),13 but in speaking of relics, Thomas has left behind the arbitrariness of the sign and is exploring what amounts to an ‘essential referentiality’, the same kind of ‘essential referentiality’ posited by his contemporary Roger Bacon in the opening sentence of his treatise De signis (1367): ‘Signum est in praedicamento relationis et dicitur essentialiter ad illud cui significat’ (‘A sign predicates a relation, or stands in a relation of predication, and is said to be essential to that thing for which it signifies’).14 Striking here is the dative cui in place of the expected accusative, but Bacon then even comments on the dative because at issue is the relation between sign and signified, word and referent: ‘Hoc verbum ‘significo’ essentialius et principaliter respicit illud cui adquiritur aliquid, hoc est rem per dativum significatum, quam per accustativum’ (‘This verb ‘significo’ regards that thing by which something is acquired, more essentially and primarily, that is, [it regards] the thing signified by the dative rather than the accusative’). On first view, this preference for the dative is surprising: the expected accusative used for expressing a direct object would seem to convey better a direct link between sense of Scripture – ‘Sacramentum est sacrae rei signum (…) Sacramentum est invisibilis gratiae visibilis forma eius similitudinem gerens et causa existens’ (‘A sacrament is the sign of a sacred thing […] A sacrament is the visible form of an invisible grace, bearing its similarity and existing for its sake’; Augustini de Dacia O.P. ‘Rotulus pugillaris’, ed. Angelus Walz, Rome, Institutum Angelicum, 1929: 177-178). 13 A clear exposition of Aquinas’ position is found in Park, Die Rezeption der mittelalterlichen Sprachphilosophie in der Theologie des Thomas von Aquin. 14 Pinborg, ‘An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s Opus Maius’, quotation at p. 82.

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sign and signified, but somehow the dative appeals to Bacon more, and this can be explained by the Pauline phrase configuratum corpori. The difference between Bacon and Aquinas would seem to lie in Bacon’s effort to establish an essential referentiality for natural signs and in Aquinas’s locating this same essential referentiality in the realm of the sacred. In assessing the importance of the Pauline text from the Epistle to the Philippians, it is important to understand the importance of the prefix con- attached to the verb figurare: it implies a direct and immediate link between the body of Christ and the bodies of believers. In other words, configurare is far stronger than figurare, and as such goes beyond an argument made by Erich Auerbach in his famous essay on figura which at times suggests an interchangeability between figura and signum (with occasional references to imago as well).15 This interchangeability vanishes with the verb configurare, which appears to have been synonymous with conformare: both verbs suggest the sharing of an innate form or figure (indeed, the fifth-century bishop of Ravenna, Petrus Chrysologus, misquotes Romans 12:2, ‘nolite conformari huic saeculo’ – rendered by the King James Version as ‘be not conformed to this world’ – as ‘nolite configurari huic saeculo’).16 One of the collateral issues here relates to Aquinas’s somewhat contradictory use of imago. He appeals to distinctions in the ‘imaginary’ status of the Cross and the Virgin. In the same passage from Summa III, q. 25 where he first concludes ‘sic veneramur crucem tantum ut imaginem Christi’ (‘and thus we venerate the Cross as such as an image of Christ’), only a few lines later he argues that the veneration of the Virgin was not at the same level of latria because her status as an image of Christ, when considered in its status as a certain object (res quaedam), as the adoration of Christ or of the Cross, is not worthy of veneration. While the Virgin is an imago that refers to its exemplar, Christ (III, q. 25 a. 5 ad 2: ‘Non tamen eo modo quo honor imaginis refertur ad exemplar, quia ipsa imago, prout in se consideratur ut res quaedam, nullo modo est veneranda’, [‘not however in the way in which the honor of the image can be taken back to a copy, since this image, just as it is considered in itself as a certain thing, should in no way be venerated’]), its objective – and referential status – when considered as such does not merit veneration. Aquinas is trying to establish a semiotic hierarchy of referentiality; whether he has succeeded is another question. Jean de Meun seems to think that the Angelic Doctor may have entangled himself in contradiction. 15 Auerbach, ‘Figura’. 16 Chrysologus, Sermonum collectio, ed. A. Olivar, sermo 120, line 11.

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The context given here by the Transfiguration of Christ which functions as the underlying semiotic metaphor finds its way into one of the best-known examples of the ineffability topos, where Dante in Paradiso I.70-71 even seems to be aware of how this kind of transfiguration involves a transcendental process which words cannot grasp, ‘trasumanar significar in verba non si poria’ (‘signifying passing beyond the human cannot be expressed in words’). For Dante, as for Aquinas, there is a clear distinction in the way referentiality works in the realm of the sacred and the natural: the meaning of the sacred, while ineffable, is inseparable from its own holiness. Aquinas will address this distinction when he compares the adoration of the sacrament and the adoration of relics together in the Summa, and in linking both, he is at pains to distinguish how the Eucharist is a sign of the body of Christ, whereas saints’ relics are a configuration of his resurrection. One concrete historical event of mid-thirteenth-century Paris behind Aquinas’s meditation on relics and Jean de Meun’s positing an interchangeability between relics and testicles was the consecration of the Sainte-Chapelle in 1248 to house Louis IX’s collection of relics, including the Crown of Thorns, a church easily seen from the Quartier Latin a stone’s throw away on the other side of the Seine. Little wonder then that Thomas Aquinas commented on the veneration of relics; what is striking is that he comments on relics within the context of the resurrection of the body.17 A second context in Scholastic thought is equally pertinent here, seen in the shift from forma to signum in Thomas’s discussion of the nature of the sacrament within the larger context of the discussion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, namely the question of significatio ad placitum. Aquinas justifies venerating relics because, as the former temple and organs of the Holy Spirit, they ‘should configure to the Body of Christ through its glorious resurrection’ (‘sunt corpori Christi configuranda per gloriam resurrectionis’), and so, by honoring saints’ relics, we honor Christ, and hence do not fall into the error of the pagans.18 The error in question here was the pagan worship 17 The best summary on the question is: Bynum, ‘Material Continuity, Personal Survival, and the Resurrection of the Body’. 18 ‘fuerunt templum spiritus sancti, et organa spiritus sancti in eis habitantis et operantis, et sunt corpori Christi configuranda per gloriam resurrectionis. Unde et ipse Deus huiusmodi reliquias convenienter honorat, in eorum praesentia miracula faciendo […] honorando reliquias sanctorum non incidimus in errorem gentilium, qui cultum latriae mortuis hominibus exhibebant.’ (‘They were the temple of the Holy Spirit and organs of the Holy Spirit residing and working in them, and they should be configured to the body of Christ through his holy resurrection. And thus even God honors relics properly in this way by performing miracles in their presence […] by honoring the relics of the saints we do not fall into the error of the pagans who practiced the cult of worship for dead men.’)

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of the dead (‘qui cultum latriae mortuis hominibus exhibebant’).19 The use of the dative here cannot be understated in light of the prefix con- because it implies a direct, immediate correspondence between relics and their referent, in other words, an essential referentiality. The term configuro and its derivatives hint at a direct connection or sharing between the object and its configurations, a clear semantic intensification of figuro.20 They take on a striking frequency in the thirteenth century: an inspection of the pertinent Latin databanks (Patrologia Latina, Brepols Library of Latin Texts) reveals some 502 occurrences, 43 examples of which are found in Bonaventura and 139 examples of which turn up in Aquinas. The various verbal forms of configuro invariably take the dative (for instance, a search at the Brepols Library of Latin Texts for the phrase configur* corpori turns up 170 examples). In speaking of how relics configure to the resurrection of Christ, Aquinas posits a direct, essential correlation between relics and Christ’s resurrection, whereby nothing arbitrary is found in this correlation. As noted above, Aquinas’s position contrasts with that of Bacon in De sensis (where configur* occurs seven times, in four of which where it is paired with conformat*, reminiscent of how the two terms were synonymous in late and medieval Latin). Bacon does not speak of signa arbitraria, but of different kinds of signa naturalia.21 He articulates one aspect of these natural signs by speaking both of configuration and of conformity, arguing that, besides the sign predicating an essential relation, ‘the second mode of the natural sign is when something is signified, not through a logical inference, but because it shares the form (con-forms to) and figure of (con-figures to) a single thing related to another in its parts and properties’ (‘Secundus modus 19 Latria designates worship or adoration reserved only for the Trinity, whereas dulia (‘service’) is Thomas’s term for the veneration of the saints, and is ranked beneath hyperdulia, the expression for veneration of the Virgin. 20 Even Forcellini struggles to explain the meaning of configurare, all the while missing the reference to the Pauline description of the Transfiguration (Forcellini, Totius Latinitatis Lexicon (TTL) 1:773) ‘Conf igurare est f igurare, conformare, ad similitudinem alterius eff ingere’ (‘To configure is to figure or to conform, to fashion according to the similarity of the other’). For purposes of comparison, see the entry for configuro in TLL, IV, pp. 212-13. See also the important discussion of Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, particularly pp. 100-112, on representation without resemblance in William of Auvergne and form and likeness in Aquinas. 21 Pinborg, ‘An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s Opus Maius’, 82: ‘Naturalia autem dicuntur, quia ex essentia sua et non ex intentione animae signi rationem recipiunt’ (‘However, [signs] are called natural because they receive the reason of the sign from their essence and not from the mind’s intention’).

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signi naturalis est quando non propter illationem aliquam significatur aliquid, sed propter conformitatem et configurationem unius rei ad aliud in partibus et proprietatibus’).22 Now, without referring to the parallel between the Pauline text and Aquinas, the essential and, more crucially, the overlooked subtext for understanding the term configurare in both Bacon and Aquinas, Katharine H. Tachau carefully explains the nuances implied by configuration in the following terms: Another way of expressing this causally determined correspondence between objects and these veridical mental images […] is to state that the species are ‘natural signs’ (signa naturalia) of their objects. These signs can be distinguished from conventional ones established, or in Baconian terms, ‘imposed’ (imposita) arbitrarily as are the particular significative sounds of particular languages. The distinction lies in the fact that, in contrast to those that signify conventionally (ad placitum), the relation of an intentio or species to its generating object is innate, by virtue of their shared nature. This relation of natural sign to the object that it ‘signifies’ is the nexus of knowing and meaning (significatio).23

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What she interprets as a ‘causally determined correspondence’ makes perfect sense when one overlooks the Pauline subtext. All the same, her calling attention to the role of ad placitum and intentio shows that she is trying to detect something like an ‘essential referentiality’. Intentio plays an extremely important role when the Scholastics turn to the topic of significatio ad placitum, first discussed by Boethius, and later by Alanus ab Insulis and Abelard. It would seem that the question gained currency thanks to Aquinas’s discussion of Aristotle’s Peri hermenias,24 in 22 Pinborg, ‘An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s Opus Maius’, 83. Pinborg (p. 76) also gives examples from Bacon’s Opus tertium where he speaks of certain natural signs that signify by conf iguration, ‘quaedam per conf igurationem, ut imago Sancti Nicolai est signum eius configuratum et conformatum’ (‘those [signs are natural] because of their configuration, just as the image of Saint Nicholas is its configured and conformed sign’). 23 Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham, 17-18. 24 Boethius, De diuisione (CPL 0887), col. 886, line 59, ‘nomen est vox significativa ad placitum sine tempore’ (‘A name is an arbitrary signifying sound’). Alanus ab Insulis, Summa ‘Quoniam homines’ I.I.9c, p. 144, line 11, ‘voces dicuntur significare ad placitum et hoc vel illud significare posse ex beneplacito instituentis’ (‘Sounds are said to signify arbitrarily and can signify this or that according to the user’s good pleasure’). The expression is found in Peter Abelard’s Glossae super ‘Peri hermeneias’ 2.58, p. 88 and in Thomas de Aquino, In Aristotelis libros Peri hermeneias, I, lec. 5, num. 3, line 1, p. 25, lect. 6, num. 8, line 18, p. 33 and lect. 10, num. 2, line 3, p. 48; in his In Aristotelis libros Posteriorum Analyticorum, II, lect. 6, num. 9, line 4, p. 349; in his In Aristotelis

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particular Aquinas’s claim that the will (voluntas) was the underlying principle of ad placitum (significativum ad placitum, eius principium est voluntas), or, in other words, that the intention of the speaker was the origin of meaning to language, a claim which contradicts Roger Bacon’s position on intentio, for whom intention was linked to an essential referentiality of natural signs. Aquinas uses the term sanctorum reliquiae or variants thereof eleven times, ten of which are found in the Summa. The earliest reference to the saints’ relics is found in Super Sententias 3, dist. 9, in a section devoted to the question whether adoration should be given to the humanity (as opposed to the divinity) of Christ (Utrum humanitati Christi exhibenda sit latria). Here Aquinas sketches out ideas which he will later develop more fully and more hierarchically, as well as with respect to the veneration of relics in the Summa (III, 25). Aquinas – all the same, the author of the new office for the Feast of Corpus Christi and therefore much preoccupied with Christ’s corporality, with his humanity, issues central to the popular piety of his age – is struggling with the relationship between the worship of Christ, the adoration of the Cross, the veneration of the Virgin, and that of the saints and their relics. The next two occurrences are in Summa II-II, q. 96, during a discussion of whether it is permitted to wear divine words ‘suspended’ from the neck (collo suspendere). Since the word of God is not less holy than saints’ relics, and since it was permitted to wear saints’ relics hanging from the neck or to carry them for self-protection (certainly an allusion to processions of saints’ relics), it should be permitted to ‘wear’ God’s words. The third occurrence is in Summa II-II, q. 99, devoted to the question of sacrilege, and here Aquinas returns to his much earlier meditation on the same topic in Super Sententias. In this chapter, Aquinas seeks to establish a hierarchy of holiness in order to determine degrees of sacrilege. The worst form of sacrilege is committed against the sacraments, then in second place, sacramental vessels, sacred images, and then saints’ relics. This hierarchy also anticipates the semiotic relation between relics and the Resurrection. Aquinas turns again to relics in Summa III, 25, devoted to the general topic of the adoration of Christ, and he follows the same tack of establishing a librum De sensu et sensate, lect. 2, num 32, line 3, p. 11; and in his Quaestiones disputatae de ueritate (qu. 1-22 [partim] sec. codicem originalem Thoma ipso dictante conscriptum): qu. 4, art. 1, corpus, p. 119, ed. Leonine, p. 77, ed. Marietti. William of Ockham uses phrases like significativa ad placitum over twelve times, again showing that terms which were bandied about in mid- and late-thirteenth-century Scholasticism turned into academic formulas during the fourteenth century. For different perspectives on the question, see also Minnis, Magister Amoris: The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics, 141-42; and Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun, passim.

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hierarchy in worship. Here, he concludes, images of Christ and the Cross are to be worshipped with the same ‘adoration of latria’ as Christ himself, and this because of the direct or prototypical (or essential) relationship between images of Christ and the Cross to Christ himself. The adoration of the Virgin, however, is not of the same order as the adoration shown to the Trinity, and is classed as hyperdulia or extreme reverence. Since the saints’ bodies, Aquinas continues, were temples and organs of the Holy Spirit, they can be configured, through the glory of the Resurrection, to Christ’s body, and merit reverence or dulia. At no point does Aquinas comment on the difference between significando and configurando which so preoccupied Roger Bacon. Strangely, by contrast, Aquinas’ contemporary and colleague at the Sorbonne, Bonaventure, seems not to have been interested at all in the question of the veneration of relics, so that Jean de Meun’s references to relics in all likelihood would seem (by process of elimination) to allude to Aquinas’s discussion in the Summa – and here it is important to investigate how Jean de Meun’s French often echoes Latin phrases very much in the air in different parts of the University of Paris, including the faculty of medicine.

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Jean de Meun and the Connection to the University of Paris: Intention, the Triad of Demonstration, Knowledge and Recognition, and Relics Jean de Meun seems to have been keenly aware of the importance of the concept of intention in contemporary Scholastic thought. Given the key role for Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon played by intentio in discussing significatio ad placitum, it is striking how frequently Jean de Meun uses expressions such as nule entencion, droite entencion, male entencion, and entencion double (‘no intention’, ‘right intention’, ‘bad intention’, ‘double intention’) which are obvious calques of nulla intentio, recta intentio, mala intentio, and duplex intentio, almost as though these turns of phrases were in the air in the university milieu that Jean de Meun frequented.25 This 25 Recta* intentio* (which occurs 37 times in Thomas, out of 139 hits at the Library of Latin Texts) reappears in Jean’s ‘Sachiez que nus a droit n’i va / ne n’a pas entencion droite’, (vv. 4392-93, ‘Know that no one rightly goes there, unless he has the right intention’) and ‘selonc la droite entencion’, (v. 11085, ‘according the right intention’); nulla* intentio* is found in Peter Johannis Olivi (once), Aquinas (3 times), and William of Ockham (3 times), and corresponds to Jean’s ‘si que par nule entencion / n’i puisse avoir excepcion’, (vv. 4661-62, ‘such that there can be no exception by no intention’) – otherwise the expression ‘nule entencion’ does not seem to occur elsewhere in medieval French; and mala* intentio* (which occurs 24 times in Thomas, of 108

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list of phraseological calques can be extended, but the significant points are first, that loan translations in Jean de Meun’s French echo, and this in a strikingly fresh way, the Latin he appears to have regularly heard and spoken, and second, that he presents a miscellany of conflicting positions on many issues, citing sometimes Thomas Aquinas, sometimes Roger Bacon, sometimes Guillaume de Saint-Amour. He stakes out his own independent and largely self-ironizing position, not so much a theorist of any position as a parodist of many. All the same, he is squarely working (as his subsequent translations also demonstrate) at the interface of Latin and vernacular in the Latin Quarter, in a context well defined by a well-known manuscript transcribed by a single scribe around 1278, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 837. One striking parallel example to Jean de Meun’s play with entencion is found in his use of a tripartite formula invoking demonstration, knowledge, and recognition (demonstré, seü, conneü, a calque on Scholastic arguments linking demonstratio, scientia, and cognitio). This first example turns up in Raison’s description of love, itself based on Natura’s speech in the De planctu naturae, where Jean de Meun departs from Alanus. The latter’s ‘sive certa descriptione describens, sive legitima diffinitione diffiniens, rem immonstrabilem demonstrabo, inextricabilem extricabo’ (PL 210, col. 455 A: ‘either describing with a certain description, or defining with a legitimate definition, I will demonstrate an indemonstrable thing’) becomes, in Jean’s French: Or te demonstreré sanz fable chose qui n’est pas demonstrable, si savras tantost sanz sciance et connoistras sanz connoissance ce qui ne peut estre seü ne demonstré ne conneü (vv. 4249-54). [‘Now I will demonstrate something to you without fable, and you will know something without knowledge, and will recognize something without recognition, what cannot be known, neither demonstrated nor recognized.’] hits) is echoed in Jean’s ‘car bone predicacion / vient bien de male entencion’, (vv. 5083-84, ‘for good preaching stems well from evil intention’) – the expression appears to be rare in medieval French, occurring in the Franco-Venetian Prise de Pamplune, Jean de Meun, Deschamps and Christine de Pizan. Jean writes, ‘Ainsinc m’entencion double oi, / n’onc mes nul jor ne la doubloi’ (vv. 10271-72, ‘Thus I had my double intentions, and I never duplicated it ever’), echoing Aquinas on duplex intentio: Super Euangelium Iohannis reportatio, ch. 7, lect. 2, num. 1040, p. 197: ‘Et ponit duplicem intentionem per quam intelligitur duplex origo doctrinae’ (‘And he posited a double intention according to which a double origin of doctrine is understood’).

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Here Jean introduces a very subtle change. In place of ‘rem immonstrabilem demonstrabo, inextricabilem extricabo’ (‘I will demonstrate something indemonstrable, I will extricate something inextricable’), Raison instead invokes a triad often found in Scholastic writers: demonstrating the indemonstrable from Alanus is expanded to knowing the unknowable and recognizing the unrecognizable. This threesome of demonstration, knowledge, and recognition, while already attested in Boethius, seems to have been revived by Aquinas, inspired by a passage in Aristotle.26 Somewhat later, William of Ockham († 1347) repeatedly invoked this triad,27 suggesting that between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fourteenth century, it had become a standard academic formula, which would in turn imply that Jean picked it up from the oral Latin-speaking culture in which he lived.28 26 In Aristotelis libros Posteriorum Analyticorum II.2.5, line 19, p. 333: ‘Sequeretur igitur quod aliquis non habens horum demonstrationem sciret ea; eo quod nihil prohibet aliquem habentem def initionem non simul habere demonstrationem; quamvis def initio sit demonstrationis principium. Non enim quicunque cognoscit principia, scit conclusionem deducere demonstrando’ (‘Therefore it follows that someone not having demonstration will know these things, and by the same token that nothing prohibits someone from having a definition without at the same time having a demonstration, although a def inition is the principle of demonstration, for whoever recognizes the first principles, knows by demonstration to deduce the conclusion’). Summae theologiae I.14.3: Tunc enim dicitur aliquid comprehendi, quando pervenitur ad finem cognitionis ipsius, et hoc est quando res cognoscitur ita perfecte, sicut cognoscibilis est. Sicut propositio demonstrabilis comprehenditur, quando scitur per demonstrationem, non autem quando cognoscitur per aliquam rationem probabilem (‘For then it is said that something is recognized when the end of recognition of it is reached, and this is when the thing is recognized as perfectly as it is recognizable. Just so a demonstrable proposition is understood when it is known through demonstration, not however when it is recognized by some probable reason.’). 27 Guillelmus de Ockham, Expositio in libros Physicorum Aristotelis, v. 4, 1:1,2, p. 26, line 154: ‘Nam secundum expositionem Commentatoris, […] ostendit modum demonstrandi in adquirendo cognitionem causarum rerum naturalium, volens quod demonstratio in scientia naturali in adquirendo cognitionem causarum est demonstratio a signo’ (‘For according the exposition of the commentator […] he shows a means of demonstrating by acquiring recognition of the causes of natural things, wanting that a demonstration in natural knowledge in acquiring recognition of causes is a demonstration from a sign’). Expositio in librum Perihermenias Aristotelis II.5.4, 462: ‘tales termini “cognitum”, “scitum”, “demonstratum” et huiusmodi’ (‘such terms as “recognized”, “known”, “demonstrated”, and similar’). Summa logicae III, 2, cap. 24, line 4: ‘nihil vere scitur nisi quod per demonstrationem cognoscitur’ (‘Nothing is truly known except that it be recognized through demonstration’). 28 Jean suppresses a key passage from Alanus, where Natura calls the speech that serves as Jean’s basic source as a ‘theatralis oratio joculatoriis evagata lasciviis’ (‘theatrical speech wandering among lascivious jests’) and then avers that she wishes to return to her previous, more mature style (‘nunc stylus paululum maturior ad praefinitae narrationis propositum revertatur’). Jean, however, lets Raison continue on in the style of theatralis oratio, but certainly expected his readers to perceive this conscious, if not relentless, somewhat adolescent adherence to ‘joculatoriis […] lascivis’.

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Within this context of incorporating Scholastic sources into his work, Jean de Meun’s use of reliques takes on a special significance. In fact, he only uses it eight times, but in each instance, the word has been carefully chosen (ed. Lecoy, vv. 7081, 7082, 7084; 15,849, 15,853; 21,213, 21,555, 21,570). He used it in contexts which are slightly skewed from the usual ones where one finds the word in medieval French texts: first in Raison’s argument for significatio ad placitum, that is, where she rejects Amant’s criticisms of her using the word for testicles (coilles) as vulgar, saying that she could just as well have said relics instead of balls; second, at the end of Venus’s speech where the men in Cupid’s army swear an oath on their arrows rather than on relics (a somewhat ironic nod to how various chansons de geste invoke relics on the eve of a battle); and third, when Amant finally plucks the Rose (where reliques now suddenly refers to female genitalia rather than male testicles). These examples all underscore the arbitrariness of referentiality that Raison had argued for earlier in the poem. In other words, when Jean de Meun has Raison claim that coilles and reliques are interchangeable in the name of significatio ad placitum, he was playing on the Aquinas interpretation of the essential referentiality of relics as configuring the Resurrection of Christ as a counter-example of significatio ad placitum. Since Aquinas has never been claimed as a source for the Roman de la Rose, at issue here is Jean de Meun’s connection to mid-thirteenth-century university life, and here linguistics based on Latinisms may perhaps help to reconstruct this link. Thanks to the research of Luciano Rossi, it seems clear that Jean had received a profound training in jurisprudence in Bologna, which had in turn opened up a career for him as a legal adviser to the Diocese of Orléans, to Charles d’Anjou (the youngest son of Louis VIII and Blanche de Castille, to whom, as Rossi cogently argues, Jean de Meun’s part of the Rose seems to be obliquely dedicated), and to the French royal courts of Saint Louis, Philippe le Hardi, and Philippe le Bel.29 Jean would later distinguish himself with his translation of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae for Philippe le Bel and of Vegetius’s De re militari for Jean II de Brienne, count d’Eu, whose father Alphonse had been the ‘Grand Butler of France’ (grand chambrier de France) during the reign of Louis IX, and who was buried next to this king in Saint-Denis. In other words, it is now possible to identify Jean de Meun as closely connected both to Paris’s very lively academic legal culture and to the highest circles of the royal court. 29 Rossi, ‘Du nouveau sur Jean de Meun’; Rossi, ‘Encore sur Jean de Meun’; Rossi, ‘Jean de Meun e Guido Guinizelli a Bologna’.

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But there is more. The second example for reconstructing the midthirteenth-century context of Jean’s part of the Rose is Amant’s description of impregnating the Rose. The scene contains an interesting and overlooked detail: Amant describes how he took particular care that his seed and that of the Rose are mixed together inseparably: ‘Si fis lors si meller les greines / qu’el se desmellassent a peines’ (‘and then I had the seeds so mixed together, that they could hardly be separated’, ed. Lecoy, vv. 21,697-98). Jean de Meun is alluding to the theory of female semen found in the writings of Galen, a theory rejected both by Aristotle and Aquinas. The argument turns on whether the menses represent female semen, and Aristotle denies the claim, or as William of Moerbeke puts it in his translation of De generatione animalium: ‘Signum autem huius mulierem non emittere semen’ (‘the sign of this is that the woman does not produce seed’, Clavis: 17.5 (M), lib. 1, cap. 20, p. 33, line 26 (ed. Bekker: 728a)), which Aquinas then picks up in Super Sent. III, 3, q. 5 a. 1: ‘semen mulieris nihil facit ad generationem’ (‘a woman’s seed plays no role in generation’). The much-debated question of the potential obscenity of the term coilles has overlooked this allusion to female semen. Jean de Meun’s most likely source for Galen’s theory would have been the fraternity of surgeons (La Confraternité de Saint-Côme et de Saint-Damien situated right next to the convent of the Franciscans – the surviving refectory of the Cordeliers still stands today, on the Rue de l’École de Médicine, next to the confraternity, founded in 1255 by Louis IX and today called simply La Confrérie des chirurgiens). It would seem that Jean de Meun was very much up to date on the various debates in mid-thirteenth-century Paris simply given the physical proximity, within the enceinte de Philippe-Auguste, of roughly 500 meters separating the four mendicant monasteries – Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians. A somewhat younger contemporary of Jean de Meun’s, Henri de Mondeville (1260-1316), later the royal surgeon of Philippe le Bel, took up the question of female sperm in his handbook of surgery from 1312. In describing the reversed symmetry of male and female organs of reproduction, de Mondeville wrote that the ovaries produced female semen: a quibus vasis, tempore coitus, ad fundum matricis impellitur muliebre sperma, et cum viri spermate commiscetur’ (‘from these vessels, during the time of coitus, the woman’s sperm is excreted from the deepest part of the womb and can be mixed with the man’s sperm’). He indicates his source as one Rasy II° Almansoris, that is, the Liber ad Almansorem (or more precisely the Kitab al-Mansuri of Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, translated into Latin in 1175 by Gerard of Cremona).

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Here we come closer to the heart of the matter, because naming genitals was, of all things, blamed on women. The evidence for this charge comes directly from the medical culture of thirteenth-century France, and again from Henri de Mondeville’s surgical handbook from 1312, where he observes that male genitals got their names because women, in their way of speaking, had assigned them these names: ‘virga et membrum sunt nomina imposita huic membro a mulieribus per excellentiam sicut patet per modum loquendi earum’ (‘the penis and the member are the words imposed on this member par excellence by women just as is clear in their way of speaking’).30 While this remark postdates Jean, it echoes all the same the linguistic realities in Paris in which Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Jean de Meun lived. The real joke is that Amant objects to Raison’s use of the term coilles not because it is obscene, but because it is not a word that belongs in the mouth of a gentle maid: ‘Si ne vos tiegn pas a cortaise / quant ci m’avez coilles nomees, / qui ne sunt pas bien renomees / en bouche a cortaise pucele’ (‘And so I hardly think you courteous when you have spoken here to me of balls, which are not particularly renowned in a gentle maid’s mouth’, ed. Lecoy, vv. 6898-901). Raison is not a cortaise pucele – but she has been talking like a woman, ‘in their way of speaking’ (‘in modum loquendi earum’). First she claims that there is a different meaning or sen to the word coilles (vv. 7128-29) than the one Amant has understood, and then finally admits that coilles and vit really need no gloss, in other words, that they exhibit an essentialist referentiality.31 The speech of women, in the vernacular, resembles, in its distance from Latin, the speech of the stereotypical vilain of medieval French literature. The courtois/vilain dichotomy continues the urbanitas/rusticitas opposition of classical rhetoric,32 an opposition captured in Jerome’s phrase sancta rusticitas, which not only inspired thirteenth-century Franciscan preachers, 30 Mondeville, 123, n. (chapter title in French: Du vit). Latin: [Henri de Mondeville], Die Chirurgie des Heinrich von Mondeville (Hermondaville) nach Berliner, Erfurter und Pariser Codices, ed. Julius Pagel (Hirschwald, 1892). 31 ‘Mes puis t’ai tex .ii. moz renduz, / et tu les as bien entenduz, / qui pris doivent estre a la letre, / tout proprement, sanz glose metre. / – Dame, bien les i puis entendre, / qu’il i sunt si legiers a prendre / qu’il n’est nus qui françois seüst, / qui prendre ne les i deüst, / n’ont mestier d’autres declarances’ (vv. 7151-59). 32 Richter, ‘Urbanita-Rusticitas: linguistic aspects of a medieval dichotomy’. The semantic development in medieval French represents an interesting side case: with the disappearance of cities in early Gaul after the fall of the Roman Empire, the courtois/vilain dichotomy literally reproduces a kind of geographical shift, from the urbs to the cohors, from the rus to the villa. The term courtois stems from low Latin curtis, which itself derives from classical Latin cohors, ‘corner of a farm’, which then assumed a military connotation as the court of a sovereign; vilain

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but also mirrors the historical tensions between Latin and the vernacular. Who, after all, in Raison’s opinion, is at fault in this dispute? Squeamish women, of course, who also of course do not speak Latin: ‘Se fames nés noment en France, / ce n’est fors desacoutumance’ (‘If women in France do not speak of these things, it is only because they are not in the habit of doing so’), vv. 7101-2. Elsewhere in Jean de Meun’s part of the Rose, in discussions of Origen and Abelard, coilles is used without provoking any comment, so that it is safe to conclude that the Raison/Amant argument serves as a pretext for Jean de Meun to play with a constellation of topics associated with Scholastic linguistic philosophy, specifically the question of significatio ad placitum. Medieval churchmen, from the authors of penitential handbooks, to Peter Damian speaking graphically of various forms of homosexual intercourse in his Liber Gomorrhianus, to the chronicler Cosmas of Prague, had few qualms about explicitly describing sexual acts,33 sometimes with a slight apology such as ‘unam […] breviter referam, ne lectori fastidium inferam’ (‘I shall report one thing briefly, lest I cause my reader some irritation,’ says Cosmas to preface his description of what would now be called a pole dance performed by Mathilda of Tuscany, † 1125, to excite her second husband, Welf V).34 Obscenity was not an issue: fastidium or ‘irritation’ was. In Mathilda’s case, Cosmas as confessor is explicit because he wants to exculpate the 42-year-old duchess, who had done her best to consummate her marriage with her 17-year-old husband. He failed to fulfill his conjugal duties after his much older bride flaunted her ‘accessibility’ on their wedding night. The stems from classical Latin villa, a rural estate. See Burgess, Contribution à l’étude du vocabulaire pré-courtois, 35-43; Dubled, ‘Quelques observations sur le sens du mot villa’. 33 Payer, Sex and the Penitentials. 34 ‘Hec cum prima et secunda nocte dux obiceret domne, tercia die sola solum ducit in cubiculum, ponit in medio tripodas et desuper mensalem locat tabulam et exhibuit se sicut ab utero matris nudam (…) At ille stabat auribus omissis, ut inique mentis asellus aut carnifex, qui longam acuens macheram stat in macello super pinguem vaccam excoriatam cupiens exenterare eam. Postquam vero diu sedit mulier super tabulam et velut anser, cum facit sibi nidum huc et illuc vertens caudam frustra.’ (‘Since the duke on the f irst and second night had rejected his wife, on the third day, she, alone, took him, alone, into the bedroom, set up a tripod in the middle of the room, and placed a table on top of it, and then showed herself [to him] naked as from her mother’s womb […] and he stood there with fallen ears, somewhat like a hangman or an ass’ colt, who, having sharpened a long sword stood in a butcher’s stall over a fat skinned sow, wanting to disembowel her. Afterwards, the woman sat for a long time on this table, like a mother goose making her nest and waving her tail here and there, in vain’.) The Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition is available at: http://www.dmgh.de/de/fs2/object/ display/bsb00000841_00097.html?sortIndex=010%3A050%3A0009%3A010%3A00%3A00&zo om=0.75&html=true

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importance of this implied claim should not be discounted, for Mathilda’s later death without an heir was the cause of great friction between the Holy Roman Empire and the Church (and obviously a topic particularly close to the dynastic politics of Jean de Meun’s putative patron, Charles d’Anjou). By having Amant reject coilles as debauchery or ribaudie, as not being renomees / en bouche a cortaise pucele, Jean de Meun squarely situates the Rose in the courtois/vilain dichotomy foregrounded by the contemporary scribe of the great fabliaux collection of BnF, fr. 837. Like the other great fabliaux recueils copied somewhat later, BnF, fr. 837 combines ‘courtly’ texts (La châtelaine de Vergy, Floire et Blanchefloir), fabliaux, works whose theme is le vilain,35 textes farcis (mixing Latin and French), and Mariological texts. It also transmits Rutebeuf’s Complainte de Maistre Guillaume de Saint-Amour and other anti-Mendicant works. This thematic heterogeneity prompted Anatole de Montaiglon in 1881 to separate the textes pieux from the fabliaux:36 he could find no reason why the same scribe inspired by l’esprit gaulois would have first copied Li ABC Nostre Dame (an abecedarium of the Virgin, fols 170va-171va) followed by Li jugemenz des cons (‘The Judgment of the Cunts’), or why Le pardon de foutre (‘The Pardon for Fucking’, fol. 173rb-vb) comes just before La proiere de Nostre Dame (‘The Prayer of Our Lady’) by Gautier de Coinci and, somewhat later (fols 177vb-178rb), the quintessential prayer of the campaign for the Immaculate Conception: O intemerata et in aeternum benedicta (‘O unblemished and blessed for all eternity’). By consciously editing out the Mariological materials from a manuscript transcribed during the controversy over the Immaculate Conception at the Sorbonne,37 de Montaiglon ripped the fabliaux out of their original context, the same context of Jean de Meun’s part of the Rose. Albeit in different proportions, Jean’s Rose also combines the same heterogenous features found in BnF, fr. 837. For example, taking a cue from ‘De la demoiselle qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre’ (‘About the maiden who could not hear talk about fucking’), the Raison/Amant exchange could be renamed De l’amant qui ne pooit oïr parler des coilles (‘About the maiden who could not hear talk about balls’). 35 These works include: L’estillement au vilain, fols 119vb-121ra; Vilain mire, fols 139rb-141rb; fols 164rb-165vb: Proverbes au vilain; fol. 182ra; Des .xxiii. manieres de vilains; Du vilain qui gaaigna paradis par plait, fols 228va-229rb; Le despit au vilain, fols 233vb-234ra; Jean Bodel, Du vilain de Bailluel, fols 242vb-243rb; Le dit du buffet [Vilain au buffet], fols 275vb-277ra; Rutebeuf, Le pet au vilain, fol. 315ra-rb:. The table of contents of BnF, fr. 837 is given at: http://www.arlima.net/ mss/france/paris/bibliotheque_nationale_de_france/francais/00837.html. 36 See Richards, ‘Lire les fabliaux aujourd’hui’. 37 Lamy, L’Immaculée Conception.

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In this specific context, Jean de Meun has Raison speak in a manner entirely consistent with the contemporary translation of de Mondeville’s Latin original, which regularly uses the terms now incorrectly thought of as being automatically obscene such as vit, con, cul, and coilles38 – indeed, the perineum was even called the entrepète (roughly the ‘farting part between’ [genitals and anus]). Tobler-Lommatzsch dutifully records these examples from de Mondeville without commentary. Two earlier thirteenth-century sources closer to Jean de Meun but not referenced in the standard dictionaries of medieval French, the Livre du Sydrac (composed between 1270 and 1300) and the tax list of 1292, follow the same practice. The translator speaks of the penis as a functional organ: ‘le vit est membre official’ (‘the prick is an organ performing a service or office’). In general, the translator also refers to a number of other organs in the body as either ‘membre consemblable [“de même nature”] ou official’ (‘a similar organ – of the same nature – or one [executing the same] office’ or simply as ‘membre official’, such as the lungs, diaphragm, or bladder). This remark sheds further light on the context of Jean de Meun’s use of Aquinas’s reflections on relics. From this perspective, Raison, in Jean de Meun’s part, is anything but an allegorical figure in the tradition of Lady Philosophy. Jean de Meun himself (who was, after all, the translator of Boethius) signals this departure when he describes Raison as la bele, l’avenant (‘the beautiful and the fetching’). He uses these two adjectives combined, formulaically, four times (for Raison, v. 4196; for the unsurpassed beauty of Nature, v. 16,211; for Nature’s description of an ideal couple involved in reproduction, v. 18,976; and for Pygmalion’s statue when it/she becomes alive, v. 21,122). Indeed, he is well and truly citing a formula to describe female beauty which, to the best of my knowledge, is only first attested in contemporary thirteenth-century motets: twice in the so-called ‘Montpellier Codex’ and once in a song attributed to 38 As the nineteenth-century editor of Mondeville’s Chirurgie, Alphonse Bos, both medical doctor and philologist, noted: ‘Il faut croire que les termes scientifiques pour désigner ce qu’on appelle les parties honteuses n’étaient pas encore créés, car notre traducteur rend ‘vulva, virga, anus’, etc., par des mots vulgaires, grossiers, si grossiers qu’on ne pourrait les admettre dans un dictionnaire usuel. Mais ces mots étaient-ils alors si grossiers qu’ils nous paraissent maintenant? Le langage, il est vrai, était beaucoup plus libre, et l’on trouverait difficilement aujourd’hui un document off iciel, comme le Rôle de la taille de 1292, où seraient inscrits des contribuables tels que Jehan Con-Doré, Richard Gros-Cul, Eude Coille-Noire, Guillaume fout vielle, la rue de tire vit, Jehan fout en paille. Il n’y aurait donc pas à s’étonner beaucoup si un livre d’anatomie et de chirurgie contînt les mêmes mots qui, à la même époque, n’avaient pas effarouché la pudeur administrative. Mais ces mots qui sont obscènes pour nous ne l’étaient pas pour nos ancêtres’ (Mondeville, La chirurgie de Maître Henri de Mondeville, traduction contemporaine de l’auteur, 1:XLV-XVI). See Marcotte, ‘Alphonse Bos, Glossaire de la langue d’oïl (xie-xive siècles)’.

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Andrieu Contredit d’Arras († 1248). The term shows up as well in the fabliau ‘Del prestre taint’ transcribed in BnF, fr. 837, where the female whom the neighboring priest lusts after is depicted as ‘molt estoit cortoise dame / Et fresche et avenant et bel’ (‘she was a very gentle lady, and fresh, and fetching and beautiful’). In other words, by calling Raison bele et avenant, Jean is alluding, not to philosophical texts, but to songs his thirteenth-century contemporary readers would have heard in the taverns of the Quartier Latin and to the culture of the scribe of BnF, fr. 837, who interlaces Marian devotional works with ribald tales. When Raison coolly claims she could have used the word relics in place of balls, she is invoking semiotic conventionality. When Amant then objects that coilles is inappropriate, because it is improper in a gentle woman’s mouth, he is invoking standards used not only in courtly romances, but also terms used to describe how women, innocent of Latin, speak about body parts. When, in turn, Raison then answers by referring to Scholastic discussions of referentiality, Amant essentially plays dumb. Jean de Meun has created a dialogue between two characters speaking at cross-purposes apparently for the simple fun of parodying both courtly and Scholastic culture in the context of a very cacophonous Paris at the end of the thirteenth century.

Bibliography

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Primary Sources Abelard, Peter. La vie et les epistres Pierres Abaelart et Heloys sa fame, traduction du XIIIe siècle attribuée à Jean de Meun avec une nouvelle édition des textes latins d’après le ms. Troyes Bibl. Mun. 802. Edited by Eric Hicks. Geneva: Slatkine / Paris: Champion, 1991. —. Lettres d’Abélard et Héloïse. Edited by Eric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau. Paris, Livre de poche, 2007. —. Sic et non. Edited by B. Boyer and R. McKeon. Turnhout: Brepols, 1976-1977. Alanus ab Insulis. ‘De planctu Naturae’. In Patrologia Latina Cursus Completus. Edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, Migne, 1844-1864, v. 210, col. 429-482. Augustinus of Dacia. Augustini de Dacia O.P. ‘Rotulus pugillaris’. Edited by Angelus Walz. Rome: Institutum Angelicum, 1929. Berengar of Tours, Contra Faustum. Edited by J. Zycha. CPL 321. Turnhout, Brepols, 1891. Christine de Pisan, Jean Gerson, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier and Pierre Col. Le débat sur le Roman de la Rose. Edited by Eric Hicks. Paris: Champion, 1977.

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Chrysologus, Petrus. Sermonum ollection a Felice episcopo parata, sermonibus extravagantibus adiectis. Vol. 2. Edited by A. Olivar. Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina 24A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Forcellini, Aegidius. Totius Latinitatis Lexicon. 2 vols. Leipzig: Hahn, 1835. Gratian. Decretum magistri Gratiani [Concordia discordantium canonum]. Edited by Emil Friedberg. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Le Roman de la Rose. 3 vols. Edited by Félix Lecoy. Paris: Champion, 1965-70. Mondeville, Henri de. Die Chirurgie des Heinrich von Mondeville (Hermondaville) nach Berliner, Erfurter und Pariser Codices. Edited by Julius Pagel. Berlin: Hirschwald, 1892. —. La chirurgie de Maître Henri de Mondeville, traduction contemporaine de l’auteur. Edited by Alphonse Bos. Paris: Firmin-Didot (SATF), 1897-98. Pinborg, Jan. ‘An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s Opus Maius: De Signis’. Traditio 34 (1978): 75-136. Vegetius, Publius Flavius. Li abregemenz noble honme Vegesce Flave René des establissemenz apartenanz a chevalerie, traduction par Jean de Meun de Flavii Vegeti Renati Viri Illustris Epitoma Institutorum Rei Militaris. Edited by Leena Löfstedt. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia [Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia / Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae], 1977.

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Secondary Sources Auerbach, Erich. ‘Figura’. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Foreword by Paolo Valesio. Translated by Ralph Manheim, 11-76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. (Original: ‘Figura’, Neue Dantestudien, 11-71. Istanbul: n.p., 1944.) Burgess, Glyn S. Contribution à l’étude du vocabulaire pré-courtois. Geneva: Droz, 1970. Bynum, Caroline Walker. ‘Material Continuity, Personal Survival, and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts’. History of Religions 30, no. 1 (August 1990): 51-85. Dédeck-Héry, Venceslas Louis. ‘Boethius’ De Consolatione by Jean de Meun’. Mediaeval Studies 14 (1952): 165-275. Dubled, H. ‘Quelques observations sur le sens du mot villa’. Le Moyen Âge 59 (1963): 1-10. Féret, Henri-Marie. ‘SACRAMENTUM RES dans la langue théologique de S. Augustin’. Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 29:2-4 (1940): 218-243. Fyler, John M. Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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King, Ronald F. ‘The Origin and Evolution of A Sacramental Formula: Sacramentum Tantum, Res et Sacramentum, Res Tantum,’ The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 31:1 (1967): 21-82. Lamy, Marielle. L’Immaculée Conception: étapes et enjeux d’une controverse au Moyen-Age (XIIe-XVe siècles). Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Langlois, Ernest. Origines et sources du Roman de la Rose (Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1890). Marcotte, Stéphane. ‘Alphonse Bos, Glossaire de la langue d’oïl (xie-xive siècles), contenant les mots vieux français hors d’usage, leur explication, leur étymologie et leur concordance avec le provençal et l’italien’. Perspectives médiévales [Online], 36 (2015), Online since 1 January 2015, Accessed 20 May 2016. http://peme.revues. org/8230. Marmo, Costantino. ‘Bacon, Aristotle (and all the others) on Natural Inferential Signs’. In Roger Bacon and Aristotelianism, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, special issue of Vivarium 35, no. 2 (1997): 136-54. —. ‘De virtute sermonis/verborum, L’autonomie du texte dans le traitement des expressions figurées ou multiples’. In Le pouvoir des mots au Moyen Âge, edited by Nicole Bériou, Jean-Patrice Boudet, and Irène Rosier-Catach, 49-69. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Mews, Constant. Abelard and Heloise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. —. ‘The Historia translationis sacri corporis Thome Aquinatis of Raymundus Hugonis: An Eyewitness Account and its Significance,’ In Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe. Edited by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards. 257-284. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. —. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. New York: Saint Martin’s, 1999. Minnis, Alastair. Magister Amoris: The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Morton, Jonathan. The Roman de la Rose in Its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Muckle, Joseph T. ‘The Personal Letters between Abélard and Héloïse: Introduction, Authenticity and Text’. Mediaeval Studies 15:1 (1953): 47-94. Park, Seung-Chan. Die Rezeption der mittelalterlichen Sprachphilosophie in der Theologie des Thomas von Aquin: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Analogie. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Pasnau, Robert. Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Payer, Pierre J. Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code 550-1150. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Richards, Earl Jeffrey. ‘Les contraires choses: Irony in Jean de Meun’s Part of the Roman de la Rose and the Problem of Truth and Intelligibility in Thomas Aquinas’. In Nouvelles de la Rose, Actualité et perspectives du Roman de la Rose. Edited by

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Dulce Mª González Doreste and Maria del Pilar Mendoza-Ramos, 375-90. La Laguna: Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de La Laguna, 2011. —. ‘Lire les fabliaux aujourd’hui’. In ‘Lire les textes médiévaux aujourd’hui’, (Colloque International, 25-26 janvier 2010, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III), edited by Patricia Victorin, 131-48. Paris: Champion, 2011. Richter, Michael. ‘Urbanitas-Rusticitas: Linguistic Aspects of a Medieval Dichotomy’. In The Church in Town and Countryside (Papers Read at the 17th Summer Meeting and the 18th Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society), edited by Derek Baker, 149-57. Studies in Church History 16. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. Reprinted in: Studies in Medieval Language and Culture, 54-60. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995. Rossi, Luciano. ‘Du nouveau sur Jean de Meun’. Romania 121 (2003): 430-60. —. ‘Encore sur Jean de Meun: Johannes de Magduno, Charles d’Anjou et le Roman de la Rose’. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 51 (2008): 361-77. —. ‘Jean de Meun e Guido Guinizelli a Bologna’. Bologna nel Medioevo, Atti del Colloquio internazionale (Bologna, 28-29 ottobre 2002), Quaderni di filologia romanza 17 (2003) [2004]: 87-108. Tachau, Katherine H. Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundation of Semantics, 1250-1345. Leiden: Brill, 1988.

About the Author

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Earl Jeffrey Richards is Professor of Romance Literatures at Bergische Universität Wuppertal. He had published widely in the area of medieval thought and literature, with particular expertise in Christine de Pizan.

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The Cult of Thomas Aquinas’s Relics at the Dawn of the Dominican Reform and the Great Western Schism Marika Räsänen

Abstract This chapter reconstructs the cultural and theological politics of the celebrations of Thomas Aquinas’s translatio, looking closely at the liturgy used to commemorate the day. It argues that the veneration of Aquinas’s relics, as well as the masses said in his honor, enabled him to figure as a healer and an agent of reform. Aquinas comes to be projected as an Avignon saint, in a cult promulgated by Elias Raymundus of Toulouse. This chapter shows how commemorative practices interwove to produce this reforming Avignon saint, particularly looking at hagiography, ritual, and, the display of relics.

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Keywords: Thomas Aquinas, Relics, Elias Raymundus, Translatio, Avignon

The end of the fourteenth century saw the first reform attempts of the Order of Preachers and the beginning of the Great Western Schism (1378). Elias Raymundus of Toulouse, elected as the Master of the Order in Avignon on 6 June 1367, was a fervent reformer. He seems to have already launched vigorous renewal inside the Order from when he was appointed as a vicar on 21 February 1365.1 Elias’s activity as a reformer, however, has been overshadowed by the next Master of the Order, Raymond of Capua. This is evident in studies of Dominican history from the beginning of the twentieth century: for example, father Daniel-Antonin Mortier pointed out, in his major work on general masters of the Order of Preachers, that Elias’s principal administrative act was the transportation of Thomas Aquinas’s remains (d. 1274) from 1

Montagnes, ‘Le rôle du Midi’, 308-9; Meerssemann, ‘Études sur l’ordre’, 213-57.

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a Cistercian house in Italy to the Dominican convent in Toulouse, France, in 1368-1369.2 After making this important observation, Mortier does not try to combine Elias’s efforts for reform and the establishment of the relic cult, nor the influence of the Schism on both of them. The same is applicable to more recent studies: the combination of all three – the reform, the Schism, and Thomas’s relic cult – has remained without particular attention, which makes the issue worth approaching.3 Nevertheless, those sources which tell us about the translation of Thomas Aquinas’s remains were products of their age and, as such, they offer a way to analyze the impact of the reform and the Schism in those communities where the texts were used. The aim of this chapter is to examine the significance of Thomas’s relic cult for Elias’s early reform, especially through the liturgy for the feast of translatio, and to look at the effects of the Schism on the cult. I consider the texts of the liturgy and their message to be a part of the hagiographical genre at large. As such, sources must be considered following the principles of hagiographical studies: beneath my gaze is the interaction between the saint and the devotional community. This interaction processed the contents of medieval cults of saints, stabilizing and transforming them and giving new significance to the saints. 4 As different processes to create new and update old cults had common elements, it is obvious that there were many similar features in Thomas’s and other saints’ cults. It is, however, important to recognize that the features connected to Thomas’s personality and deeds, whatever they had in common with other saint’s lives, were always adapted to or interpreted according to the current age and place. What makes Thomas’s translatio interesting in regard to hagiographical studies is that it must be analyzed not only in the context of the contemporary cult of saints but primarily side by side with the earlier devotional literature and dies natalis liturgy dedicated to him, written down in consequence of Thomas’s canonization process in the 1320s.5 2 Mortier, Histoire des maîtres, 405. On the transportation, see also Delaruelle, ‘La translation des reliques’. Recently the translation of Thomas’s relics has been approached from different viewpoints: see Mews, ‘The Historia translationis’; Richards, ‘Ceremonies of Power’; and Räsänen, ‘The Memory’. 3 The entanglement of phenomena of reform and schism on a general level is discussed in Bellito, ‘The Reform Context’. 4 Extensive hagiographical scholarship discusses these phenomena. The most classical are, for example, Brown, The Cult of the Saints; Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society; Wilson, ‘Introduction’; Heffernan, Sacred Biography; Vauchez, La saintété and, most recently, Malo, Relics and Writings. Especially on liturgy and the cult of saints, see several articles in the Liturgy of the Medieval Church, and on liturgies to commemorate saints’ relics in their political and cultural context, Brand, Holy Treasure. 5 Räsänen, Thomas Aquinas’s Relics.

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When we emphasize the nature of hagiography as a product of its time and place, it is worth stressing at the outset that Elias chose the side of the Avignon Obedience when the Schism began, as did many others involved in the translation. The hypothesis is then that the Schism played a major role in the formulation of Thomas’s relic cult, the matter of which will be considered in detail in the next pages.6 Furthermore, the chapter argues that Thomas’s cult was intended to serve as an emblem for the emerging reform movement inside the Dominican Order. The message of the renewal is vigorously expressed in the publicly celebrated liturgy of the feast of translatio and as such it offers an excellent basis from which to consider the reform models Thomas aimed to represent.

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Translatio Manifests the Reform Elias Raymundus and his team found the inspiration for the new liturgy of the feast of Thomas’s translatio (28 January) in his earlier feast, that is, the Office of dies natalis (7 March), as well as from the dies natalis of St. Dominic, the founding father of the Order of Preachers.7 The opening of Thomas’s two Offices reveals the influence of the earlier liturgical tradition. Where the first vesper of the dies natalis begins with the verse ‘Blessed Thomas, teacher of the church, light of the World, splendour of Italy’, the Office of the translatio says: ‘O how blessed art thou, mother Italy, who hast given birth to the ray of a new sun’.8 The themes of light, sun, and enlightenment are constantly repeated in both offices. These elements symbolize Thomas’s heavenly wisdom and doctrinal purity, encourage listeners to follow the model, and, at the same time, favor the reform to which Thomas was represented to be leading Christianity. The ideas of return and renewal were the key elements of medieval reforms. Thus, the reform is implicitly written into the liturgy of translatio by repeating the familiar elements from the earlier feast. 6 On the uses of relics in general in relation to the Great Western Schism, see Bauch, ‘The Relics of Roman Churches’; and in some specific cases, Hohlstein, ‘Sacra lipsana’; Prouvost, ‘Les miracles’; and Richards, ‘Ceremonies of Power’. 7 Thomas’s dies natalis was established after his canonization (1323) at the end of the 1320s. For more on the liturgy for dies natalis and the canonization, see Räsänen, Thomas Aquinas’s Relics; Mews, ‘The Historia translationis’, 258-60, 262; and Vuori, Räsänen, and Heikkinen, The Medieval Offices (hereafter The Offices). 8 English translations of the chants of the Offices are by Seppo Heikkinen from The Offices. The book also contains the Latin original texts.

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Whereas the idea of reform emerges from the repetitious use of words and sentences at a general level, the renewal is verbalized more explicitly in the invitatory for the Matins of translatio, that is, in the beginning of the first Service of the actual feast day on 28 January:

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Let the faithful celebrate, Delighting in a new joy; Thomas returns to his father’s bosom Leaving his tomb behind.9

To emphasize Thomas’s role as the model for the reform, the liturgy of the translatio equates him with St. Dominic. To highlight Thomas’s equal status, the music of the Office is also borrowed from St. Dominic’s dies natalis. The invitatory describes the arrival of Thomas’s relics in Toulouse where St. Dominic had received the first papal privileges for his activity in 1216.10 In this context, Thomas’s return is presented as a return to the beginnings of the Order, to its birthplace. According to the invitatory, the transportation of the relics – and, together with the relics, Thomas’s saintly presence – ‘to his father’s bosom’ signifies recovering the Order at the place of its origin. The liturgical feast for Thomas’s translatio emphasizes that the return represents Thomas’s personal homecoming. The act appears as the longawaited son’s return to his father, as Thomas died in the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova in today’s south Lazio. The body was kept at the Cistercian house for almost a century, and according to different literary evidence, the Dominicans as well as Thomas’s relatives and others tried in vain to have the saintly corpse to themselves. Finally, the Dominicans’ wishes were realized, and Pope Urban V ordered Thomas’s remains to be moved to the possession of the Order. The first reading of the Office, composed to celebrate and memorialize the translation of the relics, rejoices the recent history: Exultemus in domino, beloved brothers, let us rejoice in spiritual delight, for the glory of the translation of the blessed Thomas Aquinas, is recollected: the friar Preachers have indeed confronted a great joy when they have henceforth brought back to their own treasure. From the year of our Lord’s 9 Compare with The Offices. The chants of the Office of Translatio are also transcribed, but not very accurately, in Douais, Les reliques. 10 The emphasis on Toulouse as the origin of the life of the Order and the place to where Thomas integrated himself is again powerfully presented in the hymns for matins: Whence Father Dominic / Received the message of life / There the Italian teacher / Received his hospitality. The Offices; Douais, Les reliques.

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incarnation 1274, it has taken a long time, 75 years, from the year 1274, when the saint doctor departed this life and his esteemed corpse was placed in a tomb at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova, in the bishopric of Terracina, in Campania. Then, under the eye of the divine justice [the corpse] was brought back to the Dominicans so that the prophecy would be completed: Hec requies mea in seculum seculi (‘This is my rest for ever and ever’). That consists of one Jubilee and a half, which amounts to 75 years, the number predicted by the saint doctor in prophetical spirit.11

The peculiar description of the end of the citation becomes clearer when one remembers that when the Off ice was composed, at the beginning of the 1370s, the Jubilee, that is, an expectation of Christ’s new coming, occurred every 50 years. According to the reading, one-and-a-half Jubilees made 75 years. Hence, the text implies that with the words ‘Hec requies mea in seculum seculi’, which Thomas had allegedly pronounced in 1274, he had prophesized his return to the Dominicans in the year 1349, 75 years after his death. Indeed, the Dominican literary tradition recounts that the count of Fondi took Thomas’s corpse from Fossanova in 1349, kept it on two separate occasions, and gave it to the Dominicans in 1368. According to the Dominican interpretation, the count of Fondi acted under the guidance of the divine spirit and accomplished Thomas’s prophecy. I have interpreted the passage as representing a Christological model in which Thomas returns to the hands of the Order: the friars perceived the arrival of the relics at Toulouse as Thomas’s second coming among the brethren.12 His first was when Thomas joined the Order of Preachers in Naples in 1244.13 Ideally, the return started the new era at the birthplace of the Order, in the place from which the history of the Preachers began. The message of the new beginning becomes stronger in the first great responsory of the Office of the translatio, Ecce novus. The responsory was performed immediately after the previously described first reading: Behold, the new spring of the gardens, Long hidden in the earth; It nourishes the rivers, 11 Alia historia translationis 1. 12 On the prophesy and the involvement of the Count of Fondi in the history of Thomas’s relics, see Räsänen, Thomas Aquinas’s Remains. 13 This period of Thomas’s life has received remarkable attention among scholars; see especially Mandonnet, ‘Thomas d’Aquin novice’; Torrell, Initiation, 1-12; Tilatti, ‘La cattura’; and Räsänen, ‘Family vs. Order’.

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Watering the world from the heavens, This is Thomas, the light of the learned, Inspired by God.14

The words describe Thomas as the fountain who nourishes the earth and gives new life to its people. During the Matins Service, singing the responsory completes the Christological concept introduced in the reading. The responsory builds upon Psalm 103, 13 Rigans montes (Watering the hills).15 The psalm refers to the works of God and was understandable also as an indication of the works of Christ on the earth. Thus, the function of the responsory seems to be an enforcement of the allusion to Thomas as the second Christ. Interestingly, the liturgical reference penetrates deeper to Thomas’s intellectual career, and more specifically to one of his sermons, the theme of which was Rigans montes:16

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The King and Lord of the heavens set down this law from all eternity that the gifts of his Providence should come to the lower through intermediaries. […] It is plain to the senses that from the highest clouds rain flows forth by which the mountains and rivers are refreshed and send themselves forth so that the satiated earth can bear fruit. Similarly, from the heights of divine wisdom the minds of the learned, represented by the mountains, are watered, by whose ministry the light of divine wisdom reached to the minds of those who listen.17

In the sermon, Thomas positions himself as a mountain, that is, the learned intermediator who teaches everybody through the light of the divine wisdom. Thomas actualized the heavenly wisdom, which was why his model and words were worth listening to. Master Elias wisely used the numerous layers of the tradition around Rigans montes, which place Thomas among the masters and leaders of Christianity. In the catena of the Christian teachers, Thomas’s suitability as a model for the reform was hardly deniable. 14 Compare with note 8. 15 Already the General Chapter of Caster had given the first ordinance to add verse Rigans montes at the end of the Matins and Vespers to commemorate Thomas daily in the liturgy of the Order in the same manner as St. Dominic and Peter the Martyr. See Acta Capitulorum Generalium II, p. 340. 16 Thomas gave the sermon at the University of Paris, presumably when he became a Master of theology in 1256; see Torrell, Initiation, 75-76. 17 Thomas Aquinas, Rigans montes, Pr. English translation in Selected Writings.

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In summary, the beginning of the Office of translatio, the invitatory presented above, the first reading, and the first responsory strongly emphasize the return and the beginning of the new era based on the reformed origins. The return is inevitable; the gaze of the Order turns back to Toulouse, the birthplace of the Order, and St. Dominic, its founder. The first reading and the following great responsory refer in abstract terms to the acts of Christ and Thomas in the world. They point to the future which can be sensed to come true at the end of the Office of the translatio, in the beautiful hymn of Lauds:

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The beautiful, reddening dawn brings its rosy splendour, our rejoicing chorus praises the laureled teacher. Thereupon the star of the heavens reveals its brilliant light to our eyes, bringing us Thomas’s image, given as a light to the ages. Already it begins to fill the western sky with its rays; and after his journey of many miles, Thomas is received by Toulouse. The rays of this light clear all doubts. Mother Church urges all to venerate Saint Thomas, testifying to his true, noble doctrine, secure, firm and lucid, shown by divine words. Let us sing with joyful voices glory to the eternal king, who gives us his grace at the request of blessed Thomas. Amen.18

The hymn is a splendid description of the early morning and the beginning of the new day under Thomas’s guidance and protection. It also communicates the metaphorical presence of Thomas in that moment everywhere the hymn is chanted. The hymn does not lead to a reformed life simply by words and metaphors but by the selection of the meter: the hymn is written in the iambic dimeter which Ambrose of Milan used in his hymns. The use of this meter is deliberate, intended to manifest the return to the age of the church fathers and to signify Thomas as a person equivalent to the fathers and capable of bringing renewal to the Church and Christianity as a whole.19

Resistance against the New Feast, Success of the Old Saint Embracing Thomas’s relic cult can be understood as an act of explicit promotion of the reform. In the dissemination of the reform and the cult, 18 Latin and English texts, see The Offices. 19 All the hymns for Thomas’s feast are in the same meter. Metrical analysis by Seppo Heikkinen, more profoundly on the iambic dimeter in the hymn Aurora pulchra rutilans, see Räsänen and others, ‘From a Hiding Place’ and The Offices.

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Elias co-operated with Pope Urban V and several of his fellow brothers.20 The names of the Dominicans who assisted in the transfer of Thomas’s relics and who were also reformers, are given in documents relating to the translation. These colleagues of Elias included Raymond of Capua, Stefanus de Cumba, Petrus de Cayssalis, and Raymundus Hugonis.21 Raymond and Stefanus, especially, were known as fervent reformers; the first is often (wrongly) referred to as the master general who started the renewal in the Dominican Order, and the latter acted with great zeal at the time of the translation of Thomas’s body in Italy.22 I would propose that the involvement of these friars in the translation of Thomas’s relics practically nailed the imaginary of the transportation and Thomas’s sainthood to early reform idealism. Master Elias’s reform was rigorous; he had taken back, for example, all the privileges granted earlier by him and his predecessors, and his decisions were resisted in many places, including Toulouse.23 The resistance seems to have been overcome there, however, by introducing the cult of Thomas’s relics to the citizens. According to the Historia translationis, the masses thronged to see the arrival of Thomas’s body, welcoming the saint with a sumptuous procession and other festivities.24 With Elias as a prime mover, the Dominicans started to collect money for Thomas’s new shrine in their church.25 Numerous miracles believed to have been mediated by Thomas were recorded by the Dominicans in following months.26 Petrus de Cayssalis, later the prior of the convent of Toulouse and one of the friars trusted to carry the precious relics from Italy to France, presumably played a great role in stabilizing Thomas’s cult as one of the major cults of the local Dominican community.27 Thomas’s relic cult was so strongly associated with Elias’s reform ideology that the adopting of the feast seems to have met with persistent opposition. 20 Pope Urban V urged the Order to the stricter observance and gave, for example, a bull in regard to the reform in the Roman province in 1369; see Meersseman, ‘Études sur l’ordre’. 21 Toulouse, MS 610, 21. 22 For the activities of Raymond, see the vast bibliography on St. Catherine of Siena; on Stefanus, see Meersseman, ‘Études sur l’ordre’. 23 Mortier, Histoire des maîtres, 403; Montagnes, ‘Le rôle du Midi’, 309. 24 Bologna, MS A; Toulouse, MS 610. For analyses of the festivities, see Richards ‘Ceremonies of Power’. 25 Acta Capitulorum Generalium II, pp. 421-22. 26 Miraculae in Bologna, MS A; Toulouse, MS 610; Venice, III.121. MS A has the largest sample of the miracles, 100 cases, but the text in fact ends with the claim that 200 miracles occurred in consequence of the translation of Thomas’s corpse to Toulouse (fol. 135v). 27 On messages of the different texts of the translation and their authors, see Mews, ‘The Historia translationis’.

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To win over the friars as supporters of the cult, Master Elias employed different means. He sent an encyclical letter to fellow brothers containing a description of the miracles mediated by Thomas in Toulouse and the surrounding area.28 The great number of the healing miracles associated with Thomas’s relics did not persuade the friars completely. A mark of probable opposition against the reform cult can be observed in the acts of the general chapters of the Dominican Order in Bourges in 1376 and in Carcassonne in 1378. In these chapters, Elias tried to impose observance of the feast as it seems to have not yet been adopted to the annual liturgy in the Dominican communities.29 The Schism began in the same year as the General Chapter of Carcassonne was organized, and it presumably complicated the situation of the feast even more. In my opinion, there can be no doubt that Thomas’s relic cult became identif ied as one of the cults supporting the Avignon Obedience. The principal reason to connect the cult to the Schism was the same as to why the cult was perceived as reformatory: the persons behind the translation and the remodeling of Thomas’s cult. The most important character is Elias, who became the Master of the Obedience of Avignon. Raymond of Capua challenged Elias by becoming the Master of the Roman Obedience. Interestingly, the final version of the Historia translationis, written at the beginning of the 1370s, that is, before the official rapture in the Schism, had already diminished the role of Raymond of Capua in the story. According to the original texts, Raymond would have given Elias important help by asking the reformed nuns to pray that the Dominicans would receive Thomas’s body from the Cistercian monks.30 In fact, the transportation of Thomas’s relics probably helped initiate poor relations between Italian and French Dominicans. Together with Elias, the other reformers who were involved in the transportation of the relics, Stefanus de Cumba, Petrus de Cayssalis, and Raymundus Hugonis, took the Avignon side. When the Schism started, Stefanus was appointed as the provincial preacher of the Province of Toulouse for nearly ten years (1378-1387) and the inquisitor of the same province from

28 The letter is a part of the text better known as Miracula facta in translatione sacri corporis Sancti Thome, edited in AASS. The edited Miracula does not contain the formulation of the letter at the beginning of the text. The salutation of the friars is contained in all the three manuscript evidences which we know of the Miracula: Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 610; Venice, Marziana III 121; Bologna, MS A. 29 Acta Capitulorum Generalium II, pp. 430-31, 446. 30 Bologna, MS A, fol. 117; Toulouse, MS 610, 13.

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1405 to 1407.31 Raymundus was the confidant of Elias and Pope Clemens VII, under whom he had a significant career. In 1384, Raymundus became a Penitentiary of the Holy See, and in 1387 he was appointed as the prior of the Province of Toulouse.32 Thomas’s new cult center was growing in Toulouse, where the corpse and the head of the saint were venerated. The cult had all the preconditions to become the unifying and most important cult for the Dominicans belonging to the Avignon Obedience. Following the division of the two obediences, the cults of saints were also quite necessarily divided. Bologna, where St. Dominic’s relics rested in a tomb in a Dominican house, must be seen as the capital of the Dominicans of the Roman side given the material presence of their leader. From the perspective of the Schism, the liturgy of Thomas’s translatio, composed some years before the rapture, appears to foreshadow perfectly the needs of the Avignon Obedience. For the Avignon side, the Office created the presence of their own leading figure to set aside, politically if not spiritually: St. Dominic. If Thomas’s relic cult became the symbol of unity for the Avignon side of the friars, shouldn’t the feast have started to spread quickly among them? Or was the opposition against the reform characters of the cult so powerful that the relic feast was still rejected? It is difficult to give any exact answer to these questions, but some remarks can be made in relation to them. One place where the hypothesis of importance of Thomas’s translatio to the Avignon Obedience seems to hold true is the Dominican community of Paris, but we cannot be sure whether the feast was already adopted to the liturgy of the convent of Saint Jacques before the Schism.33 Saint Jacques was among the rare convents which conserved one of Thomas’s bodily relics, his arm, which was given to the King of France in summer 1369 and deposited by the Dominicans.34 A Breviary presumably originating from the convent contains the texts for the translation Office in an additional gathering.35 To understand the unique nature of this Breviary, one must 31 Montagnes, ‘Le rôle du Midi’, 306, 319. On the earlier career, see Mortier, Histoire des maîtres, 403. 32 Montagnes, ‘Le rôle du Midi’, 319. 33 Other examples of including the Office of Thomas’s translation in the Dominican books presumably during the Schism come from Poissy, the monastery of the Dominican nuns: Chantilly, MS 54; Melbourne, RARESF 096.1 R66A. 34 Bologna, MS A, fol. 119r-v; Toulouse, MS 610, 23-25. Compare with Mews, ‘The Historia translationis’, 277-78; and Richards ‘Ceremonies of Power’, 338-48. 35 Paris, MS 356, fols 428vb-433rb. Placed immediately before the Office of the Translation is another addition by the same hand, ‘In festo beate marie de pietate’ (fol. 424ra-b). The next

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add that the copies of the Office of the translation hold one interesting detail, noticed by Constant Mews and Jeffrey Richards: there are two slightly but meaningfully different beginnings of the Office in medieval manuscripts. One emphasizes the equality of Italy and France promoting Thomas’s sanctity (the more common version), whereas the other version raises France to a more prominent position as it had received Thomas’s relics in Toulouse.36 The Breviary of Saint Jacques emphasizes the supremacy of France.37 In this choice one hears very much the echoes of the controversy between two powers, the King of France and the pope of Rome, and, at the time of the Schism, the controversies between the popes of Avignon and Rome.38 Thus, the Dominicans of Saint Jacques may have created unity and loyalty to Avignon with the words from the beginning of the Office of translatio. Interestingly, despite the Schism, the translation feast seems to have travelled with the early reformers and penetrated to the Roman side, into those communities favorable to the reform. Among the first examples of this kind are Colmar and Venice. The Master of the Roman Obedience, Raymond of Capua, granted a license in 1389 to Conrad of Prussia to reform the Dominican male convent of Colmar.39 The municipal library of Colmar conserves a remarkable collection of Dominican liturgical manuscripts which date more or less from the period of the reform. Additions made to the manuscripts at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries include, as a norm, the liturgy for Thomas’s translatio. 40 Christian Meyer, the editor of the catalogue of annotated manuscripts, seems to think that addition after the Translation feast is done by a different hand from the mid-fifteenth century and it deals with Saint Vincent of Ferrer. 36 Mews ‘The Historia translationis’, p. 260; Richards ‘Ceremonies of Power’, passim. 37 Paris, MS 356, fol. 428vb: ‘O quam dives effecta gallia…’. 38 Jeffrey Richards’s remarks on similar messages, even similar argumentation between the Office of Thomas’s translation and Évrard de Trémaugon’s Somnium viridarii and their joint support for the French kingdom are very interesting; see ‘Ceremonies of Power’, esp. 321. 39 Barthelmé, La réforme dominicaine; Hillenbrandt, ‘Die Observantenbewegung’. 40 The importance given to Thomas’s translation feast can be grasped from a Psaltter-Hymnary in which three hymns for the translation feast are copied as an addition in the beginning of the manuscript, see Colmar, MS 301, fol. 1. In general, both Thomas’s feasts appear to have had a special position in the Dominican communities of Colmar. In the winter part of their antiphonaries, Thomas’s feasts are the only later additions, made on different occasions; see Colmar, MSS 134; 137; 309; 310; 313 (the MS contains only a mention of the translation feast). Almost the same applies to the Psaltter-Hymnaries of the female convent (d’Unterlnden), MSS 404 and 405, in which in the additional gathering are the feasts only for Corpus Christi, Thomas Aquinas (both feasts), and the Virgin Mary (Hymni de feasto beate Marie). In the latter MS the additional part is the same with the exception of the Virgin Mary.

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the feast was added to the codices soon after its confirmation, that is, after the year 1370 and before the end of the century. 41 On the grounds of the earlier discussion, we may assume that the translation feast was adopted to the liturgy of the convent as a mark of its reform after 1389. 42 Provided that the adoption of the feast of the translation happened after the year 1389, the Schism would already have divided the Order of Preachers. In that moment, one may suggest, the impetus to approve the feast was precisely its nature to encourage the reform in Colmar. The way the Off ice for Thomas’s translation feast is copied to the manuscripts implies that the feast was deliberately adopted during the Schism and that it was perceived to support not only the reform but also the Roman identity of the divided Order. This argument is supported by the beginning of the Office of the translatio: from two possibilities, the Dominicans of Colmar chose the version which emphasizes equality and, at the same time, opposes the idea of French superiority. 43 One manuscript is unusual: in the last verso folio there is only one chant from the Office of the translatio. Interestingly, it is not from the beginning of the feast but from the very end, the antiphon of the second vesper O splendor Italie. 44 Choosing this antiphon to represent the feast of the translatio implies strongly that in Colmar the Dominicans needed to emphasize Thomas’s Italian origins in the period of the controversies and underline the identification to the Roman Obedience. The liturgy may have also responded to the rapture by seeking unity between the rivals – and especially so from the beginning of the fifteenth century when the Master of Roman Obedience began acting vigorously to unify the Order, as will be demonstrated below – through the history of transfer of Thomas’s relics. Venice was the first Italian city in which the Dominican Observance reform was introduced by Giovanni Dominici in 1391. 45 Also from Venice we have an interesting collection of texts connected to Thomas’s relic cult. Basically the whole hagiography of Thomas’s translation is copied in one manuscript, often identified as the Cividale Legendary (although it contains 41 Meyer, Collections d’Alsace. 42 The feast for the Visitation of Saint Mary, approved in the Dominican liturgy in 1401, is a later addition like Thomas’s translation. Stylistic comparison between them indicates the slightly younger age of the Visitation. The Visitation can be found in a number of manuscripts, for example: MSS 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 303, 308, 316, and 317. 43 The early addition of the feast of Visitatio refers to the Roman Obedience. 44 Colmar, MS 131, fol. 233v. For the description of the MS, see Meyer, Collections d’Alsace, 7-8. 45 Bartolomea Riccoboni, Negrologio del Corpus Domini, 315-18. See also Alce, ‘La riforma’; and Fois, ‘I religiosi Decadenza’.

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also other texts besides saints’ Lives) or simply MS A (hereafter only MS A). 46 In 191 parchment folios, it contains one version of an account of the Historia translationis of Thomas’s relics, written by Raymundus Hugonis (fols 113-118v), not known from elsewhere. I have studied the manuscript with Constant Mews and we have decided to call this account the ‘original’ version to distinguish it from another still existing text in Toulouse, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 610. 47 Just before Raymundus’s Historia translationis, MS A presents a short historia translationis (fols 109v-112), called sermo in this manuscript, but which in fact is the same text edited by the name Alia historia translationis in Acta Sanctorum. The sermon or Alia historia is similar in its narration to the long Historia translationis, but is by no means just a mechanical abbreviation of the longer text.48 Moreover, MS A contains a brief account of the translation of Thomas’s arm to Paris (fol. 119-119v) and miracles collected at Thomas’s tomb in Toulouse (fols 120-135v). 49 We know that the manuscript was copied at the Dominican convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice in 1409-1410.50 All these texts differ signif icantly (the long Historia translationis, Miracula) or slightly (the short Historia) from their existing counterparts in Toulouse. The uniqueness of the texts gives a strong impression that they are all more or less the first copies of the original texts, brought to Venice perhaps as early as the 1370s with the Italians who participated in the transportation of Thomas’s relics to Toulouse and returned home.51 We know that Tommaso of Siena, a friar strongly inclined to the reform, gathered Lives of Dominican saints and other textual traditions of the Order for the 46 Currently in Archivio dei Predicatori in Bologna. Single Lives of the manuscript have been studied, but a more complete analysis of the uses and significance of the MS is still unpublished. Constant Mews and I are preparing an article addressing the translation of Thomas’s body, the theme of which allows us to propose a wider interpretation of the functions of the manuscript; see Mews and Räsänen, ‘The Translation of the Holy Body’, forthcoming. 47 The account in Toulouse is a longer and more elaborate narration and, as such, we call it the ‘final’ version of Historia translationis. Our forthcoming article, ‘The Translation of the Holy Body’, presents the difference between the two versions and our thinking on their positions as ‘original’ and ‘final’. 48 This shorter Alia historia can be found in the late medieval Dominican liturgical books, divided as nine readings of the Matins service. On the primary message of the Alia historia and its difference from the long narration, see Mews, ‘The Historia translationis’, 278-79. 49 The description of the content of the manuscript basis on the future article ‘The Translation of the Holy Body’. 50 Klaniczay, ‘Proving Sanctity’, 12; Nocentini, ‘Lo “Scriptorium”’, 103-4, 117, n. 123. 51 Alia historia indicates the death of Urban V on 19 December 1370 (sancte memorie). This detail gives us a reason to suggest the terminus post quem for the copying of the text in 1371. See Bologna, MS A, fol. 110v.

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library of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. His copyists transcribed these texts into the numerous manuscripts that traveled from Venice especially to other reformed Dominican houses.52 Our joint studies with Constant Mews have already led us to the conclusion that the copying of MS A must relate to the reform and also the re-unification of the Order after the Schism. In 1401 the newly elected Master of the Roman Obedience, Thomas de Firmo, enforced the Order to adopt the feast of Thomas’s translatio as a part of the Dominican liturgical year.53 In 1409, when Alexander V was elected as pope in Pisa, Thomas de Firmo believed strongly in the unification of the church and followed the Pisan pope. Alexander declared Thomas de Firmo as the one and only Master of the Order that same year. The nomination followed the discharge of several Dominicans in high positions in the Avignon Obedience.54 MS A, bound in rushes in 1409-1410, collected Lives of saints from both sides of the Schism, Thomas’s relic cult being the most remarkable ‘Avignon cult’.55 In this context, MS A must necessarily be interpreted as a politicized history text aiming at the reconstruction of the unity of the Dominican Order under a single Master. Finally, it is important to note that outside the Dominican Order, Thomas’s relic cult was celebrated apparently only in Toulouse. Thomas’s case is not a medieval exception: translation feasts were generally created to respond to the needs of the community, which became a new custodian of the relics, that is, the cults remained rather local. But, interestingly, Thomas’s dies natalis feast seems to have achieved new popularity in France, especially in Paris, at the end of the fourteenth century.56 The new implementation of the old dies natalis feast was possibly a consequence of Thomas’s status as one of the principal Dominican cults in the regions faithful to the Avignon pope. Besides the perception of Thomas as an Avignon saint, the reason behind the new success can also be attributed to the fact that his arm-relic was received with great solemnity in Paris in 1369. Around Toulouse, Thomas also performed miracles connected to 52 Nocentini, ‘Lo ”Scriptorium”’, 98, 100. 53 Acta Capitulorum Generalium III, 104-5. 54 Montagnes, ‘Le rôle du Midi’, 317-22. 55 Mews and Räsänen, ‘The Translation of the Holy Body’. 56 This success can be grasped, for example, from the liturgical books used in Paris at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the f ifteenth century. In some of them Thomas’s feast is an addition, and especially in more recent ones, it is original. See Paris, MS 341, fol. 149r; MS 342, fols 3r, 567va-568va; MS 344, fol. 439rb; MS 345, fols 466v-470v; MS 406, fols 2r, 247vb-248rb.

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the Hundred Years War.57 This may equally have boosted his cult in the Kingdom of France. Although Thomas’s relics provided the impetus for the success of his cult, the old feast of the dies natalis was probably easier to adopt elsewhere than Toulouse as it concentrated uniquely on the praise of the saint, and not the city.

Conclusion

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It is hardly a coincidence that the versatile material relating to Thomas’s translation was copied at one of the leading convents of the Dominican Observance reform in Italy. As we have seen, the other interesting set of the sources comes from Colmar, the first Observant house in the whole Order. From the material in Paris, we read the signs of the Schism and conflict. Thus, in my opinion, it can be argued that St. Thomas Aquinas was an important part of the politicized history of the late medieval reform and the Schism in the Dominican Order. His cult was a cult of the reformer, believed to be able to heal controversies inside the Order. Yet one detail in the Historia translationis, all but insignificant, emphasizes the collaboration of two principal figures of the Dominican Schism, Masters Elias and Raymond, for the translation of Thomas’s corpse to Toulouse. After the Schism, it may have been hoped that this imaginary would prepare the rapture inside the Order as well as in promulgating the feast and the reform. Indeed, after the Schism the fifteenth century saw growing popularity of the feast of Thomas’s translation in the Dominican Order and wide success of Thomas’s saintly figure in Western Europe.

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Alia historia translationis, Acta Sanctorum, Martii I. Paris and Rome: Victor Palmé, 1865, cols 737-739. Bartolomea Riccoboni, Cronaca del Corpus Domini and Necrologio del Corpus Domini. In Giovanni Dominici, Lettere spirituali, edited by Maria Teresa Casella and Giovanni Pozzi. Spicilegium Friburgense 13. Freiburg: Edizioni Universitarie, 1969. Bologna, Archivio dei Predicatori, MS Serie VII 10160 manoscritto di Cividale (=MS A) Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 54. Colmar, Bibliothèque municipale, MSS 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 301, 303, 308, 309, 310, 313, 316, 317, 404, 405. S.G. Douais, Mgr. Les reliques de Saint Thomas d’Aquin. Textes originaux. Paris: Librairie Vve CH. Poussielgue, 1903. Melbourne, State Library of Victoria, RARESF 096.1 R66A (=Poissy Antiphonal). Miracula facta in translatione sacri corporis Sancti Thome, Acta Sanctorum, Martii I. Paris and Rome: Victor Palmé, 1865, cols. 733-36. Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MSS 341, 342, 344, 345, 356, 406 Thomas Aquinas, Principium rigans montes. In Corpus Thomisticum, http://www. corpusthomisticum.org/otd.html. Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings. Introduced and translated by Ralph McInerny. Penguin Books, 1998. Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 610. Venice, Biblioteca nazionale Marziana, MS III 121. Vuori, Hilkka-Liisa, Marika Räsänen, and Seppo Heikkinen, eds. The Medieval Offices of Saint Thomas Aquinas, MusDoc Research Publications series. SibeliusAkatemia: Helsinki, 2019.

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Secondary Sources Alce, Venturino. ‘La riforma dell’Ordine domenicano nel ‘400 e nel ‘500 veneto’. In Riforma della Chiesa, cultura e spiritualità nel Quattrocento veneto, edited by F.G. Trolese, 333-43. Italia Benedettina 6. Cesena: Badia di Santa Maria del Monte, 1984. Barthelmé, Annette. La réforme dominicaine au XVe siècle en Alsace et dans l’ensamble de la province de Teutonie. Strasbourg: Heitz, 1931. Bauch, Martin. ‘The Relics of Roman Churches in Nicolò Signorili’s Descriptio Urbis Romae’. In Relics, Identity and Memory in Medieval Europe, edited by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and E. Jeffrey Richards, 115-84. Europa Sacra 21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. Bellito, Christopher M. ‘The Reform Context of the Great Western Schism’. In A Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), edited by Joëlle Rollo-Koster

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and Thomas M. Izbicki, 303-31. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, vol. 17. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Brand, Benjamin. Holy Treasure and Sacred Song: Relic Cults and their Liturgies in Medieval Tuscany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. Delaruelle, Étienne. ‘La translation des reliques de Saint Thomas d’Aquin à Toulouse (1369) et la politique universitaire d’Urbain V’. Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 56 (1955): 129-46. Fois, Mario. ‘I religiosi Decadenza e fermenti innovatori’. In La chiesa di Venezia tra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by Giovanni Vian, 147-82. Contributi alla Storia della Chiesa Veneziana 3. Venice: Edizioni Studium Cattolico Veneziano, 1989. Heffernan, Thomas J. Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hillenbrand, Eugen. ‘Die Observantenbewegung in der deutschen Ordensprovinz der Dominikaner’. In Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen), edited by Kaspar Elm, 219-71. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989. Hohlstein, Michael. ‘Sacra lipsana: The Relics of Catherine of Siena in the Context of Propagation, Piety, and Community’. In Catherine of Siena: The Creation of a Cult, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Gabriela Signori, 47-68. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Klaniczay, Gabor. ‘Proving Sanctity in the Canonization Processes (Saint Elizabeth and Saint Margaret of Hungary)’. In Procès de canonisation au Moyen Age: Aspects juridiques et religieux, edited by Gabor Klaniczay, 117-48. Rome: École française de Rome, 2004. Liturgy of the Medieval Church. 2nd ed. Edited by Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005. Malo, Robyn. Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Mandonnet, Pierre. ‘Thomas d’Aquin novice prêcheur (1244-1246)’. In Revue Thomiste: Revue doctrinale de théologie et de philosophie. Vol. 8, 3-24. Toulouse: École de théologie, 1925. Meerssemann, Gilles Gérard. ‘Études sur l’ordre des frères prêcheurs au début du grande schisme’. AFP 25 (1955): 213-57. Mews, Constant. ‘The Historia translationis sacri corporis Thome Aquinatis of Raymundus Hugonis: An Eyewitness Account and its Significance’. In Relics, Identity and Memory in Medieval Europe, edited by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards, 257-84. Europa Sacra 21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016.

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—, and Marika Räsänen. ‘The Translation of the Holy Body of Thomas Aquinas from Fossanova to Toulouse: The Original Narrative by Raymundus Hugonis’. Unpublished article. Meyer, Christian. Collections d’Alsace, de Franche-Comté et de Lorraine, I Colmar, Bibliothèque municipale. Catalogue des manuscrits notés du Moyen Âge conservés dans les Bibliothèques publiques de France. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. Montagnes, Bernard. ‘Le rôle du Midi dominicain au temps du Grand Schisme’. In Le Midi et le Grand Schisme d’Occident, 305-30. Cahiers de Fanjeaux 39. Toulouse: Editions Privat, 2004. Mortier, Daniel Antonin. Histoire des maitres généraux de l’ordre des frères prêcheurs. Vol. 3, 1324-1400. Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1907. Nocentini, Silvia. ‘Lo “Scriptorium” di Tommaso Caffarini a Venezia’. Hagiographica: Rivista di agiografia e biografia della Società internazionale per lo studio del Medio Evo Latino 12 (2005): 79-144. Prouvost, Yveline. ‘Les miracles de Pierre de Luxembourg (1387-1390)’. In Hagiographie et culte des saints en France méridionale (XIIIe-XVe siècle), 481-506. Cahiers de Fanjeaux 37. Toulouse: Privat, 2002. Räsänen, Marika. ‘Family vs Order: Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Dominican Habit in the Narrative tradition of the Order’. In Identity and Alterity in Hagiography and the Cult of Saints, edited by Ana Marinković and Trpimir Vedriš, 201-18. Bibliotheca Hagiotheca, Series Colloquia 1. Zagreb: Hagiotheca, 2010. —. ‘The Memory of St Thomas Aquinas in Orvieto’. In Relics, Identity and Memory in Medieval Europe, edited by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards, 285-317. Europa Sacra 21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. —. Thomas Aquinas’s Relics as Focus for Conflict and Cult in the Late Middle Ages: The Restless Corpse. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Räsänen, Marika, Seppo Heikkinen, and Hilkka-Liisa Vuori. ‘From a Hiding Place to the Eternal Glory: Thomas Aquinas’s Saintly Presence in Dominican Liturgy’. Quaestiones medii aevi novae 22 (2017) 53-80. Richards, Earl Jeffrey. ‘Ceremonies of Power: The Arrival of Thomas Aquinas’ Relics in Toulouse and Paris in the Context of the Hundred Years War’. In Relics, Identity and Memory in Medieval Europe, edited by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and E. Jeffrey Richards, 319-52. Europa Sacra 21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. Tilatti, Andrea. ‘La cattura di Tommaso d’Aquino da parte dei parenti’. In Ovidio Capitani quaranta anni per la storia medioevale. Vol. 2, edited by Maria Consiglia De Matteis, 345-57. Bologna: Patron editore, 2003. Torrell, Jean-Pierre O.P. Initiation à saint Thomas d’Aquin: Sa personne et son œuvre. Paris: Editions du Cerf; Fribourg: Editions Universitaires de Fribourg, 1993.

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Vauchez, Andre. La saintété en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age d’après les procés de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques. Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 241. Rome: École Française de Rome, 1981. Weinstein, Daniel, and R.M. Bell. Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Christendom, 1000-1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Wilson, Stephen. ‘Introduction’. In Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, edited by S. Wilson, 1-53. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

About the Author

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Marika Räsänen is Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Turku. She is a scholar of the cultural history of medieval religion, with a particular focus upon relics and hagiography.

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Section 3 Theological Transmissions:

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Intellectual Culture after 1200

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9

Food for the Journey The Thirteenth-Century French Version of Guiard of Laon’s Sermon on the Twelve Fruits of the Eucharist Janice Pinder Abstract The one surviving French sermon on the Eucharist of Guiard of Laon, bishop of Cambrai (1238-1247) and supporter of the movement to establish the feast of Corpus Christi, was long thought to be the record of vernacular preaching by the bishop, until the discovery of a Latin original prompted a reassessment. Using all available manuscript evidence, and carefully comparing the Latin and French sermons, I position the French sermon as a work of vernacular theology created during Guiard’s episcopate, infused with the spirituality of Eucharistic devotion that culminated in the Corpus Christi movement. It was well received by an elite lay audience, continuing to circulate in collections of devotional texts for the next two centuries.

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Keywords: Eucharist, Vernacular Theology, Sermon

Among the theorists of the Eucharist in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Guiard of Laon is overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. Few histories of the development of the sacrament mention him, and he appears as a minor figure in histories of scholastic theology. Nonetheless, the evidence assembled by his modern biographer, Peter Boeren, suggests that among his contemporaries he had a reputation as an expert on the Eucharist.1 Recent scholarship knows him best as a supporter of the movement to establish the feast of Corpus Christi. He was among the experts consulted by Juliana of Mont Cornillon, the holy woman 1 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 40.

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whose inspiration lay behind the feast, and seems to have been favorable to it himself.2 Guiard’s contemporaries also celebrated him as a preacher; over 400 sermons are attributed to him in Schneyer’s Repertorium, most of which are preserved in university sermon collections. Apart from a handful of quaestiones, these sermons constitute the written record of his work. Arguably, though, his most successful sermon was one which did not find its way into those collections, and which circulated mainly in French, Dutch, and German translations. The thirteenth-century French version was particularly successful: eleven copies have now been identified, three of which date from the thirteenth century and a further six from 1300 to 1317.3 There are also two later translations into French. One is embedded in Robert the Carthusian’s Le Chastel perilleux, written in the fourteenth century for his cousin Rose, a nun at Fontevrault. The other is found in a late-fifteenth-century manuscript of the Chastel, and is different from both Robert’s version and the earlier one.4 This chapter focuses on the thirteenth-century version, which provides a precious window into the reception of Guiard’s Eucharistic theology among laypeople and underlines his importance as a supporter of the holy women of Liège and their efforts to establish the Corpus Christi feast. This French version of the sermon was clearly well-regarded as a source of teaching on the Eucharist among laypeople and their spiritual advisers; not only did it continue to be copied throughout the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth, it was the most common freestanding treatise on the Eucharist in French collections of spiritual advice throughout the period. It therefore occupied a significant place in the mediation of Eucharistic theology to the laity – mediation not only in the sense of transmission from the clerical sphere to the lay, but also of reception, since the choices of manuscript commissioners, compilers, and readers played a role in which elements were circulated. Implicit in readers’ choices was the match between what they read and their own religious practices. Lay readers also shaped the religious texts created for them by their expectations of form and language, just as they shaped the various genres of secular literature. The French sermon 2 Newman, ‘The Life of Juliana of Cornillon’, II.7. The others were Jacques Pantaleon, Hugh of St. Cher, and three Dominican friars from Liège, Giles, John, and Gerard. The hagiographer describes Guiard and Hugh as shining ‘like great lights of heaven because of their life and learning’. 3 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon was aware only of two; Zink, La Prédication en langue romane lists a further four; while Oliver, ‘Je pecherise renc grasces a vos’ adds two more. Additional copies are traceable through the JONAS database, and more may be revealed as that invaluable tool evolves http://jonas.irht.cnrs.fr/. 4 See Madureira, ‘Modelos e traduções’.

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shows evidence of this shaping, sharing structural and rhetorical features with the network of vernacular works of spiritual advice within which it was transmitted, and which distinguish it from its Latin source. Little is currently known about the genesis of the French sermon. When Guiard’s biographer Boeren edited it, he was aware of only two manuscripts, and did not yet know of the single surviving copy in Latin. On the basis of what he believed to be the earliest manuscript, he concluded that the sermon had been preached in French to the nuns of Origny-Sainte-Benoite in the second decade of the thirteenth century, long before Guiard became bishop of Cambrai, and before Juliana of Mont Cornillon began to share her ideas about a feast centered on the Eucharist.5 Among the copies that have come to light since the publication of Boeren’s edition, however, several are earlier than his base manuscript, and offer new evidence about the sermon’s early circulation. Furthermore, the assumption that the French text was a record of a sermon delivered by Guiard himself in French was contradicted by the discovery of the Latin sermon, making the idea of a French translation more likely. However, although the edition of the French text has been available since 1956, and one of the Latin text since 1957, the relation between the two has not been explored in any depth.6 This study uses this new evidence to uncover more about the circumstances of the French sermon’s creation and the textual community that created it. Examining the evidence provided by the manuscripts from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that are now known, it argues for a much later date for its creation than that advanced by Boeren, one which places it squarely in the period of his episcopate and of the movement to establish the feast of Corpus Christi. It investigates the relationship between the French and Latin sermons on the twelve fruits of the Eucharist, analyzing the French author’s treatment of his Latin source to uncover evidence of its intended audience and connections with the climate of Eucharistic devotion surrounding the establishment of the feast of Corpus Christi. It also considers the French sermon in relation to the early liturgy for Corpus Christi, and to other vernacular spiritual advice literature, to throw more light on the textual community that produced it. Before turning to the sermons, however, it begins with a brief consideration of Guiard of Laon and his contribution to Eucharistic theology and practice.

5 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 131. 6 The two editions are Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 310-19; and Ampe, ‘Een oud “Florilegicum eucharistaricum”’.

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Guiard of Laon and the Eucharist Guiard of Laon first appears in the documentary record in 1212, as the chaplain of Robert of Châtillon, bishop of Laon, having previously completed the studies that made him a master of theology, possibly in Paris.7 From Laon he went to Troyes, where he was archdeacon from 1215 to 1221. Subsequently he became a canon of Notre Dame in Paris, a regent master in the faculty of theology, and was chancellor of the University in 1237. The next year he was elected bishop of Cambrai, where he remained for the next ten years, retiring briefly to the monastery of Afflighem before his death in 1248. As bishop of Cambrai, Guiard was favorable to the relatively new religious movements of the mendicants and the beguines. He gave the Dominicans and the Franciscans permission to preach and to seek alms throughout his diocese, and made several decisions favorable to beguines.8 His interactions with some of the holy women in his diocese and the neighboring diocese of Liège are recorded in the vitae of Lutgarde of Aywières, Margaret of Ypres, and Juliana of Mont Cornillon. He is reported to have been present at the meeting where Juliana’s ideas for the feast of Corpus Christi were presented to Robert of Thourotte, the bishop of Liège. But while the events that connect Guiard with the feast of Corpus Christi occurred in the last decade of his life, it seems that his Eucharistic theology was developed much earlier. Boeren characterizes the sacramental theology of his writings on the Eucharist (particularly in relation to the sacrament of penance) as that of the first quarter of the thirteenth century, and the twelve benefits of the Eucharist, the hallmark of his preaching on the subject, are referred to in one of his quaestiones, composed before 1228.9 In Guiard’s university sermons, pastoral interests take precedence over speculative theology, and the quaestiones that survive focus on moral questions.10 At Notre Dame he may have held the post of theologus, the person in charge of pastoral formation of the canons (one document refers to him with that title), which brought with it a regency in the faculty of theology.11 His episcopal activity also indicates a keen interest in maintaining the quality of pastoral work in his diocese, through examination of candidates for benefices, recommending reference books, and commissioning synodal 7 This brief account follows Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 16. and Boeren, ‘GUIARD DE LAON, évêque, vers 1170-1248’, col. 1129. 8 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 83. 9 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 243. 10 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 40. 11 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 34-35.

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sermons on such topics as the duties of a pastor, preaching, and the sacraments. He was active in promoting Eucharistic piety in his diocese, and this interest no doubt drew him to the holy women who practiced it so wholeheartedly.12 Given Guiard’s pastoral interests, it is not surprising that his writing and preaching on the Eucharist did not engage directly with the questions that exercised speculative theologians of the time, centered on the transformation which took place during consecration, but was chiefly concerned with its effects on those who received it. Guiard was the first theologian to show a deep interest in the benefits of the Eucharist. Earlier writers, including Bernard of Clairvaux, talked about three or four effects. Guiard’s contribution was to elaborate these into a system of twelve, subdivided into four groups of three: those which heal the soul damaged by sin, those which purify and strengthen the soul, those through which the life of Christ transforms the soul, and those which give a foretaste of eternal life.13 A feature of his system was its use of theories of digestion and of the Galenic five-fold effects of medicine.14

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The Latin Sermon The manuscript Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, 8609-20 contains a set of texts on the Eucharist, one of which bears the rubric Sermo domini Wiardi de duodecim fructibus sacramenti. This part of the manuscript dates from the fourteenth century; it has been added to a thirteenth-century hagiographic collection. The manuscript belonged to the Cistercian women’s convent of Ter Cameren near Brussels, and it was probably written at the nearby Cistercian monastery of Villers-en-Brabant.15 Earlier copies must have existed, since the Brussels manuscript is too late to have been the one from which the French, German, and Dutch translations, which are all represented in thirteenth-century copies, were made. This sermon is not 12 On Guiard’s reforming episcopal activity, see Bériou, ‘La prédication synodale au XIIIe siècle d’après l’exemple cambrésien’; and Caspers, ‘Requirements for Becoming and Remaining a Pastor’. 13 De XII fructibus venerabilis sacramenti, ed. Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 320-27. See also Boeren, ‘GUIARD DE LAON, évêque, vers 1170-1248’, 1129. 14 Preservativa, curativa, conservativa, confortativa, mitigativa. Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 246, 252-57. 15 Ampe, ‘Een oud “Florilegicum eucharistaricum”’, 303; Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 262n.88.

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preserved in any of the collections of sermons dating from Guiard’s time in Paris; it seems to have been transmitted exclusively through monastic networks. Internal evidence indicates that the sermon preserved here was preached to the Premonstratensian canons of Saint Martin in Laon.16 There is no indication of the date, but Boeren suggested that the choice of an anecdote about the siege of Acre would only have made sense while it was still fresh in people’s memories; he felt that this would not have been the case after 1230.17 It was perhaps no accident that Guiard chose the benefits of the Eucharist as his subject when he preached at St. Martin’s, a senior Premonstratensian house. Eucharistic devotion was a central element of Premonstratensian spirituality, and authors from the order had written about it, some in terms recalled by Guiard’s sermon.18 There is no evidence, however, that St. Martin’s played a role in the preservation of the sermon. Given the probable origin of the surviving manuscript at Villers, and that Guiard was especially close to the Cistercians, it seems likely that it was transmitted through Cistercian networks, which perhaps included the Cistercian monks Guiard chose as companions in his episcopal household.19 The sermon takes as its theme Apoc. 22:2: ‘Ex utraque parte fluminis lignum vite afferens fructus duodecim per singulos menses reddens fructum suum, folia ligni ad sanitatem’. The first part develops the theme and establishes its connection to the sacraments. Christ is both tree and fruit, but when received worthily in the sacrament, this fruit is manifested in twelve benefits. There follows the enumeration and illustration of the twelve fruits (here without the subdivision into groups). The second part of the sermon deals with the conditions for receiving the sacrament worthily, ending with a warning against staying away from the Eucharist too long. 16 Ampe, ‘Een oud “Florilegicum eucharistaricum”’, 307. 17 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 131. Boeren was referring to the French sermon, but the anecdote is also in the Latin sermon. 18 Adam Scot in a sermon on the Eucharist preached to the canons called it the ‘single most efficacious remedy for our wounds’, and Richard the Englishman was one of the authors who listed three benefits: it wipes away sins, strengthens virtues, and raises to eternal life. Petit, The Spirituality of the Premonstratensians, 266, 271. 19 Noting traces of Cistercian influence in Guiard’s thought, Boeren speculated that he may have belonged to the order for a while early in his life, before his university studies. He was invited several times to preach to the nuns at the Cistercian abbey of Antoine-des-Champs during his time in Paris. When he was appointed to the see of Cambrai, he brought a small number of Cistercian monks with him to serve as chaplains; Boeren suggests that he wanted to live in community with them, observing the Cistercian rule. Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 14-15, 42, 52.

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The method of the exposition of the benefits is to introduce each one and adduce a number of scriptural and patristic authorities to illustrate or explicate it. Explanations are supported by scriptural examples (often themselves developed allegorically), examples from everyday life, and an anecdote from the recent crusade. Many of the expositions of the fruits contain suggested prayers and meditations.

The French sermon

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Manuscripts There are now eleven known manuscripts of the French sermon, and one unconfirmed copy destroyed in 1944. P Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 6447, fols. 360ra361va, 1275-76 L London, British Library, MS Harley 2930, fols. 186v-193v, c. 1280 T Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 9400, fols. 79v-82r, c. 1290 M Metz, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 535, fols. (?), end 13c (destroyed)20 C Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château (Musée Condé), MS 134 (1014), fols. 75rb-76ra, start 14c. G Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliotek, MS Codices gallici 914, f. 38ra-39vb, start 14c.21 A Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 1802, fols. 107ra112ra, early 14c.22 Q Saint-Quentin, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 86, pp. 529-43, 1315-1723 S Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 939, fols. 101v-105, 1327 B Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 3458, fols. 14r-21r, end 14c F Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 1879, fols. 153-161, 15c N Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 940, fols. 133r-140r, 15c The oldest three (P, L, T) date from the last quarter of the thirteenth century. All three are beautifully made illuminated manuscripts: two miscellanies 20 Descriptions and some transcriptions in Meyer, ‘Notice du ms. 535 de la Bibl. Mun. de Metz’; and Långfors, ‘Notice des manuscrits 535 de la bibliotheque municipale de Metz et 10047 des nouvelles acquisitions du fonds français de la bibliotheque nationale’. 21 Hasenohr, ‘Isidore de Séville, auteur ascétique “français”?’, 311-12. 22 Field, ‘From Speculum anime to Miroir de l’âme’, 83-85. 23 Marichal, ‘Les drames liturgiques du Livre de la Trésorerie d’Origny-Sainte-Benoîte’.

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of devotional works for women, one (T) probably made in Tournai or Douai and the other (P) somewhere in Hainault, and one psalter (L), likely to have been made for a beguine in Huy.24 Three of the manuscripts (P, Q, F) have a request for prayers at the end which names Guiard as the original author of the work (P and Q call him bishop of Cambrai, while the much later F has ‘maistre Guymbart de Laon’). While the Latin sermon dates from well before Guiard’s election to the see of Cambrai, and may even have been first preached when he was still in Laon, it seems likely that the French version was made later. The earliest known copy, P, dates from around 1275. However, at the end of the sermon in P the reader is asked to pray for Guiard, the bishop of Cambrai, in terms that suggest he is still living:

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En le fin proie iou a tous cels et a toutes celes ki cest sermon liront et oront ke il prient por maistre Guiart levesque de cambray et por celui ki lescrist ke dex lor otroit se grasce et lor doint vraie conissance de lui amer et seruir si com il doiuent iusques en le fin.25

P was made over 25 years after Guiard’s death, so the prayer must have been copied from a manuscript created when he was still alive. This suggests that the translation was made during his episcopate (1238-1247), since the prayer names him as bishop of Cambrai. Later manuscripts that include the passage either ask for prayers for Guiard’s soul (Q, F) or ask for prayers without naming the author (A). A comparison of the three earliest manuscripts also suggests that the text had been circulating for some time before they were made, lending support to the theory that the translation was made while Guiard was bishop of Cambrai. Although the text of the sermon is relatively stable, variants already present in the oldest manuscripts and reflected in the later ones show that the transmission had developed to a point where there was some divergence by the 1270s and 1280s. A telling point on which the three oldest manuscripts (L, T, P) diverge is the translation of a sentence from the Latin sermon ‘Unde filio sumenti salubrem potum dicit mater: 24 For T, see Vanwijnsberghe, ‘De fin or et d’azur’, 10; and Hunt, Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts, 141. For P and L, see Oliver, ‘Je pecherise renc grasces a vos’, 251, 254; and Oliver, Gothic Manuscript Illumination in the Diocese of Liege, 166. Suggestions that P was made for Margaret of Flanders are discounted by Hanno Wijsman on the grounds that it is absent from Flemish comital inventories before 1469: Luxury Bound, 228. 25 ‘At the end, I beg all those men and women who read and hear this sermon to pray for master Guiard, bishop of Cambrai, and for the one who wrote it down, that God grant his grace and give them true understanding to love and serve him as they should right to the end.’

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Bibe sanitatem’. L is closest to the Latin, translating mater as mere. The early-fourteenth-century manuscript G also has mere. T, while otherwise giving the same translation of the sentence as L, has mires (‘doctor’) instead of mere, a logical correction for a scribe unfamiliar with the Latin source since the passage is about medicine and has earlier mentioned visiting a doctor. Q and A also have mires. The other thirteenth-century manuscript P, which may be the oldest of the three, has a completely different reading which departs radically from the Latin: ‘Si com vous veez ke li hom quant il est malades ke li medecine li done le santé del cor’.26 The text of P otherwise corresponds closely to L and T, so it may be that this reading originated in an attempt to reconstruct from the context a sentence that was illegible in the exemplar, by the scribe either of P or of the manuscript he was copying from. This reading is reflected, with some variations in wording, in C, F, and N. The places of production of the earliest manuscripts suggest that the translation was made somewhere in Hainault or the diocese of Liège. The Cistercian abbey of Villers, close to the border between the two regions and the probable place of origin of the surviving Latin copy of the sermon, is a strong candidate. Villers is well-known as a source of spiritual support for Cistercian nuns as well as for beguines in the diocese of Liège, and a center of production of hagiography and devotional texts, in Latin and the vernacular.27 It has even closer connections with the Corpus Christi movement, however: it was the burial place of Juliana of Mont Cornillon and an early adopter of the feast. In 1251 Hugh of Saint-Cher established an indulgence attached to its celebration in the abbey church, one of his efforts to promote the feast after the death of Robert of Thourotte.28 It is plausible that monks of Villers would have already been collecting teaching material on the Eucharist during Guiard’s lifetime, and made a French version of the famous bishop’s sermon for the women to whom they were providing spiritual guidance. It is also possible, however, that the translation was made somewhere else, perhaps even in Guiard’s own household in Cambrai. Features of the French Translation The French text is by no means a close translation of the Latin, and the ways in which it differs from the Latin text offer precious indications of its author’s 26 ‘Just as you see that when a man is sick the medicine gives him bodily health.’ 27 See Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 83, 88-90; and Lefèvre, ‘L’abbaye de Villers et le monde des moniales et des béguines au XIIIe siècle’. 28 Walters, Corrigan, and Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi, 12.

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purposes and its intended audience. The translator’s method is consistent with Michel Zink’s observation that translators of Latin sermons spelt out points a non-Latin-reading audience would not be expected to understand immediately, avoided abstractions, gave plenty of concrete examples, and tried to anticipate misunderstandings.29 In what can be seen as a simplification of content, the French version only corresponds to the first part of the Latin sermon, omitting the part dealing with the conditions necessary for worthy reception of the sacrament. It also changes the theme to Arbor bona and turns the tree of life passage into the prothema, omitting the initial development of the theme and moving directly to listing the benefits. These editorial decisions not only simplify the focus of the sermon, however; they place a stronger emphasis on the reasons for receiving the sacrament frequently, and reduce the emphasis on the state of the receiver. The table below shows the arrangement of the Latin and French texts, using P:

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Table 9.1 Brussels, Bibl Roy 8609-20 (fols)

BnF, fr. 6447 (fols)

Primus fructus est sanatio et mundatio animarum. Peccatum enum vulnus est et macula anime. Secundus fructus est quod absolvit a reatu pene debite, vel ex toto vel ex magna parte. Tercius fructus, quia hoc sacramentum munit animam, et premunit contra instantes temptationes, sicut castra armis et victualibus muniuntur contra hostes.Tercius fructus, quia hoc sacramentum munit animam, et premunit contra instantes temptationes, sicut castra armis et victualibus muniuntur contra hostes. Quartus fructus est, quod purificat animam ab importunis cogitaionibus et inhonestis affectionibus. Quintus fructus est restitucio perditorum. Quintus fructus est restitucio perditorum.

Li premiers fruis est ke il sane l’ame ki est malade de pechie. Li secons biens ke li sacremens fait ce est ke il desloie l’ame de pechie et de paine. Li tiers biens est ke li sacremens restore cou ke perdu estoit.Li tiers biens est ke li sacremens restore cou ke perdu estoit.

Li quarte cose ke li sacremens fait ce est ke il purefie le cuer. Li quins dons ke li sacremens done ce est ke il warnist l’ame ausi com li haus hom warnist sen castel quant il crient ses anemis.Li quins dons ke li sacremens done ce est ke il warnist l’ame ausi com li haus hom warnist sen castel quant il crient ses anemis.

29 Zink, La Prédication en langue romane, 177.

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Brussels, Bibl Roy 8609-20 (fols)

BnF, fr. 6447 (fols)

Sextus fructus est, quia sicut cibus carnis corpus corroborat, sic panis iste cor hominibus confirmat, ut possit resistere temptationibus, et virtutum ardua ascendere. Septimus fructus est in melius commutation. Septimus fructus est in melius commutation.

Li sisimes biens ki le sacremens fait ce est ke il conferme. Car li pains dont dauid dist: Panis cor hominis confirmet.

Li sietismes biens ke li sacremens done ce est ke il mue l’ame.Li sietismes biens ke li sacremens done ce est ke il mue l’ame. Li witimes biens ke li sacremens fait ce Octavus fructus est, quia hoc sacramentum est ke il done vie.Li witimes biens ke li mortua vivficat.Octavus fructus est, quia hoc sacremens fait ce est ke il done vie. sacramentum mortua vivficat. Li nueuimes biens ke li sacremens fait ce Nonus fructus est, quod hoc sacramentum est ke il done mouement,* ce est legierete moveri facit animam secundum voluntatem de corage, ki li hom est plus legiers et plus Christi, non secundum motum sensualitatis apparellies en tous les biens.Li nueuimes vel fomitis.Nonus fructus est, quod hoc sacramentum moveri facit animam secundum biens ke li sacremens fait ce est ke il done mouement,* ce est legierete de corage, ki voluntatem Christi, non secundum motum li hom est plus legiers et plus apparellies sensualitatis vel fomitis. en tous les biens. Li disimes biens ke li sacremens fait ce est Decimus fructus est quia fideles per hoc ke il acompaigne l’ame a le compaignie sacramentum intrant in confrariam spiritus del saint esperit, a tous les biens ke on sancti. fait el ciel et en terre, et por cou l’apelon communion ke il nos acompaigne a tous biens. Undecimus fructus est, quia hoc sacramentum Li onzimes biens ke li sacremens fait ce est dat delicias mundo palato cordis. ke il done delisces. Li douzimes biens ke li sacremens fait ce Duodecimus fructus est et preparatio ad est ke il done vie parmenable. gloriam et eius adeptio.Duodecimus fructus est et preparatio ad gloriam et eius adeptio.

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Note: * MS viuement; LT mouement.

As Wybren Scheepsma has noted, benefits three and five are reversed in the French translation, and many of the authorities (in particular, Rabanus Maurus and John Chrysostom) are omitted.30 But a close comparison of the French and Latin texts reveals that the differences go much deeper. While much of the content of the French text can be matched to passages in the Latin, it does not always appear in the same place, and there are other passages in the French which have no model in the Latin at all. One of the principles governing the translator’s changes seems to be the selection and making explicit of relevant 30 Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 166. While in the Latin the authorities are often left to speak for themselves (their significance may have been elaborated when the sermon was preached), the French contains fewer authorities and more explanatory text overall.

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doctrinal points. Supporting examples and allegorical developments are sometimes retained, and sometimes repurposed from other parts of the sermon. Since most of the benefits derive in one way or another from the Eucharist’s nourishing or healing properties, much of this supporting material can work, with a little adjustment, in different places. This adjustment often involves the addition of circumstantial detail which makes the example more immediate and relevant to a lay audience. Many of these differences are illustrated in the two transposed sections, on the third and fifth benefits. In the Latin sermon, the third benefit is that the sacrament provisions the soul against attack, in the same way that a lord provisions his castle against siege. It identifies the provisions of the castle (bread, wine, and salt meat) with the flesh and blood of Christ, and develops an idea based on a quotation from John Chrysostom about the body of Christ repelling demons and attracting angels, with an example directed at the Premonstratensian canons of St. Martin in Laon to whom the sermon was preached (‘vos claustrales’), evoking the protective merits of their relic of the arm of St. Laurence. In the French sermon, where provisioning is dealt with as the fifth benefit, the translator has omitted the quotation from Chrysostom, its development, and the example, probably deciding that it was too closely tied to the monastic context of the Latin sermon. The space thus created is filled with material from the Latin benefit five, restitucio perditorum. The Latin benefit five develops an analogy between the physical restoration of the body through eating, and the restoration by the Eucharist of that which the soul has lost through sin. There is a long allegorical development of Joel 2:24-25, ‘Implebuntur aree frumento, et redundabunt torcularia vino et oleo, et reddam vobis annos, quos comedit locusta et bruchus et rubigo et erucha’, in which Christ is identified with the wheat, and the Virgin with the threshing floor. Embedded within this is an anecdote about a woman at the siege of Acre who first donated all her wealth to help fill the moat so the city could be taken, and when that did not suffice, threw herself in. It is used to illustrate the immense capacity of the Virgin’s spirit and womb (‘mens et venter’) created by her humility, which Christ filled with himself after he had not been able to fill it with grace. In the Latin sermon, all this exposition is working towards a return to the theme of restitution with the last part of the biblical passage, ‘reddam vobis annos …’. In the French version, the core material from this section relating to the Eucharist as food appears in the section on provisioning the castle (benefit five in the French), reshaping it to fit its new context and audience. The quotation from Joel is preceded by Gideon’s request for a sign that God will deliver him from his enemies, asking that a fleece spread on the

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threshing-floor be soaked with dew while the ground around it remains dry (Judges 6:37). The conflation of the two passages produces a dialogue between Gideon and God:

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Nos trouons que Gedeon priat nostre sangnur qu’ilh li demostraist une signe de sa uenue que li airs demorast secche et li uiares fust molhies, et nostre sires li dist q’avenroit [quant] li aire seroit plaine de froment et li pressoirs soriroit de uin. (L fol. 188v).31

Then follows a simplified development of the allegory of the threshing floor, and wine-press, wheat and wine, and the woman at Acre, some of which follows the Latin quite closely. At the end, the Latin development of the Virgin as areole aromatum (Song of Songs 5.13) is replaced by a different metaphor: Mary is the sachet of spices that is used to make a restorative drink, claré. The French returns to the Latin model at the end, with a close translation of its prayer.32 The French sermon’s treatment of the restoration of what has been lost, as benefit three, uses only the last part of the Latin passage, where ‘reddam vobis annos …’ is interpreted as restoring the spiritual benefits lost through sin. The French sermon has no allegorical development here; it devotes all the space to explaining the doctrine of ‘biens mortefiés’ (‘bona perdita per peccatum mortificati’), evidently a point that the translator felt needed to be made clear to a lay audience. A similar narrowing of focus to highlight a doctrinal point occurs in the second benefit, where the French sermon focuses on one aspect of the theology of sin and its remission and carefully explains the concepts of guilt (coulpe) and penance (penitance). Overall, the French sermon transmits Guiard’s key teachings on the benefits of the Eucharist: its medicinal and nourishing effects on the soul; its absolving of venial sins and mortal sins that have been confessed; and 31 ‘We find that Gideon asked our Lord to show him, as a sign of his coming, that the threshingfloor would remain dry and the fleece would be wet, and our Lord told him that he would be coming when the threshing-floor was full of wheat, the wine-press overflowing with wine.’ P has arche (‘coffer’ or ‘kneading trough’) instead of aire, but is the only manuscript with that reading. 32 ‘Domine, castrum consciencie mee inerme est; penuria affectum est, venio ad te, dei virtutem et ad eorum auxilium, qui tecum sunt. Venio ad te, a quo omnis habundancia et sufficiencia est. Venio, inquam, et reddo tibi castrum meum, ut ipsum defendas armis muniens, et cybis spiritualibus adimplens’ is translated as: ‘Sire ie tieng cest castel de vous si nel ai de coi garnir et si ai molt d’anemis ki prendre le voelent. Sire ie vieng a vous ke vous garnissies le castel de m’ame de vous meisme Dex.’ (P fol. 369vb) (‘Lord, I hold this castle from you and I have nothing to provision it with and many enemies who want to take it. Lord, I come to you so you will provision the castle of my soul with yourself, God.’)

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the spiritual delights it affords. It includes most of the prayers from the Latin sermon, and both sermons end with an encouragement to receive the Eucharist as often as possible.

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The French Sermon and Corpus Christi In her seminal study of the Liège psalters, with their emphasis on Eucharistic prayers, Judith Oliver noted that the period during which they were produced corresponded closely to that of the efforts to have the feast of Corpus Christi inserted into the Church calendar (1246-1311).33 The bulk of the French sermon manuscripts date from the second half of this period, and the earliest ones come from an era that significantly overlaps that of the psalters. One of the sermon manuscripts, L, is among the psalters identified by Oliver as having been made for a beguine, and she noted the correspondences between the sermon’s references to daily mass and to receiving communion from the chalice as well as the host, and the experience of a beguine living in the diocese of Liège.34 The translation itself is likely to have been made towards the beginning of the period of psalter production, which in turn is just after the time when Juliana and John of Mont Cornillon composed the first office for the feast. A comparison of the off ice and both the Latin and French sermons reveals some shared elements. Like Guiard’s sermons, it is rooted in the sacramental theology of the preceding century, drawing texts and inspiration predominantly from Alger of Liège and Hugh of Saint Victor.35 Boeren noticed traces of what he called ‘psycho-physiological’ – medical and digestive – vocabulary also used by Guiard.36 Certainly, the aspect of the Eucharist as food is foremost, as the opening words of the first antiphon Animorum cibus suggest, and it appears in many of the antiphons; transformation through eating is also a recurrent theme.The sequence Laureata plebs fidelis has some specific points in common with the twelve fruits sermon in both Latin and French.37 Strophe 3 alludes to the tree of life and to Aser’s bread, 33 Oliver, Gothic Manuscript Illumination in the Diocese of Liege, 37. 34 Daily mass is attested in beguine statutes, and the chalice continued to be offered to the congregation in the diocese of Liège after it had been withdrawn elsewhere. Oliver, ‘Je pecherise renc grasces a vos’, 256. 35 Walters et al., The Feast of Corpus Christi, 61 (the off ice is edited on pp. 150-83); Walters, ‘“Laureata plebs fidelis”’, 72. 36 Boeren, La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 253. 37 The case for Juliana as composer of the music and words of the sequence is made in Walters, ‘“Laureata plebs fidelis”’.

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fit for kings (Gen. 49:20), while strophe 7 calls the Eucharist ‘esus pauperum, nullum querens precium’, recalling Guiard’s reminder in the fifth benefit that those who eat at the table of the Lord do not have to pay for their meal (used in the tenth benefit in the French sermon). Such resemblances do not mean that Guiard’s sermon was a source for the office, but they do point to a congruity of outlook which may help to explain why Guiard’s sermon was translated at that time, and why the translation found a ready audience. This is borne out by two added passages in the French translation that link it to the idiom of Eucharistic devotion reflected in the off ice, and the spirituality of the mulieres religiosae. The notion of the Eucharist as a viaticum, food for the journey through life, comes in the closing lines of the seventh benefit: ‘Car il est vie ki nos soustient en ceste voie. Et nos auons grande voie a aller si auons besoing de grande viande porfitaule’ (P, fol. 360vb).38 This is an addition by the French translator; viaticum is not a concept referenced explicitly in Guiard’s Latin sermon. It appears, however, in two places in the office: in the Benedictus antiphon ‘Panis vite panis angelorum, Ihesu Christe vera mundi vita qui semper nos reficis et vite nunquam deficis ab omni sana languore ut te nostro viatico in terra recreati te ore plenissimo manducemus in eternum’, which resonates strongly with the French, and again in the sequence Laureata plebs fidelis ‘O dulce convivium supernorum civium in terris viaticum nos ducens ad patriam’. The second addition occurs in the French treatment of the ninth benefit. What in Latin is described as making the soul move in accordance with Christ’s will, rather than with its own sensual impulses, in French becomes a movement described as legiereté de corage (‘lightness of heart’). This is a movement of the heart culminating in the inarticulate joy of ecstatic union with the divine. The French sermon uses the Latin term jubilus and gives the standard definition from Gregory the Great, ‘De cest esmouuement vien ioie de cuer ke on apele iubilus. Ceste ioie ne puet on dire ne ne doit on taire’.39 There is no trace of this in the Latin sermon, although Guiard does deal in other terms with the joys of contact with the divine brought about by the Eucharist. It does occur, however, in French texts dealing with contemplative prayer from this region and this period, including two copied alongside the sermon, the Abbaye du saint esprit (G, M), and the Sermon du palmier (P, A, 38 ‘For he is the life that sustains us on this road. And we have a long road to travel, and need great nourishing food.’ 39 ‘From this movement comes a joy of the heart called jubilus. This joy cannot be spoken, nor may it be silenced.’ ‘Iubilatio quippe dicitur cum cordis laetitia oris efficacio non expletur, sed quibusdam modis gaudium prodit, quod ipse qui gaudet, nec tegere praeualet, nec explere.’ Moralia in Job 28.15, CCSL 143B. I am indebted to Constant Mews for this reference.

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N). 40 It characterizes a form of prayer often associated with beguines, as in the thirteenth-century poem by Nicholas of Bibra: ‘quod earum / quaedam ducuntur extra se vel rapiuntur, / ut videant Christum; vulgus jubilum vocat istum’. 41 The French sermon’s way of expressing this theme places it firmly in the spiritual and linguistic universe of the vernacular devotional works written for and consumed by women in northern France and the southern Low Countries in the second half of the thirteenth century. The new evidence brought by the additional French manuscripts, together with a close comparison of the French and Latin sermons, allows us to place the creation of the French text in the context of the mulieres religiosae of the French-speaking southern Low Countries, at a time when the Eucharistic devotion characteristic of that milieu was culminating in the effort to establish the feast of Corpus Christi. Whoever created the French sermon knew his source very well, and was also steeped in the idiom of vernacular spiritual writing of the thirteenth century and familiar with the spirituality of the women it addressed. The source was probably the Latin sermon we know through the Brussels manuscript, since none of the differences between it and the French version are inconsistent with the techniques used by adapters of Latin texts into the vernacular, particularly by an adapter who was familiar enough with Guiard’s teaching on the Eucharist not to betray it when rearranging the material. It cannot be ruled out, however, that the source was another version of the sermon revised by Guiard himself, as Scheepsma has suggested, or even a notation of a sermon delivered by Guiard in French. 42 What is certain though, is that the French sermon far outstripped its source in popularity, and this should caution us against seeing the uptake of ideas about the Eucharist among the laity (and indeed of other pastoral products of scholastic theology) as a linear process. It seems ironic that, while Juliana’s office was soon replaced by something more elegant and theologically modern, the French sermon continued to be copied for 200 years, faithfully transmitting Guiard’s early-thirteenth-century sacramental theology. 40 For example, the copy of the Abbaye in G (fol. 92vb) has ‘Jubilations ce dist Saint Grigoires si est une tres grans ioie qui est conceue en ame par grasce apres orison par amor et par ferueur d’esperite qui ne puet estre dou tout moustree ne dou tout celee’, and the copy of the Palmier in P (fol. 363vb) has ‘Et quant ele le sent venir en sen cuer par le grasce si en a si grant ioie ke ele ne le puet dire ne del tout taisir’. 41 Bibra, Carmen Satiricum, ed. Th. Fischer (Halle, 1870), 92, quoted in Passenier, ‘“Women on the Loose”’, 64. 42 Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 171.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Ampe, A. ‘Een oud “Florilegicum eucharistaricum” in een vierteende-eeuwshandschrift’. Ons Geestelijk Erf 31 (1957): 301-24. Bibra, Nikolaus von. Carmen Satiricum. Edited by Th. Fischer. Halle, 1870. Gregory the Great. Moralia in Job. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina vol. 143B. Turnhout: Brepols, 1985. Walters, Barbara R. ‘“Laureata plebs fidelis”: A Victorine Sequence from the Feast of Corpus Christi in Thirteenth-Century Liège’. In Music, Dance and Society: Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Memory of Ingrid G. Brainard, edited by A.I. Buckley and C.J. Cyrus, 71-88. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011.

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Secondary Sources Bériou, Nicole. ‘La prédication synodale au XIIIe siècle d’après l’exemple cambrésien’. In Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, 22e congrès, Amiens, 1991. Clerc séculier au Moyen Age, 229-247. Boeren, Peter C. ‘GUIARD DE LAON, évêque, vers 1170-1248’. In Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, tome 6 (1967), col. 1127-1131. Boeren, Petrus Cornelis. La Vie et les oeuvres de Guiard de Laon, 1170 env.-1248. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956. Caspers, Charles M.A. ‘Requirements for Becoming and Remaining a Pastor: An Impression from the Late Medieval Synodal Statutes of the Diocese of Cambrai, 1308-1500’. Nederlands Archief Voor Kerkgeschiedenis / Dutch Review of Church History 83 (2003): 84-103. Field, Sean L. ‘From Speculum anime to Miroir de l’âme: The Origins of Vernacular Advice Literature at the Capetian Court’. Mediaeval Studies 69 (2007): 59-110. Hasenohr, Geneviève. ‘Isidore de Séville, auteur ascétique “français”?’ Romania 128, no. 3-4 (2010): 299-351. Hunt, Elizabeth Moore. Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts, 1270-1310. New York: Routledge, 2007. Långfors, Arthur. ‘Notice des manuscrits 535 de la bibliotheque municipale de Metz et 10047 des nouvelles acquisitions du fonds français de la bibliotheque nationale’. Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliotheque nationale 42 (1933): 139-288. Lefèvre, Jean-Baptiste. ‘L’abbaye de Villers et le monde des moniales et des béguines au XIIIe siècle’. In Villers, une abbaye revisitée: actes du colloque: 10-12 avril 1996 (1996): 183-229.

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Madureira, Magrarida. ‘Modelos e traduções: A versão do Chastel Périlleux do MS. Paris, BnF, fr. 1882’. In Modelo: Actas do V Colóquio da Secção Portuguesa da Associação Hispânica de Literatura Medieval, 201-210. Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 2005. Marichal, Robert. ‘Les drames liturgiques du Livre de la Trésorerie d’Origny-SainteBenoîte’. In Mélanges d’histoire du théatre du moyen-age et de la renaissance offerts à Gustave Cohen. Paris: Nizet, 1950. Meyer, Paul. ‘Notice du ms. 535 de la Bibl. Mun. de Metz’. Bulletin de la Société des anciens textes français 12 (1886): 41-76. Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B. Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Newman, Barbara, trans. ‘The Life of Juliana of Cornillon’. In Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy; Juliana of Cornillon, Author of the Corpus Christi Feast; and Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, 143-302. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 20. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Oliver, Judith. ‘“Je pecherise renc grasces a vos”: Some French Devotional Texts in Beguine Psalters’. In Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature, and Translation: Studies for Keith Val Sinclair, edited by Peter Rolfe Monks and D.D.R. Owen, 248-62; Leiden:. Brill, 1994. —. Gothic Manuscript Illumination in the Diocese of Liege (c. 1250-c. 1330). 2 vols. Corpus of Illuminated Manuscripts from the Low Countries = Corpus van verluchte handschriften uit de nederlanden 2-3. Leuven, Belgium: Uitgeverij Peeters, 1988. Passenier, Anke. ‘“Women on the Loose”: Stereotypes of Women in the Story of the Medieval Beguines’. In Female Stereotypes in Religious Traditions, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 61-89. Studies in the History of Religions 66. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Petit, François. The Spirituality of the Premonstratensians During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Translated by Victor Szczurek. Edited with an introduction by Carol Neel. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011. Scheepsma, Wybren. The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century. Translated by David F. Johnson. Brill’s Series in Church History 34. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Vanwijnsberghe, Dominique. ‘De fin or et d’azur’ Les commanditaires de livres et le métier de l’enluminure à Tournai à la fin du Moyen Age (XIVe-XVe siècles). Leuven: Peeters, 2001. Walters, Barbara R., Vincent Corrigan, and Peter T. Ricketts. The Feast of Corpus Christi. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.

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About the Author

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Janice Pinder is a member of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. She researches literary and theological texts and cultures in medieval France.

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10 A Sense of Proportion Jacobus Extending Boethius around 1300 John N. Crossley* Abstract Boethian arithmetic formed the basis of music theory for the medieval encyclopedist, Jacobus. His monumental Speculum musicae shows us how people around 1300, and particularly in the University of Paris, were slowly accommodating themselves to the newly rediscovered works of Aristotle, while the long-known works of Euclid and Boethius still gave a definitive theoretical basis to music. Not without effort Jacobus reworked Boethius and went further, though still using Boethian techniques. One difficulty he encountered was the problem of dividing the tone into two equal parts.

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Keywords: Jacobus de Ispania, Jacques de Liège, Speculum musicae, Medieval Music Theory, Semitone

Music theory in the thirteenth century was very different from today. While it was acknowledged that music provided sensory pleasure, it was believed that the senses were inadequate to provide a theoretical foundation for music. For this only the Platonic heaven of numbers was appropriate. This meant that music theory was part of mathematics. Jacobus, who wrote a massive encyclopedia of music theory, held this view and not only revisited but also dramatically extended the earlier work of Nicomachus (living c. 100 CE; from Jerash, in modern Jordan) and Boethius (c. 480-524). In this chapter I concentrate on two of his concerns: the problem of dividing a tone into two equal parts and his enormous extension of the Boethian characterization of musical intervals by numerical ratios. * Celebrating a quarter century of translating and working with Constant Mews, alumnus eiusdem collegii.

Monagle, Clare (ed.), The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789462985933_ch10

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In the fledgling thirteenth-century University of Paris, music theory was taught as one of the seven liberal arts in a framework that owes its origins to Boethius. Boethius had transferred the legendary Pythagorean theory of music, which had been put on a rigorous footing by Nicomachus of Gerasa, expanding, and clarifying it.1 Jacobus de Ispania (c. 1260-c. 1330), otherwise known as Jacques de Liège,2 worked in Paris in the 1290s, and he undertook to revise Boethian music theory, adding explanations where he felt them necessary.3 His time in Paris seems to have been crucial to the development of his version of music theory. In discussing Jacobus it is vital to consider his context – in many senses of the word – if we are to understand his motivations and limitations when he wrote his great work, the Speculum musicae. The only complete copy of this huge work is a fifteenth-century manuscript of 293 folios (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, latin 7207). 4 My concerns here are with why and how he wrote his treatise; thereby I hope to illustrate how people at the University of Paris around 1300 were using new techniques (including algorism: the art of calculating with the then relatively new Hindu-Arabic numerals) to extend old results while also responding to new developments in music theory. These latter were driven by two major forces: the newly resurgent ideas of Aristotle and new styles of performed music – principally polyphony – with its accompanying theory. Jacobus acknowledged the importance of Aristotelian ideas as far as metaphysics are concerned, but sought to reconcile them (in the manner of Kilwardby) with those of Boethius.5 Aristotle’s ideas, however, presented at least two kinds of challenge: his rejection of the ‘music of the spheres’, on which Jacobus compromised and which I shall not treat here; 6 and his methodology of observing the world and what happens in it – and here Jacobus only reiterated the views of Boethius on musical practice.7 The theory underlying polyphony, the Ars nova, was dealt with, quite polemically, in the last book of the Speculum by a rigorous defense of 1 Kilwardby, De ortu, 136 (ed. Judy, 55) uses the word ‘transtulit’, saying ‘sicut patet in Arithmetica Nicomachi quam transtulit Boethius de Graeco in Latinum’. 2 Jacobus is known as ‘de Ispania’ or ‘Leodiensis’ but there is debate as to his origins. See Bent, Jacobus, for considerations of his biography and, for his name, Wegman, ‘Jacobus’. Re Jacobus in Paris, see Bent, Jacobus, 8 ff.; and Desmond, Mirror, 6n.10. 3 Jacobus, Speculum musicae, Book II, Chapter 56. Later references will simply be in the form Jacobus, I.2, i.e. Book I, Chapter 2. 4 See Bent, Jacobus, 2, also i. 5 Aristotle is mentioned less than 50 times, while Boethius more than 600. 6 See, for example, Desmond, Mirror, chap. 7. 7 Jacobus, Books VI and VII; cf. Desmond, Mirror, 279n.330.

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the Antiqui against the Moderni music theorists, but I shall not consider this book here.8 Ultimately Jacobus wanted to present all of the known, and indeed some new results, in the theory of music in the spirit of Boethius. Unlike writers shortly before him, such as Jerome of Moravia (fl. 1272-1307), who largely selected and re-presented the work of earlier writers, Jacobus introduced new theoretical results.9 In the end he produced not simply an encyclopedia – Speculum was the standard name for such – but a work much of which, even today, could be classified as a pure research monograph.10 Teaching in Paris in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was still officially structured around the disciplines of the Trivium (Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy), on at least three of which (Logic, Arithmetic, and Music) Boethius was a recognized authority. Beaujouan pointed out long ago that the Quadrivium was only taught on feast days – of which there were, it must be said, many.11 Moreover, the newly felt influence of Aristotle drove people away from mathematics.12 Rico, however, has more recently shown that there was much more teaching of, and interest in, mathematics than has previously been noted.13 The Quadrivium was traditionally divided into two parts: those concerned with numbers, Arithmetic and Music; and those concerned with magnitudes, Geometry and Astronomy. The distinction between number and magnitude goes back at least to Euclid.14 Magnitudes – length, area, weight, etc. – have obvious connections with geometry and astronomy; quite literally we see (or feel) the relations. The connection between arithmetic and music is more philosophical. Jacobus was at pains to expand the study of Boethius from only the first two of the five books of De institutione musica,15 which were all that were 8 See, for example, Desmond, Mirrror, 18, 27 and chap. 4, and other references there; also Desmond, ‘Vitry’. 9 Jerome used a great deal of material from Johannes Affligemensis (John Cotton); see Weber, Intellectual currents, chap. 3. On the other hand, Jacobus (in II.126) carried out explicit calculations of the numerical proportions of 51 intervals, which do not seem to have been done previously. 10 The literature on Jacobus does not seem to have recognized how much of the work of the earlier books is completely novel in presenting the ratios of musical intervals that had not been considered earlier. 11 See Beaujouan, ‘Motives’. 12 See Dyer, ‘Speculative “Musica”’, 182. 13 See Rico, Music. 14 For a thorough discussion of how Euclid treated numbers and magnitudes, see GrattanGuinness, ‘Numbers’. 15 It is not clear when Jacobus studied the Arithmetica of Boethius.

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taught in Paris at the time and which Jacobus ‘heard’,16 when he was there, which is generally agreed as sometime between the 1290s (certainly after 1277) and 1310.17 ‘This teaching did not delve deeply into the arithmetical matter of the treatise’, rather the interest lay in the ontological status of the subject matter of music theory.18 On the other hand, De musica confirmed ‘its position as the textbook for musica strictly envisioned as a “science of consonance”’.19 Consonances are indeed fundamental in music theory as is evident even from other texts of the period. Central to Jacobus’s endeavor are Boethius’s De institutione arithmetica and De institutione musica (but also the Consolation of Philosophy), and works on algorism.20 It is clear, however, that Jacobus ultimately read all five books of the De musica because a ‘certain worthy man’ (quodam valente) made them available to him.21 The massive contribution of Jacobus in his first six books was to extend the Boethian identification of musical intervals with numerical ratios as far as was (reasonably) possible. My principal concern is with his great extension of Boethian arithmetical techniques in dealing with musical intervals. I hope to show why Jacobus persisted in the ancient Greek manner of favoring multitude over magnitude, that is to say, numbers over lengths, areas, etc. Secondly, there is the question of how much knowledge of mathematics (both practical and theoretical) he had and whence he acquired that knowledge. This leads to a third point, a purely mathematical one: the problem of using techniques of addition in a situation that, to the modern mind, requires multiplication. The difficulties associated with these three points should not be underestimated. Finally, I crave the forbearance of music theorists and mathematicians alike when I explain things that are second nature to one but not to the other. 16 Jacobus, II.56, ‘de duobus primis libris [de Boethii Musica], quos Parisius audieram’. See also Rico, Music, 33, for his claim about the date at which Jacobus heard these. 17 See Bent, Jacobus, 9-10; and Rico, Music, 33. Also Bent, Jacobus, 60 says: ‘The late 1320s seems right for the composition of at least the final book of the Speculum, in his self-confessed old age. It is only at the very end of his treatise that Jacobus declares that it was his primary intent to defend the art of the ancients, and a secondary purpose to outline speculative theory and chant’. 18 Rico, Music, 36 and 41-42. 19 Rico, Music, 46. For non-musicologists a consonance may be defined as a sweet-sounding musical interval produced when two notes are struck together. Basic examples are the fourth (e.g. C-F), fifth (e.g. C-G), and the octave. 20 Rico, Music, 30. 21 Jacobus, II.56. See Bent, Jacobus, 9, where she argues that at least one copy of the Musica would have been available ‘in Paris around the rue St-Jacques in the late thirteenth century’.

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Philosophically, Jacobus followed Boethius in not trusting the senses but requiring the theory of music to be in the domain of rules and reason:22 ‘Not all judgment ought to be given to the senses but reason ought more to be trusted. […] The ultimate perfection and the faculty of recognition consists in reason, which, holding itself to fixed rules, does not fall into any error.’23 In this way music was put on a firm intellectual foundation, rather than one based on the senses, and this view persisted. Jacobus was also to use this philosophical view against Aristoxenus and his division of the tone into two equal parts.24 Despite his persistence, Jacobus found the mathematics of Boethius hard to understand and he states this quite firmly at the very beginning: ‘But the work that I took on was laborious and long for me, and many cogitations had to be expended, and it was begun too late [in my life]’.25 In terms of mathematics the De insitutione arithmetica is a principal source for him and he refers to it more than 200 times. He needed a starting point and, like most people at that time, although he found it in Boethius he also used the more recent work of Jordanus Nemorarius, to whom he refers fifteen times,26 though to Euclid only five times, but he cites these two, together with Boethius’s inspiration, Nicomachus, as his mathematical authorities.27 While it is true that Latin translations of essentially the whole of Euclid were available at the time, only a fraction of the work of Euclid was known at all widely: not much more than the first six books.28 There was another aspect of arithmetic that made a great difference to Jacobus in doing his calculations: algorism. Indeed algorism made the calculations in Books II and III possible. The art of algorism comprises reading and writing Arabic numerals, using place notation for tens, hundreds, etc., rather than Roman numerals, and the methods of doing arithmetical 22 Jacobus, I.1, referring explicitly to Boethius, V.2, says: ‘because [Boethius] does not consider music theory as sound in itself, but as numbered sound’ (‘quia [Boethius] non considerat musica sonum per se sumptum, sed sonum numeratum’). 23 Boethius, De musica I.9: ‘Non omne judicium dandum esse sensibus sed amplius rationi esse credendum. … Postrema ergo perfectio, agnitionisque vis in ratione consistit, quae certis regulis sese tenens nullo unquam errore prolabitur’. 24 See, for example, Jacobus, III.14. 25 Jacobus, I.1: ‘Opus autem quod assumpsi, laboriosum et longum mihi est et multis cogitationibus est explendum, tardeque nimis est inceptum’. 26 Two of these are comments on Jordanus. 27 Jacobus only mentions Euclid’s De arte geometria in Boethius’s translation (Bent, Jacobus, 11). Boethius had developed most of his Arithmetic from Nicomachus, who lived c. 100 CE; see Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction. 28 See Dyer, ‘Speculative’, 191.

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computations with them.29 Jacobus probably learnt his algorism from one of the many copies of the texts by Johannes Sacrobosco and Alexandre de Villedieu,30 but he only mentions algorism on two occasions. First, he commends Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279) for including algorism as a practical art extending the theory of numbers in De ortu scientiarum.31 Secondly, he rejoices in its advantages: ‘Oh how useful is the science of algorism!’32 While Boethius would have used an abacus, Jacobus used algorism where the methods of calculating, in particular multiplying, were much simpler once one was used to operating with, or even just reading, the numerals. Before algorism was available an abacus was usually used or, as Murray pointed out long ago, ready-reckoner tables reduced multiplication to repeated addition.33 The first problem with algorism is the shape of the numerals; the second is that Arabic numerals change their meaning: ‘with minor exceptions, Roman numerals do not change their meaning when they change their place.34 On the other hand Hindu-Arabic numerals do change their meaning when they change their place’. Consider 3 in 437 or in 3,145,872, where it means two different things: 30 in the former and 3 million in the latter.35 Another distinguishing feature of algorism is the way that calculations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) are made. When one works with an abacus no trace remains of the steps in the calculation once it is complete. By contrast, when writing Arabic numerals, the techniques of algorism leave traces that can be independently verified: one can check the working. This also reduces the chance of error. Jacobus used his knowledge of algorism to revive (not merely revise) and extend the work of Boethius. 29 Strictly speaking these should be called ‘Hindu-Arabic’ since the numerals originated in India and were subsequently transmitted through the Arab world, the Maghreb, and then into Western Europe. Chrisomalis, Numerical Notation, uses ‘Western system’. Jordanus’s De elementis does not treat algorism but he wrote another work on algorism (see Jordanus, De elementis, 9). 30 Compare with Steele, The Earliest Arithmetics. 31 Jacobus, I.2, ‘Nam, de numero, licet sit scientia speculativa, ad praxim tamen extenditur in algorismo’. ‘Jacobus cites the De ortu scientiarum of Kilwardby (“hic Robertus”) five times early in Book I (ch[apter]s. 2, 7, 8), where he follows Kilwardby’s classification of music, distinguishing it from Boethius and Isidore [of Seville]’ (Bent, Jacobus, 145). However, interestingly Kilwardby actually says that algorism is a part of arithmetic: ‘algoristica, quae est pars arithmeticae et ad eam pertinens’ and ‘ars algoristica mathematica pars est arithmeticae propriae’ and then adds ‘Algoristica autem operativa sub illa est et mechanica’, thereby characterizing both its status and its usefulness (Kilwardby, De ortu, 155 and 156, p. 62). 32 Jacobus, II.78, ‘O utilis algorismi scientia!’ 33 See Murray, Reason, 156. 34 The minor exceptions are where an isolated character precedes a larger one: for example, in XC, which means 100 − 10 = 90. 35 See Crossley, ‘Old-fashioned’, 84-85.

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The connection between music and numbers is probably less obvious now than it was in the Middle Ages. There was a long tradition, going back to Pythagoras, showing how numbers were related to music. The (surely apocryphal) account of Pythagoras hearing hammers in a blacksmith’s shop and finding that the proportions of the weights of the harmonious ones were very simple was the root. This harmonious relation with numbers put music in the realm of reason, rather than that of the senses.36 Boethius defined music as ‘numbered sound’. When musical intervals were compared, deficiencies were immediately apparent: some intervals, such as half a tone,37 did not have corresponding proportions, something that would not have occurred if magnitudes had been considered. However, for this we need to consider proportions and their use, in particular the composition of proportions. First, we should be more precise and distinguish between ratios, presently normally written in the form a:b. Proportions are represented by ratios.38 That is why we say that 4:2 is in the same proportion as 6:3, while it is clear that the ratios 4:2 and 6:3, i.e. the expressions we write down, are syntactically different: they have different numbers in them! What we should say, and what Euclid would have said, is ‘4 is to 2 as 6 is to 3’. These two ratios represent the same proportion or, alternatively, are in the same proportion. However, as is current practice, I shall use the terminology ‘proportion a:b’ when strictly speaking I should say ‘proportion represented by a:b’.39 Interestingly, whenever Jacobus uses the Latin word ‘ratio’ in his text, it is only in the sense of ‘reason’. 40 Book I of the Speculum musicae provides a thorough presentation of the theory of proportion as it was then conceived, 41 which required including material from Boethius’s De institutione arithmetica. The niceties of modern 36 Jacobus, I.29: ‘For Aristoxenus wanted the status of consonances to be established by the judgment of sense. The Pythagoreans, however, held the status of these to be more fundamentally by the judgment of reason, granted that sense is responsible for the seeds of cognition’. (‘Nam voluit Aristoxenus ut de consonantiis standum esset praecipue iudicio sensus. Pythagorici vero tenuerunt de illis standum esse principalius iudicio rationis, licet sensus praestaret ibi quaedam semina cognitionis.’) 37 A semitone is not half a tone, see below. 38 Desmond, Mirror, 88 quotes the succinct description in Odington, Summa, 48: ‘Proportio est habitudo quantitatum’ (‘Proportion is a relation of quantities’, present author’s translation). 39 For example Jacobus, I.60: ‘Si igitur sic dicatur: “Sicut se habet 8 ad 4, sic 4 ad 2”, proportionalitas est.’ 40 In general, medieval writers on music theory seem not to have used the Latin word ratio in the sense of the English word ‘ratio’, preferring to use the terminology of proportions. 41 Compare with Murdoch, ‘The Medieval Language’.

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mathematical notation were not available to him, so everything had to be done in words (and numerals). 42 Now I turn to the detailed connections between musica, that is to say, music theory, and numbers. The tuning of the medieval monochord was based on that attributed to Pythagoras and a proportion of 2:1 produced an octave lower sound, 4:3 a fourth (e.g. C-F on the musical scale), and 3:2 a fifth (e.g. C-G), while the tone (e.g. C-D) corresponded to a proportion of 9:8. When we add two tones together on the musical scale, e.g. F-G and G-A, we get another interval F-A, comprising two tones; similarly for other intervals. Because these are proportions composed rather than added we have to ‘multiply’ the elements together. In composing two tones we are combining 9:8 with 9:8 and the resulting proportion is 81:64.43 Now, while some musical intervals have very simple proportions, other intervals involve larger numbers and it is not hard to calculate that what corresponds to the (Pythagorean) semitone (e.g. B-C) is 256:243; many thirteenth-century authors got this far. 44 (Boethius called this the ‘minor semitone’; the major semitone is the remainder when this is subtracted from a tone.) Jacobus (II.60) had already said that, according to Boethius, a semitone is so called, not because it is a half tone but because it is less than a tone, or imperfect.45 Therein lies the problem of dividing the tone equally: what is the proportion that defines halfway between two notes that are themselves a tone apart? Before he tackles this problem, Jacobus follows Boethius in analyzing the numerical proportions for many combinations of musical intervals, thereby extending Boethius’s work. Book II provides descriptions and mathematical details of the basic intervals and their relation to mathematical proportions. 46 Book III considers the semitone. As noted above, despite the difficulties of calculating with Roman numerals, Boethius managed to calculate proportions involving numbers as large as about half a million. Jacobus rehearsed all of these and took matters a step further going into the millions. This is the culmination of Book II: it is principally devoted to 42 Though he does use Roman and Arabic numerals. See above. 43 The modern algebraic way of thinking of this is to say that in adding two tones together the new proportion is obtained by multiplying: we say 9/8 times 9/8 = (9 × 9)/(8 × 8), so the proportion is 81:64. 44 See, for example, Crossley, ‘Cogitations’ for the calculation. This was the furthest Grocheio, Ars musice, fol. 41r [4.13] and Guy of Saint-Denis, Tractatus de tonis, fol. 61r [1.1.8], went in their discussions of Boethian numerical proportions. 45 Jacobus, II.60, ‘quia non sunt integri toni, et, secundum hoc, semitonium dicitur non a “semi”, quod est dimidium, et tonus quasi dimidius tonus, sed a “semus, sema, semum”, quod est imperfectus, ta, tum”’. 46 For a detailed analysis see Crossley, ‘Cogitations’.

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establishing the proportions corresponding to an exhaustive list of 51 musical intervals (II.126). These combinations go far beyond those to be found in Boethius’s De institutione musica and involve extensive computations. It would appear that Jacobus found his knowledge of algorism enabled him to go further than Boethius in establishing the exact proportions. The crucial element here was the ability to do large multiplications. When considering the semitone, initially Jacobus was misled because in thinking about proportions he tended to look, like many others, at the additive difference apparent in the ratios rather than their multiplicative aspect. The tone can be represented by the ratio 9:8 or, equivalently, 18:16. If we divide the difference between 18 and 16 in half, then we look at the ratios 18:17 and 17:16 and expect, as Jacobus initially did, to have found the two semitones. 47 Fortunately the loan of the Boethius text – and his detailed study of it – saved him from persisting with the error. 48 It is in Book III that Jacobus, like others before him, looks for an answer to the problem of dividing a tone into two equal parts, but he requires a solution within the realm of numbers; in essence the search was for a proportion represented by a ratio between whole numbers. 49 We would say that Jacobus wanted to find a (numerical) proportion x:y such that when composed with itself it gives a tone, 9:8.50 If he had used magnitudes, as Aristoxenus did, then the matter could have been easily resolved by a geometric argument involving incommensurable magnitudes.51 Long before Euclid the Pythagoreans had discovered that there was no unit that could 47 Jacobus, II.56: ‘I held this opinion about the proportion of the semitones for a long time, taking it from various treatises on musica, and from poor understanding of Boethius himself’. (‘Tactam opinionem de proportione semitoniorum quandoque et diu tenui, sumens eam ex aliquibus Musicae tractatibus, et ex imperfecto et etiam malo intellectu ipsius Boethii.’) 48 See Boethius, De musica III.13. 49 Jacobus, like Boethius, admits (vulgar) fractions, i.e. fractions of the form m/n where m and n are whole numbers. It is then easy to find an equivalent whole number ratio by multiplying both terms of the ratio by n. 50 In modern algebraic terms we need a solution to x2:y2 = 9:8. To show this gives an irrational ratio we only need to know that if 2 divides a square number, z2, then it divides z. Assume that x and y have no common factor. If x2/y2 = 9/8, then 8x2 = 9y2 and therefore 2 divides y2 and therefore, for some z, y = 2z. Then 8x2 = 9 × 4z2 and 2x2 = 9z2 . Likewise z is of the form 2w, so 2x2 = 9 × 4w2, and x2 = 9 × 2w2 . But then 2 divides x, contrary to our assumption that x and y had no common factor. Hence there are no (whole) numbers x, y satisfying our original condition. 51 See Boethius, De musica V.16-18 and also other subsequent references to Aristoxenus. The geometrical solution is easy. We need to find a length c between 8 and 9 such that 8:c = c:9. In general to find c such that a:c = c:b, draw a circle with diameter a + b. Erect a perpendicular from where the two lengths meet. The length from there to where it touches the circle is the desired c.

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measure both the side and diagonal of a square: they are not commensurable or, as we would say, if we have a unit square, then its diagonal is irrational or, to put it another way, √2 is irrational. When it comes to proportions, they did not admit there was a proportion of 1 to √2. This is because proportions were determined by measuring the elements involved in whole numbers. So the mindset that strictly distinguished between numbers and magnitudes proved an insuperable barrier.52 Likewise, for Jacobus, magnitudes belong to the domain of the senses rather than the intellect, so Aristoxenus’s approach is not acceptable.53 So Jacobus followed Boethius (De musica III.1) and set out to demonstrate that it is impossible to divide the tone into two equal parts. Although he had strong knowledge of that author, he seems to have felt safer when he actually had a copy of Boethius to hand.

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But, thank God, who saved me from error as I shall relate, when I proposed to write this treatise on music, the Musica of Boethius was made available to me by a certain worthy man, in which, looking over it here and there, in the third book I hit upon, amongst other things [a passage on the relation of the minor to the major semitone] … The work that I compiled on the proportions of the semitone held me back not a little, and delayed this work, but sometimes it was useful to step backwards, in order to leap further.54

He will not follow Aristoxenus but pursues an arithmetical path. As a result he embarks on three ‘proofs’ that one cannot compute intermediate proportions. He looks at adding numbers into proportions but this approach conflicts with the multiplicative composition of proportions. His method of proof is to consider the potential numerical proportion (sometimes expressed in less than its lowest terms) and then look at ‘adjusting’ the numbers in the proportions considered. In II.56 he starts to consider the problem that the tone is not divisible into two equal parts. In this chapter, finding a ‘half-tone’ proportion means locating a number n such that 8:n is as n:9, since the tone 52 Full reconciliation between numbers and magnitudes was a triumph of nineteenth-century mathematics; for example, see Crossley, Emergence, 144. 53 For example, see Desmond, Mirror, 328. 54 Jacobus II.56: ‘Sed, Deo gratias, qui ab errore illo me retraxit ut referam, cum tractatum hunc de Musica facere proponerem, a quodam valente Boethii Musica mihi concessa est in qua, hic et ibi, respiciens, inter alia impegi in tertii libri […] Illud autem opus occasione semitonialium proportionum compilatum me non modicum detinuit et hoc opus retardavit; sed expedit nonnunquam, retrocedere, ut longius saliatur’.

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corresponds to the proportion of 8:9.55 Clearly, there is no number between 8 and 9, so this is impossible. Now 8:9 is in the same proportion as 16:18, so try again. The only possible contender is 17 but then he considers what amounts to 17/16 and 18/17. The former is larger than the latter and so the proportions are not equal. In the following chapter (II.57) he goes to larger numbers. In each attempt he looks at the arithmetical differences between the terms of the ratio while the geometric mean is what is needed,56 since one can only find a truly intermediate proportion when the terms in a ratio representing it are both perfect squares. The same style of argument is then repeated again with larger numbers but also with considerations of further intervals. There is a problem with this method: as he takes larger and larger numbers, there is always the question as to whether, even by taking much larger numbers, a solution will ever be found. So, technically speaking, a proof of impossibility is required. The techniques for doing this may be found in Euclid (from Book X on) but Jacobus did not know, and almost certainly did not even have access to, the later books of Euclid. It follows that, from the modern point of view, the ‘proofs’ presented by Jacobus were deficient, though his conclusion was correct. He was not in the position to achieve what he really wanted but he did all he could to present plausible arguments that the proportion for the tone could not be divided into two equal parts.57 In writing his Speculum Jacobus presented as full a picture of Boethian music theory as was possible at the time and went further calculating the proportions for many more intervals (II.126);58 his aim was fulfilled, but not without effort. At the end of Book III he reiterates how he had to think very hard and do many calculations but it had also been fun. ‘If I have been lacking, it is because I am not sufficient to fully understand such hard material, which requires many cogitations, and many operations with numbers’, but then he continues, ‘If they [the readers] are lovers of music theory, they will delight in it. They will revel in the proportions of numbers, in the varieties and stupendous comparisons of [huge] numbers’.59 55 It does not make any difference whether we consider 8:9 or 9:8 since we are looking for something intermediate. The two forms correspond to a lower or a higher tone. 56 The arithmetic mean is the simple average; the geometric mean of a and b is the c such that c2 = ab. 57 On medieval ratiocinations on the semitone, see Peden, ‘“De Semitonio”’. 58 For technical details of the calculations of the 51 intervals, see Crossley, ‘Cogitations’. 59 Jacobus, III.56: ‘si defeci [est] quia non sufficio ad plene capiendam tam arduam materiam quae multas requirit cogitationes, multas numerorum collationes. […] Si amatores musicae sint theoriae, delectentur. Ludant hi in numerorum proportionibus, in variis et stupendis numerorum comparationibus’.

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He has come a long way. He has revisited, revived, and significantly expanded the work of Boethius, defending him and the supremacy of intellect over sense. He has clung tightly to the Pythagorean tradition while to some extent accommodating new ideas from Aristotle. His desire to understand the work of Boethius thoroughly has been made easier by his knowledge of the new science of algorism. Indeed that ‘useful science’ has made it possible for him to handle numbers on an order of magnitude larger than those in Boethius, and it surely made the calculations much easier than using Roman numerals and more reliable than using an abacus. His aim was to present a comprehensive treatment of the theory of music, something that had not been done previously. In doing that he developed new results about proportions for 51 musical intervals, reviving interest in the work of Boethius, taking into account newly found ideas of Aristotle, and incorporating the necessary mathematics so that this music theory would be available in one grand, truly encyclopedic, source. It is indeed a veritable reflection of the whole basis of medieval music theory: a speculum musicae.

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Acknowledgments I am indebted to Margaret Bent for introducing me to the ‘elephant in the room’ (as she described the Speculum) in Oxford in 2015. I am particularly grateful for her numerous fine comments that have led to significant improvements in this chapter. Thanks also to Karen Desmond, who made some interesting observations that helped clarify my exposition and Philipp Nothaft for helpful comments and new information. As always I am grateful to my colleagues in the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Monash University, where an early version of this chapter was presented, and especially to my co-workers Constant Mews and Carol Williams.

Bibliography Primary Sources Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. Fundamentals of Music. Translated with introduction and notes by Calvin M. Bower. Edited by Claude V. Palisca. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Hieronymus de Moravia. Tractatus de Musica. Edited by Simon Cserba. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1935.

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Jacques de Liège [Jacobus de Ispania]. Speculum musicae. Edited by Roger Bragard. Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 3. Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1961. Jordanus de Nemore. De elementis arithmetice artis: A Medieval Treatise on Number Theory. Edited by H.H.L. Busard. 2 vols. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1991. Kilwardby, Robert. De ortu scientiarum. Edited by Albert G. Judy. Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 4. London: British Academy, 1976. Nicomachus of Gerasa. Introduction to Arithmetic. Translated into English by Martin Luther D’Ooge, with studies in Greek arithmetic by Frank Egleston Robbins and Louis Charles Karpinski. New York: Macmillan, 1926. Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. Odington, Walter. Summa de speculatione musicae. Vol. 14, Corpus scriptorum de musica. Edited by Frederick Hammond. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1970. Steele, Robert, ed. The Earliest Arithmetics in English. Early English Text Society Publications. Extra series 118, London: Oxford University Press, 1922. Reprint, New York: Millwood, 1975.

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Secondary Sources Beaujouan, Guy. ‘Motives and Opportunities for Science in the Medieval Universities’. In Scientific Change, edited by Alastair Crombie, 219-36. London: Heinemann, 1961. Bent, Margaret. Magister Jacobus de Ispania, Author of the Speculum musicae. Royal Musical Association Monographs 28. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Chrisomalis, Stephen. Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Crombie, Alastair C., ed. Scientific Change. London: Heinemann, 1961. Crossley, John Newsome. The Emergence of Number. 2nd ed. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1987. —. ‘Old-fashioned versus Newfangled: Reading and Writing Numbers, 1200-1500’. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, 10 (2013): 79-109. —. ‘The Writings of Boethius and the Cogitations of Jacobus de Ispania on Musical Proportions’. Early Music History 36 (2017): 1-30. Desmond, Karen. ‘Behind the Mirror: Revealing the Contexts of Jacobus’s Speculum musicae’. PhD diss., New York University, 2009. —. ‘Did Vitry Write an Ars vetus et nova?’. Journal of Musicology 32, no. 4 (2015): 441-93. Dyer, Joseph. ‘Speculative “Musica” and the Medieval University of Paris’. Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (2009): 177-204. Grattan-Guinness, Ivor. ‘Numbers, Magnitudes, Ratios, and Proportions in Euclid’s Elements: How Did He Handle Them?’. Historia Mathematica 23 (1996): 355-75.

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Murdoch, John E. ‘The Medieval Language of Proportions: Elements of the Interaction with Greek Foundations and the Development of New Mathematical Techniques’. In Scientific Change, edited by Alastair Crombie, 237-71. London: Heinemann, 1961. Murray, Alexander. Reason and Society in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Peden, Alison M. ‘“De Semitonio”: Some Medieval Exercises in Arithmetic’. Studi Medievali 35 (1994): 368-403. Rico, Gilles. ‘Music in the Arts Faculty of Paris in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’. DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 2005. Weber, Laura. ‘Intellectual Currents in Thirteenth-Century Paris: A Translation and Commentary on Jerome of Moravia’s Tractatus de musica’. PhD thesis, Yale University, 2009. Wegman, Rob C. ‘Jacobus de Ispania and Liège’. Journal of the Alamire Foundation 8 (2016): 253-74.

About the Author

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John Crossley is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. He has published in the areas of medieval musicology and the colonial history of the Philippines.

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Utrum sapienti competat prolem habere? An Italian Debate Sylvain Piron

Abstract This chapter considers fourteenth-century Italian debates about the costs of marriage to the work of a philosopher. Following Heloise’s famous injunction against the idea of marriage to Abelard, when she railed against the impact it would have upon his work, this chapter investigates how the terms of this conversation were transformed by the insights of lay intellectuals of cities like Arezzo, Bologna, and Florence, who were grappling with the implications of fatherhood as part of the economic unit of the household, and its role in the political life of the city.

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Keywords: Prehumanism, Fatherhood, Heloise, Family

One of the major accomplishments of Constant Mews is his effort to establish Heloise as a thinker and a writer in her own right. Long before he joined her name to that of her husband in the title of a volume dedicated to ‘great medieval thinkers’,1 he had already pinpointed her intellectual impact on Abelard in an important article devoted to their readings of Jerome.2 Of the pair, she clearly was the one who had a greater familiarity with the Church Father. Asserting this fact was instrumental in Mews’s identification soon afterwards of Heloise as the woman in the Epistolae duorum amantium, whose intimate knowledge of Jerome is remarkable.3 Jerome is also a central 1 Mews, Abelard and Heloise. 2 Mews, ‘Un lecteur de Jérôme au XIIe siècle: Pierre Abélard’, repr. in Mews, Abelard and his Legacy. 3 Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard.

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reference in what has to be considered as Heloise’s intellectual masterpiece. Her famous ‘Dissuasion from marriage’ (‘dehortatio matrimonii’), inserted within Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, relies heavily on arguments to that effect borrowed from Jerome’s Contra Jovinianum. It is unfortunate that the study of misogynistic prejudices is itself sometimes encumbered by misogynistic preconceptions. Scholars often doubted that Heloise could have really built on her own a complex argumentation, putting to use a large number of classical examples. Since Abelard also used many of them in his Theologia christiana (written in or soon after 1122), it seemed logical to infer that he first gathered them at that time, before putting them to use again in the Historia calamitatum (around 1131).4 Yet, a closer textual analysis reveals that, in that chapter of the Historia, Abelard is indeed reporting extracts of the authentic letter Heloise had sent him around 1117, while refusing the wedding plans he had made with her uncle Fulbert. The insertion within her distinctive prose of a few remarks that clearly bear the stamp of Abelard is a sure sign that he was incorporating in his narration extracts of a document that lay before his eyes.5 The concern she expressed in the first letter she sent him upon receiving the Historia was not that he had misrepresented her arguments. She recognized her own words, but complained that he had left out the part in which she explained why it was wrong for her to marry, focusing only on the reasons it was improper for him to enter a marriage.6 The fact that Abelard repeated the same arguments in his theological writings a few years after their disastrous marriage demonstrates that he kept this letter, and took very seriously what she had written. There can hardly be a stronger proof of the intellectual respect he had for her. Heloise, then, is the first medieval author to reintroduce the classical topos of the impropriety of marriage for a philosopher. After Abelard in the Theologia christiana, John of Salisbury and Walter Map gave it an even wider audience. Silvana Vecchio has devoted some important studies to the discussion that went on during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.7 Besides philosophical and moral treatments of that issue, many writers used it as a literary theme, from Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose and Chaucer’s 4 See, for instance, Marenbon, ‘Abélard: les exemples de philosophes et les philosophes comme exemple’, 129; Delhaye, ‘Le dossier anti-matrimonial de l’Adversus Jovinianum et son influence sur quelques écrits latins du XIIe siècle, 73-74: ‘on ne peut s’empêcher de douter de la véracité du récit. On a vraiment trop l’impression que les paroles rapportées ici ne sont pas d’Héloise mais de l’auteur de la Theologia Christiana’. 5 Piron, ‘Heloise’s Literary Self-fashioning and the Epistolae duorum amantium’, p. 116-27. 6 Luscombe, The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, 132. 7 Vecchio, ‘De uxore non ducenda’, 53-64; Vecchio, ‘Les deux épouses de Socrate’, 227-39.

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Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, up to Rabelais whose Tiers livre is entirely built on deciding whether Panurge should marry or not.8 A late resurgence of this medieval and Renaissance topos features in Friedrich Nietzsche’s rejection of marital life as a deadly impediment to the practice of philosophy: ‘Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with that which might persuade to it […] A married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my proposition – and as for that exception, Socrates – the malicious Socrates, it would seem, married ironically, just to demonstrate this position’.9 The theme on which I would like to focus constitutes, in a sense, a side issue of this wider debate. To borrow a concept dear to Constant Mews, it will lead us to explore some specific ‘communities of learning’, formed by lay intellectuals active in central and northern Italy in the decades around 1300. At that time, a number of remarkable cultural personalities were active in and circulating between and around the university cities of Bologna, Padua, and Arezzo and the merchant city of Florence, sharing a number of distinctive features. They were all involved in communal politics and administration, interested in philosophy and in various sciences, and eager to recover and sometimes emulate Roman classical texts. Most of them were also writing poetry in Latin and in the vernacular, and sometimes in both languages.10 Dante Alighieri is of course the most famous figure among this network, but he is only one among many similar characters. Like Dante, and in stark contrast to the later generation of Petrarch and Boccaccio, none of the members of these circles had taken even the lowest of sacerdotal orders.11 Being immersed in civil and active life, the question for them was therefore not to discuss the benefit or disadvantage of marriage, since they were all married. They would rather twist the discussion to one of the core consequences of marriage: is it better to have or not to have children? Constant Mews’s research into the Epistolae duorum amantium provided an important methodological lesson for historians. We should not be intimidated by monuments of medieval Latin literature, and leave such sources to the sole care of philologists and literary scholars. To the contrary, it is necessary to approach them as cultural artifacts that deserve to be read as 8 Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage; Wilson and Makowsky, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage. 9 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, p. 107. 10 Coccia and Piron, ‘Poésie, science et politique’, 549-86. I am currently expanding this chapter into a monograph together with Giuliano Milani and Antonio Montefusco; I wish to acknowledge their support in preparing the present work, as well as good advice from Didier Lett. 11 Dionisotti, ‘Chierici e laici’, 49-52.

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historical documents, in order to cast light on the social and intellectual life of the milieux within which they were produced. Actually, the first item we shall discuss is not totally ignored by historians. It is fairly well known as one of the most striking productions of the Paduan ‘prehumanist’ circles active around 1300. It consists of an exchange of ten poems (six sonnets, two shorter poems, and two distich serving as conclusions) in which the leading figure of this group, Lovato Lovati, and his most important associate, Albertino Mussato, discuss whether a man endowed with children is happier than one who has none.12 Ronald Witt has briefly commented upon this debate, which still awaits a modern critical edition.13 The five preserved manuscripts, all produced in the Veneto in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, describe this exchange of poems as a ‘Quaestio de prole’ or under a variety of titles evoking a disputed question.14 Such a description is revealing of the reception of this literary production. Yet for a correct assessment of its conception, it is misleading, since the whole process out of which these pieces emerged has little to do with a scholastic context or model. Instead, this poetical dialogue should be qualified as a tenson which, quite uniquely, is formulated in classicized Latin hexameters. Although it may be argued that such oratorial encounters are found universally, the twelfth-century Occitan troubadours devised a specific type of poetical joust, made of alternating stanzas composed by two or more poets. This repeated pattern of query and counterattack had a strong impact on the Italian vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century. As a rule, Italian tenzoni only comprised sonnets – and it must be noted that the poems forming the core of the ‘Quaestio’ are indeed Latin sonnets comprised of fourteen lines. While love was the only topic discussed within that form in the Sicilian tradition, Tuscan writers could also use it to debate political issues. When it takes a comic tone, sometimes loaded with obscene or insulting innuendos as in Dante’s exchange with Forese Donati, the antagonism displayed in the tenzone does not imply any real hostility between the partners involved. Lovato’s challenge to Mussato has to be seen in that light. This background should help us in discerning the humorous and ironic aspect of the discussion. 12 The letters were first edited in Padrin, Lupati de Lupatis, Bovetini de Bovetinis. I have not been able to access this rare volume and have relied on the electronic edition provided by the project Poeti d’Italia in lingua latina [online], http://www.poetiditalia.it. For the story of the text, see Cecchini, ‘La Quaestio de prole’. 13 Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’, 106-8. 14 An alternative title to ‘Quaestio de prole’ is ‘Utrum sit melior conditio, an habencium filios an non habencium’, Venezia, Bibl. del Civico Museo Correr, Codd. Cicogna, 2408. See Monti, ‘Per la fortuna della Questio de prole: i manoscritti’.

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Lovato starts with an allusion to his friend’s Latin nickname – Asellus (Donkey), he himself being Lupus (Wolf) – before raising the issue: ‘Take two men, one lacking children while the other has plenty; tell me which of them was born under the better star?’.15 In his first answer, Mussato states ingenuously that ‘when progeny comes happily, it is the most precious gift, for what makes happy is good; its possessor is blessed by the stars’.16 The role of a child as a support in the father’s old age is also evoked. Lovato has an easy job in reversing the proposition: ‘Clouds do not resolve a doubt; for the one who lacks children, if this pleases him, I judge him happy in that regard’. Presenting Mussato with a list of fathers who had to witness the death or ruin of their children, from Lycurgus to Priam, he confronts the naivety of his friend: ‘among such thousands, search for one father who has not been tormented by an extreme fear or grief for the sweet love of children’.17 Priding himself on optimism (‘Spes est mihi gloria semper’), Mussato adduces in his response the case of Anchises, whose son Aeneas carried him on his back away from the destruction of Troy, and objects that Lovato is himself an example of the natural tendency to surpass one’s father.18 In his third round, Lovato insists that there are more reasons to fear than to hope, and doubts that his friend’s descent will keep his fame intact, to which Mussato replies by opposing virtue to fear.19 As an envoi, both authors juggle with the authority of Euripides (known through Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae) who claimed himself happy to be childless; this was, Mussato argues, only one misfortune among many others.20 The fact that the exchange closes by appealing to a judge is the surest sign that the debate was indeed conceived as a tenson. The chosen arbiter, Zambono di Andrea de Favafuschis, using the nickname of Bos (Ox), proceeds by repeating the whole discussion in 15 ‘Quaestio’, poem 1, vv. 6-7: ‘Et duo sint, alter natis caret, alter abundat / Dic uter in lucem meliori venerit astro’. 16 ‘Quaestio’, poem 2, vv. 9-11: ‘Progenies si laeta venit, ditissima res est / Nam bona si laeta est: huius possessor ab astris / Diligitur […]’. 17 ‘Quaestio’, poem 3, vv. 2-10: ‘Nubila non solvit dubii; nam et prole carentem / Si sibi laetitiae est, reor hac in parte beatum / […] Seu bona seu mala sit, prolis flet dona Lycurgus, / Nauplius, Evander, Priamus, Nestorque Creonque. / Innumeros taceo; tu de tot milibus unum / Vestigato patrem quem non stimulaverit ingens / Aut timor aut fletus pro dulci prolis amore’. 18 ‘Quaestio’, poem 4, vv. 13-14: ‘et tu, melior patre, iungito patrem / Quem superas, propriis sic et superabere natis’. 19 ‘Quaestio’, poem 5, v. 8: ‘Heu quanto spes est minor illa timor’; poem 6, vv. 6-8: ‘semper metuendane mors est? / Quod toti morimur Seneca improbat et Cato […] virtutem oppone timori’. 20 ‘Quaestio’, poem 7, vv. 1-2: ‘Censuit Euripides ipsius nube sinistri / Felicem qui prole caret’; poem 8, vv. 1-2: ‘Euripides inter reliqua infortunia dixit / Felices qui prole carent’. See Boethius, De consolatione Philosophiae III.7.6.

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his own words before awarding the prize to Lovato. As Mussato objected, Zambono sent a further poem to another companion, Benvenuto Campesani, asking him to serve as an appeal judge and suggesting that Mussato should offer them all a dinner. This conclusion is a good reminder of the friendly and witty nature of the discussion. Besides sharing literary tastes, both debaters belonged to the Paduan college of judges, while Zambono and Campesani were prominent notaries in Padua and Vicenza. Performing such sophisticated literary exercise was an element of sociability among the cultural elite of the commune. A historical reading of the whole sequence has to take into consideration the personal situation of each author. Deducing Lovato’s status from the position he defended in the ‘Quaestio’, Ronald Witt considers him childless.21 Actually, this was not the case. Married to Jacopina di Vincenzo da Solesino, he was rich in at least three sons, Rolando, Polidamante, and Giordano, and a daughter, Beatrice.22 The unusual name given to his second son was supposedly that of the son of Antenor, the mythological founder of Padua, whose tomb Lovato claimed to have identified during renovation of a hospital in his neighborhood, and for whom he had a monument built in 1283.23 Given the peculiarity of this name, it is highly probable that he is the ‘Polidamax Paduanus’ who appears in a list of Dominican friars belonging to the local convent in March 1299.24 Being a father, Lovato would yet depict fatherhood as a misfortune. This does not imply any lack of affection for his children nor disappointment that they could not match the literary achievements of his nephew, Rolando da Piazzola, another major figure of the same circle; as a matter of fact, Lovato could have considered Rolando as his own son, for Rolando had lost his father at an early age. The solution should rather be sought in the relationship between the two debaters. Born in 1240, Lovato was an experienced man, twenty years older than his friend. Mussato had married a daughter of the rich Lemizzi family sometime before 1294. His only son we know of, Vitaliano, took his name from an important character on the mother’s side.25 He also had daughters 21 Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’, 106. 22 Kohl, ‘Lovati, Lovato’, 215-20. 23 Weiss, ‘Lovato dei Lovati (1241-1309)’, 8. 24 Il “Liber contractuum” dei frati Minori di Padova e di Vicenza (1263-1302), ed. Bonatto, 766. The dates could even suggest that Polidamante was given his name as a celebration of his father’s discovery of Antenor’s tomb, a few years before the monument was erected in 1283. 25 Vitaliano del Dente Lemizzi, half-brother of Mabilia di Guglielmo Dente Lemizzi, was an important money lender and a prominent political figure, neighbor, and stepbrother of Enrico Scrovegni, cf. Milani, L’uomo con la borsa al collo.

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whose names are not documented. There is no sure ground for a precise dating of the ‘Quaestio’, but Mussato’s marriage provides at least a sure terminus post quem, since the first poem describes him as a father. This very verse could in fact provide a reasonable explanation for the whole tenson: ‘The world admires you as such a fortunate father!’26 More than stating a fact, this line sounds rather as if it is recording an event. In other words, the whole exchange could have marked an occasion, inspired by the birth of Mussato’s first child. Instead of simply congratulating him, Lovato would have warned his friend against the hardships of fatherhood, the high risk of having to mourn a newborn child or a reckless youth, and the perpetual anxiety caused by the love of fragile children. In sum, his part in the controversy offers wise and learned advice from a senior to a fresh and ingenuous young father. It is up to the reader to decide whether some element of affectionate irony is also present in his speech. At any rate, his warnings were not unfounded. Vitaliano eventually caused the political downfall of his father, while taking part in a failed coup in Padua, at a time when Albertino was still active as an ambassador for the city. In his exile, the poet lamented this foolishness.27 Yet Vitaliano also dedicated to him a series of poems based on Ovid’s Tristia.28 The Paduan erudites were not attempting to shape their lives on patterns set by ancient models, in the way Heloise once imagined her destiny as a protagonist of Ovid’s Heroides. The classics provided them with a moral and emotional repertoire out of which they could reflect on a life determined by very different principles. To achieve the status of leading political and cultural figures in Padua’s civic life, there was no alternative to marriage, and preferably marriage into an important family, as Mussato had done. In turn, marriage entailed the production of offspring. Medieval masculine identity implied fatherhood as a necessary attribute.29 The lament of having children amounts to the lament of a social duty, not a rejection of it. Yet, it is interesting to note that this discussion is entirely conducted on a personal level and does not invoke the requirements of civic life. Although Mussato was later praised as a hero of the Commune for his chronicles as well as for 26 ‘Quaestio’, poem 1, v. 11: ‘Sic fortunatum videant te saecula patrem’. 27 Gianola, ‘Ipotesi su un’edizione trecentesca delle opere storiografiche di Albertino Mussato’, 170: ‘Et rerum mundanarum variatio fili, et urbis nostre status immutatio, nec non et morum tuorum vix unquam mihi credita depravatio, nos a rudimentorum tuorum serie et proposito inanis utilitatis abduxit’. 28 Chevalier, ‘Albertino Mussato o la figura del poeta esiliato: edizione di un centone autobiografico dai Tristia di Ovidio’. 29 Lett and Certin, ‘Ouverture’.

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the Ecerinis, a tragedy inspired by Seneca depicting the tyranny of Ezzelino da Romano, his defense of fatherhood has no clear political justification, if only a general reference to the glory of Anchises’s lineage. Another less well known document may confirm this interpretation of the ‘Quaestio’. It will take us to a similar milieu in Tuscany, a decade or two later. Geri d’Arezzo is now almost forgotten as an author, but Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence in the last decades of the fourteenth century, celebrated him on par with Mussato for his Latin eloquence, and considered them both as the sole forerunners of the humanism he propounded.30 Holding a doctorate in civil law, active as a judge in various important positions in central Italy, Geri had also been educated in the high literary tradition of his hometown.31 Among his poems and writings preserved in only one manuscript, a beautiful letter of consolation is addressed to a friend, Cambio di Poggibonsi, another learned lawyer, active as a judge in Florence and Bologna in the 1310s and 1320s.32 Cambio was in need of comfort, for he frequently complained that his wife did not bear him a child.33 Geri was compassionate. Admittedly, while the desire for children is natural for women, a man who remains sterile is of despicable condition.34 Yet he should avoid dubious treatments against sterility, such as going to public baths for that purpose, drinking potions, or wearing magical phylacteries.35 Nor should he, in his pursuit of procreation, exceed the demands of modesty (the acceptable frequency of sexual intercourse is not explicitly stated). After these general observations, the core of the advice is grounded on personal experience. Geri claims to be in a good position to judge, since he has a first-hand knowledge of all possible situations. While his first and now 30 Salutati, Epistolario, 3:84. Geri was rediscovered by Weiss, Il primo secolo dell’umanesimo, 51-66. 31 Wieruszowski, ‘Arezzo as a Center of Learning and Letters in the Thirteenth-Century’. 32 Geri d’Arezzo, Lettere e Dialogo d’amore, 78-82. 33 Geri, Lettere, 78-82: ‘Sepenumero de fortune malignitate conquereris, domine Cambi, quod coniugem puerperam non habes, que et tui suique voti in suscipienda sobole non compos anxiatur’. 34 Geri, Lettere, 78-82: ‘Indulgendum est enim si mater esse desiderat; feminarum namque precipuum munus est concipere tuerique conceptum: quod ubi non datur, apud viros, quamvis uxorios, contemptui se esse arbitrantur’. This point is confirmed by Salutati, Epistolario, 2:368: ‘cuius rei gratia viros ac mulieres sterilitate notatos, vix homines et defectivos homines reputamus’. More generally, see Lett, L’enfant des miracles, 242-44. 35 Geri, Lettere, 78: ‘Neque enim illos tulerim steriles viros, qui ob id balnea frequentant, peregrinarum succos herbarum potant, potiones sorbillant et, quod ridiculosius est, anicularum imprecationibus credunt usque ad phylateria curiosi et cartularum virginalium appendia, quo nichil profecto insulsius’. Potions, syrups, and baths are treatments suggested by the contemporary Montpellier doctor Bernard de Gordon in his Tractatus de sterilitate mulierum.

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deceased wife had remained infertile, his second spouse gave him many children, some of whom died in infancy, only three of them surviving.36 One son, Giovanni, became a notary in Arezzo, while another, Federigo, was involved in literary activities and at times a correspondent of Petrarch.37 As he tries to list all the inconveniences of paternity, Geri provides one of the most poignant medieval expressions of fatherly tenderness:38 ‘I admit that the early childish years are extremely joyful; yet, they are full of tears, to such an extent that every single laughter is accompanied by ten noisy cries, which are very bitter for the parents’.39 The evocation of sleepless nights caused by the noisy cradle is as vivid as that description of a household given by Heloise. Geri raises another important practical issue, perhaps with some degree of exaggeration: as the Tuscan mothers refused or neglected to nurse their babies, the cost of wet nurses brought families to the verge of ruin.40 These young creatures are also frequently prone to untimely death or dangerous illnesses, leaving the parents helpless and continuously destroyed by anguish.41 Should they survive their early years, when adolescence comes, they succumb to many vices, disappointing their parents’ expectations of support and filial devotion. Ovid is quoted as alluding to sons awaiting their father’s death in order to grab their inheritance. All these negative aspects of having and raising children are meant to counterbalance the frustrated desire from which Cambio suffers. Geri’s conclusion is simply a counsel of patience, proposing that his friend be contented with whatever divine providence has prepared for him. Without explicitly naming him, Geri evokes Euripides as an example of the misfortune of childlessness accepted 36 Geri, Lettere, 78: ‘Precessit uxor alia istam quam habeo dilectissimam michi: illa me patrem non fecit, infecunda; ista plurium parentem effecit, quorum alii non ista, sed perpetua et vera luce perfruuntur, in ipso pene vite lumine revocati’. 37 Foà, ‘Geri d’Arezzo’, 412-13. WHERE IS #38??? 38 For the expression of such feelings, see Lett, L’enfant des miracles, 154-56. 39 Geri, Lettere, 80: ‘Fateor etatula illa infantili iocosissimos esse: que tamen plena lacrimulis est, sic ut unus risus decem lacrimas comites habeat vociferas, parentibus amarissimas’. 40 Geri, Lettere, 80. On the early habit of wet nursing, see Klapisch-Zuber, La maison et le nom, 263-89. 41 Geri, Lettere, 80: ‘Nec prosequor acerbissimos in ipsis flosculis frequentesque obitus, quos cum adhuc dum ordirentur, succisos, inconsolabiliter deflemus: et ubi grandiusculi iam verbula ligatis sonis moliuntur, frequentes egretudines, ut illos sepe collectis protuberatos humoribus dum videmus, exanimemur: et cum ex levissimis causis insperatis febriculis ardere videmus, decoquimur, quibus annorum teneritudo necessarias morbi medelas non recepit. Taceo ad omnem strepitum domus, ad omnes equinos discursus, cordis incussa ex filiorum suspicata pernitie gelidi’.

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happily. 42 His peroration finally brings about a ray of hope. Perhaps God will eventually hear Cambio’s prayers and grace him with some ‘beautiful children’; for children are usually depicted as ‘beautiful’ in such writings. Tu interim gaude sorte tua (‘As for you, in the meantime, enjoy your fate’).43 Geri’s letter shares a number of common references with Lovato and Mussato, but he could easily have accessed them on his own. It is therefore difficult to decide if he was aware of their ‘Quaestio’. Whatever the case, his subtle argumentation resolves the tension expressed in the Paduan debate. Having children is certainly desirable, and socially expected from every married couple, but it is also a terrible emotional and economic burden. The unfortunate parents lacking a descendant can therefore find a bit of comfort in contemplating all the worries they avoid. Interestingly, the invocation of providence and the advice of patience shift the mere erudite reflection on ancient fathers into a more encompassing Christian moral attitude. Yet again, no mention is made of any political duty to have and raise children. This discussion, in both forms it takes, demonstrates that these poet-lawyers were aware of the peculiarity of their situation as married intellectuals. The dominant tendency was not an unambiguous celebration of their roles as heads of families. Whatever their individual motivations, echoes of the anti-matrimonial discussion were still present in the background, especially in Lovato’s case. It is therefore interesting to observe wider tendencies in that regard during this period. Although, in 1277, the bishop of Paris accused the teachers of the Arts faculty of arguing in favor of the natural character of copulation and of reading Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, their leading figure, Siger of Brabant, himself defended an ascetic position, quite akin to that of Thomas Aquinas: marriage is strictly incompatible with philosophy; the search for ‘intellectual felicity’ excludes any other type of pleasure. 44 In stark contrast, one generation later, the main Averroist philosopher in Italy, Antonio Pelacani of Parma, teacher at Bologna arts faculty from 1306 to 1312, before becoming doctor and adviser to the lord of Milano, Matteo Visconti, followed in Mussato’s footsteps by marrying into the highest 42 Geri, Lettere, 82: ‘Meministi, si non decipior, illius, quod per multorum ora tritum non ineleganter evolvitur Greci preceptoris qui carentem liberis infortunio, dixit se esse felicem’. But the rejection of marriage is quickly brushed aside: ‘Sunt et qui fortunatum putent inuxoratum: sic ille Terentinus et quod fortunatum isti putant uxorem nunquam habuit, a quibus longe dissentio’. 43 Geri, Lettere, 82: ‘Dabit forsitan Deus sollicitis precatibus tuis et votis auditum, ut pulcra faciat te prole parentem. Tu interim gaude sorte tua’. 44 Siger de Brabant, Écrits de logique, de morale et de physique, 102-3. See Bianchi, ‘La felicità intelletuale come professione nella Parigi del Duecento’; and De Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge, 181-245.

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society with the Marchioness Mabilia Pallavicini. 45 On the other hand, his contemporary, Marsilio Mainardini of Padua, whose father was a friend and associate of Lovato, opted for a clerical status and sought ecclesiastical benefices in order to achieve a remarkable career at the University of Paris, where he was the first Italian to reach the position of a rector. 46 The social requirements of intellectual respectability in French and Italian institutions were still at odds. Yet, on both sides of the Alps, around the turn of the century, a growing interest in the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics demonstrates a willingness to enter into a philosophical discussion of the household, and thereby a recognition of the social duty of raising a family. An early translation, produced before 1250 and later updated by William of Moerbeke, failed to enter the philosophical curriculum and did not elicit any commentary. The new surge of interest appears to be connected with the more frequent reading of the Politics, whose first book contained a brief discussion of the household, as the basis from which a city is composed. Both works were therefore frequently lectured upon consecutively. 47 In 1295, Master Durand d’Auvergne, procurator of the University of Paris at the Roman curia, provided a new translation, with the help of two Greek bishops, during a stay at Anagni. 48 His version became the basis of university lectures, among which we possess written traces of classes given by two leading ‘Averroists’ of the following decades, Ferrand of Spain and Jean of Jandun. The most important contribution produced in Paris is the commentary by Bartholomew of Bruges, dedicated in 1309 to Annibaldo Caetani di Ceccano, nephew of the Cardinal Giacomo Stefaneschi, at the time a student at the Paris faculty of arts. 49 In the same period at the Montpellier medicine faculty, Armengaud Blaise, nephew of Arnau of Vilanova, translated from Arabic the pseudo-Galenic Economics that 45 Calma, ‘Pelacani, Antonio’, Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, t. 82 (2015), 92-95. 46 Yet his close association with John of Jandun, who followed him in exile at the court of Lewis of Bavaria after the publication of the Defensor pacis in June 1324, with absolutely no reason besides their intimate connection, may suggest a different motive to his clerical commitment. Homosexuality could have been a crucial element in his option for celibacy. 47 Flüeler, Rezeption und Interpretation der aristotelischen Politica im späten Mittelalter also contains a listing of all commentaries on the Economics. 48 While the edition of the various Latin versions of the Economics by Christoph Flüeler in the ‘Aristoteles Latinus’ series is still pending (but recently made available on the ‘Aristoteles Latinus’ database), some of the results of his unpublished PhD are presented in Blažek, Die mittelalterliche Rezeption der aristotelischen Philosophie der Ehe. The colophon of Durandus’s translation is quoted in Oresme, Le Livre de Yconomique, 787. On the context of Boniface VIII curia, see Internullo, ‘Roma e gli ambienti pontifici’. 49 Flueler, Rezeption und Interpretation.

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covered the same issues: possessions, servants, wife, and children.50 In Italy, Bartolomeo da Varignana commented upon the pseudo-Aristotle, probably sometime after he left Bologna in 1311, since the local examples he provides involve Venice and Chioggia.51 For all those authors, following Aristotle in the first book of the Politics or the Economics, the naturalness of marriage and procreation is taken for granted: ‘a household is not perfect without the production of children’.52 The French maverick political writer Pierre Dubois, who recalls having heard Siger himself lecturing on the Politics, went as far as expressing doubts about the relevance of clerical celibacy, in his ambitious plan to populate the Eastern Latin Kingdom.53 Engelbert von Admont, who studied for a decade in Padua before turning back to his Austrian Benedictine monastery around 1288, provides an interesting resolution of those conflicting traditions. His short treatise Utrum sapienti competat ducere uxorem (‘Is it proper for the scholar to take a wife?’) recalls many classical arguments against marriage taken from Jerome, Walter Map, and Ovid, before exposing a series of reasons in its favor that are also backed by numerous literary examples.54 The authority of the Aristotelian Economics that describes the ‘most pleasant and holy conjunction of husband and wife’ ( jucundissima et sanctissima societas viri et mulieris) demonstrates beyond any doubt that procreation and marriage are natural and necessary for the perpetuation of the human species. The frequency of misogynistic comments among the classics is explained away by drawing a list of unpleasant and evil women from sacred and profane history. Poets and philosophers dissuaded from marriage with such examples in mind, to which Engelbert opposes a number of laudable ancient matrons. On the whole, marriage as such cannot be rejected for the common people. Yet, it is not fitting for the philosopher who devotes himself to higher speculation. Just like Abelard in the Theologia christiana, when speaking of philosophers, Engelbert had monastic life and his personal case in mind. As for the general situation, where marriage is an indispensable 50 Plessner, Der Oikonomikos des Neupythagorers ‘Bryson’ und sein Einfluss auf die islamische Wissenschaft, 205-13, now repr. in Swain, Economy, Family and Society from Rome to Islam, 498-503. 51 Siraisi, ‘The Libri Morales in the Faculty of Arts and Medicine at Bologna’, repr. in Siraisi, Medicine and the Italian Universities 1250-1600; Lambertini, ‘L’arte del governo della casa’. 52 Bartolomeo da Varignana, Scriptum librum yconomicorum Aristotilis, Venice, Biblioteca dei padri Redentoristi, MS 3, fols 33r-50r, see f. 35r: ‘Quod autem domus non sit perfecta nisi adsit productio liberorum patet’. 53 Dubois, De recuperatione terrae sanctae, 51, 121. 54 Admontensis, Opuscula philosophica, 103-42, briefly discussed by Blažek, Die mittelalterliche Rezeption, who fails to note his Paduan background.

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social requirement, the final word is interestingly given to Aspasia (quoted through Cicero): ‘the question is solved when the best wife is married to the best husband’.55 Engelbert is a useful landmark since he managed to absorb the best of both philosophical and literary culture available in Padua. Yet, his personal situation is not relevant to our discussion. Turning to Admont as an abbot, his example has little to tell us about the practical advantages and inconveniences of having children. For craftsmen and artists, the transmission of technical skills and know-how within the family was a rule. In the times and areas under discussion, it may suffice to remember the case of Nicola Pisano and his son Giovanni, the most remarkable sculptors of their age.56 In the medical profession as well, dynastic transmission was frequent. Among doctors active in Bologna, Dino del Garbo and Bartolomeo da Varignana were born into medical families and had sons who continued their activities, the Florentine Garbo family persisting in the medical trade for centuries.57 Poets had fewer skills and secrets to pass on to their descendants, except for the possession of books. If none of the characters under review was surpassed by his sons, a continuation in literary taste and activity is manifest in a number of cases, such as for Geri d’Arezzo. As is well known, two of Dante’s sons contributed to their father’s glory. Iacopo and Pietro Alighieri, who followed their father in exile, both were among the first commentators of the Commedia, Iacopo returning to Florence while Pietro made a career as lawyer in Verona.58 Law is another intellectual field in which the practical advantage of raising a family was sometimes obvious. Already in the mid-thirteenth century, Accursius, who had achieved a hegemonic position in the civil law faculty, lead quite an aggressive strategy in favor of his sons, while extorting money from his students through usurious loans. Francesco, born of a first marriage in 1225, achieved a brilliant career of his own, being a successful advisor to the King of England during the period in which the Lambertazzi faction to which he belonged was banished from Bologna. On the other hand, Cervetto, born of Accursius’s second marriage, is the epitome of a spoiled heir. Graduated at the scandalously young age of seventeen, inheriting the whole library of his father, he was a failure when he had to assume political responsibilities, and 55 Engelbert, Opuscula, 142: ‘et soluta est vobis quaestio, quando optimus optima et optima optimus est conjucta’. 56 Seidel, Father and Son. 57 On this cohort, Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils. 58 De Robertis and Milani, ‘Introduction’, xxix-xxx. This new inquiry into the documentation related to Dante’s family has allowed us to identify another son, Giovanni, and two daughters, Antonia and Beatrice.

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was mocked for the fatuity of his legal opinions. Upon his return to Bologna, Francesco made sure that his father and himself were cleaned of their usurious reputations, before having a mausoleum built in his father’s honor, emulating those of other important lawyers, in which he himself would be buried.59 Taddeo Alderotti was in a similar predominant position within the arts faculty, but could not pass it on, since he only had a daughter and an illegitimate son. Likewise, Cino da Pistoia, the leading figure in civil law in the early fourteenth century, lacked the necessary basis to establish a dynasty. Instead of permanently moving to Bologna, he married in his hometown and chose to lead an itinerant career in various universities in central and southern Italy. Moreover, upon his death in 1337, he left only four daughters, none of whom appears to have married into the legal profession.60 By any account, the most spectacular case of a successful family strategy is to be found among canon lawyers. Giovanni d’Andrea, born around 1270 of a modest grammar teacher in Bologna, became one of the most influential canonists in the first decade of the fourteenth century, quickly amassing possessions and prestige.61 His marriage to Milancia, daughter of the canonist Bonincontro dallo Spedale, played a part in this ascent, and he then applied the same strategy to his offspring. His two legitimate sons, Bonincontro and Federico, both became doctors in canon law, while his three daughters were all married to law professors.62 On top of this, he also thought fit to adopt his most talented student, Giovanni Calderini. Owing to his political abilities, he was able to remain a central personality in Bologna until his death in 1348, even while his son Bonincontro and the husband of his daughter Novella had to flee as political opponents in 1338. His preeminence was already such by 1317 that he was not only commissioned to write the new statutes of the faculty, but also obtained on that occasion an exorbitant privilege. While a careful distinction was drawn between chairs open to the locals or to foreigners, it was stated that he and his descendant, through male or female lineage, could access any position. And in case he would decide to lecture on the recently published Clementine Decretals, regardless of any electoral procedure, he would be entitled to do so.63 Giovanni Calderini, 59 Grandi, I monumenti dei dottori e la scultura a Bologna (1267-1348). 60 Zaccagnini, Cino da Pistoia. 61 Tamba, ‘Giovanni d’Andrea’, 667-72. 62 He also managed to obtain important benefices in favor of his two illegitimate sons, Francesco and Gerolamo. 63 Malagola, Statuti delle Università e dei collegi dello studio bolognese, 38: ‘Et ubi forenses inveniri non possent forma predicta servata, tunc in deffectum eligi possit Bononiensis, salvis tamen privilegiis D. Iohannis Andree concessis et per diutinam consuetudinem et observantiam

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who himself produced five sons in the course of three successive marriages, managed to have at least one of them occupying a chair in canon law, who benefited from this privilege until the very end of the fourteenth century.64 The extent to which Giovanni d’Andrea’s dominance over the canon law faculty became a family business is remarkably expressed in the way he refers, on three occasions, to the opinions of his wife Milancia. As Guido Rossi demonstrated, this advice never implies any sophisticated learning, beyond simple common sense.65 First, Milancia is said to have opposed giving unfortunate names to children. She also stated that, upon an invitation to lunch, the host should go and fetch the guest only if it were a woman or a person of high status. The third case is slightly more complex. When some leeks are planted in one parish, and then transplanted into ground belonging to a different parish, to which church should the tithe be paid? Milancia proposed a simile with the mother and the wet nurse of a child; the feeding of the latter does not obliterate the true motherhood of the first. Instead, Giovanni insisted on the reality of the transplantation in a new ground that did not occur in the case of a child. All in all, these three allusions, whose comic tone is obvious, amount to little more than Inspector Columbo’s habit of referring to the sayings of his wife. In doing so, Giovanni d’Andrea demonstrated that he was not setting a barrier between his family life and his role as the leading professor in Bologna. The legend that surrounds the teaching activities of his daughter Novella is even more interesting. The story that captured the imagination of many novelists is exclusively based on the report of Christine de Pizan, who told Novella’s story in the Livre de la cité des dames: Giovanni Andrea, the famous legist who taught at Bologna nearly sixty years ago, similarly opposed the view that women should not be educated. He gave his beloved daughter Novella, a fine and lovely girl, such a good education and detailed knowledge of law that, when he was busy with other tasks which prevented him from lecturing to his students, he could approbatis quod ipse et sui descendentes per lineam masculinam et qui tunc sunt vel fuerint mariti descendentium per eandem lineam ab eodem, libere et per omnia eciam ut forenses ad omnes sedes possint assumi […] Si tamen contingt dominum Johannem Andree Clementinas legere velle, cesset hoc statutum, nec electus ad Sextum illas tunc legere teneantur’. The phrase ‘et per diutinam consuetudinem et observantiam approbatis’ probably represents an addition incorporated in the 1347 renewal of the statutes. 64 ‘Calderini, Giovanni’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, t. 16 (1973), 606-8. Interestingly, three of his sons were named after the Magi: Gaspare, Mechiorre, and Baldassare. Gaspare is the one who became a doctor in canon law. 65 Rossi, ‘Contributi alla biografia del canonista Giovanni d’Andrea’, 1451-1502, repr. in Rossi, Studi e testi di storia giuridica medievale.

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send his daughter in his place to read to them from his professorial chair. In order not to distract the audience by her beauty, Novella had a little curtain put up in front of her. Thus she lightened her father’s load and relieved him of some of his duties. In his devotion to her, he chose to preserve her name for posterity by writing an important commentary on a legal text which he named Novella in her honor.66

As Guido Rossi demonstrated, Christine’s father, Tommaso da Pizzano, held a chair of astrology and medicine in Bologna from 1344 to 1356. On at least one occasion, he acted together with Novella’s brother-in-law, Giovanni da San Giorgio. Tommaso certainly had first-hand knowledge of the Andrea family that he could have easily passed on to his daughter, even more so since he held similar views on the education of girls. It should be noted that Christine does not refer to any source, while most of her other Italian stories are drawn from Boccaccio. All the details she provides appear to be accurate, except for the fact that the book was not named after the daughter. Both the daughter and the book, named in the same year (1312), were in fact recording the name of Giovanni’s mother who had just passed away. It can therefore be accepted that Novella, on some occasions, did not lecture in the formal manner, but read aloud to the students her father’s writings while he was busy elsewhere. More than a sign of women entering the public intellectual scene, this episode shows again that Giovanni d’Andrea was conceiving his control over the faculty as a family business. At the time Christine was writing, in 1405, the discussion about marriage and children had shifted again. In the central decades of the fourteenth century, Petrarch had famously revived the anti-matrimony polemics in some of his letters, sometimes drawing directly from Heloise,67 but even more importantly in his De remediis utriusque fortunae. These brief dialogues between Reason and Joy or Grief provide harsh warnings against the worries of marriage and the many burdens caused by offspring, sometimes evocative of Geri’s arguments. For instance, as a consolation, Petrarch presents the case of an infertile wife as the best remedy to escape the worries of fatherhood.68 In the same period, while portraying a gallery of famous women (De mulieribus claris), Boccaccio wrote his deeply misogynistic Corbaccio.69 The general 66 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 140-41. 67 See for instance, Petrarca, Le Familiari, 35. 68 Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortune. Les remèdes aux deux fortunes. See I.67, De uxore fecunda et facunda; I.70, De ortu filiorum; I.71, De filio infante festivo; II.12, De numerose prolis gravi sarcina; II.22, De uxore sterili. 69 Dated to 1365 by Giorgio Padoan.

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mood was to change a few decades later, as demonstrated by a long letter written by Coluccio Salutati in 1392, defending the good of marriage against Petrarch’s criticism.70 Many writings produced in the humanist milieu of the following decades attest to a similar defense of family life among a new generation of lay intellectuals. More than Alberti’s famous Della famiglia (1433-1440),71 Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria (1415), written in Venice but dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, was the first widely circulated manual on domestic life adapted to this new audience.72 Its large circulation was only overshadowed by the new translation and commentary on the Economics by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1421) that achieved enormous success, with over 200 manuscripts and five printed editions in the fifteenth century.73 Christine was their contemporary, but she did not belong to the same world. Through her father, she was the heir of the earlier Italian university culture of the mid-fourteenth century. But her major intellectual inspiration was drawn from the great French academic Nicole Oresme who produced, among other things, a French commented translation of the Economics.74 As a widow and mother of three children while making her living as a woman of letters, she had many reasons to fight misogynistic prejudice. The Livre de la cité des dames contains a chapter that argues against the irrational preference for boys over girls. Interestingly, Christine manages to quote Petrarch in order to depict the ungrateful behavior of children, which she attributes especially to boys. To the contrary, she insists that daughters are by far less troublesome, and care much more for their aging parents.75 I do concur.

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Christine de Pizan. The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by Rosalind BrownGrant. London: Penguin, 1999. Coluccio Salutati. Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati. 3 vols. Edited by Francesco Novati. Roma: Forzani, 1896. Engelbert Admontensis, Opuscula philosophica. Edited by C. Hueber. Regensburg: Peezil, 1725. Francesco Barbaro. The Wealth of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual. Edited and translated by Margaret L. King. Toronto and Tempe: Iter Academic Press and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015. Francesco Petrarca. De remediis utriusque fortune: Les remèdes aux deux fortunes. Edited and translated by Christophe Carraud. Grenoble: Millon, 2002. —. Le Familiari. Edited by Vittorio Rossi. Firenze: Sansoni, 1934. Geri d’Arezzo. Lettere e Dialogo d’amore. Edited by Claudia Cenni, with Patricia Stoppacci. Pisa: Pacini, 2009. Il “Liber contractuum” dei frati Minori di Padova e di Vicenza (1263-1302). Edited by Elisa Bonatto. Roma: Viella, 2002. Leon Battista Alberti. I libri della famiglia. Edited by Francesco Furlan. Torino: Einaudi, 1994. Lovato Lovati et alii. Lupati de Lupatis, Bovetini de Bovetinis, Albertini Mussati necnon Jamboni Andreae de Favafuschis carmina quaedam ex codice veneto nunc primum edita. Edited by Luigi Padrin. Padova: Tipografia del seminario, 1887. Nicole Oresme. Le Livre de Yconomique. Edited by Albert D. Menut, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 47, no. 5 (1957). Petrus Abaelardus et Heloissa. The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise. Edited by David Luscombe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013. Pierre Dubois. De recuperatione terrae sanctae: Traité de politique générale. Edited by Ch.V. Langlois. Paris: Picard, 1891. Siger de Brabant. Écrits de logique, de morale et de physique. Edited by Bernardo Bazán. Louvain-Paris: Publications universitaires-Nauwelaerts, 1974. Statuti delle Università e dei collegi dello studio bolognese. Edited by Carlo Malagola. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1888.

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Renaissance, edited by Thomas Ricklin, with Delphine Carron and Emmanuel Babey, 119-33. Paris: Vrin, 2006. Mews, Constant J. Abelard and Heloise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. —. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in TwelfthCentury France. New York: Palgrave, 1999. —. ‘Un lecteur de Jérôme au XIIe siècle: Pierre Abélard’. In Jérôme entre l’Occident et l’Orient, edited by Y.M. Duval, 429-44. Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1988. Reprinted in Constant J. Mews, Abelard and his Legacy. Aldershot: Variorum, 2001. Milani, Giuliano. L’uomo con la borsa al collo: Genealogia e uso di un’immagine medievale. Roma: Viella, 2017. Monti, Carla Maria. ‘Per la fortuna della Questio de prole: i manoscritti’. Italia medioevale e umanistica 28 (1985): 71-95. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals, trans. By Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Piron, Sylvain. ‘Heloise’s Literary Self-Fashioning and the Epistolae duorum amantium’. In Strategies of Remembrance: From Pindar to Hölderlin, edited by Lucie Doležalová, 103-62. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Plessner, Martin. Der Oikonomikos des Neupythagorers ‘Bryson’ und sein Einfluss auf die islamische Wissenschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 1928. Rossi, Guido. ‘Contributi alla biograf ia del canonista Giovanni d’Andrea. L’insegnamento di Novella e Bettina, sua figlie, ed i presunti responsa di Milancia, sua moglie’. Rivista trimestrale di diritto e procedura civile 11 (1957): 1451-1502. Reprinted in Guido Rossi. Studi e testi di storia giuridica medievale. Milano: Giuffrè, 1997. Screech, Michael A. The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’ Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy. London: Arnold, 1958. Seidel, Max. Father and Son: Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. München: Hirmer, 2012. Siraisi, Nancy. ‘The Libri Morales in the Faculty of Arts and Medicine at Bologna: Bartolomeo da Varignana and the Pseudo-Aristotelian Economics’. Manuscripta 20 (1976): 105-18. Reprinted in Nancy Siraisi. Medicine and the Italian Universities 1250-1600. Leiden: Brill, 2001. —. Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Soudek, Josef. ‘The Genesis and Tradition of Leonardo Bruni’s Annotated Latin Version of the (Pseudo-) Aristotelian Economics’. Scriptorium 12 (1958): 260-68. —. ‘Leonardo Bruni and his Public: A Statistical and Interpretative Study of his Annotated Latin Version of the (Pseudo-) Aristotelian Economics’. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (1968): 51-136.

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Swain, Simon. Economy, Family and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Tamba, Giorgio. ‘Giovanni d’Andrea’. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Roma: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 2001, 55:667-72. Vecchio, Silvana. ‘De uxore non ducenda. La polemica anti-matrimoniale fra XIII e XIV secolo’. In Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura, edited by Michelangelo Picone and Claude Cazalé Bérard, 53-64. Firenze: Cesati, 1998. —. ‘Les deux épouses de Socrate. Les philosophes et les femmes dans la littérature des exempla’. In Exempla docent: Les exemples des philosophes de l’antiquité à la Renaissance, edited by Thomas Ricklin, with Delphine Carron and Emmanuel Babey, 227-39. Paris: Vrin, 2006. Weiss, Roberto. Il primo secolo dell’umanesimo: Studi e testi. Roma: Storia e letteratura, 1949. —. ‘Lovato dei Lovati (1241-1309)’. Italian Studies 6 (1951): 2-28. Wieruszowski, Helene. ‘Arezzo as a Center of Learning and Letters in the ThirteenthCentury’. Traditio 9 (1953): 321-91. Wilson, Katherina M., and Elizabeth M. Makowsky. Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Witt, Ronald G. ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Zaccagnini, Guido. Cino da Pistoia. Pistoia: Pagnini, 1918.

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About the Author Sylvain Piron is Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Ehess). He is a researcher in the fields of the anthropology and history of scholastic thought, focusing on the intersections between political, economic, and religious ideas.

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12 Attuning to the Cosmos The Ethical Man’s Mission from Plato to Petrarch Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides Abstract The essay discusses music and silence as two important paradigms for articulating spiritual progress in the Platonic corpus and its reception by Neoplatonic and Christian thinkers. After examining the importance of music in Plato’s theory of the soul, mainly in the Republic and the Timaeus, I argue that he appreciated music as a spiritual awakening, as preparation for the truth which is always experienced in deafening silence. Proclus, a sensitive reader of Plato, and later thinkers such as Proclus and Boethius, provided a secure path for the survival of Platonic ideas in the West. Petrarch, a meticulous reader of Augustine, grappling with the same Platonic notions that frustrated the fourth-century theologian, experiments boldly with Platonic silence in the Secretum and his Rime Sparse.

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Keywords: Plato, Neoplatonics, Proclus, Augustine, Petrarch, Music, Silence

O may we soon again renew that song, And keep in tune with Heav’n till God ere long To his celestial consort us unite, To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light. Milton, ‘At a Solemn Music’, 25-28

Introduction This chapter explores the tension between two moral paradigms ascribed to Plato and zealously embraced by medieval thinkers, especially Petrarch:1 1

Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence’, passim.

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virtue is realized when, having perceived cosmic music, humans strive to attune to it; yet, at the same time, virtue is perfected in silence. I start by examining Plato’s references to man’s musical nature and to cosmic harmony, including his odd description of the role of the Sirens in generating it.2 Although Plato did not discuss the ideal of quiet reflection in an overt or systematic manner,3 ‘Platonic silence’, as the expert way to grasp philosophical truth, is already advocated by Cicero. 4 Both concepts were advanced in the Neoplatonic tradition in which Augustine was steeped5 and through whom the notion of silent contemplation was firmly transplanted in Christian philosophical thought.6 In the second part of the chapter, I trace the milieu of ‘Platonic silence’ in Petrarch, arguing that he joined a long line of earlier thinkers who, having interpreted the Platonic Sirens in a specific way, believed that their music marked an initial stage of spiritual awakening and that the wise man ultimately ought to overcome the appeal of music in favor of silence. In ancient Greek, the term music (deriving etymologically from the Muses), refers not only to the art of sounds but also the means of communicating culture, such as poetry and even dance; it is worth noting that ‘music and musical teaching had a substantial impact on ancient rhetorical theory’.7 Hence, Democritus, who famously described ‘man as a 2 Regarding man’s musical nature, see Clay, Platonic Questions, especially 73, 142-49. 3 See, for example, Plato, Republic 604e2-3 (‘τὸ δὲ φρόνιμον καὶ ἡσύχιον ἦθος’; also, in note 32 below); Hippias Major 295a4-5 (‘εἰ ὀλίγον χρόνον εἰς ἐρημίαν ἐλθὼν σκεψαίμην πρὸς ἐμαυτόν’); Phaedrus 229a2-3 (‘ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ καθιζησόμεθα’) with Hunter, Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature, 12. Also, see notes 47-49 below. 4 Cicero, De Inventione 1.4 responding to Plato’s Republic 497a; see Altman, The Revival of Platonism, 11 and 275 (also, see his discussion of De Inventione 1.3 on p. 9). Also, note that Plato has been understood to practice silence by not engaging with his protagonist, Socrates, in any of his dialogues, an example that Cicero also appreciated; see Atkins, Cicero on Politics, 25: ‘One f inal characteristic common to both Cicero’s De republica and Plato’s Republic […] concerns the feature that Cicero claimed had separated this work from his later cycle of dialogues in the letter of June 45: the author’s silence’; also, see Clay, Platonic Questions, xi-xiii; also, see Hunter, Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature, 109-10, with reference to Cicero, De Oratore 1.231. 5 Augustine, Confessions 7.9 and 7.20; Contra Academicos 2.2.5 (Fuhrer/Simone); De beata vita 1.4 (Fuhrer/Simone). Edwards, Socrates and the Early Church, 139: ‘Augustine could not have read Proclus, but he breathed the air that nurtured him’; Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 236. Mazzeo, ‘St Augustine’s Rhetoric’, 175: ‘St. Augustine’s analysis of rhetoric reveals an authentic platonism which he recreated out of the contemporary materials furnished by neoplatonists and Academics’. 6 Mazzeo, ‘St Augustine’s Rhetoric’, 189-92. 7 De Jonge, ‘Grammatical Theory’, 987-88.

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small world’,8 wrote a number of treatises on music.9 As Brancacci pointed out, Democritus included music, together with grammata manthanein and gymnastics, among the activities contributing to the acquisition of aidós (honor) and thus to the realization of human virtue (areté), its intimate value lying in the ability to form the feeling of honor.10

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Pythagoras, on the other hand, prescribed music as medicine and attempted to align souls to their divine nature, by performing the so-called ‘soul adjustments’; he also developed the theory about the harmony of heavenly bodies, the so-called ‘Music of the Spheres’, arguing that music was an expression of harmony, the divine principle that rules the universe and our world.11 Thus, music enables us to see into the structure of nature. In addition, Pythagoras believed that ‘from the heavens to aerial and terrestrial beings there was a certain descending communication’, thus implying a notion of divine Providence.12 Influenced by both Democritus13 and Pythagoras,14 and thoroughly familiar with the sophists’ interest in music,15 Plato developed the idea of attuning to the cosmos.16 Importantly, while for the Pythagoreans the study of music (and maths) is the contemplation of divine principles, Plato appreciates it merely as preparation for doing so.17

8 ‘anthrôpos mikros cosmos’ (Graham, The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy, 632, no. 193); Furley, Cosmic Problems, 231; Guthrie, The Presocratic Tradition, 471-72. 9 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 9.7.48 (= 68A33, Diels and Kranz); Brancacci, ‘Democritus’ Mousika’, 194. 10 Brancacci, ‘Democritus’ Mousika’, 195. 11 Iamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica 15.64-67 (Deubner). 12 Iamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica 32.217.29-218.3; cf. O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived, 100. 13 Ferwerda, ‘Democritus and Plato’, passim. Also, see Taylor, Nomos and Phusis, passim. 14 Influenced by Pythagoras, Platonists viewed the celestial motions as reflections of divine reason since they followed mathematical laws; Plato, Timaeus 33b; Aristotle, Physics 265a13. Also, see Brancacci, ‘Democritus’ Mousika’, 186 with Frank, Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer, 150-84; the latter suggested that we should distinguish Democritus’s concept of armonia from that of Pythagoras based on the contrast implied in Plato’s Republic 531b. 15 Compare with Plato, Protagoras 318e; Greater Hippias 285b-286c. See Novokhatko, ‘Greek Scholarship’, 40. 16 For the association of the political and natural kosmoi which Plato develops in the Republic 430d-432a and its intellectual background in ancient Greek thought, see Rehm, The Play of Space, 398n.34. 17 Fideler, The Pythagorean Sourcebook, 35.

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Plato’s Notion of Attuning to Virtue In the Timaeus, Plato systematized the idea that the cosmos and the soul are ‘made out of music’,18 structured according to the simple ratios of the octave (2:1), the perfect fifth (3:2), and the perfect fourth (4:3). The idea, further explored by Plotinus and Proclus,19 was transmitted to the West through Cicero20 and Boethius.21 In the Platonic and Neoplatonic theories, music is understood as the natural law that the ethical man follows in order to realize his connection to the cosmos and the divine nous that rules it.22 However, one great difficulty in appreciating the nuances of Plato’s theory of attuning to cosmic music is his description of the Sirens in the Republic – a text that precedes his elaborate cosmology in the Timaeus. At the end of Book 9 of the Republic, Socrates discusses the necessary training of the man who wishes to improve himself intellectually and spiritually; the text aims to prepare Glaucon, Socrates’ interlocutor, as well as the audience, for the final book of the Republic, which concludes decisively with the excision of poetry from the ideal city. Plato’s emphasis on the philosopher’s musical inclination at this point in his work has not received adequate scholarly attention.23 The text reads as follows:

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οὐκοῦν ὅ γε νοῦν ἔχων πάντα τὰ αὑτοῦ εἰς τοῦτο συντείνας βιώσεται, πρῶτον μὲν τὰ μαθήματα τιμῶν, ἃ τοιαύτην αὐτοῦ τὴν ψυχὴν ἀπεργάσεται, τὰ δὲ ἄλλα ἀτιμάζων; […] ἔπειτά γ᾽, εἶπον, τὴν τοῦ σώματος ἕξιν καὶ τροφὴν οὐχ ὅπως τῇ θηριώδει καὶ ἀλόγῳ ἡδονῇ ἐπιτρέψας ἐνταῦθα τετραμμένος ζήσει, ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ πρὸς ὑγίειαν 18 Timaeus 30a-b, 31-33, 34b, 35a-39e, 40d-44d, 46c-47e. 19 See, Plotinus, Enneads IV.4.40-41; and Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. 20 Cicero, Somnium Scipionis V.10.18. 21 Boethius, De Institutione Musica 1.2 (Gottfried); cf. Donato, Boethius’ ‘Consolation of Philosophy’, 163-77; also, Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres, 30-32. 22 Plato, Laws 714a1-2 with Folch, The City and the Stage, 305-6. 23 Compare with the dialogue Laches 188d3-9 where Plato def ines the musical person as follows: ‘καὶ κομιδῇ μοι δοκεῖ μουσικὸς ὁ τοιοῦτος εἶναι, ἁρμονίαν καλλίστην ἡρμοσμένος οὐ λύραν οὐδὲ παιδιᾶς ὄργανα, ἀλλὰ τῷ ὄντι ζῆν ἡρμοσμένος οὗ αὐτὸς αὑτοῦ τὸν βίον σύμφωνον τοῖς λόγοις πρὸς τὰ ἔργα, ἀτεχνῶς δωριστὶ […] ἥπερ μόνη Ἑλληνική ἐστιν ἁρμονία’. ‘Such is the man whom I perceived to be “musical”: he is attuned to the fairest harmony, not that of a lyre or other instruments of entertainment, but he is, in fact, attuned to living his own life in which his words agree with his deeds, simply in the Dorian mode […] which is the only Greek harmony.’ Translation modified from Lamb, Plato IV, 39. Compare Hunter, Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature, 75, discussing the correspondence between Aristophanes, Knights, lines 185-93 and Plato’s Republic 487d-88e; Hunter translates Aristophanes’ reference to μουσική and μουσικὸς as ‘education’ and ‘educated’, missing the fuller interplay between the two texts.

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βλέπων, οὐδὲ τοῦτο πρεσβεύων, ὅπως ἰσχυρὸς ἢ ὑγιὴς ἢ καλὸς ἔσται, ἐὰν μὴ καὶ σωφρονήσειν μέλλῃ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀεὶ τὴν ἐν τῷ σώματι ἁρμονίαν τῆς ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ ἕνεκα συμφωνίας ἁρμοττόμενος φανεῖται. παντάπασι μὲν οὖν, ἔφη, ἐάνπερ μέλλῃ τῇ ἀληθείᾳ μουσικὸς εἶναι. [Then the sensible man will live directing all of his affairs to this end; first, by valuing the studies that will give this quality to his soul and rejecting the others. […] ‘And then,’ I said, ‘regarding the regime and nurture of his body, he will not, having given himself over to beastly and irrational pleasure, live his life turned to this direction, neither will he focus on his health, nor will he give preference to how to become strong or healthy or beautiful, unless he is going to gain temperance from these qualities, but he will always appear to be attuning the harmony of his body for the sake of the harmony of his soul’. ‘I agree in every way’, he said, ‘if he is going to be truly musical’.]24

Accordingly, he adds, the wise man will only pay attention to his inner constitution25, only interested in participating in the politics of the ideal republic, a model of which exists only in heaven.26 Plato begins Book 10 by pointing out the mimetic nature of poetry which corrupts the minds of the members of the audience, especially when they cannot know exactly what the objects of poetry are really like.27 To support his argument he has Socrates refer to the difference between a mirror where you see the reflections of things and the real things themselves.28 Hence, once more Plato returns to the issue of how we can figure out the truth from the many imperfect versions of it to which we are exposed; what is the necessary training and who may be the right instructor for that training of distinguishing between truth and quasi-truth.29 In pointing out the deficient nature of the reasoning faculty of our soul,30 the one that relies for its convictions on measurements and calculations, Plato is keen to include 24 Republic 591c1-d3; translation modified from Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, Plato Republic, Books 6-10, 385-87. 25 Republic 591e1-2. 26 Republic 592a-b. 27 Republic 595a-b. 28 Republic 596e; this description reminds us of the cave allegory earlier in Republic 514a-520a; the cave allegory is also linked with the analogies of the Sun (Republic 507b-509c) and the divided line (Republic 509d-511c), all images preoccupied with the distinction between truth/ reality and quasi-truth/reality. 29 See Republic 602c, for imitation as a third stage from truth. 30 Republic 602d.

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poetry as one of the arts which deceive us.31 He is especially worried about the effects of poetry, because its imitative aspect stirs a certain part of our thought that entertains irrational behavior. Poetry, Plato argues, encourages irrational reaction to various misfortunes that people suffer in life, urging them to deviate from what they know to be the correct way of responding, that of ‘calm, thoughtful disposition’32 achieved by ‘pondering over what has happened’.33 This is, according to Plato, the difference between poetry and philosophy.34 The philosopher is aware of poetry’s imitative nature and does not allow it to affect him in the same way that he appreciates the immortal nature of the soul and tries accordingly to purify it from external challenges such as injustice, licentiousness, cowardice, and ignorance.35 The ideal occasion for this purification to happen is, of course, at the point of our death;36 this is also the time to reflect upon the rewards of virtue, especially since reputation, including poetic renown, implies a recognition on account of just behavior.37 But, importantly, Plato specifies that ‘justice is the best thing for the soul itself’,38 implying that the true philosopher needs to account to himself in a mood of quiet reflection. Accordingly, Plato argues that regardless of our earthly status and experiences, the just man is still able to make himself ‘like a god’ and receive rewards either in this life or posthumously.39 It is at this point that Plato cites the story of Er, who in a state of necrophany was able to see and hear some of the wonders that await men after death. After witnessing the punishment of tyrants in the afterlife, Er notes that the greatest fear of the souls trying to enter the higher level of heavens was that ‘sound should break out when each one went up: indeed, each one went up most gladly when there was silence’. 40 Er refers to the music of the 31 Republic 603b8-9. Also, see Phaedo 97c1-98e where Socrates describes how he came to reject Anaxagoras’ theories. 32 Republic 604e2-3 (‘τὸ δὲ φρόνιμόν τε καὶ ἡσύχιον ἦθος’); translation from Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, Plato Republic, Books 6-10, 429. 33 Republic 604c6 (‘τῷ βουλεύεσθαι, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, περὶ τὸ γεγονὸς’); translation modifed from Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, Plato Republic, Books 6-10, 429. 34 Republic 607b-c. 35 Republic 609b. 36 Republic 611b-c; also, see Plato, Cratylus, 403a-404b, where he associates knowledge with Hades and places his Sirens in the Underworld (also see note 136 below); Liefferinge, ‘Sirens’, 482. 37 Republic 612b. 38 Republic, 612b3 (‘ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸ δικαιοσύνην αὐτῇ ψυχῇ ἄριστον ηὕρομεν’). 39 Republic, 613a-b. 40 Republic 616a8-9 (‘μὴ γένοιτο ἑκάστῳ τὸ φθέγμα ὅτε ἀναβαίνοι, καὶ ἁσμενέστατα ἕκαστον σιγήσαντος ἀναβῆναι’); translation from Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, Plato Republic, Books 6-10, 471; cf. note 136 below.

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Sirens when he sees the souls reaching the meadow where they have to decide on their next incarnation. While a lot of thought has been dedicated to figuring out the exact shape of Plato’s Spindle of Necessity around which the eight cosmic circles move in constant rotation, 41 each controlled by a Siren that produces a single sound on one note, little attention has been given to the fact that their music offers the background to the souls’ selection of their next incarnation. Notably, among all the souls that Plato mentions, Odysseus is the only one who, mindful of his previous toils and taking a rest from ambition, spends a long time looking for the life of a private citizen with no interest in public affairs. 42 Odysseus, it seems, was able to withstand the music of the Sirens. Here Plato almost antagonizes Homer and his well-known tale of Odysseus’s bypassing of the Sirens. 43 While, however, Plato’s modelling of his teleological thesis on Homer’s Nekyia has been discussed in scholarship, 44 his description of the Sirens remains steeped in scholarly debate. That Plato indeed wished to compare himself to Homer is also suggested in the Symposium where Socrates is compared to the Sirens;45 furthermore, we are told that τὰ οὖν ἐκείνου […] αὐλῇ […], μόνα κατέχεσθαι ποιεῖ καὶ δηλοῖ τοὺς τῶν θεῶν τε καὶ τελετῶν δεομένους διὰ τὸ θεῖα εἶναι. [his melodies have in themselves the power to possess and so reveal those people who are ready for the god and his mysteries. That is because his melodies are themselves divine.]46

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Still, despite his profile as a musician, also reiterated in the Phaedo where Socrates admits that he even tried to compose poetry before dedicating himself to philosophy, ‘the greatest music’, 47 Socrates was notorious for

41 Republic 617b-c; for a description of the spindle, see Schils, ‘Plato’s Myth of Er’, 108-14. 42 Republic 620c. 43 Homer, Odyssey 12.165-200. 44 See Díaz de Cerio Díez, ‘Socrates ad Inferos’, especially 69-74 and 82-85, who discusses the comparison of Socrates with Odysseus (yet with no reference to the Sirens); also, Planinc, Plato Through Homer, 82, 96, 103-7. 45 Symposium 216b1. 46 Republic 215c6-8; translation from Prior, ‘The Portrait of Socrates’, 153, who discusses the comparison of Socrates with Marsyas; cf. 215d4-5 and 215e2-5. 47 In Phaedo 60e1-8 Socrates relates how in his youth he experienced recurrent dreams urging him to “make music;” although he regarded philosophy as the “greatest music” (61a4-5: ὡς φιλοσοφίας μὲν οὔσης μεγίστης μουσικῆς), he did not neglect to dabble, albeit briefly, in composing ordinary poetry (see Phaedo 61a-b, esp. 61a8-9: ταύτην τὴν δημώδη μουσικὴν ποιεῖν).

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undergoing frequent spells of trance in silence. 48 Thus, in Alcibiades I Socrates is reported as following Alcibiades around quietly trying to urge him to change his ways and achieve a spiritual breakthrough. 49 Although we tend to appreciate Plato’s Sirens as a positive spin on the Homeric ones, typically charged with deadly lust, Plato, in my view, essentially reiterates Homer, arguing that the true philosopher will ignore the Sirens.50 This may also have been Proclus’s understanding of the Platonic Sirens, despite being accused of over-interpreting Plato.51

Neoplatonic Responses to the Republic

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Similarly to Plato,52 his commentator Proclus stresses that all souls suffer forgetfulness when they descend into the realm of matter,53 thus being disassociated with the divine, and that salvation consists in the recollection of the divine world.54 Proclus stresses the image of Helios as the raiser of souls to the Demiurge, clearly inspired by Plato’s use of the Sun allegory in 48 On Socrates’ silent fits of abstraction, see Plato, Symposium 175a7-10 and 220c3-d5. Also, his Theaetetus 189e-190a and 173e-174a with Frede, ‘The Soul’s Silent Dialogue’, 28-31. Socrates repeatedly reported his inner exchanges with his daimonion; see, for example, Plato, Apology 31c-d, 40a-c, 41c-d, Phaedrus 242b-d, Republic 496c, Theaetetus 150e-151a; Euthyphro 3b; Euthydemus 272e-273a; Theages 128d-129e; also, see Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1.1-5 and Apology 12-13. Socrates’ tendency to withdraw into himself is ridiculed in contemporary comedy; see Aristophanes, Clouds 227-234 and Plato, Apology 19c4-7. In the Phaedrus (249d1-4) Socrates argues that as the philosopher focuses on developing his judgement through systematic practice, he inevitably withdraws from society; also, see Plato, Republic 488e1-501a7. By far, however, the most prominent instance of advocating Socratic silence is the much-quoted passage from Plato’s Phaedo (67e), where the life of the philosopher is defined as a continuous struggle to minimize the influence of the body on the mind and, therefore, as practice for death and its permanent silence. The references cited here (and their reception in Neoplatonic thinkers) are discussed in greater detail in Anagnostou-Laoutides, The History of Inebriation and Reason, and id. ‘Man before God’, both forthcoming. 49 Alcibiades I, 106a3; cf. Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World, 166. 50 On Proclus’s understanding of Plato’s appreciation of Homeric poetry, see Lamberton, Proclus the Successor, xviii-xx; cf. notes 64-67 below. 51 Liefferinge, ‘Sirens’, 485-92. 52 See, for example, Phaedrus 250a1ff. and 72e3ff.; Republic 621a. For Plotinus’ appreciation of the notions of harmony and silence, see Banner, Philosophic Silence and Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Man before God’, forthcoming. 53 Proclus, De Malorum Subsistentia 21.15-18 (Isaac/Steel). 54 Proclus, Hymns III.3-9 (Berg). For the anagogic character of Helios in Proclus’s Hymns, see Berg, Proclus’ Hymns, 63 and 177. For the idea of the soul as an attunement in Plotinus (Enneads I.1.4.14-16; 4.3.22.1-9) and Porphyry (Sententiae 18, Lamberz), in connection with Plato’s Phaedo 86b7-c2, see Sorabji, ‘The Mind-Body Relation’, p. 154.

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the Republic.55 In his Hymn to Helios, the god is addressed as ‘evil-averting’56 and a servant of the Muses57, whose gifts Proclus hopes to cultivate in an attempt to imitate divinely inspired poets such as Homer and Orpheus. These are identified with the philosopher by Proclus who believes that the true philosopher is the true musician and that the Muses can inspire both the philosopher and the poet with divine wisdom.58 Importantly, in his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Proclus argues that Plato called the divine souls ‘Sirens’ in the Republic because they were able to remind us, at least, those who have not entirely forgotten the spiritual world,59 of the cosmic harmony to which our souls must remain attuned.60 At this point Proclus discusses the appropriate upbringing of the guardians which should be ‘an image of the universe’ in order to encourage our recollection of the divine world.61 Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras62 and Cicero in his Dream of Scipio63 also refer to the return of the souls through music and imitation. Pépin has argued that both in his commentary on the Republic64 and the Phaedrus65 Proclus revamped Homer’s negative understanding of the Sirens by focusing on their role as ‘soul-guiding and helping musicians’.66 In other words, our ability to sail by the Sirens is the very symptom of our spiritual awareness and the start (rather than the end) of our journey to wisdom. As Proclus argues, there are three different levels of Sirens: first, the Sirens of 55 See note 28 above. 56 Line 39, ‘αλεξικάκοισιν αρωγαίς’ (referring to the evil of rebirths which punishing daemons prepare for those who do not live in accordance with Nous). 57 Hymns III.43-44. 58 Proclus, In Platonis Rem Publicam Commentarii I.57, 8-23 (Kroll); Plato, Phaedrus 61a3. 59 Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentaria I.41, 4-5 (Diehl). 60 Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum I.41, 14-16. 61 Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum I.40, 24 (‘πῶς εἴκασται πρὸς τὸ πᾶν’). Also, see I.41, 5-14, where Proclus describes how the appropriate music (and gymnastic) can bring the lives of the guardians to ‘harmonious fruition’ and fashion ‘the rhythmical and tuneful divine motions, always unswervingly preserving the same disposition of the chariots of the gods’. Translation by Tarrant, Proclus: Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, 135. 62 Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras, 82 reports one of the akousmata, the maxims that prepare his disciples for wisdom; to the question ‘What is the Oracle of Delphi?’ the answer is: ‘[T]he tetraktys, or the harmony where the Sirens dwell’. According to Liefferinge, ‘Sirens’, 500, this is but another attempt to create a linear association between Pythagoras, the Sirens of Homer, and the heavenly harmony of Plato, easily achieved through Apollo. 63 Cicero, Somnium Scipionis 6.18.18-19. 64 Republic 617b4-7. 65 Through his reference to the cicadas in Phaedrus 230c. 66 Pépin, ‘Réactions du Christianisme’, 8; also discussed by Moro Tornese, ‘Music and the Return of the Souls’, 123-24; also, see Moro Tornese’s discussion of Hermias’s identification of the cicadas with the Sirens in his exegesis of Plato’s Phaedrus on p. 124. Compare Liefferinge, ‘Sirens’, 483.

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Plato’s Republic, the ‘celestial Sirens’; second, the terrestrial Sirens within the world of genesis, Homer’s Sirens; third, the subterrestrial Sirens. It is common to all Sirens, Proclus states, to produce a physical harmony. The Muses, on the other hand, are associated with intellective harmony.67 Thus, Proclus reworked the Platonic model to argue that the Muses denote intellectual, divine values, while the Sirens remain attached to material goods.68 Provided we are aware of these distinctions, the Sirens can still ‘remind’ us of our goal. Proclus also describes four kinds of music relevant to the Muses.69 Despite their differences Proclus assures us that, unlike poetry, all music has an anagogic character.

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Τοσούτων τοίνυν ὄντων τῶν παρ’ αὐτῷ μουσικῶν ἤδη φανερόν, ὅπως τὴν ποιητικὴν ὑπὸ τὴν μουσικὴν τακτέον, εἴτε τὴν ἔνθεον εἴτε τὴν μὴ τοιαύτην, καὶ τίνος διοριστέον, ὅτι τῆς ἀναγομένης. ταύτην γὰρ εἴχεν ὁ πρώτιστος βίος, και ταύτην διώριζεν τῆς ποιητικῆς ὡς μιμητικῆς, οὐκ ἐθέλουσαν μιμητικῶς ζῆν, ἀλλά ἀπὸ τῶν μιμητῶν ἀναρπάζειν ἑαυτὴν εἰς τὰ παραδείγματα τῶν ἀρμονιῶν τῶν τῇδε καὶ ῥυθμῶν. [Therefore, since, in his view, it is already clear that they [the poets] are musical only to a certain degree, poetry must be classified under music, whether divinely inspired or not, and must be separated from it, because music is anagogic. Our very first type of life owned this type of music and Plato separates it from poetry, because of its imitative character, and since it does not wish to lead an imitative life, music snatches itself out of copies towards the models of the heavenly harmonies and rhythms.]70 67 See νοερὰ ἁρμονία, in Proclus, In Rem Publicam II.238, 21-239, 14 (Kroll). Proclus adds that, although the Muses are absent from the myth of Er, ‘by being drawn into the circle of circles, the Sirens are lower than the Muses’ (In Rem Publicam II.237, 20-22. Finally, below the Muses but close to them, the Sirens exist under the guidance of Apollo Mousagētes (leader of the Muses). Proclus insists on the presence of Apollo, who ‘produces imitations, blessed with harmony and rhythm’ (In Rem Publicam I.68, 14-16; ‘ποιήματα […] ἐναρμόνια καὶ ἔρρυθμα’) and even presents the god as presiding over the circuits of the spheres (In Rem Publicam I.69, 10-12 and 26-29). As Liefferinge argued (‘Sirens’, 497), in his attempt to produce a consistent explanation of the Platonic argument, Proclus also refers to the god in Plato’s Timaeus, ‘assigning to Apollo (absent from Timaeus) the role of “moving the circles of the Divine Souls that turn in measure according to perfectly rhythmic movements”’ (In Rem Publicam I.69, 12-14). According to Liefferinge, Proclus views the god as the necessary link between the earthbound poet and the divine world (In Rem Publicam I.43, 22-25), hence he becomes the warrantor of the poet’s role in Plato’s ideal city. Also, see Lamberton, Proclus the Successor, xx. 68 In Rem Publicam II.68, 3-16. 69 In Rem Publicam I.57ff.; for a description of the four types of music, see Moro Tornese, ‘Music and the Return of the Souls’, 126-27. 70 In Rem Publicam I.60, 6-13, with my translation; also, see Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, 327; Berg, Proclus’ Hymns, 115; and Sheppard, Studies on the Fifth and Sixth Essays, 18.

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Although the Platonic text does not refer to the Muses and Proclus asks a question that Plato did not feel was important for his argument – that is, what is the relationship of the Sirens with the Muses – his understanding of the text certainly takes into account Plutarch’s comparison of the Homeric and the Platonic Sirens where we hear: αἵ γε μὲν δὴ Ὁμήρου Σειρῆνες οὐ κατὰ λόγον ἡμᾶς; τῷ μύθῳ φοβοῦσιν, ἀλλὰ κἀκεῖνος ὀρθῶς ᾐνίττετο τὴν τῆς μουσικῆς αὐτῶν δύναμιν οὐκ ἀπάνθρωπον οὐδ᾽ ὀλέθριον οὖσαν ἀλλὰ ταῖς ἐντεῦθεν ἀπιούσαις ἐκεῖ ψυχαῖς, ὡς ἔοικε, καὶ πλανωμέναις μετὰ τὴν τελευτὴν ἔρωτα πρὸς τὰ οὐράνια καὶ θεῖα λήθην δὲ τῶν θνητῶν ἐμποιοῦσαν κατέχειν καὶ κατᾴδειν θελγομένας: αἱ δ᾽ ὑπὸ χαρᾶς ἕπονται καὶ συμπεριπολοῦσιν. ἐνταῦθα δὲ πρὸς ἡμᾶς ἀμυδρά τις οἷον ἠχὼ τῆς μουσικῆς ἐκείνης ἐξικνουμένη διὰ λόγων ἐκκαλεῖται καὶ ἀναμιμνήσκει τὰς ψυχὰς τῶν τότε: τὰ δ᾽ ὦτα τῶν μὲν πλείστων περιαλήλιπται καὶ καταπέπλασται σαρκίνοις ἐμφράγμασι καὶ πάθεσιν, οὐ κηρίνοις: …..ἀλλά μοι δοκεῖ Πλάτων ὡς ἀτράκτους καὶ ἠλακάτας τοὺς ἄξονας, σφονδύλους δὲ τοὺς ἀστέρας, ἐξηλλαγμένως ἐνταῦθα καὶ τὰς Μούσας Σειρῆνας ὀνομάζειν ‘εἰρούσας’ τὰ θεῖα καὶ λεγούσας ἐν Ἅιδου, καθάπερ Σοφοκλέους Ὀδυσσεὺς φησι Σειρῆνας εἰσαφικέσθαι Φόρκου κόρας, θροοῦντε τοὺς Ἅιδου νόμους. [For surely Homer’s Sirens frighten us inconsistently with the Platonic myth; but the poet too rightly implied that the power of music is neither inhuman or destructive, but that it creates, as it seems, in the souls that go from here below and wander after death, love for heavenly and divine things and the forgetting of mortal things. It possesses and enchants them with its spell, so that under the influence of that joy, they follow the Sirens and join them in their circuits. And here, as a faint echo of the music reaches us and appealing to our souls with words, it reminds them of their past experiences. But most ears are clogged and blocked by carnal obstructions and passions, rather than wax. But the soul that through its good natural disposition, senses the echo and remembers, and suffers what is nothing less than the maddest of passions – longing and yearning to be free of the body, yet unable to do so. Not that I agree with this view on all points: it seems to me, that just as Plato refers to the axes of the sky as ‘shafts’ and ‘spindles’, and to stars as ‘whorls’, so here too, contrary to usage, he called the Muses ‘Sirens’ because they ‘say’ (εἰρούσας) and proclaim that which is divine in the realm of Hades.]71

71 Plutarch, Table Talk 9.14.5 (=745c); translation with modifications from Minar, Sandbach and Helmbold, Plutarch, Moralia IX, 279-81.

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Equally, Cicero referred to the Sirens as ‘Muses of Hades’72 which pose an intellectual (not sensual) lure to men of philosophical minds.73 Thus, in describing the other type of Sirens, the genesis Sirens, as Proclus calls them, he maintains that

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ἃς ὁ μὲν ἀναγόμενος καὶ σώζων ἑαυτὸν παραπλεύσεται τὴν ἀμείνω διώκων ἁρμονίαν καὶ ὡς ἀληθῶς μουσικήν, ὁ δὲ πολὺς ἀσπάσεται ὑπὸ τῶν Σειρήνων δεσμευθεὶς ἐγκαταμένειν τῇ φύσει καὶ ταῖς τῆς φύσεως γλυκοθυμίαις, γοητευμένος ὑπ’ αὐτῶν. [he who sets out to sea and saves himself will sail by them, pursuing the better harmony and true music, but the many, fettered by the Sirens, will be glad to remain in nature and in nature’s delights, seduced by them.]74

Boethius, avidly read in the Middle Ages, appreciated Proclus’s scheme: as Moro Tornese has pointed out, he refers to the musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis, which together with the level which corresponds to the ultimate One, make up the four levels of music in Proclus’s classification.75 Therefore, Plato’s inclusion of the Sirens in his theory is necessary to complement the perfect mirroring between the structure of the cosmos and man’s journey to God, as a threshold or awareness stage of appreciating the difference between divine music and its imitations. In my view, this observation implies that the music of the Sirens in the Republic represents – or at least was understood to represent – levels of attuning to the cosmos and, while still attached to the corporeal world, the philosopher is expected to make the right choice. This will allow him to maintain the balance between the constituent parts of his soul, thus preserving some of the rhythm that he had heard before his incarnation. In other words, Plato stresses the determination of the individual to impose his will over the temptations he faces during the multiple incarnations of his soul. Accordingly, Vergil – who, as I have argued elsewhere, enjoyed a reputation as 72 Cicero, De Finibus 5.18.48-9. 73 Liefferinge, ‘Sirens’, 494-99. 74 In Rem Publicam II.68, 10-14; my translation having consulted Liefferinge, ‘Sirens’, 499. 75 Moro Tornese, ‘Music and the Return of the Souls’, 128; also, Hicks, Composing the World, 114-246, for a close analysis of the reception of Boethius’s tripartite scheme of music; on p. 246 he notes: ‘What is important, however, is that the gradual silencing of the Platonic cosmos occurred in dialogue with the very Platonic texts that had grounded and guaranteed the material reality of the musica caelestis, and the musica mundana generally, for nearly a millennium. […] The music of the spheres did not disappear altogether, but it changed its tune considerably’. The reception of the theory of cosmic music by Christian writers, is discussed by Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, 196-209.

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the most Platonic poet from late antiquity onwards76 – describes Aeneas as avoiding the shores of the Sirens, pointing to his spiritual readiness, his will to remain attuned to his divine mission.77 The episode, interpreted as an allusion to Vergil’s rejection of the Homeric world,78 was, in my view, read by Dante and Petrarch as a Neoplatonic allegory for spiritual awakening.79 But this is precisely the time when the musical inclination of the ethical man must be reassessed.

Moving from Music to Silence: Augustine and Petrarch80

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In the Secretum, modelled on Dante’s Comedy,81 Petrarch, guided by Veritas and Augustine, is forced to accept that he has deviated from the path of virtue; his weaknesses included feelings of lust but, also, his predilection for Plato and his unwillingness to give up poetry. To overcome these Petrarch chooses to reflect in ‘Platonic silence’,82 that is, he chooses the ‘secluded withdrawal’ or secretum that gave the title to his work.83 Petrarch’s association of carnal desire and ‘lust for words’ is perfectly in keeping with his classical models, especially Statius,84 but, also Dante, who is keen to join the debate between poetry and philosophy in his Comedy.85 In addition, ‘Platonic silence’ and the seductive song of the Sirens are also constantly contrasted in his Rime Sparse.86 Acutely aware that both poetry and philosophy entail 76 Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Vitae Vergilii’, passim. 77 Vergil, Aeneid 5.838. 78 Kyriakidis, Narrative Structure, 117. 79 Valle, ‘A New Perspective on Dante’s Dream’, 6-12; Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds, 106-18; Hollander, ‘Purgatorio XIX’, 80-84. 80 This part of the chapter revisits Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Un’ Altra Storia’, 20-24. 81 Marsh, ‘The Burning Question’, 211 and 216-17. 82 Marsh, ‘The Burning Question’, 217; Charalabopoulos, Platonic Drama, 63. 83 Marsh, ‘The Burning Question,’ 213; note that secretum is the neuter singular nominative or accusative, or masculine singular accusative of the perfect passive participle of secerno, meaning to separate, to part, to reject. 84 See Parkes, ‘Reading Statius’, 478-79, which discusses Petrarch’s appreciation of Dante’s self-posing as a literary successor of Vergil and Statius in Purgatorio 21 and 22; also, see especially Purgatorio 22.73, where Statius says to Vergil (per te poeta fui: per te Christiano; because of you I became a poet: because of you, a Christian). Singleton, Purgatorio, 1:238-239, with Kallendorf, The Protean Virgil, 56. For Statius’s intention to discuss the value of poetry in Platonic terms in his Thebaid, see Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Drunk with Blood’, 313-22. 85 Jones, ‘Music and the Maternal Voice’, 38-46. 86 Peterson, Petrarch’s ‘Fragmenta’, 108, notes that Petrarch wrote certain Rime Sparse in parallel with the Secretum, which obviously explains the preoccupation of both works with

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rhetorical eloquence,87 Petrarch aspires to the ‘silence of a higher life’, marking his spiritual progress ‘by a movement from speech to silence’.88 At this point it is worth noting that Petrarch’s spiritual guide, Augustine, despite envisioning God as silent,89 nevertheless wrote a treatise entitled De musica where he tried to christianize the Pythagorean theory of cosmic music by paying attention to the alternation of sound and silence in music. Augustine wrote: Ista certe omnia quae carnalis sensus ministerio numeramus, et quaecumque in eis sunt, locales numeros qui videntur esse in aliquo statu, nisi praecedentibus intimis et in silentio temporalibus numeris qui sunt in motu, nec accipere illos possunt, nec habere. [Certainly, all these things that we enumerate, by the work of carnal sense, and all things in them, can neither receive nor possess a local rhythm, which seems to be in a certain rest, unless the inmost temporal rhythms, which are in motion, silently precede.]90

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Augustine perceived this alternation as a manifestation of coming into being and non-being which accords with his belief in a universe created ex nihilo;91 in this scheme the silent intervals are precisely the periods when our senses are less likely to interfere with our understanding, thus promoting spiritual advancement.92 For Augustine, failing to acknowledge this nothingness leads to a denial of the cosmic order, in turn leading to further disharmony.93 For the ‘cosmic poem’ to exist, he tells his readers in De Musica, each person must be in its own proper place and time: similar themes. Compare Sturm-Maddox, ‘Petrarch’s Siren’, especially p. 12, who contrasts Laura’s singing and talking. She also explores Petrarch’s indebtedness to Dante in the Rime Sparse in Dante and Petrarch. 87 Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence’, 147-48; Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine, 318-34. 88 Petrarch, Ad Familiares 55.3.12 (Rossi/Bosco); Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence’, 157. Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Un’Altra Storia’, 22. 89 Confessions 1.28; cf. Pranger, ‘Augustine and the Silence’, 74 (on Confessions 10.24.35). 90 De musica 6.17.58 (Migne); my translation having consulted, Taliaferro, Augustine on Music, 377-78. 91 De musica 6.17.57. 92 De musica 6.10.27: ‘cur in silentiorum intervalis nulla fraude sensus offenditur, nisi quia eidem juri aequalitatis, etiamsi non sono, spatio tamen temporis quod debetur, exsolvitur?’ (‘Why in rests isn’t our sense offended by a deficiency, if not because what is due that same law of equality, although not in sound, is yet made up in spread of time?’); translation, Taliaferro, Augustine On Music, 353. 93 Pickstock, ‘Ascending Numbers’, 189.

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Quam ob rem, quisquis fatetur nullam esse naturam, quae non, ut sit quidquid est, adpetat unitatem suique similis, in quantum potest, esse conetur atque ordinem proprium uel locis, uel temporibus, uel incorporeo quodam libramento salutem suam teneat, debet fateri ab uno principio per aequalem illi ac similem speciem diuitiis bonitatis eius, qua inter se unum et de uno unum carissima, ut ita dicam, caritate iunguntur, omnia facta esse atque condita quaecumque sunt, in quantumcumque sunt. [Therefore, whoever admits that there is no nature that does not desire unity in order to be what it is, or that does not try, to the best of its ability, to be similar to itself and to keep its proper order, either spatially or temporally or in some kind of incorporeal balance, as its health, must admit that all things, whatever they are, inasmuch as they exist, have been made and created from one origin, through a form, equal and similar to this origin by the riches of its goodness, through which they are united with each other as one, and, as one from the one, by the loveliest love, so to speak.]94

We may understand this thesis as Augustine’s model of redemption through music or even his model of ‘attuning’ to the Logos. After all, Augustine accepts Plato’s notion of memory which can be triggered by the hearing of a sound at a certain point in life; furthermore, Augustine perceives the human body as a musical instrument of the soul (in literal terms) which could also explain (from his viewpoint) the need for God’s incarnation. Augustine’s theory of ‘attuning’ to God in the De Musica bears undeniable Neoplatonic, especially Boethian, echoes; for example, he refers to desire as the basis of knowledge95 and compares our human reason with the more vivid ‘fire of charity’.96 To these, we may add the profound importance of silence, a notion that did not escape Petrarch’s attention.97 In the Secretum, Petrarch introduces his readers to Veritas, a female f igure corresponding to Dante’s Beatrice and Plato’s Beauty. The work, written as a dialogue between Petrarch and Augustine, immediately evokes the Platonic dialogues. In Book I Veritas reminds the poet that he has deviated from the path of virtue, having succumbed to ephemeral pleasures. However, because her speech is non-human, she seeks to 94 De musica 6.17.56 with my translation, having consulted Taliaferro, Augustine on Music, 375. 95 De musica 6.12.3, 6.13.39. 96 De musica 6.17.59. 97 Caranfa, ‘Silence and Spiritual Experience’, 188-91; Mazzeo, ‘St. Augustine’s Rhetoric’, 182, 187-88 and especially 193-94 discussing Augustine’s use of ‘Platonic silence’.

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communicate her message through Augustine, Petrarch’s revered master.98 After an examination of the Stoic theories of passion, Cicero’s principles on virtue, and Vergil’s poetic teachings, Book I concludes with the suggestion to meditate on death and opt for a def inite turn to Platonic truth as advocated by both Augustine and Cicero.99 At this point, Augustine and Petrarch agree to reflect on the matters raised in silentio (‘in silence’).100 The motif of contemplative quies and silentio that allows for reflection on eternal values is often revisited in the remaining two books of the Secretum, which Petrarch chooses to conclude with an impressive image of cosmic silence: O utinam id michi contingat, quod precaris; ut et duce Deo integer ex tot anfractibus evadam, et, dum vocantem sequor, non excitem ipse pulverem in oculos meos; subsidantque fluctus animi, sileat mundus et fortuna non obstrepat. [How I wish that it happened to me what you pray for; so with God as my guide I may escape whole from so many traps, and while I follow him who calls me, I may not throw dust in my eyes; and may the waves of my soul settle down, the world be silent and adversity not soar against me.]101

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In the second book of the Secretum, Augustine tries to chastise Petrarch on account of his self-confessed dedication to the writings of Plato.102 In his response, Petrarch admits that, in Cicero’s steps, he is in awe of Plato’s authority, but has difficulty with following his argumentation in a rational way,103 to which Augustine advises continuous meditation: Unum semper ante oculos habeto Platonis superiorem illam haud spernendam esse sententiam: ab agnitione diuinitatis nil magis quam appetitus carnales et inflammatam obstare libidinem. Hanc igitur doctrinam assidue tecum uersa. 98 Peterson, Petrarch’s ‘Fragmenta’, 15-16. 99 McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, 23-25. 100 Caranfa, ‘Silence and Spiritual Experience’, 188-89; cf. Marsh, ‘The Burning Question’, 212-13, who points out the ancient genres that inform Augustine’s ‘question-and-answer technique of soliloquy to dramatize the poet’s inner conflicts’; also, cf. Mazzeo on notes 5 and 6 above. 101 Secretum 18.8.5-8 (Mann) with my translation; cf. Ad Familiares 50.3.12 stressing his aspiration for ‘the silence of a higher life’. 102 Secretum 11.3.1-2: ‘et hec ex Platonis libris tibi familiariter nota sunt, quibus avidissime nuper incubuisse diceris’. 103 Secretum 11.4.7-8: ‘Plato…etsi rationem nullam afferret, …ipsa autoritate me frangeret’.

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[Always have in mind one thing; that memorable maxim of Plato which must not be spurned: ‘Nothing more can impede your knowledge of divinity than carnal appetite and ardor of passion’. So meditate that doctrine incessantly.]104

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As mentioned, in the course of the Secretum Petrarch is found guilty of amorous feelings but, also, of his unwillingness to give up his poetic glory.105 His poetic ambition is especially attacked in the second half of the third book where, by questioning his Africa, Petrarch essentially questions his coronation.106 Given that, as Marsh pointed out, the subtext for the three books of the Secretum is Dante’s Divine Comedy (with its Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradise),107 Petrarch’s engagement with the value of poetry and fame (on account of his poetry) is the culmination of his recognition of Dante’s genius and the core of his attempt to grapple with Platonic notions. Although the Secretum, just like the Divine Comedy, does not seem to offer a solution to his dilemma to continue with his literary projects or not, in reality Petrarch did opt for contemplative silence in the spiritual company of Saint Ambrose in Milan.108 In doing so, Petrarch emulated Augustine, but, also, Cicero and Vergil, who had acknowledged Plato’s intellectual eminence before him.109 Furthermore, as Kirkpatrick observed, the implications of the Secretum are too obvious in the 366 lyric poems of Petrarch,110 written in the vernacular, and discussing Laura, the woman Petrarch adored, and who, unlike Dante’s Beatrice, is portrayed as too susceptible to human error. The motif of ‘Platonic silence’ remains constantly on Petrarch’s mind throughout the Rime Sparse.111 In a way, Petrarch, struggling in the awareness that both poetry and philosophy were closely associated with rhetorical 104 Secretum 11.13.1-3 with my translation. 105 McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, 29; Marsh, ‘The Burning Question’, 213. 106 Marsh, ‘The Burning Question’, 214-15. 107 Marsh, ‘The Burning Question’, 216. 108 Marsh, ‘The Burning Question’, 217; in Milan Petrarch wrote his Familiares 21.15, where he summarizes his discussion with Boccaccio on Dante; also, see Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels, 232-33. 109 See Edgeworth and Stem, The Silence of Vergil, 7-9, on silence in the Aeneid; although they do not examine the Platonic background of Vergilian silence, they discuss the possibility that by his silence Vergil wished to reserve for his readers the element of choice. On Augustine’s contemplative isolation, see Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine, 142-45. 110 Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature, 34; also, Kirkpatrick, The European Renaissance, 226-27. 111 The following poems contain references to silence: 18, 20, 23, 37, 46, 49, 71, 105, 123, 125, 135, 150, 164, 171, 172, 177, 185, 205, 207, 215, 237, 261, 270, 283, 293, 302, 309, 330, 356.

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eloquence,112 seems to opt for Augustine’s model of marking his spiritual progress ‘by a movement from speech to silence, from outer appearance to inner truth’.113 Petrarch writes: Profecto itaque, nisi videri magis quam esse propositum nobis est, non tamen plausus insane multitudinis quam veritas in silentio placebit. [Truly then, unless our purpose is to seem [learned] rather than to be so, the applause of the foolish crowd will not please us so much as truth in silence.]114

Poetry then can only be appreciated as a medium; accordingly, Petrarch seems to have designed Laura’s inconsistencies of character in order to emphasize her role as a mere medium, not the real truth.115 Although his Laura differs in that from Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s lady is, nevertheless, inspired by Dante and his invocation to Apollo in Paradiso 1.14-16, where we read:

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O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso, come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro. [O good Apollo, for this last labor make me such a vessel for your power as you require to bestow the beloved laurel.]116

The lines remind us of Proclus’s elevation of Apollo to the divine force that guides the Sirens and warrants the poets’ inspiration. Yet, Petrarch was only too aware of the danger of the seductive Sirens; like them, poetry is alluring and can condemn one to becoming famous in the mouths of the uneducated masses, a fate Dante and, by his own admission, Petrarch’s early poetry had suffered.117 Accordingly, in Rima 167 Petrarch refers to a heavenly Siren which promises him a divine revelation through death, yet, at the same time keeps reminding him of the earthly pleasures to which he is so prone. In Rima 366 112 Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence’, 147-50; cf. Seigel, Philosophy in Renaissance, 34-57, and Lee, Petrarch and St Augustine, 318-34. In On his Own Ignorance Petrarch refers to Plato as ‘the most eloquent of all men’; cf. Cicero, De Oratoria 1.2.47; cf. Augustine, De Civitate Dei 8.9 arguing that among pagan philosophers Plato and his followers were the closest to Christianity. 113 Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence’, 157. 114 Ad Familiares, 1.8.20; translation, Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence’, 158. 115 See Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence’, 158-68, on the role of inconsistency in Petrarch in light of his humanistic experience. 116 Translation Durling, The Divine Comedy, 3, 23. 117 Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Vitae Vergili’, 347-48.

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Petrarch prays to the Virgin Mary in terms that identify her both with truth and wisdom; in his prayer he asks for forgiveness because ‘Medusa and an error turned him to stone’;118 here Boethius’s ‘Lady Philosophy’ seems to be increasingly ‘Marianized’.119 Yet, all along, Petrarch’s attempt to associate poetry with the deceptive Sirens is also an adept allusion to Vergil, Dante, and importantly Plato. As mentioned, Vergil famously described Aeneas as avoiding the shores of the Sirens, steering instead to Italy.120 Accordingly, Dante presented his character and Vergil as facing the Siren in Purgatorio 19 where Vergil manages to expose her ugliness, thus steering Dante away from her; as Valle argued, Dante’s dream of the Siren is not only the inspiration of his Comedy, but crucially, the only instance when Dante is critical of his vision and aware of its reliance on his imagination – the qualities he attributes to Beatrice are those he projected upon her.121 Notably, Cicero interpreted the song of the Sirens as passion for knowledge,122 a notion that Augustine echoed in his De Ordine.123 In the same vein, Plutarch argued that we fail to listen to divine music because of our carnal passions which obstruct us from acquiring divine knowledge.124 In Plutarch’s view the problem with the Platonic text lies in the connection of the Muses with the Sirens or, rather, determining when eagerness for divine knowledge becomes infatuation and hence, diversion from truth. Accordingly, in the Catalepton Vergil is portrayed as rejecting rhetoric125 and the Muses (on account of their falsehood) to follow the Epicurean philosopher Siro/Silo:

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ite hinc, Camenae, uos quoque ite saluete, dulces Camenae, nam fatebimur uerum, 118 Rima 366, lines 111-12; Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 313 and 575; Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels, 62; for the role of Medusa in the Rime, see Foster, Beatrice or Medusa, 52-54; cf. Williams, Through Human Love to God, 110-11. 119 Consolatio Philosophiae 1.1.11; Schlapbach, ‘The Temporality of the Muses’, 48-49. 120 Aeneid 5.866; note that the Sirens themselves remain off stage in Vergil’s Aeneid. According to Kyriakidis (Narrative Structure, 54), Hellenistic sources relate a mythic version according to which the Sirens must die after failing to charm Odysseus; probably aware of these sources, Vergil seems to cast Aeneas as visiting a deserted Homeric landscape. 121 Valle, ‘A New Perspective on Dante’s Dream’, 6, 9-12. 122 Cicero, De Finibus 5.18.49. 123 See Schlapbach, The Temporality of the Muses, 41-56 on the confusion of Sirens and Muses in the Neoplatonic tradition and Augustine’s association of the Muses with knowledge in his De ordine; cf. Liefferinge, ‘Sirens’, 494-99. 124 Cicero, Quaestiones Convivales, 9.14.6.2. 125 Vergil, Catalepton 5.11-13; cf. Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, 40-42, for a summary of Petrarch’s Ciceronian appreciation of rhetoric as a means to knowledge, despite Plato’s rejection of it in both Phaedrus and Gorgias; Seigel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence’, passim.

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dulces fuistis [go away Muses, even you go away, sweet Muses, for let us confess the truth – you have been sweet.]126

While Vergil’s turn to philosophy – which in late antiquity and the Middle Ages is transformed to an adherence to Plato127 – anticipates Boethius’s attempt to overcome this impasse by introducing the Muse of Philosophy, a number of early Christian thinkers juxtaposed the Sirens’ knowledge with that of God urging their audiences to choose the ‘choir of prophets instead.128 The problem of the Sirens is, in my view, already implied in Plato, who insists in the Republic that

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ἀρετὴ δὲ ἀδέσποτον, ἣν τιμῶν καὶ ἀτιμάζων πλέον καὶ ἔλαττον αὐτῆς ἕκαστος ἕξει. αἰτία ἑλομένου: θεὸς ἀναίτιος 129 [virtue has no master; each of us will have more or less of it according to whether one honors or despises it. The blame is with him who chooses. God is blameless.]130

Therefore, it seems that, according to Plato, the choice to embrace virtue is ours; hence, Vergil chooses to end the Aeneid in silence, perhaps as a way of allowing his audiences to make their own choice.131 Still, any correct choice ought to be graced by divine authority and therefore, despite its appeal, the Sirens’ song must fail for truth to be embraced.132 Just as Licentius, Augustine’s student, ponders in silence his master’s advice to use his poetic gift by employing philosophizing allegories,133 so Petrarch, who in the Secretum is found guilty of his lust for bodies as much as for words, is keen to take a step further and lift the veil of poetry. Troubled by the element of choice, yet ready to sail beyond the dubious human experience, 126 On the spelling of Siro, see Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, 80 with note 18 and also, Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Vitae Vergili’, 338. 127 Anagnostou-Laoutides, ‘Vitae Vergili’, passim. 128 For example, Methodius of Olympus, De autexusio 1.1-3 (Franchi); Ambrose, Expositio in Lucam 4.2 (= Corpus Christanorum Series Latina 14.106); also, see McDonald, Christianizing Homer, 266-67. 129 Republic 617e3-5. 130 My translation. 131 Edgeworth and Stem, The Silence of Vergil, 7-9; cf. note 109 above. 132 Fagan, Plato and Tradition, 50-64; also, Rhodes, Eros, Wisdom and Silence, 127, 353, 457. 133 De ordine 1.8.24 (Fuhrer/Simone) (‘Hic ille tacitus ac diu consideratione nutans, motato capite abscessit’).

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subject to uncertain impressions and deceptive mortal speech, Petrarch 134 embraces philosophy in emulation of Dante,135 Vergil, and Plato; thus, he tries to purify his soul for the divine music which, as Augustine taught him, exists only in silence.136

Bibliography Primary Sources (Texts, Translations, Commentaries)

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N.B. For all Greek and Latin texts cited in the footnotes and not included in the bibliography, I have used the Loeb Classical Library Editions. Berg, Rudolphus Maria. Proclus’ Hymns: Essays, Translations, Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Deubner, Ludovicus, ed. Iamblichi de vita Pythagorica liber. Leipzig: Teubner, 1937. Diehl, Ernest, ed. Procli Diadochi in Platonis Timaeum Commentaria. 3 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1903-1906. Diels, Hermann and Walther Kranz, ed. Die Fragment die Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Weidmann, 1935. Durling, Robert M. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vol. 3, Paradiso. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. —. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Emlyn-Jones, Chris, and William Preddy. Plato Republic, Books 6-10. Loeb Classical Library 276. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

134 Peterson, Petrarch’s ‘Fragmenta’, 11-14. 135 On Dante’s knowledge of the theory of cosmic music, which he accepts partially, see Ciabattoni, Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, 209-16, with further bibliography. 136 In discussing the punishments of the souls described by Er in the Republic, Proclus wonders what their benefits may be (In Rem Publicam II.184, 29-185). His answer is inspired by Plato’s reference to ‘the joy of making the ascent in silence, that is to say, without hearing the noise (τὸ φθέγμα) made by the opening (the exit) when an evil one attempts to get out’. Thus, Proclus concludes, the benefits granted to the just are to be in the company of Plutonian demons and, after a journey consisting of appearances and purifications, to communicate with Pluto himself and Kore, as in the Mysteries of Eleusis. Proclus confirms this surprising interpretation with this quote from Cratylus 403d7-e2: ‘οὐδένα δεῦρο ἐθελῆσαι ἀπελθεῖν τῶν ἐκεῖθεν, οὐδὲ αὐτὰς τὰς Σειρῆνας, ἀλλὰ κατακεκηλῆσθαι ἐκείνας τε καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους πάντας: οὕτω καλούς τινας, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐπίσταται λόγους λέγειν ὁ Ἅιδης’ (‘Nobody wants to return here from the other world, not even the Sirens, but a spell holds them and all others there; so beautiful words, as it seems, Hades knows to speak’); translation modif ied from Fowler, Cratylus, 73. Also, see notes 36 and 40 above.

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Fairclough, Henry Rushton (trans., revised by George Patrick Goold). Virgil. Aeneid: Books 7-12. Appendix Vergiliana. Loeb Classical Library 64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918. Fideler, David R. The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library: An Anthology of Ancient Writings Which Relate to Pythagoras and Pythagorean Philosophy. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, rev. ed. 1987. Franchi, Roberta, ed. Metodio di Olimpo: Il libero arbitrio. Milan: Paoline Editoriale Libri, 2015. Fuhrer, Therese and Adam Simone, ed. Aurelius Augustinus. Contra Academicos, De beata vita, De ordine. Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Graham, Daniel W. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Gottfried, Friedlein, ed. De institutione musica libri quinque. Accedit geometria quae fertur Boetii. Leipzig: Teubner, 1828-1875. Reprint: Frankfurt: Minerva, 1966. Guthrie, William K. C. The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Isaac, Daniel (ed. and trans.) with a note by Steel Carlos. Proclus: Trois études sur la providence, III. De l’existence du mal. Collection des universités de France. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982. Kroll, Guilelmus, ed. Procli Diadochi In Platonis Rem Publicam Commentarii. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1899-1901. Lamberton, Robert, trans. Proclus the Successor on Poetics and the Homeric Poems: Essays 5 and 6 of his Commentary on the Republic of Plato. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. Lamberz, Erich, ed. Porphyry. Sententiae. Leipzig: Teubner Verlag, 1975. Mann, Nicholas, ed. and trans. My Secret Book. Francesco Petrarca. The I Tatti Renaissance Library 72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Migne, Jacques Paul, ed. Augustine, De Musica, Patrologia Latina 32. Paris: Migne, 1841. Minar, Edwin L., Francis Henry Sandbach, and William Clark Helmbold, eds. and trans. Plutarch, Moralia, Volume IX. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Rossi, Vittorio and Umberto Bosco, ed. Le Familiari. Edizione Nazionale delle opera di Francesco Petrarca, vols. 10-13. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1933-1942. Sheppard, Anne. Studies on the Fifth and Sixth Essays of Proclus’ Commentary on the Republic. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980. Singleton, Charles, ed. and trans. Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

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Taliaferro, Robert Catesby. St. Augustine on Music. Book I-VI. Annapolis: The St John’s Bookstore, 1939. Tarrant, Harold, ed. and trans. Proclus: Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus: Volume 1, Book 1: Proclus on the Socratic State and Atlantis. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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De Jonge, Casper C. ‘Grammatical Theory and Rhetorical Teaching’. In Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship. Vol. 2, Between Theory and Practice, edited by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 981-1011. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Díaz de Cerio Díez, Mercedes. ‘Socrates ad Inferos: The Nekyia in the Works of Plato’. In Ancient Epic: Literary and Linguistic Essays, edited by Mercedes Díaz de Cerio Díez, Conception Cabrillana, and Cecilia Criado, 57-100. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015. Donato, Antonio. Boethius’ ‘Consolation of Philosophy’ as a Product of Late Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Edgeworth, Robert J., and Rex Stem, ‘The Silence of Vergil and the End of the Aeneid’. Vergilius 51 (2005): 3-11. Edwards, Mark. ‘Socrates and the Early Church’. In Socrates from Antiquity to the Enlightenment and Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Michael Trapp, vol.1: 125-42. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Fagan, Patricia. Plato and Tradition: The Poetic and Cultural Context of Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Ferwerda, Rein. ‘Democritus and Plato’. Mnemosyne, ser. 4, 25, no. 4 (1972): 337-78. Folch, Marcus. The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato’s Laws. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Frank, Erich. Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer: Ein Kapitel Aus Der Geschichte Des Griechischen Geistes. Halle: Verlag von Max Niemeyer, 1923. Frede, Dorothea. ‘The Soul’s Silent Dialogue: A Non-aporetic Reading of the Theaetetus’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 215 (1989): 20-49. Furley, David. Cosmic Problems: Essays on Greek and Roman Philosophy of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Gordon, Jill. Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Hicks, Andrew. Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hollander, Robert. ‘Purgatorio XIX: Dante’s Siren/Harpy’. In Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honour of Charles S. Singleton, edited by Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini, 77-88. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1983. Holmes, Olivia. Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the Divine Comedy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Hunter, Richard. Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature: The Silent Stream. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Jean Pépin, ‘Réactions du Christianisme latin è la sotériologie métroaque’. In La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’Impero romano: atti del Colloquio internazionale su la soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’Impero romano, Roma, 24-28 settembre 1979, edited by Ugo Bianchi and Maarten J. Vermaseren, 256-75. Leiden: Brill, 1982. Jones, Nancy A. ‘Music and the Maternal Voice in Purgatorio XIX’. In Embodied Voices: Presenting Female Vocality in Western Culture, edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, 35-49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kallendorf, Craig. The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Kenney, John Peter. The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Re-Reading the Confessions. New York: Routledge, 2005. Kirkpatrick, Robin. English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence. London: Routledge, 1995. —. The European Renaissance 1400-1600. New York: Longman, 2002. Kyriakidis, Stratis. Narrative Structure and Poetics in the Aeneid: The Frame of Book 6. Bari: Levante Editori, 1998. Lee, Alexander. Petrarch and St. Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology, and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Marsh, David. ‘The Burning Question: Crisis and Cosmology in the Secret (Secretum)’. In Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, edited by Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, 211-18. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Mazzeo, Joseph A. ‘St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence’. Journal of the History of Ideas 23, no. 2 (1962): 175-96. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The Worlds of Petrarch. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. McClure, George W. Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. McDonald, Dennis R. Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and the Acts of Andrew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Meyer-Baer, Kathi. Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Moro Tornese, Sebastian F. ‘Music and the Return of the Soul in Proclus’ Commentary on the Republic’. In Ancient Approaches to Plato’s Republic, edited by Anne Sheppard, 117-28. London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2013. Novokhatko, Anna. ‘Greek Scholarship from its Beginnings to Alexandria’. In Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship. Vol. 1, History, Disciplinary Profiles, edited by Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos, 3-59. Leiden: Brill, 2015. O’Meara, Dominik J. Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

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Parkes, Ruth. ‘Reading Statius through a Biographical Lens’. In Brill’s Companion to Statius, edited by William Dominik, Carole E. Newlands, and K. Gervais, 465-80. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Peterson, Thomas E. Petrarch’s ‘Fragmenta’, The Narrative and Theological Unity of ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2016. Pickstock, Catherine. ‘Ascending Numbers: Augustine’s “De Musica” and the Western Tradition’. In Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric, and Community, edited by Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones, 185-215. New York: Routledge, 1998. Planinc, Zdravko. Plato through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Pranger, Burcht. ‘Augustine and the Silence of the Sirens’. Journal of Religion 91, no. 1 (2011): 64-77. Rehm, Rush. The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Rhodes, James M. Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Schils, Griet. ‘Plato’s Myth of Er: The Light and the Spindle’. L’antiquité classique 62, no. 1 (1993): 101-14. Schlapbach, Karin. ‘The Temporality of the Muses: A Reading of the Sister Goddesses in Late Antique Latin Literature’. In The Muses and Their Afterlife in Post-Classical Europe, edited by Kathleen W. Christian, Clare E.L. Guest, and Claudia Wedepohl, 33-58. London: Warburg Institute, 2014. Seigel, Jerrold E. ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence in Petrarch’. Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 2 (1965): 147-74. —. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Sorabji, Richard. ‘The Mind-Body Relation in the Wake of Plato’s Timaeus’. In Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon, edited by Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils, 152-62. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Sturm-Maddox, Sara. Dante and Petrarch: The Earthly Paradise Revisited. New York: SUNY Press, 1999. —. ‘Petrarch’s Siren: “Dolce Parlar” and “Dolce Canto” in the Rime Sparse’. Italian Quarterly 27 (1986): 5-19. —. Petrarch’s Laurels. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Taylor, Christopher Charles W. ‘Nomos and Phusis in Democritus and Plato’. Social Philosophy and Policy 24 (2007): 1-20. Tomás Antonio Valle. ‘A New Perspective on Dante’s Dream of the Siren’. The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English 15, no. 1 (2013) article 3: 1-16. https://scholarcommons.

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About the Author

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Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides is a member of the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, where she works on intersections of theology, philosophy, and classical literature with a recent focus on themes of drunkenness and communion.

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Section 4

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Gender, Power, and Virtue in Early Modernity

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13 The Miroir des dames, the Chapelet des vertus, and Christine de Pizan’s Sources* Karen Green

Abstract This chapter offers a reading of the Othea Epistre, an early work by Christine de Pizan. It has been generally supposed that Christine was influenced by a text called the Fleurs de toutes vertues, as the Othea seemingly borrows a great deal from it. This chapter tests this assumption, widely accepted in the scholarship, by questioning why it has generally been assumed that the Fleurs predates the Othea. The chapter argues that there is little evidence that the Fleurs predated Christine’s text. Instead, deploying philological analysis, the chapter shows that it is much more likely that the anonymous author of the Fleurs borrowed from the Othea. Keywords: Christine de Pizan, Othea Epistre, Fleurs de toutes vertues

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Among the works found in the libraries of the women mentioned by Christine de Pizan in the Cité des dames, a couple stand out as particularly popular. One is the Miroir des dames, a French translation of the Speculum Dominarum compiled by the Franciscan, Durand de Champagne, during the last decade of the thirteenth century; another is La Somme le roi, compiled a little earlier, in 1279, by a Dominican called Laurent.1 Following the hunch that * Research for this chapter was made possible by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, DP0772993, held with Constant Mews and Janice Pinder. Many individuals participated in that project and in subsequent investigations, which built on it. In particular, this chapter was facilitated by the development of concordances, digital copies of works, and new software, to which many people contributed. Among these are Rina Lahav, Alan Crosier, Tomas Zahora, Earl Jeffrey Richards, and Charmaine Manual, for whose contributions I am extremely grateful. I am particularly indebted to Richards for his generous comments on an earlier version of this work. 1 Green, ‘What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading?’; Laurent, La Somme le roi; Mews, ‘The Speculum Dominarum’.

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Christine did not have privileged access to the library of Charles V prior to the duke of Burgundy’s commission to write the panegyric biography of this king in 1403, but was using books she owned or that were available in the libraries of the aristocratic women with whom she was acquainted, I here discuss the probable influence of these two earlier moral manuals on Christine’s Epistre Othea, thus updating and to an extent contesting the pioneering efforts of P.G.A. Campbell and Curt Bühler.2 There is no doubt that one finds echoes of the Miroir des dames in Christine’s Livre de paix and in other political treatises, but the situation with regard to the Othea is rather more complicated. Studying the sources of the Othea is important for assessing the originality of Christine’s ideas, and the extent of their diffusion during the fifteenth century. For the conclusion of my investigation is that, rather than, as Bühler surmised, Christine having borrowed from the work which he initially called the Fleurs des toutes vertus, in fact, a rather later version of this work, which has been designated the Chapelet des vertus, borrows passages from Christine’s Othea without acknowledgement. When Bühler noticed the similarities between the Othea and the Fleurs de toutes vertus, he was unable to extend his investigations into European libraries, because of the second World War, and was misled by his mistaken belief that the Fleurs predated the Othea into concluding that Christine had copied from this text.3 His surmise has been widely accepted, but to those who are more familiar than Bühler with the full extent of Christine’s works, it has always seemed rather odd that she would have borrowed from a compilation that generally manifests less cohesion, intelligence, and authority than her own. The oddity is removed once one sees that, in fact, the Chapelet depends heavily for both its structure and content on the Othea. Since the Chapelet was widely copied and printed during the fifteenth century, the recognition that it draws on Christine’s earlier work provides important evidence of her widespread but underacknowledged influence.

The Structure of Epistre Othea Before beginning the exploration of the influence of the Miroir des dames and the Somme le roi on Christine’s first major pedagogic text in prose, it 2 Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa; Bühler, ‘The Fleurs de Toutes Vertus and Christine de Pizan’s L’Epître d’Othéa’; Bühler, ‘The Fleurs de toutes vertus’. 3 Bühler, ‘The Fleurs de Toutes Vertus and Christine de Pizan’s L’Epître d’Othéa’, 40.

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is necessary to say something about the structure of her work. The Othea consists of 100 chapters, each comprising a text, a gloss, and an allegory. In an early manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque nationale at Paris, BnF fr. 848, these are arranged in a rather complex way on the page, with one or more short texts in the center, and the glosses and allegories framing them. 4 By the time she completed the two luxurious editions of her works, one for Jean de Berri, the other for Isabeau de Bavière, somewhat later, in 1414, each chapter was illuminated with its own image, and the text, gloss, and allegory followed in sequence. The ‘text’ is usually a four-line poem, similar in content and purpose to the rhymed ‘proverbes’ of her earlier Proverbes Moraux, but which associates a moral injunction with some god, goddess, or character from the pagan world. The gloss gives a brief account of the actions, virtues, or vices of this individual, and concludes with a saying from a pagan philosopher. The allegory exposes the Christian significance of the text and gloss, usually incorporating a saying gleaned from the Church Fathers, and invariably ending in a Latin sentence from the Bible. It has been assumed that Christine did not, in general, select these nuggets of wisdom from their original sources, but gleaned them from a variety of compilations and other sources. The 100 chapters of the Othea can be grouped as follows: the prologue and following three chapters are based on the cardinal virtues – prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude – to which Christine adds a fifth, reputation or renown. We then find seven chapters associated by her with seven planets, virtues, and days of the week, each of which is also associated with a metal, and a desirable characteristic, sometimes introduced through the thought that one should avoid the property represented by the god. The three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity are next, identified with Minerva, Pallas, and Penthesilia, followed by the seven deadly sins, pride, ire (anger), envy, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lechery. Then come the articles of the faith, which bring us to Christine’s 34th chapter, identified with Atrapos. They are followed by the Ten Commandments, which take us to Chapter 44, Aurora. Up to this point, the structure of L’Epistre Othea looks very much like a reordering of La Somme le roi, which begins with the Ten Commandments, followed by the articles of the faith, and the seven deadly sins. Its fourth part begins with the three theological virtues, followed by the four cardinal

4 For a full description of all the Othea manuscripts see Mombello, La tradizione manoscritta. See also Pizan, Epistre Othea; Pizan, Othea’s Letter to Hector.

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virtues.5 The second half of Christine’s work follows far less obvious structural principles, and traces of the structure of Le Somme le roi are more difficult to discern. After the story of Pasiphae, who illustrates the soul which returns to God, and that of Adrastus, which teaches that the good knight should be careful with whom he associates, Christine’s stories illustrate the qualities of the good spirit. After the Ten Commandments and the articles of the faith, Laurent’s work includes a treatise on the seven deadly sins, a treatise praising virtue, and a treatise on the virtues, organized around seven gifts of God, each of which has seven degrees and branches. The gifts of God are humility, love/friendship, equity, strength/prowess, sympathy, understanding, and wisdom.6 Since many of the qualities that Laurent describes in this part are also ascribed by Christine to the good spirit, it is quite possible that she used his work as a basic model, but elaborated the fundamental teachings in her own way. In the light of the structural similarities between the texts, La Somme le roi no doubt lies in the background of Christine’s work, but by embellishing its traditional moral injunctions with illustrations from works such as L’histoire ancien jusqu’à Caesar and L’Istoire de Troye, she has followed the lead of works like the Livre des eschecs and Ovide moralisé, which were owned by the women she knew, offering moral instruction presented in an entertaining and engaging manner, as she states it should be.7 P.G.A. Campbell demonstrated that the bulk of the quotations from the Church Fathers found in Othea were translated from the Latin of the Manipulus florum of Thomas Hibernicus, but that those which accompanied the Ten Commandments were not found there.8 He surmised that she must have consulted some other available compilation, and checked La Somme le roi without success.9 Recent investigations by Cheryl Lemmens, collaborating on the new translation of the Othea undertaken by Earl Jeffrey Richards and Renate Blumenfeld-Kozinski, have confirmed that Christine relied heavily on the Manipulus florum; Lemmens has argued that the passages on the Commandments in fact derive from Augustine’s sermon 250, on the Ten Commandments.10 Campbell also wondered whether Christine had extracted the Latin citations directly from the Bible or from a compilation, and indeed, claimed 5 Laurent, La Somme le roi. The connection to La Somme le roi was noticed by Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 39, 286. 6 Laurent, La Somme le roi, 92-93. 7 Pizan, Epistre Othea, 200; Pizan, Othea’s Letter to Hector, 37. 8 Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa, 155-68. 9 Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa, 168. 10 Pizan, Othea’s Letter to Hector, 138-39.

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to have found the bulk of her citations in a compilation, the Flores Bibliorum, also attributed to Thomas Hibernicus.11 Given the demonstrated availability of the Miroir des dames in Christine’s milieu, I initially wondered whether one would have just as much luck by searching there. This search in fact had a somewhat positive outcome: about one-third of the Latin sentences in Othea are also found in the Miroir. However, any search for the source of her Latin sentences must ultimately be inconclusive. While Christine may well have had to rely on a compilation for her extracts from the pagans and the Church Fathers, there really is no good reason to assume that she was not able to refer directly to the Vulgate, a copy of which she undoubtedly owned, in order to extract the sentences from Scripture that she quotes.12 Nevertheless, a study of the passages reproducing the Credo in Othea is suggestive, and compatible with the hypothesis that at this point in her text, she exploited the basic structure of Laurent’s treatise, and embellished it with features found in Durand. For instance, like Laurent, Durand reiterated the articles of the faith, and in his case, this is part of his exposition of the theological virtue of faith.13 As Laurent did, he associated each of the articles with one of the twelve apostles. Unlike Laurent, he cites the sentence from the Bible which justifies the association.14 Similarly, Christine associates each of the articles of the faith with an apostle, and quotes the relevant sentences in Latin. However, an examination of Christine’s chapters reveals that she does not slavishly follow either Durand or Laurent. She is closer to Laurent than to Durand, in the associations she accepts, but like Durand, and unlike Laurent, she reproduces the Latin. Curt Bühler has shown that the tradition of associating the apostles with the Creed is very old, and that there is considerable inconsistency in the associations.15 Since Christine undoubtedly knew the Latin Credo, the occurrence of these Latin sentences in both the Miroir and the Othea ends up offering only scant evidence for 11 Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa, 169-70. 12 As Campbell admits, at least with regard to well-known passages, L’Épitre d’Othéa, 169-70. 13 Durand de Champagne, Miroir des dames, Corpus Christi 324, f. 127r-128r, available through Parker online; Laurent, La Somme le roi, 107-11. 14 I am most grateful to Jeff Richards for having shared with me his electronic version of the Miroir des dames, which is based on the theses by Hammes, ‘Le miroir des dames de Durand de Champagne’; Janssens, ‘Le miroir des dames de Durand de Champagne’; and Bois, ‘Le miroir des dames de Durand de Champagne’. I am also indebted to Constant Mews and Rina Lahav, for access to an electronic copy of Dubrulle’s thesis, ‘Le Speculum dominarum de Durand de Champagne’, and to the recently published, Flottès-Debrulle, Le Speculum dominarum de Durand de Champagne. 15 Bühler, ‘The Apostles and the Creed’. The Creed/Apostle associations found in the Miroir des dames, which Bühler did not study, follow those in his second line, corresponding to one version of the Pseudo-Augustinus, Sermo de symbolo.

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her familiarity with Durand’s text, especially since her association of the articles of the faith with the apostles is closer to that found in Laurent than to that in Durand. So, although 30 of Christine’s Latin authorities occur in both the Speculum and Othea, of these, twelve are lines of the Credo, so should be discounted, leaving just eighteen of interest. Moreover, of these, nine have earlier been identified as coming from a text variously called the Chapelet des vertus or the Fleurs de toutes vertus, which had been claimed by Curt Bühler to have been among her sources. This raised the question, when there are many potential sources, how is one to determine the actual source?

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A Puzzle Early in the prologue of Othea one finds, ‘Comme par la somme sapience et haulte puissance de Dieu toutes choses soient creees raisonablement doivent toutes tendre a fin de lui’ (‘Since by the supreme wisdom and utmost power of God, all things were created for some reason each must tend toward his end’).16 The Prologue goes on to argue that, to achieve this end, humanity should be adorned with virtues, which aid us in the battle against sin and help us to achieve blessedness, so that human life can be called ‘droite chevalerie’ (righteous chivalry). The Miroir des dames also begins with an account of our end as human creatures. The message is illustrated through a different analogy to that used by Christine, because directed at women. Durand says, ‘Une chacune creature de la condicion naturele, qui li est de dieu empreinte et donnee, desierre la conservacion de son estre, tent naturelment au lieu ou elle est gardee et sauvee, et quant elle vient au lieu de sa conservacion: illeuc prant son repos’ (CC 324, fol. 2v) (‘Each and every creature in its natural condition, imprinted and given by God, desires to conserve its being, and tends naturally towards that place where it is safe and saved, and when it comes to the place which conserves it, there it takes its rest.’) Rather than life being true chivalry, Durand organizes his message around Prov. 14:1, ‘The wise woman builds her house’. Life for a woman, he might have said, is true homemaking. He continues, quoting from the Bible, foxes have their lairs and birds their nests and so, ‘par plus forte raison homme et femme, creatures raisonnables, dignement faites, créés et formees a l’ymage et a la semblance de la benoite Trinité pour sa conservacion, paix et repos se doit pourveoir de maison bonne, seure et convenable pour y demorer et reposer’ (CC 324, f. 3r) (‘so with even greater 16 Pizan, Epistre Othea, 201; Pizan, Othea’s Letter to Hector, 37 (translation modified).

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reason, man and woman, reasonable creatures, nobly made, created, and formed in the image and resemblance of the blessed Trinity, should, for their conservation, peace and repose, furnish themselves with a good, secure, and appropriate house, in which to rest and repose’). His long treatise will go on at length to explain what woman is according to her nature, and how she can strive to build the inner house of conscience and, avoiding the inferior dwelling of hell, come to rest in the superior house of paradise. The messages of the first part of Othea and the foundation of the Miroir are similar, but the relationship between them initially poses a puzzle. For, it has been argued that Christine was here following a very different text. In his influential article, Bühler raised a number of questions with regard to some of the sources proposed by Campbell for the Othea. Campbell argued that, for her pagan philosophers, Christine had used Guillaume de Tignonville’s contemporary Dits moraulx des philosophes.17 Bühler, who edited the English translations of the Dits moraulx, pointed out that while Tignonville’s work was undoubtedly utilized, Othea also reproduced sayings of the philosophers not found there (as Campbell had also noted).18 He then noticed that the opening lines of Othea were found in another work, ascribed a variety of names, but which we will call the Chapelet des vertus. It begins Comme par la souveraine sapience et haulte puissance de Dieu toutes choses sont crées raisonablement, toutes choses doivent [tendre] à la siene bonne euvre fin. Et pour ce que les esperitz des creatures humaines sont raisonnablement creez par luy à sa semblance, est chose necessaire qu’ilz soient aournez des vertus par lequelles ilz puissent parvenir à la fin pour laquelle ilz sont faiz.19 [Since by the supreme wisdom and utmost power of God all things are created for some reason, all things should [tend] towards their own wellfunctioning end. And since the spirits of human creatures are created with reason by him to resemble him, it is necessary that they should be adorned with the virtues by which they can achieve the end for which they are made.]20 17 Bühler, ‘The Fleurs de Toutes Vertus and Christine de Pizan’s L’Epître d’Othéa’; Eder, ‘Tignonvillana inedita’. 18 Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa, 183. 19 Rouse and Rouse, ‘Prudence, Mother of the Virtues’. For a slightly different rendition, see BnF, fr. 572, f. 77v. This is the manuscript consulted by Gabriella Parussa in her edition of the Othea. It seems that since Parussa worked on her edition, the folios of this manuscript have been renumbered, so that in order to find the folio she cites one needs to add two. 20 For the Italian prologue see Gelli, Fiori di virtù, 9.

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There are numerous other places where the prologues of the two texts give similar readings. This does not yet demonstrate that Christine used the Chapelet as a source: the borrowings could have gone in the other direction, or there could have been a common source. However, Bühler argued that it is Christine who is the borrower, and his conclusion has been accepted by Gabriella Parussa, the editor of the Othea, by Mary and Richard Rouse, who have studied the manuscripts of the Fleurs and Chapelet in detail, and by many others. The puzzle remains, however, that no manuscripts of the Chapelet exist from the early fifteenth century, and the earliest mention of a French translation of the Fiori is from 1437.21 Nor do either the Chapelet or the Fleurs turn up as books found in the libraries of the women known to Christine, and this at least must raise some doubts as to its having been used by her. In their authoritative study of the manuscripts of the Fleurs/Chapelet, the Rouses demonstrate that in the fifteenth century there existed two redactions of a partial translation of an Italian work, the Fiori di virtù. One, a fairly direct translation, which we will call the Fleurs de toutes vertus, deals with the virtues and vices in the same order as the Fiori; another, in which the chapters are rearranged, resulted in the Chapelet des vertus. It is the Chapelet which includes the prologue that contains the passages also found in Othea.22 The basic difference between the Fleurs and the Chapelet, besides the chapters being rearranged, is that some extra material is found in the Chapelet, including the prologue, which begins with the same sentence as the prologue of Othea. Rouse and Rouse find many echoes of the Chapelet in Othea but not a large number of exact matches, so they argue that Christine followed the Chapelet for her inspiration, but corrected the Latin sentences from the Bible and the extracts from the Church Fathers, using other sources available to her. However, since the Chapelet offers a rather corrupt text of the Fiori, this seemed to me to have been an odd way for Christine to have proceeded and, in considering this matter, the possibility that Othea was a source for the Chapelet, or that they had a common source, could not be ruled out. In particular, Christine tends to give a full description of the source of her rendition of the Church Fathers, and these indications are dropped in the Chapelet. Working backwards to find the correct source would have been laborious, the absence of information suggests she was the copied, rather than the copier. Unlike the case with the Chapelet, we know that the Miroir des dames was available in Christine’s milieu. It is constructed with scholastic pedantry 21 Rouse and Rouse, ‘Prudence, Mother of the Virtues’, 207. 22 Rouse and Rouse, ‘Prudence, Mother of the Virtues’, 187-89.

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around Latin sentences, which are then glossed in French. In the fourteenthcentury manuscript Corpus Christi 324, which we have identified as having been copied for Blanche of France (daughter of Jeanne d’Évreux), the usefulness of the text as a source of nuggets of wisdom is enhanced by the addition of an index. Had Christine been making use of it, all she would have had to do, in order to find an appropriate Latin sentence with which to conclude her allegories, would have been to look up the topic in the index, and copy the Latin. Sometimes she would have had to expand the sentence, using a Latin Bible, but unlike the Chapelet, the Miroir does not make mistakes. Why would she have had recourse to a corrupt French source for her Latin sentences, when a perfectly good source of the Latin, plus a translation, was available? Why would she have used a text like the Chapelet when other more authoritative works were readily to hand? For some time I wondered whether the Miroir des dames could be a common source for both the Chapelet and Othea. This was suggested by the fact that the Miroir contains a long and scholastic account of the virtue of prudence, which begins: Prudence, selon ce que dit un maistre apellé Macobius, n’est autre chose que toutes choses que tu penses, dis ou fais adrecier selon raison et que tu ne faces chose qui ne soit raisonnable. Et a prudence trois parties selon Tulles, c’est assavoir intelligence, memoire et pourveance. Intelligence regarde les choses presentes, memoire les choses paissees et pourveance les choses a venir. (CC 324, f. 139v) [Prudence, according to what is said by a master called Macrobius, is nothing other than determining everything that you think, say, or do according to reason and doing nothing which is not reasonable. And prudence has three parts according to Tully, which are intelligence, memory, and foresight. Intelligence takes account of present things, memory of past things, and foresight of things to come.]

The Chapelet introduces prudence as follows: Prudence, discrecion et sagesse est de troyes manieres selon que dit tulius. La premiere est memoire. Cest assavoir recordance et souvenance des choses passes. La second est de cognostre ce que len a affant le bien devant le mal et la verite de mensonge. Le tierce est providence. Cest assavoir le temps advenus de ce que on a affaire. (BnF, fr. 572, f. 77v) [Prudence, discretion and wisdom are of three kinds according to that which Tully says. The f irst is memory. Which is to say recording and

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remembering things past. The second is to know that one should put the good before the bad and the truth of lies. The third is providence. Which is the time to come of that which one has to do.]

The texts are by no means the same, but the Chapelet reads like a truncated, distorted, and only semi-coherent version of the Miroir. However, this suspicion did not bear much fruit. While there is significant overlap in the Latin sentences found in the Miroir and Chapelet, Durand’s text does not contain the pagan authorities cited by Christine, and there is little correspondence between the passages from the Church Fathers found in the two texts. So, even if it was among her sources, it cannot have been her source for these aspects of Othea. Indeed, the similarity here observed between the Chapelet and Miroir can be explained by a common origin in Cicero, so this line of inquiry ended up being a dead end; nevertheless, this is not the end of the story.

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What is the Chapelet des vertus? The Chapelet is based on a French translation of an Italian text, the Fiori di virtù, which was, in its turn, compiled during the first decades of the fourteenth century by an anonymous author. The French ‘translation’ is by no means a faithful rendition, and in line with fifteenth-century practice it both augments and contracts the Italian. To make matters more complicated, there appear to have been a number of recensions of the Italian. In her important article on the sources of the Fiori di virtù, Maria Corti cites a manuscript from the Biblioteca Communale di Sienna, ms. I.II.7, which has rather different chapters than the nineteenth-century edition by Agenore Gelli, which I have been able to consult.23 In the discussion of the sources of the Fiori, Conti argues that the author did not resort to the original texts cited for the variety of authorities who appear in his collection of ‘flowers’, but was himself borrowing second-hand.24 She notes that among his sources are Albert of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consili and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Doctrinale. For the structure of the discussion of love, the author resorted to Aquinas’s Summa. Following Aquinas, the Fiori pairs each virtue with its contrasting vice. In the copy that she cites, the rather mangled passage on the three parts of prudence found in the Chapelet is much closer to the original found in Cicero’s De 23 Corti, ‘Le fonti dei “Fiori di virtù”’; Gelli, Fiori di virtù, available through Google books. 24 Corti, ‘Le fonti dei “Fiori di virtù”’, 3.

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Inventione, the source for Durand’s passage.25 It also follows the original Cicero closely in the Gelli edition, where it comes at the beginning of Chapter XV, ‘Of the prudence of ants’, whereas in Corti’s source it occurs in Chapter XIII. In the Fiori each virtue is discussed, then followed by a treatment of the contrasting vice, each pair being summed up with an illustrative chapter relating the vice or virtue to some animal.26 These sections related to a ‘bestiary’ are not highlighted in the Fleurs and the Chapelet, though material from them is sometimes included in the accounts of the relevant virtues or vices. It turns out that the ultimate source for the pagan authorities in the Fiori is the same as that for the Dits des philosophes, used by Christine, an Arabic compilation by Abu’-l-Wafa-Mobasschir-ibn-Fatu, but coming from a different line of descent, explaining both the overlap and the differences between the sayings and attributions in the two texts.27 The most compelling argument that is offered by the Rouses for upholding the view that the Chapelet is a source for Christine, lies in the similar grouping of quotations in both (Table 1):28

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Table 13.1  Similarity between Chapelet and Othea Chapelet (UCLA 170/709 f. 67)

Othea, chap. 64 (Parussa ed., 290, lines 20–32)

Senecque dit, “Quant tu feras une chose mieux que aultre ne t’en vente pas car tu en seroyes mesprise.” Saint Augustin dit au livre de la Cité de Dieu que ventence est vice parvers de l’ame. Et celuy qui aime loenge humaine mesprise le vray tesmoignage de sa propre conscience. Et pour ce dit Salomon “Quid profuit nobis superbia aut diviciarum iactencia quid contulit nobis?” Sapiencie quinto.

Et semblablement dit Platon, “Quant tu feras une chose mielx que un autre, gard ne t’en vanter, car ta valeur en seroit trop mendre.” [Allegorie:] Que il ne se doit vanter pouons dire que le bon esperit se gard de vantise, car contre vantance dit saint Augustin ou .xii.e livre de la Cité de Dieu que vantance n’est pas vice de louange humaine mais est vice de l’ame perverse qui aime la louange humaine et despite la vraye tesmoignance de sa propre conscience. A ce propos dit le sage, “Quid profuit nobis superbia aut diviciarum jactancia quid contulit nobis?” Sapience .v.o capitulo

This evidence remains, however, compatible with the Chapelet being derivative, or with Christine having used the original Fiori as her source, an alternative which Rouse and Rouse do not discuss. The reason for this is, 25 Corti, ‘Le fonti dei “Fiori di virtù”’, 15-16. 26 Corti, ‘Le fonti dei “Fiori di virtù”’, 16. 27 Corti, ‘Le fonti dei “Fiori di virtù”’, 30; Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa, 175-78. I have followed Campbell’s spelling of this variously rendered name. 28 Rouse and Rouse, ‘Prudence, Mother of the Virtues’, 197.

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presumably, that the opening passages, shared by both Othea and Chapelet, do not appear in the Fiori or the Fleurs. Nevertheless, we should not neglect the possibility that a later author, noticing the echoes of the Fiori within Othea, chose to embellish a new recension with a prologue culled from Othea. In what follows I argue that this is something like what happened and, certainly, we should abandon the idea that the Chapelet was a source for Christine. In conducting my investigation, I initially supposed that her source for many of the quotes from the pagan philosophers, not found in the Dits, was either the Fleurs or the Fiori, but it transpires that even this is not the case. There are some reasons for thinking that Christine may have been familiar with either the Fiori or its French translation. Only one manuscript of the Fleurs/Chapelet collection contains a translation of the original prologue of the Fiori di virtùs, yet Christine appears to have been influenced by it.29 The manuscript in question is BnF, fr. 24785, described in the library catalogue as fifteenth century, but which the Rouses date to the early sixteenth century.30 This rendition is titled, Le livre nomme la fleur des vertus et de coustumes. It begins with a direct translation of the Italian prologue with the metaphor of a chaplet of flowers, which are virtues. This metaphor is developed and extended in the Livre de paix, I.iv in a chapter which introduces the importance of virtue (Table 2).31

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Table 13.2  The ‘chaplet of flowers’ metaphor BnF fr. 24785, f. 1r

Fiori di virtù (Gelli, 9)

Livre de paix, I.iv

Jay fait comme cellui qui est en ung grant pré plain de tres belles fleurs et qui eslis les serries des fleurs pour faire ung beau chappelet. Et pource vueilte qui cest mon petit traitie et ouvrage ait nom et soit appellé fleux des vertus et de coustumes.

Io fatto come colui ch’e in uno grandissimo prato di fiori, che elegge e coglie tutta la cima d’fiori per fare uns ghirland; però voglio che questo mio piccolo lavoretto abbia nome Fiori di virtudi e di costumi.

ay cueilli aucunes fleurectes souefves et belles ou champ des escriptures pour te faire chappel a aourner le chief de ta plaisant juenece; lesquelles dictes fleurectes sont yssues des germes entre les autres nobles plantes de vii principaulx racines de vertu,

Despite one of them occasionally having been given the name Chapelet des vertus, neither the verse prologue of the Fleurs nor that of the Chapelet actually reproduces the image of the flowers of virtue being made into a 29 Gelli, Fiori di virtù, 9. 30 Rouse and Rouse, ‘Prudence, Mother of the Virtues’, 206-7. 31 Christine de Pizan, The Book of Peace, 206-7.

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chaplet.32 Indeed, the verse prologue from BnF, fr. 1021 reproduced by the Rouses is so obviously a piece of chicanery, meant to pass off a copied work as a new translation, that it ought to raise our suspicions about the authority of all these texts. In any case, the omission of the metaphor of the chaplet in these prologues provides an initial but, as it turns out, misleading piece of evidence that Christine used either the original Italian Fiori, or a translation, for the extra pagan authorities that she needed when the Dits failed her. Another interesting, but ultimately misleading, piece of evidence is that Christine may have adapted a saying attributed to Tully, found in Fiori/ Fleurs, to derive a sentence which will become one of her favorites, that prudence and wisdom is the mother of the virtues. In the chapter on justice in the Fiori one reads, ‘Tullio dice: La giustizia si è madre di tutte l’altro virtù’ (‘Tully says: Justice is the mother of all the other virtues’).33 In BnF, fr. 24785 one reads, ‘Tulles dit justice est mere de toutes les vertus et sans elle nulle chose ne peult durer’ (f. 38r) (‘Tully says justice is the mother of all the virtues and without her nothing can endure’). Christine may have adapted this saying by applying it to prudence. It does appear in this latter form in the Chapelet, despite the fact that the idea that prudence is the mother of the virtues is not found in either the Fiori or Fleurs. The version of the Fleurs in BnF fr. 24785 offers a pretty faithful, though not perfect, translation of the first part of the Fiori as it has been edited, but after a few chapters the works begin to deviate. This may be because the translator was using a manuscript of the Fiori that differed from the version edited or, more likely, a choice was made to truncate the text. The elements of the bestiary found in the Fiori are not highlighted and most of its long discussion of the evils of women is missing. It did occur to Bühler that the French translation of the Fiori might have been an early exercise by Christine, and the omission of this misogynist material would have supported this surmise. But as we will see, there is in the end no reason to think that Christine had a hand in the Fleurs.34 As the Rouses point out, the Chapelet rearranges the order of the paragraphs found in the Fleurs so that the discussion of love, which comes first in both the Fiori and Fleurs, follows the paragraphs on prudence, folly, and temperance in the Chapelet. Not only does the Chapelet rearrange the material in the Fleurs, it both expands and contracts the material that one finds there. So, while the manuscript BnF fr. 24785 of the Fleurs at least starts out as a faithful 32 Rouse and Rouse, ‘Prudence, Mother of the Virtues’, 201. 33 Gelli, Fiori di virtù, 57. 34 Bühler, ‘The Fleurs de Toutes Vertus and Christine de Pizan’s L’Epître d’Othéa’, 40n.43.

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translation of the Fiori, the text of the Chapelet is only loosely based on the Fiori, though occasionally the Chapelet is closer to the Fiori than is the Fleurs. Interestingly, neither the Fleurs nor the Fiori contain Latin sentences from the Bible, as does the Chapelet. Before discussing the significance of this fact, it is worth comparing the treatment of the virtue of prudence in the three works. The discussion of prudence in the Chapelet follows straight after the prologue, which contains material found in Othea and is preceded by the Latin sentence from Prov. 2 Si intraverit sapiencia cor tuum, consilium custodiet. No such quotations from the Vulgate are found either in the Fiori or the Fleurs and, since one does find them in Othea, this might be taken to suggest that the Chapelet was a source for Christine. However, the reasoning can easily go in the other direction. As we saw above, the Rouses argue that the similar sequence of pagan authority, passage from a Church father, and biblical sentence found in the Chapelet and Othea implies that she used this source to help her identify related quotations. But why did she need such help? In at least 62 of her chapters her sentence from a pagan authority is drawn from Tignonville’s Dits des philosophes. Christine was able to find, from the resources available to her, sayings from the fathers and sentences from the Bible to match up with them. Why would she need help with those that she has drawn from some version of the Fiori or the Fleurs? Since it is pretty clear that the Fleurs contracts the Fiori, and the Chapelet contracts and is later than the Fleurs, it is just as likely that the person who constructed the Chapelet rearranged the material available in the Fleurs, embellishing it with passages from the beginning of the Othea and with Latin sayings drawn from this text. In order to demonstrate that this is the actual order of influence, we need to show that the Latin sentences in the Chapelet are a subset of those in Othea, and not the other way around, and/or that there are authorities in the Fiori and the Fleurs that are found in Othea, but not in the Chapelet. The attempt to do so reveals the rather surprising fact that none of these works influenced Christine.

The Biblical Quotations According to Parussa’s edition of the Othea, about 31 of the 100 quotations from scripture found in Othea are also in the Chapelet. In the manuscript BnF fr. 572 of the Chapelet, used by Parussa for her edition, the Latin quotes are usually underlined in red. Counting the underlined passages in this manuscript yields 28, and even this simple method implies that, indeed, the

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Chapelet is derived from the Othea, and not the other way around. Checking confirms that this is the case. Taking any Latin quotation from the Chapelet and searching the Othea results in a match. Moreover, the first six Latin sentences in the Chapelet follow in the order in which they appear in Othea. So, we might even conclude that the rearrangement of the ‘chapters’ of the Fleurs was dictated by the order of occurrence of the Latin in Othea.

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The Church Fathers Searching for Christine’s passages from the Church Fathers in the Fiori and Fleurs is a dead end. In Othea there are 35 passages attributed to Saint Augustine. None of these appear in either of the versions of the Fiori or the Fleurs that I have consulted. This should, I think, make us give up the idea that the Chapelet is a source for the Othea. As the Rouses pointed out, in the Chapelet one finds similar correlations between the pagan source, the passage from a Church Father, and the biblical sentence as in Othea. We have seen that one part of that correlation, the Latin sentence, does not derive from the Fiori via the Fleurs but occurs only in Othea and the Chapelet. Since Christine was quite capable of providing a Latin sentence for the more than 60 chapters in which she was relying on Tignonville’s Dits for her pagan authority, there is no reason to suspect that she followed the Chapelet, rather than the other way around. The fact that Christine’s passages from Augustine are not found in either the Fleurs or the Fiori also suggests that these too were borrowed from Othea to embellish the Chapelet. So, for instance, Chapter 20 of Othea discusses avarice, beginning with a story of Lathona, who turned evil men who would not share a pond with her into frogs. The pagan authority is taken from the Dits. The chapter of the Chapelet looks as though it comes from the Fleurs but, in fact, Augustine is not one of the authorities cited there. In fact, this pattern is repeated throughout the Chapelet. The beginning of its ‘chapters’ more or less follows the material in the Fiori/Fleurs, then a passage from the Church Fathers, and a Latin sentence is added at the end. Faced with this evidence it is increasingly clear that the puzzle about the absence of any mention of the Fleurs or Chapelet prior to 1437 should be solved by taking the evidence at face value. The Chapelet was not mentioned because it did not exist. Rather than it being a source for Christine, it is a cobbled together ‘new’ work, constructed by taking a selection of the ‘chapters’ of a French translation of the Fiori, similar to the Fleurs, and enhancing these with material drawn from the Othea. Even the re-ordering of the chapters supports this contention.

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Table 13.3  How Chapelet is compiled by adding a passage from Othea to Fleurs Fleurs BnF fr. 24785, f. 26v

Othea, chap. 20 (Parussa Chapelet ed., 233, lines 41–48) BnF fr. 572, f. 96r

Avarice est vice contraire de liberalite selon ce que dit tulles. Cest superflue cupidite que homme a davoire et de arquissez (f. 27r) justement et injustement, et de retenir ce qui ne fait besoing et qui nest de necessaire […] En la somme des vices se lit […] Saint Gregoire […] somme des vices (f. 27v) […] Saint Pol […] Salomon […] Dalicon […] Seneque […] Cassiodore […] (f. 28r) Juvenal […] Saint Cyprien […] Seneque […]

[…] dit saint Augustin que l’omme avaricieux est semblable à enfer, car enfer ne scet tant engloutir d’ames que il die ‘c’est assez’; et se tous les tresors du monde estoient amassez en la possession de l’avaricieux, il ne seroit pas rassadiez. Et à ce propos dit l’Escripture: ‘Insaciabilis occulus cupidi in partem iniquitatis non saciabitur’. Ecclesiastici .xiiii.° capitulo

Avarice est vice contraire de la vertu de liberalite et convoitise de sordonnee de acquestes les biens temporelx. Et retenir ce que on devoit donner aux pauvres ou despendre. Et Saint Gregoire dit […] Saint Paoul (f. 96v) […] Pytagoras […] Seneque […] Le maistre des sentences […] Saint Augustin dit que l’avaricieux est semblant a enfer. Car enfer jamais nest saoul pour ame qui y entre, ne aussi si touz les tresors du monde estoient amasses en la possession de lavaricieux Il nen seroit pas content ne saoul. Et à ce propos dit la sainte Escripture: ‘Insaciabilis occulus cupidi in partem iniquitatis non saciabit’. Ecclesiastici .xiiii.° capitulo

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The Pagans Demonstrating that there are passages from the pagans to be found in either the Fiori or the Fleurs as well as in the Othea, but not in the Chapelet, turns out to be frustrating. There are 21 sayings attributed to pagan philosophers in the Othea which have not been identified as coming from either the Dits or the Chapelet. Most of these are not attributed to a specific authority but to ‘un sage’. Very few are found in either the Fiori or the Fleurs, and where there appears to be a similarity, it is slight. Until conducting the search for examples of pagan authorities cited in the Fiori and Othea, but not found in the Chapelet, I assumed that, even if the Chapelet was not a source for Christine, the Fiori or the Fleurs must have been. But my failure to find any of the missing pagan authorities clearly evident in these texts made me wonder whether even the citations of the pagans found in the Othea and the Chapelet could also be found in the Fiori and/ or Fleurs. Surprisingly they could not. It is possible that Christine had access to a different version of one or other of these texts than those that I have consulted, but the searches that I have undertaken so far reveal that, with regard to the citations of pagan authorities, as well as the Latin sentences, and the sayings

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of the Church Fathers, these did not descend to the Chapelet via the Fleurs, but were added to passages from a French translation of the Fiori from the Othea. I began this chapter with a question and a puzzle. The question was whether the Miroir des dames was a source for Christine’s Epistre Othea. The puzzle was that the most promising indication that it might have been consisted in sentences claimed to have been derived from a different work, one that left no contemporary traces. The puzzle has, I believe, been solved. There is no good reason to accept the hypothesis that the Chapelet was a source for Christine. The question, however, remains undecided. There are indications that Christine used the Miroir des dames as a source for the Othea, but its influence is not satisfyingly demonstrable, and if it was an influence, it was slight. The Fiori/Fleurs collections were not, however, the source of those of her quotations from the pagans that are missing from the Dits. The borrowings in the Chapelet have led scholars up the garden path, and we are no closer to having a clear source for these than Campbell or Bühler when they noticed that not all the pagan authorities in Othea are found in the Dits. Modern digital methods could well help to resolve this question, which remains open, and beyond the scope of this chapter.

Bibliography

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Primary Sources Bois, Kristel du. ‘Le miroir des dames de Durand de Champagne: édition critique du manuscrit 11203-04 (2305) de la Bibliothèque royale de Bruxelles’. Thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Faculteit der letteren en wijsbegeerte. Romanse filologie, 1986. Dubrulle, Anne. ‘Le Speculum dominarum de Durand de Champagne’. 2 vols. Thèse présentée pour l’obtention du diplôme d’archiviste-paléographe, École Nationale des Chartes, 1987-1988. Eder, Robert. ‘Tignonvillana inedita’. Romanische Forschungen 33 (1915): 851-1022. Flottès-Debrulle, Anne, edited with the assistance of Constant Mews, Rina Lahav, and Tomas Zahora. Le Speculum Dominarum de Durand de Champagne, Paris: École des Chartes, 2018. Gelli, Agenorr, ed. Fiori di virtù. Florence: Felice le Monier, 1856. Hammes, Marie-France. ‘Le miroir des dames de Durand de Champagne, édition critique du manuscrit de Bruxelles (B.R. 9555-58), première partie’. Thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Faculteit der letteren en wijsbegeerte. Romanse filologie, 1983. Janssens, Anne. ‘Le miroir des dames de Durand de Champagne: édition critique des manuscrits 9555-58 (partie centrale) et 11203-04 (première partie) de la

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Bibliothèque royale de Bruxelles’. Thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Faculteit der letteren en wijsbegeerte. Romanse filologie, 1985. Laurent, Frère. La Somme le roi. Edited by Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise LabieLeurquin. Paris, Abbeville: Société des anciens textes français-Paillart, 2008. Pizan, Christine de. The Book of Peace. Translated by Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, and Janice Pinder. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. —. Epistre Othea. Edited by Gabriella Parussa. Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1999. —. Othea’s Letter to Hector. Translated by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Earl Jeffrey Richards. Toronto: Iter Press, 2017.

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Secondary Sources Bühler, Curt F. ‘The Apostles and the Creed’. Speculum 28 (1953): 335-39. —. ‘The Fleurs de toutes vertus’. PMLA 64 (1949): 600-601. —. ‘The Fleurs de Toutes Vertus and Christine de Pizan’s L’Epître d’Othéa’. PMLA 62 (1947): 32-44. Campbell, P.G.C. L’Épitre d’Othéa, étude sur les sources de Christine de Pisan. Paris: Champion, 1925. Corti, Maria. ‘Le fonti dei “Fiori di virtù” e la teoria della “nobilita” nel Duecentro’. Giornale storico della letteratura Italiana 136 (1959): 1-82. Green, Karen. ‘What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading? The Libraries of Christine de Pizan’s Contemporaries’. Medievalia et Humanistica 36 (2010): 77-100. Mews, Constant J. ‘The Speculum Dominarum (Miroir des Dames) and Transformations of the Literature of Instruction for Women in the Early Fourteenth Century’. In Virtue Ethics for Women, 1250-1500, edited by Karen Green and Constant J. Mews, 13-30. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. Mombello, Gianni. La tradizione manoscritta dell’‘Epistre Othéa’ di Christine de Pizan. Torino: Accademia delle Scienze, 1967. Rouse, Mary A., and Richard H. Rouse. ‘Prudence, Mother of the Virtues: The Chapelet des Vertus and Christine de Pizan’. Viator 39 (2008): 185-228. Tuve, Rosemund. Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

About the Author Karen Green is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely in the area of women’s political thought in Europe in the early modern period.

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14 In Praise of Women Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti’s Gynevera de le clare donne Carolyn James Abstract Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti’s Gynevera de le clare donne, a manuscript collection of 31 female biographies, completed in early 1492, aimed to defend, and even to normalize, the exercise of political authority by elite women. Based loosely on Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, but written in Italian, not Latin, it departed radically from its model by excluding women who had acquired notoriety through wickedness or been undone by the supposedly innate failings of their sex. Instead, it focused on those who had achieved worldly renown through remarkable, but always virtuous, conduct. This essay analyzes the cultural and political context of this text and why it found favor with women such as the young Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua.

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Keywords: Women and the Political Virtues, Isabella d’Este, Female Regency in Renaissance Italy

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Latin anthology of 106 female biographies, De mulieribus claris, completed around 1361, includes only six post-classical women. The author explains why in the conclusion of the work: ‘As is apparent, I have now come to the women of our own time. But so small is the number of those who are outstanding that I think it more honorable to end here rather than continue with the women of today’.1 One hundred and thirty years later, the Bolognese writer, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, took a very different view of the women of his era. In the preface of Gynevera de le clare donne, a collection of 31 lives, Arienti distinguishes his approach from that of his Tuscan predecessor: ‘one 1 Boccaccio, Famous Women, 473.

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can say that many women have lived excellently in our age and are certainly no less deserving of having poems or histories written about them than the ancient and noble women who were glorified for their memorable deeds by famous writers’.2 With one exception, the individuals profiled in the Gynevera had died by the time Arienti wrote about them, a choice he claims to have made to avoid charges of seeking to ingratiate himself with the living. However, many of his subjects existed only a generation or two before his own. Their names would have been entirely familiar to late-fifteenth-century readers, since they were associated with some of Italy’s most powerful families – the Visconti, Sforza, Este, Gonzaga, and Montefeltro and the Aragonese monarchs of Naples. Apart from their near contemporaneity, the women of the Gynevera present another notable contrast to those in De mulieribus claris. Boccaccio considered fame to be the achievement of ‘a reputation throughout the world for any deed whatsoever’.3 Thus, many of his extraordinary women acquired notoriety through wickedness, while others performed mighty and courageous deeds, only to be ultimately undone by their innate feminine failings. Arienti’s heroines, on the other hand, are depicted as having achieved worldly renown through remarkable, but always virtuous, conduct. This chapter analyzes the cultural and political context of this authorial stance. It argues that by writing in praise of well-known women from the recent past, whose interventions in public affairs and on behalf of their families had achieved extraordinarily positive results, the author aimed to defend, and even to normalize, the significant political and cultural roles that their female descendants played in Italian courtly societies. As the private secretary of Andrea Bentivoglio, a minor member of the oligarchy that ruled Bologna between 1446 and 1506, Arienti frequented the country villas and city palaces of the Bolognese elite. There, he met and conversed with women from Italy’s preeminent families, as they visited their Bolognese relatives, or passed through the city as young brides destined for marriages that aimed to cement strategic alliances between the peninsula’s ruling dynasties. Occasionally, he traveled with his employer to neighboring states to attend important weddings, such as the one that took place in 1473 in Ferrara, when the new duke, Ercole d’Este, married Eleonora d’Aragona, daughter of the king of Naples, Ferrante d’Aragona, and his late wife, Isabella di Chiaromonte.4 Arienti came to appreciate the extent to which the noble 2 Arienti, Gynevera, 1-2. Translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 3 Boccaccio, Famous Women, 11. 4 Arienti includes details of his attendance at this wedding in the biography of Ercole d’Este’s mother, Riccarda da Saluzzo. Arienti, Gynevera, 352-60 (359).

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birth and dynastic connections of Italy’s many duchesses and marchionesses were vital to their husbands’ attempts to legitimize regimes that were acquired by military force and needed regularly to be defended by the same means. He no doubt noted that when compelled to go off to war, Italy’s princely rulers often preferred to leave their wives in charge of state affairs, since male relatives had been known to take advantage of temporary absences of their kinsmen to usurp power for themselves. Arienti was quick to realize that such highly placed women might prove to be fertile sources of patronage and he was not alone in recognizing that they were becoming a political force to be reckoned with. Two writers associated with the Este court of Ferrara had already written in support of aristocratic women’s capacity for leadership before the Gynevera was completed in 1492. In Del modo di regere e di regnare, a vernacular poem composed in the late 1470s, Antonio Cornazzano cited examples from Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris to provide evidence of female worth. He argued that the work’s dedicatee, Eleonora d’Aragona, was particularly able to transcend the limitations of her sex, because of the innate qualities associated with her royal Aragonese blood. In 1487, at the height of the duchess’s influence, Bartolomeo Goggio, a notary who hoped to find work at the court of Ferrara, dedicated a vernacular treatise entitled De laudibus mulierum to Eleonora, which aimed ‘to prove the dignity and merits of women’, and went so far as to suggest that ‘women, in every possible thing, have exceeded men’.5 These texts had a limited circulation in manuscript, probably only within the Ferrarese court. However, they represented early Italian attempts to defend women’s ability to govern, contributing to a debate that gathered momentum in northern Italy from the last decade of the fifteenth century and beyond. It is likely that Arienti knew about the works of Cornazzano and Goggio, even if he never read them. He was certainly familiar with Eleonora d’Aragona’s high political profile, having first met the duchess at her wedding, and becoming, thereafter, a trusted client of her husband through the regular provision of newsletters, sent from Bologna over the course of the 1480s.6 Eleonora wielded considerable diplomatic influence during this decade. She also exercised more direct power as regent of the duchy of Ferrara during her husband’s frequent absences from court, this role underpinned by an Aragonese tradition in which the king’s spouse enjoyed official recognition as 5 For a recent discussion of the texts by Cornazzano and Goggio, see O’Leary, ‘Politics, Pedagogy and Praise’, 296-307, quote at 303. On Eleonora d’Aragona, see also James, ‘Florence and Ferrara’; Chiappini, Eleonora d’Aragona; Gundersheimer, ‘Women, Learning and Power’. 6 James, The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 75-169.

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his lieutenant general.7 Of course, Eleonora was not a queen. Nonetheless, she interpreted her political duties in the spirit of her female forebears. According to the Ferrarese chronicler Ugo Caleffini, a minor chancery bureaucrat, the duchess awed contemporaries with her regal bearing, melodious, but powerful, voice and a command of rhetoric that was the fruit of a sophisticated education. Caleffini observed that by 1484 Eleonora’s occasional regencies had become routine: ‘In this period the duke of Ferrara worried little about government; rather his illustrious madam duchess ruled over and governed everything, as she had done in the past’.8 The chronicler saw nothing wrong with this; indeed he regarded Eleonora’s attentive style of administration as an improvement on that of the duke, whom he portrayed as devoted to his own pleasures, rather than to matters of state. Arienti went further in the Gynevera, presenting the view that queens ruling in their own right, or female regents exercising power on behalf of their male kin, could possess the necessary prerequisites for the proper exercise of political authority, especially if they embraced the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. He depicts women successfully exercising these qualities in dispensing justice, rallying troops, negotiating peace treaties, and undertaking major ecclesiastical patronage, the last activity associated with the princely virtue of magnificence. In De triumphis religionis, a treatise completed by Arienti around 1497 and dedicated to Ercole d’Este, the author defines magnificence as the sister of liberality, associated as it was with large-scale and worthy spending to achieve ‘sumptuousness, greatness and sublimity’. Seen by him as the most important virtue of all for a ruler, Arienti devotes fully a third of his treatise to describing the many manifestations of the duke of Ferrara’s magnificence, readily on display in his beautifully decorated palaces and in the ambitious schemes of urban renewal that he presided over. In combination with a remarkable piety, Ercole’s magnificence is said to be evidence of his status as a great and divinely sanctioned ruler.9 The pursuit of honor and eminence through patronage of religious and civic projects was a fundamental aspect of political culture in the wealthy and highly competitive societies of fifteenth-century Italy. The suggestion in the Gynevera that noblewomen with political responsibilities should also cultivate magnificence was novel, given that vanity and the proclivity to unvirtuous spending on needless luxury was a commonplace of misogynist 7 Earenfight, The King’s Other Body, 1-2; Schiappoli, ‘Isabella di Chiaromonte’. 8 Caleffini, Croniche, 640. See also the entries for the years 1486 and 1487, at 666 and 683. 9 Arienti, De triumphis. On magnificence as a moral virtue, see Howard, Creating Magnificence.

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criticism. Arienti presents, indeed, a radical refiguring of female virtue, conventionally seen as involving silence, obedience, and an attentive defense of chastity, to encompass the active moral qualities hitherto associated only with masculinity and male authority. This unorthodox proposal is not presented through philosophical argument; rather it emerges obliquely from the biographical examples chosen by Arienti to showcase female achievements in a range of endeavors undertaken beyond the domestic sphere. As the title indicates, Arienti dedicated his anthology of female biographies to Ginevra Sforza, the wife of Sante Bentivoglio and then of Giovanni II Bentivoglio, successive leaders of the Bentivolesco regime in Bologna. An illegitimate daughter of Alessandro Sforza, lord of Pesaro, Ginevra’s unions with Sante and Giovanni II underpinned Sforza support of the Bentivoglio rise and enabled the latter leader gradually to establish a contested, but ultimately successful, dominance over his former peers to the point that he became a de facto prince.10 By the late 1480s, when Arienti turned his mind to completing the Gynevera, which he had begun to write earlier in the decade, the autocratic ways of Giovanni II Bentivoglio had rendered Bologna much more like the seigniorial regimes of its northern neighbors than it had been in the 1470s.11 While Arienti avoided any suggestion in the dedicatory preface that Ginevra shared a great deal in common with the wives of Italy’s lordly rulers, her family connections with many of the women included in the anthology constituted a veiled acknowledgement of her political influence behind the scenes. At the end of June 1492, Arienti sent the Gynevera to the eighteen-year-old marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, daughter of Eleonora d’Aragona. In a letter which accompanied the manuscript, he explained that, having recently given Ginevra Sforza the first copy, he was moved by what he had heard about Isabella’s piety and other fine qualities to create another, also in his own hand, so that she too could also read about ‘the many virtuous women who had lived their lives with outstanding excellence’.12 Arienti referred to his work, not by its actual title, but as De claris mulieribus, thus explicitly drawing the marchioness’s attention to the relationship of his text to its fourteenth century model and to the prestigious literary tradition that his own collection of biographies continued. Yet he also set himself apart from Boccaccio by writing in the vernacular, recognizing that few women, including Isabella d’Este, would be able to read complex literary Latin with facility. Judged from the perspective 10 James, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 37-52. 11 James, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 11-35. 12 James, The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 125-26.

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of a modern sensibility, the linguistic style of the Gynevera is ponderous, its Italian so overladen with Latinisms that it can hardly be compared favorably with the elegant and supple literary vernacular forged by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. However, for members of Italy’s princely families, who employed famous humanists, but could not operate in Latin themselves, Arienti’s illustrious vernacular was likely pleasing. It was distinctively northern, yet not provincial, learned, while at the same time easily understood. In the letter of June 1492, Arienti requested that Isabella accept him as a client and expressed the hope that she would recommend him to her husband, Francesco Gonzaga, assuming, perhaps, that the youth and limited financial resources of the marchioness would preclude her from being a sufficiently effective patron. Perhaps to the author’s surprise, within days of receiving the manuscript, Isabella wrote effusively, thanking Arienti for his gift in the following terms:

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This work pleased us beyond measure, because it is composed with supreme elegance and is written on a noble subject. We will read it with care, and we will try to follow in the footsteps of those illustrious matrons. We praise you more than a little for the excellence of your talent, and we send you a thousand thanks for having wanted to share your cleverness with us. In recompense, we shall count you among our principal friends. We offer ourselves ever to the service of your comfort and your honor.13

It is rare to have such direct evidence of the reception by a woman of a text conceived primarily for a female readership. Although we know that Anne of France refused to accept Symphorien Champier’s Nef des dames vertueuses (1503), there are no letters which explain exactly why that work was rejected by its dedicatee. As Helen Swift points out in her analysis of Champier’s text, it is probable that the author’s conventional view of female virtue as essentially passive failed to find favor with the queen, whose stance on the matter, articulated in written advice to her daughter Suzanne, was that excellence was achieved by active and eloquent engagement with the world.14 Isabella’s enthusiasm in response to Arienti’s unsolicited manuscript was likely prompted by the fact that the work arrived at a particularly opportune time in her life. Francesco Gonzaga had succeeded to power as marquis of 13 Isabella d’Este to Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 3 July 1492, from Mantua. Archivio di Stato Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, 2991, libro 2, folio 21v. Translation from Isabella d’Este, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Shemek, 49. 14 Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance, 179-181.

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Mantua in 1484, at the age of seventeen. Once he married in 1490, he was eager to leave his wife in charge of routine government business. He wished to pursue what he regarded as more important political work, especially to establish himself as a respected mercenary captain, a role that would bring much needed cash into the treasury and provide occasions to win honor on the battlefield. The couple’s parents and grandparents had observed a similar division of labor and Isabella had been educated to follow these earlier marital precedents.15 By mid-1491, the marchioness had begun to act as her husband’s deputy. In a letter to his sister Chiara, Francesco Gonzaga commented warmly on Isabella’s emerging administrative talents and her eager appetite for political responsibilities.

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I can hardly refrain from telling your Ladyship that during our absence we have left the burden and governance of our state and dominion to our illustrious consort, knowing that we can well rely on her prudence and integrity, for even if she is still of tender age, she has shown great promise. She is very keen to take on important and honorable matters, and demonstrates in each of her actions a singular talent, so that we may with ease and great tranquility go wherever we wish without constantly looking over our shoulder, knowing that our aforesaid consort is at home, managing our government and our affairs.16

Nonetheless, a year later, Isabella was still trying to establish exactly what duties the marquis was prepared to delegate to her and how she could facilitate greater consensus within the court, and among her husband’s subjects, about her political interventions. Arienti’s biographies provided information about how others, including her own kinswomen who had lived earlier in the fifteenth century, had navigated the challenges she faced. Isabella’s promise to read the work carefully, and to treat it as a guide in her own life, was therefore unlikely to have been mere politeness. She certainly proved to be an attentive patron to Arienti in the following years.17 Although Ginevra Sforza’s reaction to Arienti’s work is undocumented, it is probable she too appreciated it. The writer was awarded a six-month salaried 15 On political collaboration between ruling spouses in Mantua, see Swain, ‘“My Excellent and Most Singular Lord”’ and Antenhofer, ‘Il potere delle gentildonne’. For Ferrara, see Chiappini, Eleonora d’Aragona and Folin, ‘La corte della duchessa’. 16 Francesco Gonzaga to Chiara Gonzaga, 20 June 1491, Archivio di Stato Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, 2904, cc. 46r-47r. Published and translated in Bourne, Francesco II Gonzaga, 327-28. 17 James, The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 55-72.

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position as vicar of Minerbio, a Bolognese town on the road to Ferrara, in the second half of 1492, a posting that was almost certainly engineered by Bologna’s first lady to thank Arienti for the work he had dedicated to her.18

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Arienti’s Biographical Choices Gynevera de le clare donne opens with a biography of Theodelinda, daughter of King Garibald of Bavaria, who, upon marriage, became queen of the Lombards. Paul the Deacon wrote about this figure in his eighth-century Historia Langobardorum.19 Towards the middle of the fifteenth century, Theodelinda’s life and historical legacy inspired a lavishly produced fresco cycle, painted on the walls of the queen’s burial chapel in the basilica of San Giovanni in Monza. Still extant today, the more than 40 scenes, in late-Gothic style, were created by members of the Zavattari family, artists at the Milanese court. The frescoes were based on Paul the Deacon’s narrative, with some later chronicles and legends also informing the iconography. Although there continues to be debate about who was responsible for financing the expensive project, there is no doubt that Theodelinda remained a very important figure in Lombardy for many centuries after her death.20 Arienti’s account of Theodelinda’s life follows a similar narrative trajectory to the frescoes, both being largely based on Paul the Deacon’s story of the woman who had corresponded with Gregory the Great, convinced her Arian husband to embrace Christianity, and put an end to the wars that reduced northern Italy to a wasteland. However, Arienti also emphasizes the queen’s extraordinary eloquence, which gave her such influence with her spouse, King Agilulf, that she was able to persuade him to change his violent ways. Once a widow, she ruled on behalf of her young son, achieving more politically through words than the king had ever done with military force. Arienti describes how the queen treated her subjects firmly, but justly, kept factionalism in check, built new churches and monasteries to secure the spiritual well-being of her people, and restored the civic infrastructure that was destroyed during the years of warfare, thus improving the earthly existence of those over whom she ruled. By combining the cardinal virtues required by a wise and god-fearing Christian prince with the nurturing 18 James, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 85. 19 Paul the Deacon, History of the Langobards, 138-41, 148-50, 153-58, 166-68, 173. 20 The scholarship on the patron of the fresco cycle is summarized in Hirschel, ‘Problems of Patronage at Monza’.

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qualities of an attentive mother concerned for the well-being of her children, Theodelinda is shown to have possessed political strengths that her belligerent husband could not match.21 Thus, Arienti opens his collection with one of the major themes of his work: that women could be excellent authority figures if they modelled themselves on the Marion ideal, promoting peace abroad and civic harmony within their realms, rather than readily resorting to violence and aiming for conquest, as male rulers often did. The success of the Lombard queen’s two marriages, both politically strategic, is seen by Arienti as due to Theodelinda’s ability to transform unpromising situations into advantageous ones, through her powers of persuasion and a willingness to negotiate. By contrast, the eleventh-century countess, Matilda of Canossa, the subject of biography four, is depicted as having operated with a high degree of autonomy.22 Arienti begins his account of Matilda’s life by noting that the countess achieved such fame during her lifetime that it was almost impossible to take adequate account of the many chronicles and other writings that celebrated her achievements.23 One of the sources to which Arienti refers was probably a two-volume poem, modelled on Virgilian epic, by Donizione, a monk from San Benedetto in Polirone. This a large and important abbey that Matilda had enlarged and enriched with bequests. Donizione presented his poem to the countess in 1115, not long before her death, and it circulated thereafter in various copies.24 Isabella d’Este would have been familiar with Matilda’s burial chapel in San Benedetto in Polirone, a place she often visited. There were also sites associated with Matilda’s patronage in Mantua itself, such as the rotunda of San Lorenzo in the center of the city. In the mid-fifteenth century, Francesco Gonzaga’s grandfather, Lodovico Gonzaga, refurbished this beautiful small church and engaged Leon Battista Alberti to make over in classicizing style the much larger, adjacent church of San Lorenzo, founded by Matilda’s mother, Beatrice. The humanist Bartolomeo Platina praised both Matilda and Beatrice in his Historia Urbis Mantuae of 1460, arguing that by enlarging churches and building monasteries, the women had overcome the limitations of their sex through such pious and grand spending.25 Arienti reiterates this message throughout the Gynevera, urging the value of major ecclesiastical 21 Arienti, Gynevera, 9-17. 22 Verzar, ‘Legacy and Memory of Matilda’; Verzar, ‘Visualising Politics’; Nash, Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda. 23 Arienti, Gynevera, 25. 24 Donizione, Vita Mathildis. 25 Platina, Historia Urbis Mantuae, 650.

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patronage as a means of expressing devotion to God and of winning enduring renown. That aristocratic women of his own day were likely to be receptive to Arienti’s suggestion that they could aspire to be remembered for magnificent largess is supported by the fact that Lucrezia Pico della Mirandola, sister of the humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and a correspondent of Isabella d’Este, bequeathed all her estates to San Benedetto in Polirone, so the abbey might be further enlarged. The terms of her will of 3 June 1500 indicate that she saw herself as an imitatrix of Matilda.26 Since the monks at Polirone kept alive the memory of both female patrons, as part of a highly politicized struggle to maintain the abbey’s autonomy and wealth, Lucrezia largely achieved her objective of ensuring that neither she, nor Matilda, were forgotten by posterity.27 Arienti recounts that after her first husband died on the battlefield, Matilda married Azzo d’Este, the marquis of Ferrara, but soon extricated herself from this unsatisfactory union on the grounds of consanguinity, spending the rest of her life as a widow and ruling with competence over the vast patrimony in northern Italy that she had inherited from her mother. She is praised by Arienti for governing: ‘most prudently and to the satisfaction of her people, with justice, kindness, clemency and great liberality, as if she were empress of the world’, and for living ‘always with the pure mantle of chastity and piety, as an admirable and god-fearing Christian and example to her people’.28 Matilda is also lauded for her spirited defense of the Papacy during the Investiture Conflict and for her canny strategies in the long military battles to protect her estates from imperial takeover. By beginning with Theodelinda and Matilda, two pivotal figures of the medieval era, whose achievements continued to resonate well into the fifteenth century, Arienti created a bridge between the glorious classical past of female achievement, described in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, and his own age. By doing so, he aimed to show that Italy’s turbulent political history had been shaped by female as well as male protagonists. The subsequent biographical case studies of the Gynevera, predominantly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, suggested that this was still the case. The importance of the duchy of Milan in the Italian political scene is acknowledged at length in biographies of the Visconti and Sforza women, who are portrayed as integral participants in the power struggles of their 26 The will is published in Holman, ‘Exemplum and Imitatio’, 653-54. 27 On Lucrezia’s self-conscious emulation of Matilda’s ecclesiastical patronage, see Holman, ‘Exemplum and Imitatio’, 637-64. 28 Arienti, Gynevera, 26.

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dynasty. The lives of Caterina Visconti, wife of Giangaleazzo Visconti, the first duke of Milan; her granddaughter Bianca Maria Visconti, who married Francesco Sforza, the fourth duke; and her great-granddaughter Ippolita Sforza, duchess of Calabria and the spouse of Alfonso II d’Aragona, represent a formidable line of dynastic spouses, whose stories are offered as worthy examples to guide new generations of similarly influential women. Caterina Visconti is depicted as rousing the people of Milan to resist a French claim on the duchy, following the death of her husband, Giangaleazzo Visconti, her eloquence and determined demeanor saving the day:

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Having heard her persuasive words, full of affection, the citizens became tender towards her and with love and great spirt replied that they would do whatever she desired of them, even to the point of offering their goods, their children and their very lives for the sake of her state.29

Bianca Maria Visconti, whose marriage to the successful general Francesco Sforza was the crucial means by which a transition between the Visconti and the Sforza rulers was engineered, is also characterized by Arienti as militarily intrepid, charismatic, and a compelling speaker, qualities said to have been inherited from her grandmother. Bianca Maria’s commanding appearance on horseback, during the war that followed the death of her father, is shown to have been crucial to the victory of her spouse: ‘through her presence and virile words, full of affection, the soldiers of her husband gathered their courage and directed their strength against their enemies’.30 When the castle of Monza was captured by rebels, she again rode out to resolve the situation: ‘Her arrival inspired such terror and reverence in the enemy that at once, without bloodshed, the lost castle was recuperated’.31 Gentler qualities are also attributed to Bianca Maria. She is praised as generous to those who served her, charitable to the poor, and an attentive patron to convents and churches in her realm. Arienti claims she was so pious that she often walked barefoot beyond the city walls to pray at the major Marion shrines on the Virgin’s feast days, this extreme penance testimony to her holy, and even saintly, qualities.32 The life of Ippolita Sforza has a different tenor. Her marriage to the duke of Calabria represented an attempt to restore amiable diplomatic 29 Arienti, Gynevera., 75. 30 Arienti, Gynevera, 268. 31 Arienti, Gynevera, 274. 32 Arienti, Gynevera, 278.

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relations between the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples. However, the relationship between the humanist-educated Ippolita and Alfonso II d’Aragona soon soured, in part because the duke made it plain that he preferred his mistress to his learned Milanese wife.33 Arienti tells us that he had personally met the young duchess when she passed through Bologna on the journey from Milan to Naples to join her husband.34 He tactfully glosses over the duchess’s troubled marriage, dwelling instead on her learning and brilliance as a conversationalist, insisting that she could talk knowledgeably about: ‘history, the nature of states and kingdoms and how they were to be acquired and retained’, but could also hold forth on a multitude of less serious subjects so that ‘it was a pleasure to listen to her’.35 The biography of Isabella d’Este’s maternal grandmother and namesake, Isabella di Chiaromonte (1424-1465), duchess of Calabria and then queen of Naples, is one of the longest in Arienti’s collection.36 Married in 1444 to Ferrante (Ferdinando) d’Aragona, the illegitimate son of King Alfonso I d’Aragona, Queen Isabella is portrayed as having been integral to her husband’s ultimate success in subduing the rebellious barons of the realm. During the six years in which the king was forced to defend his succession on the battlefield, Isabella acted as regent, establishing a reputation for such just and measured rule that Naples itself remained peaceful. When lack of funds threatened the king’s ability to continue the war, the queen’s appeals to her subjects for financial help were met with generosity. At yet another crisis, when the prince of Taranto threatened to abandon the Aragonese cause, Queen Isabella again successfully intervened, convincing her uncle that since he had given her in marriage to Ferrante to cement an alliance with the king, he was bound to honor that agreement, for her sake and that of her children. Arienti concludes by claiming the queen’s powers of persuasion were critical to the survival of the Aragonese monarchy: ‘Thus we could almost say that Isabella saved Naples by virtue of her intelligence and eloquence, having dissuaded her uncle, the prince of Taranto, from his rebellion in the way that Vittoria saved [ancient] Rome’.37 Arienti’s collection also profiles the relatives of Ginevra Sforza, including her half-sister, Battista Sforza, the daughter of Costanza da Varano, a woman famous for her erudition. As intellectually accomplished as her mother, 33 Welch, ‘Between Milan and Naples’. 34 Arienti, Gynevera, 337-39. 35 Arienti, Gynevera, 345. 36 Arienti, Gynevera, 245-63; Schiappoli, ‘Isabella di Chiaromonte’. 37 Arienti, Gynevera, 261.

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Battista married Federico da Montefeltro, the duke of Urbino. While still a young woman, Battista was left in charge of the duchy when her husband went to the aid of Ferrante d’Aragona, during the war against the Neapolitan barons. According to Arienti’s account, the duchess ruled Urbino with prudence and spirit, winning the steadfast loyalty of her subjects in the face of persistent military threats from Sigismondo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, who hoped to take advantage of what he perceived as a power vacuum in a neighboring city state. Battista parried his tactics, forcing Malatesta to declare himself outmaneuvered by a woman ‘who could have governed all of France’.38 The duchess is depicted as going to extraordinary lengths to do her wifely duty in more conventional ways, even visiting the battlefield to be with her husband, so they might conceive the heir the couple desperately needed after the birth of nine girls. They were finally rewarded with the birth of their son, Guidobaldo.39 As regent, Battista is credited with exercising clemency, justice, and especially liberality. She adhered to her conviction that a ruler should devote personal wealth to the welfare of her subjects on the grounds that such munif icence would engender their loyalty and ensure the longevity of power. Recognizing the importance of displaying magnificence, she dressed with impressive splendor, as befitted her nobility and authority. But it was rumored that she wore a hair shirt beneath her fine garments. 40 Arienti reports that Battista was reputed to have prayed, as she lay dying, that her five-month-old son, Guidobaldo, would eventually follow her example and become ‘a true prince’ and not ‘a tyrant’. 41 Thus, she is presented as a woman who upheld the values of Christian rulership and strived to pass on that legacy to the next generation. Arienti concludes the biography with a long list of the important ambassadors and other distinguished men who attended Battista’s funeral, as a testament to the duchess’s achievements and distinguished reputation. 42 The worldly splendor and saintly levels of piety attributed to Ercole d’Este as a true and worthy prince in De triumphis religionis is here prefigured in the life of a woman. In Arienti’s view, authority sanctioned by God could reside in a man or a woman. Although almost all of the Gynevera’s subjects are aristocrats, there are several individuals of lowly origins. Arienti went to considerable lengths 38 Arienti, Gynevera, 294. 39 Arienti, Gynevera, 296-97. 40 Arienti, Gynevera, 297-99. 41 Arienti, Gynevera, 304. 42 Arienti, Gynevera, 304-12.

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to find reliable information about Joan of Arc, appealing first, but without success, to his Florentine friend, Benedetto Dei, whom he was sure would have useful French contacts, and then finally gaining material through the Bolognese chronicler and merchant Fileno delle Tuate. 43 The inclusion of Joan of Arc was likely prompted by Arienti’s concern to find a Christian parallel to Boccaccio’s pagan warrior women. The life of the Lombard peasant Bona represents another entertaining departure from the pantheon of patrician women. Kidnapped by a nobleman amused by her energetic physical sparring with fellow cowherds, Bona’s heroic efforts to free her kidnapper, following his capture by enemies, is finally rewarded with marriage to the man she rescued, the moral of the story being that courage and other noble qualities could reside even in the humblest of female vessels. 44 Towards the end of the Gynevera, there are a number of biographies from Arienti’s own domestic circle. His wife, Francesca, who died in 1488 while giving birth to their seventh child, is lauded as a virtuous spouse and mother, but also as a woman who delighted in reading vernacular translations of the poetry of Vergil and Pliny’s work on natural history. 45 Diana Saliceto, the sister-in-law of Andrea Bentivoglio, is portrayed as someone who liked to spar intellectually with members of her household, especially at mealtimes when she debated the vagaries of fortune and the lessons of history.46 Both women, from the upper echelons of Bologna’s society, but not of noble birth, are said to have been exemplary domestic managers, but also to have been well informed and open to learning. By including his own wife and several other individuals from his immediate social context, Arienti presented himself as a defender of the female sex and a proponent of a less rigidly hierarchical interpretation of marriage than convention dictated.

Isabella d’Este and the Unresolved Debate about Women’s Capacity to Govern Arienti’s Gynevera survives in only three manuscript copies and the text had a very limited readership until its publication in the nineteenth century. However, within the author’s own lifetime, some of the biographies were 43 Arienti, Gynevera, 100-114. See Arienti’s letters to Benedetto Dei of 20 June, 1 July and 11 December 1489, in James, The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, 110-12 and 114-15. 44 Arienti, Gynevera, 180-94, Chandler, ‘La Gynevera’, 229. 45 Arienti, Gynevera, 361-70 (365). 46 Arienti, Gynevera, 327-36 (328).

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translated into Latin and incorporated, without acknowledgement, into a large anthology of 186 female biographies compiled by Giacomo Filippo Foresti, an Augustinian monk from Bergamo. Published in Ferrara in 1497 in a deluxe edition liberally illustrated with woodcuts, Foresti’s De plurimus claris selectisque mulieribus combined Christian examples from the Bible, classical women from Boccaccio’s text, and some of the biographies from the Gynevera. 47 Foresti had previously written a universal chronicle, the Supplementum chronicarum, printed in Venice in 1483 and appearing in other editions thereafter.48 Arienti may well have consulted this text when he wrote the biographies of Theodelinda and Matilda, since the chronicle enjoyed wide circulation. However, in De plurimus claris selectisque mulieribus, Arienti’s lives took on an entirely new flavor, since Foresti emphasized not women’s capacity for virtue, but rather their weakness and proclivity to sin. 49 Foresti seems to have been intent on neutralizing unorthodox ideas regarding women that circulated in the previous decade within the Ferrarese court with the encouragement of the duchess Eleonora d’Aragona. The De plurimus claris selectisque mulieribus was dedicated to Beatrice d’Aragona, whose status as queen of Hungary was far more elevated than her sister Eleonora’s position in the small duchy of Ferrara. Yet, by the time Foresti completed his anthology of famous women, Beatrice was an embattled and isolated figure at the Hungarian court. After the death of her husband, King Matthias Corvinus, in 1490, the queen was forced to marry her stepson, Vladislaus II, heir to the throne, because of her own inability to have children. The new king soon repudiated the barren and much older queen.50 Thus, in a sense, Beatrice’s trajectory from enormous wealth and influence to political marginalization offered its own moral lesson about the inherent fragility of female success in a man’s world. Given that the queen shared the sad fate of many of Foresti’s classical and biblical protagonists, it is doubtful that the Augustinian cleric dedicated his work to Beatrice d’Aragona in order to ingratiate himself with her. Rather, the dedication functioned as a rhetorical mechanism to reinforce the conservative message by addressing it to someone who was compelled to learn its truth the hard way. Isabella d’Este was indirectly associated with two early sixteenth-century treatises that rebutted the negativity of Foresti’s De plurimus claris selectisque 47 Zaccaria, ‘La fortuna del De mulieribus claris’, 519-45. 48 Fratini, Giacomo Foresti. 49 Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio, 117-37. 50 On the queen’s misfortunes, see Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona.

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mulieribus. Mario Equicola’s De mulieribus (1502) and Agostino Strozzi’s Defensio mulieribus (1501) were both dedicated to her friend, Margherita Cantelmo. The texts emphasized that it was the lack of education and opportunities to exercise their talents that accounted for the supposed inferiority of women.51 As Equicola pointed out in De mulieribus, Isabella was living proof of what an intelligent and well-educated woman could achieve. As well as welcoming such philosophical defenses, Isabella vigorously promoted her capacity to exercise power by a careful attention to her public image. Although she was not able to pursue magnificence through ecclesiastical and civic building, as the wealthy Matilda of Canossa, or indeed her own father, had done, Isabella projected this princely virtue through sumptuous dress, conspicuous hospitality, and patronage of the arts on a small, but exquisitely executed, scale. She filled the small study within her private apartments in the Gonzaga castle with books, antiquities, and other rare objects that proclaimed her learning and discriminating taste, and commissioned paintings from some of the finest masters of the time to decorate its walls. A study, or studiolo, was traditionally a space associated with masculinity, although Eleonora d’Aragona and Ippolita Sforza had both created studies in their apartments in the previous generation. Isabella’s first studiolo, created over the course of her marriage, was far more ambitious than these precedents. The arcane and classically informed allegories of the f ive paintings executed by Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, and Lorenzo Costa, now all in the Louvre museum, suggest that only those armed with fortitude, prudence, and self-discipline would defeat the destructive forces unleashed by the vices, an interpretation with obvious political resonances, once it was associated with the patron of the paintings.52 The political virtues, gendered feminine linguistically, had long been represented as women. However, the female personifications were almost invariably rendered visually in monumental and static poses that reminded viewers that these were allegories, not real individuals. In the paintings commissioned by Isabella, the virtues are associated with ancient goddesses, who are depicted as dynamic and powerful, the iconography entirely consistent with the marchioness’s construction of herself as deserving of authority 51 Equicola, De mulieribus. An Italian version of Strozzi’s text, based on the author’s own translation of 1502, was used by Zambrini, who could not identify the author. See his La defensione delle donne d’autore anonimo. 52 For a recent interpretation of the iconography of the paintings, see Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros.

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and eminently capable of exercising it. Arienti proposed a similarly virile version of elite womanhood in the Gynevera de le clare donne. Although her political competence was acknowledged by most of the chancery officials and diplomats with whom she interacted during her frequent periods of regency, Isabella faced occasional resistance and resentment from those who shared Foresti’s view that a woman should have no place in public life. The perception that having been born in the neighboring state of Ferrara, she was ‘foreign’, and therefore untrustworthy, also stirred unrest among Mantua’s population during times of civic crisis, such as when there were grain shortages caused by the proximity of war. Isabella navigated such challenges successfully. Indeed, her virile behavior fulfilled the promise to Arienti to follow in the footsteps of his illustrious matrons, although this was something that her mother Eleonora d’Aragona ensured she would be able to do.

Bibliography

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Primary Sources Arienti, Giovanni Sabadino degli. Gynevera de le clare donne. Edited by Corrado Ricci and Achille Bacchi della Lega. Bologna: Gaetano Romagnolli, 1887. Reprint, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1968. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Famous Women. Edited and translated by Virginia Brown. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Caleff ini, Ugo. Croniche 1471-1494, no editor. Ferrara: Deputazione Provinciale Ferrarese di Storia Patria, 2006. d’Este, Isabella. Selected Letters. Edited and translated by Deanna Shemek. Toronto and Tempe, Arizona: Iter Press and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017. Donizione di Canossa. Vita Mathildis. Edited by Luigi Simeoni. In Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Vol. 5, edited by Ludovico Antonio Muratori, bk 2. Reprint, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1930. Equicola, Mario. De mulieribus, delle donne. Edited by Giuseppe Lucchesini and Pino Totari. Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2004. James, Carolyn, ed. The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (1481-1510). Italian Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8. Florence: Olschki and The University of Western Australia, 2001. Paul the Deacon. History of the Langobards. Translated by William D. Foulke. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Department of History, 1907.

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Platina, Bartolomeo. Historia Urbis Mantuae. Edited by Pietro Lambecio. In Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Vol. 20, edited by Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Milan: Typographia Societatis Palatinae, 1738. Zambrini, Francesco, ed. La defensione delle donne d’autore anonimo. Bologna: Gaetano Romagnolo, 1876. Reprint, Bologna: Forni, 1968.

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Secondary Sources Antenhofer, Christina. ‘Il potere delle gentildonne: l’esempio di Barbara di Brandenburgo e Paula Gonzaga’. In Donne di potere nel Rinascimento, edited by Letizia Arcangeli and Susanna Peyronel, 67-87. Rome: Viella, 2008. Berzeviczy, Alberto. Beatrice d’Aragona. Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1962. Bourne, Molly. Francesco II Gonzaga: The Soldier-Prince as Patron. Rome: Bulzoni, 2008. Campbell, Stephen. The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Chandler, Stephen. ‘La Gynevera de le clare donne di Sabadino degli Arienti’. Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 158 (1981): 222-34. Chiappini, Luciano. Eleonora d’Aragona, prima duchessa di Ferrara. Rovigo: S.T.E.R., 1956. Earenfight, Theresa. The King’s Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Fahy, Conor. ‘The De mulieribus admirandis of Antonio Cornazzano’. La Bibliofilìa 52 (1960): 144-74. —. ‘Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women’. Italian Studies 11 (1956): 30-55. Folin, Marco. ‘La corte della duchessa: Eleonora d’Aragona a Ferrara’. In Donne di potere, edited by Arcangeli and Peyronel, 481-512. Rome: Viella, 2008. Fratini, Lucia Megli. ‘Foresti, Giacomo Filippo. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani – Volume 48 (1997)’. Treccani. Accessed 17 July 2017. http://www.treccani.it/ enciclopedia/giacomo–filippo–foresti_(Dizionario–Biografico). Gundersheimer, Werner. Art and Life at the Court of Ercole d’Este: The ‘De triumphis religionis’ of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti. Geneva: Droz, 1972. Hirschel, Anthony. ‘Problems of Patronage at Monza: The Legend of Queen Theodelinda’. Arte Lombarda, n.s., 80-82 (1987): 105-13. Holman, Beth. ‘Exemplum and Imitatio: Countess Matilda and Lucrecia Pico della Mirandola at Polirone’. The Art Bulletin 71, no. 4 (1999): 637-64. Howard, Peter. Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence. Toronto: CRRS, 2012. James, Carolyn. ‘Florence and Ferrara: Dynastic Marriage and Politics’. In The Medici: Citizens and Masters, edited by Robert Black and John Law, 365-78. Florence: I Tatti Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies, 2015.

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—. Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti: A Literary Career. Florence: Olschki, 1993. Kolsky, Stephen. The Genealogy of Women. Studies in Boccaccio’s ‘De mulieribus claris’. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. —. The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. O’Leary, Jessica. ‘Politics, Pedagogy and Praise: Three Literary Texts Dedicated to Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara’. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 19, no. 2 (2016): 285-307. Nash, Penny. Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda: Medieval Female Rulership and the Foundations of European Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Schiappoli, Irma. ‘Isabella di Chiaromonte, Regina di Napoli’. Archivio storico italiano 2 (1941): 109-24. Swain, Elizabeth Ward. ‘“My Excellent and Most Singular Lord”: Marriage in a Noble Family of Fifteenth-Century Italy’. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16, no. 2 (1986): 171-96. Swift, Helen. Gender, Writing and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (1440-1538). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. Verzar, Christine. ‘Legacy and Memory of Matilda: The Semiotics of Power and Reform’. In Medioevo: Immagini e ideologie. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma 23-27 settembre 2002, edited by Arturo Quintavalle, 432-47. Milan: Mondadori Electra, 2005. —. ‘Visualizing Politics and Authority of Countess Matilda of Canossa and Tuscany: Ideology and Myth’. In Pictorial Languages and Their Meanings: Liber Amicorum in honor of Nurith Kenaan Kedar, edited by Christine Verzar and Gil Fishhof, 253-64. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2006. Welch, Evelyn. ‘Between Milan and Naples: Ippolita Maria Sforza, Duchess of Calabria’. In The French Descent into Renaissance Italy 1494-1495, edited by David Abulafia, 123-36. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995. Zaccaria, Vittorio. ‘La fortuna del De mulieribus claris del Boccaccio nel secolo XV: Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, Iacopo Filippo Foresti e le loro biografie femminini (1490-1497)’. In Il Boccaccio nelle culture e letterature nazionali, edited by Francesco Mazzoni, 519-45. Florence: Olschki, 1978.

About the Author Carolyn James is a professor in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University. Her research is focused upon the emotional, political, and literary lives of elites in Renaissance Italy, paying particular heed to histories of marriage and aristocratic families.

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15 The Invention of the French Royal Mistress Tracy Adams

Abstract This chapter considers how classical ideas were transformed in the service of legitimizing the mistress as a woman of authority. In particular, it explores how the mythological f igure of Diana was used in tableaux and pageants to represent the mistress, and to authorize her location in the court. The emergence of a mythological imaginary over the course of the sixteenth century in France, which to some degree replaced the identification of the royal family with the Holy Family, made space for different types of authority, as well as valourizing carnality.

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Keywords: Diana, Mistress, Agnès Sorel, Diane de Poitiers

Since at least the 1990s, scholars of the medieval and early modern periods in Europe have been attentive to constructions of female authority, drawing women out of the shadows to which they had been consigned by most contemporary chroniclers. Applications of alternative definitions of power and examinations of texts, accounts, inventories, and images that had previously attracted little interest are verifying that queens, female authors, and abbesses were often as involved in government as their male counterparts. Constant Mews’s meticulous readings of the documents associated with Heloise, those she wrote and those written about her, have revised our understanding of a woman who for centuries was represented as a lovesick virgin pining away in her convent. Coaxing Heloise’s erudition out of her and Abelard’s letters, Mews also draws attention to her skillful redeployment of classical male authorities, Ovid and Cicero in particular, to structure arguments about friendship and love. Moreover, he situates her in a network of figures who appreciated her piety and intellect.

Monagle, Clare (ed.), The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789462985933_ch15

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In what follows, I hope to contribute to studies of medieval and early modern women as authority figures by tracing the influence of representations of the classical goddess Diana on the development of the French political royal mistress. Modern historians rarely linger over the fact that under a series of French kings, the royal mistress wielded significant power: that is, a woman with no blood connection to the royal family not only brokered favors for her clients but advised the king, forged alliances, and negotiated with foreign diplomats. And yet, even though kings everywhere have always had mistresses and, in some exceptional cases, powerful ones, only in France did the role become a tradition. True, even in France, most royal mistresses were not politically active. Still, at least nine exercised enormous influence and were perceived there and abroad as contributing to the king’s grandeur.1 Indeed, Frederick the Great famously placed the tradition on a par with Versailles and the French army in his discussion of the ruinous propensity of German princelings to emulate Louis XIV, remarking in Book 10 of his Antimachiavel that ‘there is not a cadet of a cadet line who does not imagine himself as a sort of Louis XIV: he builds his Versailles, he has his mistresses, he leads his army […]’.2 Although scholars have devoted a number of studies to individual members of the canon of influential French royal mistresses, to date, the role’s sociogenesis and subsequent development has received no serious attention.3 I hope here to shed some light on the former, considering when and under what circumstances the role first took on its characteristic form. 1 Mistress of Charles VII, Agnès Sorel (1428-1450); of François I, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly (1508-1580); of Henri II, Diane de Poitiers (1499-1565); of Henri IV, Gabrielle d’Estrées (1573-99); of Louis XIV, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart (1640-1707), and Françoise d’Aubigné (1635-1719): and of Louis XV, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (1721-1764) and Jeanne Bécu (1743-1793). One might also make a case for including a ninth, Louis XIV’s f irst well-known mistress, Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc (1644-1710). Although she never acquired the power of the others listed here, her failure is interesting in the sense that it reinforces the notion that the position was one of genuine power, available only to women of great political skill. One might make the case for others; however, no one would dispute the standing of these eight women. 2 ‘[I]l n’y pas jusqu’au cadet du cadet d’une ligne appanagée, qui ne s’imagine d’être quelque chose de semblable à Louis XIV, il bâtit son Versailles, il a ses maîtresses, il entretient son armée…’, Frederick II, King of Prussia, Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, ou essai critique sur le Prince de Machiavel, part 2, 6. 3 The role, of course, has been the subject of many popular histories. For scholarly studies of individual royal mistresses see, for example, Potter, ‘Anne de Pisseleu, duchesse d’Etampes, maîtresse et conseillère de François Ier’, 535-56; Potter, ‘Politics and Faction at the Court of Francis I’; Goodman, The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour; Kaiser, ‘Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power’; and Bardon, Diane de Poitiers et le mythe de Diane.

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Focusing on a few key texts describing royal entries, which became increasingly magnificent and theatrical throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I make the case that the transformation in the perception of space that became manifest in the visual arts and theatre sometime between the beginning of the reign of Charles VII (1403-1461) and the end of the reign of François I (1492-1547), that is, the movement from flat to three-dimensional surfaces, from mystery to history, or from ritual to theatre, was the necessary condition for the rise of the powerful royal mistress. Although Charles VII’s mistress Agnès Sorel (1422-1450) wielded considerable clout, she was regarded simply as the king’s extra-conjugal sex partner, whereas François I’s mistress Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, the Duchess of Etampes (1508-1580), was recognized at least by 1530 in the courtly and popular imagination as a significant presence in the king’s life and, by 1540, as a serious political player. In addition, under Henri II (1519-1559), the royal mistress, embodied in Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566), attained her status as a characteristic of royalty, acknowledged, tacitly at least, by all. What had happened? The transformation that made the role possible was complex and far-ranging. However, descriptions of royal entries foreground two related aspects of this transformation that I argue to be particularly relevant to this discussion: increasing use of mythological imagery, particularly images of the huntress Diana, to express relationships among the royal house and the nobility and, more generally, increasing signs of the theatrical turn familiar especially to historians of court life.

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The King’s Most Devoted Servant But f irst a brief look at the French queen in the years just prior to this transformation is necessary. In her role as sometime regent, the queen shared important similarities with the royal mistress that offer clues about the genesis of the latter role, and, moreover, as consort, the queen and the mistress were defined in opposition to each other. To begin, then, the powerful royal mistress was a product of the same social structures that made the female regent possible. The earliest female regencies, say, those of queen-mother Adele of Champagne for her son Philip II Augustus when he went on Crusade and Blanche of Castile after the premature death of Louis VIII, were one-off solutions to urgent problems. Beginning in 1403, however, female regency began to develop as a recognized role. After naming his brother, Louis of Orleans, regent in 1393, in 1403 the periodically mad King Charles VI abolished regency altogether in an

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ordinance proclaiming that the heir to the throne, however young, would ascend immediately upon the king’s death. 4 Until the new king attained majority, the ordinance continues, the queen would be regent for him and the other children.5 Moreover, the queen would govern in his name, aided by the present king’s brother, uncles, and others of his blood, plus Royal Counselors. The ordinance thus in effect gave regency, unoff icially, to the queen mother. The ordinance was successfully contested by Louis I of Orleans, but after his murder in 1407 it was reinstated.6 The next regency began in 1484, when Anne of France and Pierre of Beaujeu were confirmed by the Estates General as guardians for the young King Charles VIII, awarded the role over the heir presumptive to the throne, Louis II of Orleans. One of the arguments in favor of Anne was that women represented no threat, unlike male relatives.7 Female regency thus was initially unofficial, implicit in guardianship, and, although later regents Marie de Médicis and Anne of Austria were specifically designated as regents as well as guardians, possession of the young king by the guardian always trumped any official position.8 The unofficial status of the female regent is interesting, expressing a paradox that was itself a product of the gender ideology embodied in feudal law provisions for women to inherit in the absence of a brother and to exercise power as substitutes for their absent husbands, fathers, sons, or brothers.9 Women were intellectually equal to men of their same rank and 4 Les Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, 8:581. 5 Ordonnances, 8:582. She would have ‘la Garde et nourrissement and gouvernement d’eulx’. 6 In a letter patent of 7 May 1403, the king acknowledged that ‘certain’ recent ordinances may have deprived his brother of power and ordered that any such portion of these recent ordinances was to be ignored. See Isabembert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 7:59, for the letter patent. 7 See Cosandey, ‘Puissance maternelle et pouvoir politique’, especially 70-71. 8 In 1484, Anne of France and Pierre of Beaujeu requested that the Estates General confirm their role of guardians of the young king. The king’s closest male relative, Louis II of Orleans, who headed the Royal Council, the kingdom’s governing body, bitterly contested the confirmation. See Cosandey, ‘De Lance en quenouille’, 817. 9 Louis VII responds to a letter of 1164 from a knight who refuses to appear before the Viscountess of Narbonne because her sex is wrong: when there is no member of the strong sex, it is permissible that a woman administer the heritage. Cited in Contamine, ‘Le Royaume de France ne peut tomber en f ille’, 79n.30. For examples of inheritance, see Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, 1:222-43. The males inherit first, but females inherit where there is no male heir; and Ableiges, Le grand coutumier de France, 290-308, on fiefs, which shows the same. See Ableiges, Le grand coutumier de France, 373 on guardianship, which the surviving parent assumes. See also Wood, The French Apanages and the Capetian monarchy, which discusses how when Louis X became king, his brother Philippe asked him to change the laws regarding apanage so that

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therefore as capable as men, but customarily legally and socially inferior, and therefore called upon only in the absence of a man. The paradox was enshrined most visibly in the so-called Salic Law, which was discussed with increasing attention from about 1420. Here the paradox consisted in the law’s simultaneously prohibiting women from ascending to the throne themselves or even transmitting the right to their son, but, for that very reason, preferring women, normally the queen-mother (in Anne of France’s case, sister), as regents.10 Because unlike the king’s male relatives, women could not succeed: as regents their interests were inextricably bound to the king’s, their power dependent on his.11 As such, they were the king’s most loyal servant. To return to the powerful royal mistress, she was supported by the same ideology that supported the female regent. However, the pertinent context here was not the family. It was rather, the circle of royal mignons, or, as they were called from the mid-sixteenth century, favorites. Achieving special prominence during Henri III’s reign (1574-1589), these young men of the mid-level provincial nobility were not clients of great lords, that is, princes of the blood, but pledged themselves directly to the king. In addition to absolute loyalty, they supplied the king with unfiltered information and served as a screen between him and the ever-increasing crowds requesting his favors.12 If the mignons reached the apogee of their influence under Henri III, however, the category existed well before. From around 1445, the beginning of Agnès Sorel’s rise, Charles VII is described as surrounded by mignons.13 Within this structure of the king’s intimates, the royal mistress, although intellectually fit for the task of political advisor, as a woman could not officially exercise such a role.14 Philippe’s daughters could inherit. Of course, misogynistic writings, mostly clerical, denigrated female intelligence. But the participation of women in noble feudal society proves that, among many, women were seen as capable and as competent as men. 10 For approximately a fourth of the years between 1484, when Anne of France, along with her husband, Pierre of Beaujeu, were confirmed in their role as guardians of the young king, and 1661, when Louis XIV assumed personal rule, five female regents effectively governed the kingdom, or, in other words, five female regents ruled in a kingdom that explicitly prohibited them from doing so. 11 The mother, of course, more than any other also loved her own children: by right, to her ‘appartient garder le bien, prouffit de Nous & de nostre Royaume, & de noz Enfans, plus que à nul autre’ (‘belongs the task of guarding the good, belonging to us and to our kingdom, and to our children, more than to any other’). Ordonnances, 8:587. 12 On the phenomenon, see Le Roux, La Faveur du roi; Contamine, ‘Pouvoir et vie de cour dans la France du XVe siècle’; and Jouanna, ‘Faveur et favoris’, 155-65. 13 For the names of the mignons and citations of the accounts that name them, see Fresne de Beaucourt, Charles VII, 4:177-81. 14 Basin, Histoire des règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI, 1:313.

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To be more precise, the female regent and the powerful royal mistress’s devotion to the king surpassed that of any man, whose ambition always threatened to put him at odds with the king. As for the mistress, true, the male favorite served at the king’s pleasure. But the female favorite was still more dependent, still more incapable of achieving anything on her own, and therefore all the more eager to support the king’s interests. Moreover, the queen consort is an important figure in this discussion because the royal mistress was constructed against her. From the time of François I’s second wife, Eleonore of Austria, during whose tenure (1530-1547) the Duchess of Etampes reached her apogee, the queens of France, with one exception, were all foreign-born. As we saw, their royal husbands – except for the sons of Catherine de Médicis, who relied heavily on their mother for political advice, and Louis XIII, who preferred male mentors – possessed powerful mistresses. As Monique Cottret notes, between the queen and mistress ‘the jobs were divided up, the queen [taking on] reproduction and representation, the mistress arts and letters and hostessing court life’.15 To this I would add that because there was no risk of a prior commitment to a foreign dynasty with the mistress, unlike the queen, in the absence of an influential queen-mother, the mistress was the king’s most faithful and intimate advisor. As we will see, Eleonore of Austria was the sister of the French king’s bitter enemy. As for Catherine de Médicis, during her own time she suffered from knowing that she was perceived by many as a foreigner and an unworthy match for a French prince.16 Later when Henri II became king, the mistrust continued. For example, when the king left her regent during a military expedition to Italy, she was initially overjoyed, but quickly discovered to her chagrin that she was forced to share the charge with Claude d’Annebaut, admiral of France.17 With just a few exceptions, the kings of France from Charles VI relied on a woman as a close adviser. For Charles VI it was his queen, Isabeau of Bavaria; Charles VII, first his mother-in-law Yolande, then his mistress Agnès Sorel; Louis XI, an exception, seems to have held women in contempt except his daughter, Anne of France; Charles VII, his sister Anne of France; Louis XII his queen, Anne of Brittany; François I, his mother, Louise of Savoy, then his 15 Cottret, ‘Les reines étrangères’, 107. 16 Almost immediately after the marriage, her kinsman, Pope Clement VII, died. The whole point of the union was to ally the French king with the Pope against the Emperor, and with the pontiff’s death many concluded that the marriage had been a mésalliance. For perceptions of the young woman as a foreigner, see Dodu, ‘Le Drame conjugal de Catherine de Medicis’, especially 122-24. 17 See Cloulas, Catherine de Médicis, 110.

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mistress, the Duchess of Etampes; Henri II, his mistress, Diane de Poitiers; the three sons of Catherine de Médicis, François II, Charles IX, and Henri III, their mother; Henri IV his mistresses, the most significant of whom was Gabrielle d’Estrees; Louis XIII, another exception whose relationship with his regent mother Marie de Médicis was difficult, relied on father figures for political guidance; Louis XIV his mistresses, most significant among them Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, and Françoise d’Aubigné; and Louis XV his mistresses Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson and Jeanne Bécu. The role of powerful royal mistress, thus, must be seen within this more fundamental context of the royal tendency to rely on a female adviser, itself a function of the gender ideology that constructed women as intellectual equals but legal inferiors, and, because of this very inferiority and the inability of women to assume power for themselves, as the most loyal and therefore best choice for intimate political advisors.

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Royal Entries and the Royal Mistress as Diana And yet, if it is clear enough how under feudalism family ties authorized the daughter, wife, mother, or sister to assume an office on behalf of her absent male relative, it is difficult to imagine what might have justified the position of the powerful royal mistress, who was unrelated to the king. We turn now to the increasing interest in classical mythology coupled with an increasingly theatrical perception of space that characterized the turn of the fifteenth century, which I suggest was the prerequisite for the rise of the powerful royal mistress. As for the former point, the royal family had always been associated with the Holy Family. But at the court of François I, especially with the onset of the substantial renovations at Fontainebleau begun in 1527, mythological narrative began to provide new models for family relationships. Earlier, mythological narratives served primarily as a pretext for allegory, forming the bare-bones literal level upon which interpretations, often contradictory, were practiced. However, as of the late fifteenth century, under the influence of Italian humanism, writers experimented with new critical methods, one of which was to return to the classical source and reproduce its fulsome, imagistic language.18 This transformed allegorical interpretation, producing mythological narratives fleshed-out with tropes that themselves provided material to be allegorically interpreted and, most important, narratives of coherent magical worlds, independent worlds 18 See Moss, Poetry and Fable, especially 6-16 and 18-40, for a detailed discussion of this process.

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free from invasive, overtly moralizing narrators who tied the myth to the present and imposed an external and presumably universal moral system on ancient matter. Jean Seznec and others have shown the continuity between the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century of allegorical and moralistic interpretation of classical mythology that guaranteed ‘the survival of the pagan gods’; still, if much remained, something crucial had shifted.19 When the king was imagined as a sort of Zeus, it was clear that he would collect mistresses.20 As for women at court, many new role models in the form of pagan goddesses became available, but the huntress Diana provided them with the most serious model for political behavior. As for the second point, descriptions of royal entries for Charles VII, Eleonore, second queen of François I, and Henri II and Catherine de Médicis, vividly demonstrate the increasingly theatrical way of engaging with the world.21 During the fourteenth century, northern Europeans had begun to celebrate the accession of a new king (or queen) with entries into the cities of the realm.22 Although early on these affairs were relatively uncomplicated processions during which city dignitaries offered gifts to the new ruler who in return confirmed their privileges, they became increasingly magnificent, especially near the end of the fifteenth century. In addition to the traditional greetings by civic dignitaries, the guilds of the city began to construct pageants where plays were performed. Specifically, as Gordon Kipling notes, ‘The introduction of pageantry in the late fourteenth century transformed the civic triumph decisively in the direction of drama. With the proliferation of scenic tableaux, the king’s advent became less and less a splendid ceremony, more and more a spectacular drama’.23 Records verify a rapid trend toward complexity, from entries like those in 1377 London and 1380 Paris, where a 19 Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. 20 Among Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier’s many erudite, insightful, and entertaining articles on the iconography of Fontainebleau, the following are especially pertinent to this point: ‘Les déboires de Diane au château de Fontainebleau’; ‘Femmes, cour, pouvoir: La Chambre de la duchesse d’Étampes à Fontainebleau’; and ‘Women on Top at Fontainebleau’. 21 The scholarship on the theatricalization of life, particularly court life, is abundant. For an introduction to the concept and its history, see Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre, chap. 2, ‘Theatrum vitae humanae’, 50-145; and, for a theoretical approach, Egginton, How the World Became a Stage. 22 A substantial body of research has been devoted to the phenomenon. See Cooper, ‘The Theme of War in French Renaissance Entries’, 15-36; Gringore, Les entrées royales à Paris de Marie d’Angleterre (1514) et Claude de France; Cosandey, La reine de France, 163-205; Kipling, Enter the King; Jacquiot, ‘De l’entrée de César à Rome à l’entrée des rois de France dans leurs bonnes villes’, 255-68; Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony; Jackson, Vive le roi!; Guenée and Lehoux, Les Entrées royales françaises; Jacquot, ‘Joyeuse et Triomphante Entrée’, 1:9-19. 23 Kipling, Enter the King, 28.

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single pageant might be erected, to mid-fifteenth century entries, which began to include dozens of tableaux vivants or ystoires, short plays, and sometimes more technically complicated performances requiring casts of hundreds.24 Most important for this discussion of increasingly theatrical perceptions of space, entries, with their religious imagery and processions leading to the city’s principal church, mapped the celestial Jerusalem onto the city and imagined the king and queen, if she was present, as types of triumphant Jesus and the Virgin, melding urban and divine space in a hopeful approximation of the new reign to its heavenly exemplar. Neil Murphy notes that during his 1486 entry to Troyes, Charles VIII ‘was welcomed as Christ and led into “his celestial city” by the townspeople’.25 This assimilation did not stop, even as entries became more elaborate. Still, the themes that the pageants treated also diversified, coming to include mythological as well as traditional biblical imagery and moral allegories. Richard Cooper writes with reference to the Lyonnais entries that a striking evolution can be observed from the ‘1507 triumph of Louis XII, returning from victory against Genoa’, where the king was regaled with actors representing Force, Prudence, Diligence, and Valiance who placed laurel crowns on his head and compared him to Theseus, Hercules, and Jason, to the 1515 entry of Francois I, also fresh from victory in Italy, who was feted with religious and allegorical themes, although with ‘some classical material, including four short Latin inscriptions, and also an allied interest in the monumental, with the royal route lined at one point by eight columns’, to the strikingly different entry of queen Eleonore in 1533. By this point, despite a lingering religious element, the conception and script of the ystoires are much more classical and scholarly than before, as is the iconography which owes much to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. An example of the new style is the tableau vivant at the Porte de Bourgneuf, set on a stage with Corinthian pillars and inscriptions in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, portraying the royal children in bed emulating Hercules in strangling a snake, witnessed by the three figures of Fortune, Renommée and Sagesse with their humanist iconographical attributes. Furthermore, the four isolated Latin inscriptions in the 1515 entry are meager compared with more than forty in the ceremony for the dauphin and over sixty in that for the queen.26 24 Ibid., 6. 25 Murphy, ‘Renaissance France’, 179. Murphy is citing Guenée and Lehoux, Les Entrées royales françaises, 274. 26 Scève, The Entry of Henri II into Lyon September 1548, 3-4.

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My claim is that the proliferation of mythologically-inspired plays co-existing with the new Jerusalem motifs indicates a new perception of space: different worlds functioning according to their own sets of expectations. Although the rise of the powerful French royal mistress could not have taken place without the gender ideology I have just laid out, in its characteristic form, the role was made thinkable by the same forces that produced royal entries that included worlds within worlds, or, more specifically, plays featuring the huntress Diana under the wider umbrella of the concept of the French king as the ‘le roy très chrestien’. In other words, although the concept of the new Jerusalem indicates a world view that collapses earthly and divine space, the co-presence of mythological enactments indicates this other, theatrical vision of the world. According to modern historians, popular and scholarly, Agnès Sorel was the first ‘official’ mistress of a French king. A recent study notes that she received the designation at a ‘joyous entry’ in 1444.27 Still more recently, another historian writes that ‘the first truly official mistress of the king of France was Agnès Sorel’.28 But neither claim is footnoted and a search of all known primary sources turns up no mention of such a designation: nothing at all to suggest that Agnès was recognized, either publicly by the king or implicitly by her contemporaries, as the holder of anything like an official role. On the contrary, although contemporary authors are often aware of her presence and the king’s affection for her, they do not know what to make of the fact that the daughter of Jean Sorel, officer of the Count of Clermont, Charles I of Bourbon, and seigneur of Coudun, near Compiègne, that is, a woman with no dynastic claim to power, received such riches from the king and maintained his favor until her death.29 The memoir of Olivier de La Marche, the earliest chronicle mention of Agnès, describes a trip of Isabelle of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy, to Chalons, in June, 1445, marvels that ‘the king had recently raised up a poor girl, a gentlewoman called Agnes Sorel, and put her in a position of such triumph and power that her station might be compared to that of the great princesses of the kingdom’.30 Contradicting La Marche’s account, chronicler Jean Chartier denies that Agnès was ever the king’s mistress at all.31 Other chroniclers write her off as the object of an aging king’s excessive lust. Georges Chastellain observes that the king fell 27 Wellman, Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France, 29. 28 Gaude-Ferragu, Queenship in Medieval France, 1300-1500, 34. 29 For Agnès’s family, see Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:172-73. 30 ‘tel triumphe et tel pouvoir’. La Marche, Complète des Mémoires relatifs à l’Histoire de France, 9:403-4. 31 Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, roi de France, 1:2 and 2:181-86.

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madly in love with and spent vast sums on her and that never was a princess more beautifully outfitted or possessed of such estate.32 Thomas Basin observes that the king had as his ‘delight’ or ‘darling’ ‘quite a beautiful little minx’ (‘habuit in delitiis unam precipuam satis formosam mulierculam’) popularly known as the ‘belle Agnès’.33 For Jacques Du Clercq, the king ‘took up with a young woman […]’.34 In describing her role, Robert Gaguin uses the ‘concubinage’; for Pope Pius II, she was one of the king’s concubines.35 It is clear that among Charles VII’s most intimate advisers, Agnès was considered politically influential. The riches that she accumulated for herself and her clients drew the ire of chroniclers, but they testify to her clout, and, more significant, a number of stray comments recorded in court documents related to investigations of plots against the king indicate that among the king’s most intimate advisers, she had the job of winning the king’s approval.36 Even her atrocious death of a massive overdose of mercury in Normandy in 1450 while the king was reconquering the territory from the English hints at her political importance: why else would someone bother to assassinate her?37 And yet, although contemporaries saw Agnès as a doted-upon mistress, they were unaware of any more significant role. I will return to Agnès’s political invisibility but turn now to royal entries and the information they have to offer. Charles VII’s entry into Paris, delayed until 1437 by the English occupation, could not have reserved a place for Agnès, who did not even enter his life until 1444. Nor is she mentioned in any of the descriptions of his entries, despite the claim I noted above. Still, as I will explain, descriptions of Charles VII’s entries are interesting when compared with examples from later reigns, revealing that the themes of the 32 ‘durement assotté’, Chastellain, Oeuvres de Georges Chastellain, 4:365-66. 33 Basin, Histoire des règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI, 1:313. 34 ‘s’accointa d’une josne femme…’, Du Clercq, ‘Mémoires’, 175. 35 Gaguin, Les croniques de France, execellens faictz et vertueux gestes des très chrestiens roys et princes qui ont régné au dict pays, depuis l’exidion de Troye la grande jusques au règne du… roy Françoys premier, fol. CLXIX verso; for Pope Pius II she is ‘unam ex illis’, referring back to ‘concubine[a]e’. Piccolomini, Pii secundi pontificis maximi commentarii rerum memorabilium, quae temporibus suis contigerunt, 160. 36 Royal adviser Senechal of Normandy Pierre de Brézé and Agnès were particularly close allies. A deposition of October 1446, cited by Fresne de Beaucourt, claims that Pierre was ‘destroying everything with the help of Agnès, through whom he held the king in subjection’. Fresne de Beaucourt, Charles VII, 3:293. Other court records involving a double-agent courtier note that Pierre has the king’s ear, partly through the help of Agnès, ‘through whom Pierre gets what he wants’. Agnès is mentioned again in a discussion of how Pierre manipulates the king: when all else fails, Agnès will make things right (‘en fera raison’). See La Chronique de Mathieu d’Escouchy, 3:265-341, especially 268 and 282. 37 On her death, see Charlier, ‘Qui a tué la dame de Beauté?’, 255-63.

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pageants, or plays, staged during these events were exclusively religious.38 Accounts of his entry into Paris indicate that after entering through the gate of St. Denis, the king was regaled with an image of St. Jean the Baptist carrying the Agnus Dei, the lamb of God, surrounded by a choir dressed as angels. He then came before a large theatre, where the Mysteries of the Passion and Judas carrying out his treachery were enacted through ‘gestures alone’. As the king came through the Porte au Peintre he discovered images of Saints Thomas, Denis, Maurice, and Louis of France, with St. Geneviève standing among them. In another theatre, the Resurrection was performed, along with Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene. In still another theatre, the Holy Spirit descended among the Apostles and Disciples. In front of the Châtelet, shepherds with their lambs received the Good News from an angel.39 Charles VII made further entries after wresting back control of various cites of the realm from the English. In Rouen in November 1449, just two months before Agnès’s death in near-by Jumièges, the pageantry was similarly religious. Things changed. Mythological narratives decorate the 1514 entry into Paris of Mary Tudor, second queen of Louis XII. The new queen stopped before the Châtelet, where on the lowest level of the scaffolding stood an eclectic collection of personnages: the allegorical figure Bon Accord (‘Good Agreement’) and the Stella Maris (‘Star of the Sea’, normally a name for the Virgin), but also Minerva, and Phebus and Diana. 40 It should be noted that the entries of François I, beginning just one year later, do not take up this new theme. Robert Knecht has written that this king’s early entries preferred religious imagery and allegories of the virtues, and an examination of the descriptions of his Paris entry in 1515 and that of Queen Claude in 1517 reinforces Knecht’s assessment that early in the reign, François I’s entries must be regarded more as late medieval than early modern. 41 This remains true for François’s second entry, in 1526, just after his return from his Spanish captivity. 42 However, when François I married the sister of his enemy, Emperor Charles V, in 1531, and the new queen, Eleonore, entered Bayonne, her first stop in her new kingdom, she was greeted by amazing creations: ‘in the streets were performed comedies and other comic productions, (‘facéties’ 38 Printed in Godefroy, Le Cérémonial françois, 1:653-56. 39 Godefroy, Le Cérémonial françois, 1:655-56. 40 Godefroy, Le Cérémonial françois, 1:731-48. 41 Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, 131. For descriptions of the entries see Godefroy, Le Cérémonial françois, 1:751-53 and 1:753-61. 42 Godefroy, Le Cérémonial françois, 1:762-65.

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and ‘faintises’) so illustriously and ingeniously composed that such things had never been seen or heard of; for it seemed that Nymphs were swooping down straight from heaven’. 43 The description of this entry also notes the presence of Diane de Potiers, ‘la grande Seneschale’, not yet the mistress of the still adolescent Henri, later Henri II, followed immediately by Anne, already François I’s mistress, referred to as ‘Mademoiselle la belle Heli’ of the queen mother’s household. It is hard to ignore ‘la belle’; why remark on the beauty of one among dozens of ladies-in-waiting in a document devoted to the entry of the new queen? Still, we find nothing untoward in the description of Eleonore’s entry into Lyon in May 1533. What we do find, however, is a renewal of mythological themes. Just after coming into the city, the queen was presented with, among other ‘scaffolds’, one on which a wood was erected where ladies danced with two masks, one sad and one happy. 44 When they danced, they were harassed by satyrs and wore their sad faces. However, when a lady dressed in white satin representing the huntress Diana appeared, the satyrs fled. In the poem that this Diana pronounced before the queen, the huntress explained that her ladies had long danced in sorrow, but now that the queen had arrived, their sadness had turned to joy. Lyon may represent the new Jerusalem, but it now contains at least one small pagan world within the larger world. Still, it is during the queen’s entry into Paris in March 1531 that we observe the most significant change yet. Guillaume Bochetel’s description notes only that ‘mysteries and figures’ were enacted on scaffolds to entertain the lady as she passed. 45 And yet, a fundamental shift in the role of royal mistress has occurred, one that marks the f irst major step toward the position we now recognize. The shift, however, is visible not in the official description of the entry but in an exterior source, a letter about the entry from English diplomat Francis Bryan to Henry VIII. The English king, hoping that the new marriage between his enemy, the king of France, and the sister of his enemy, the Emperor, would fail, kept himself informed of the details. It is important to note that although Diane de Poitiers is mentioned in the official description of this entry, the king’s mistress is not, and the reason for this is revealed in Bryan’s letter. Among the spectators gathered in Paris to greet their new queen, Bryan writes, were the king himself and Anne, 43 Godefroy, Le Cérémonial françois, 1:766. 44 Gilbert du Plaix, L’entrée de la Royne faicte en l’antique et noble cité de Lyon l’an Mil cinq cens trente et troys, le xxvii de may, n.p. 45 Bochetel, Lentree de la royne en sa ville et cité de Paris, n.p.

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whom the king placed at a window with himself beside her so that all the public could see them watching the new queen’s procession. Already things between the king and queen were going very badly, according to Bryant, who writes that beyng bothe in on house They lye not together ons in 4 nyghttys [….] He spekys very syldom unto Hyr opynly [….] He is never owt of my ladys chamber, and all for [Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly’s] sake, hys old lover [….] [T]her hath be no festyne or bankyt yet, syns the hegynnyng of the tryhumphe, but, the table furnysshyd, He hath cum and syttyn in the myddys of the horde, wher [Anne] hath syt [….] He hath also dyverse tymys ryddyn 6 or 7 myle from the Quene, and lyne owt 4 or 5 days to gether, as yt is sayd, at the howsys of hys old lovers [….]46

But most shocking of all, on the day the queen made her entry into Paris, François I, knowing where Anne and her ladies were,

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toke wyth Hym the Admyrall and the Cardynall of Lorayne; and they, fyndyng thes gentylwomen in the sayd howse, the French Kyng toke [Anne] and sett hyr before Hym in a opyn wyndow, and ther stode devysyng with her 2 long howrys in the syght and face of all the peple; whych was not a lytyll marvelyd at of the beholdders. 47

The King of France’s staging of his contempt for the new queen and the peace that his marriage to her embodied by creating a spectacle of his mistress and himself was without precedent. Anne was not yet politically powerful at this point. Foreign ambassadors began to note her centrality at the very end of the century.48 But this public acknowledgement of the king’s mistress signaled a turning point. The detailed and illustrated official description of the entry of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis into Lyon in 1549 by poet Maurice Scève demonstrates a fully developed concept of the royal mistress. Here the citizens of Lyon actively collaborated with the king to render homage to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, in full view of the queen. One of the many entertainments offered 46 State Papers Published Under the Authority of His Majesty’s Commission: King Henry the Eighth, 7:291. 47 State Papers Published Under the Authority of His Majesty’s Commission: King Henry the Eighth, 7:291. 48 The best introduction to Anne’s political importance is Potter, ‘Anne de Pisseleu, duchesse d’Etampes, maîtresse et conseillère de François Ier’.

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the royal couple was a play featuring Diana the huntress, but one more elaborate than that performed eighteen years earlier for Queen Eleonore. An enclosed field decorated with tufts and trees descended from a chateau, offering a space for the play. When the king approached, he was greeted by horns and stags and does. Suddenly the richly but scantily-clad huntress and her companion nymphs appeared. Diana presented the king with a humble lion, representing Lyon, and a poem. During the queen’s entrance the following day Diana made a similar presentation. The reference to Diane de Poitiers could not have been missed by anyone acquainted with court life, although the spectators seem to have remained discreet, and the crowds who turned up to watch may have had no idea of what they were watching. Scève does not draw attention to the connection between the huntress of the play and the king’s mistress, omitting any mention of the real Diane. However, in addition to the published description of the entry, a number of reports by ambassadors exist, and that of Giorgio Conegrani remarks on a gondola ride on the river undertaken by the king and ‘Madama la gran Seniscialla’, making clear that those in the know realized they were watching a tribute to the king’s mistress. 49 Brantôme also notes in his discussion of the entry that the Diana play was much appreciated by the king and also by Diane de Poitiers, who forever afterward loved the Lyonnais.50

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Conclusion This entry, with its homage to Diane under the figure of the huntress Diana, can be read as a figure for the role of the powerful royal mistress more generally. She lived in plain sight, an actress pretending to cavort with her nymphs while the complicit audience looked discreetly on. But it should also be noted that the performance was staged for different publics with differing expectations. As Fanny Cosandey writes, entries were personalized and collaborative productions, both ‘monarchical and popular’.51 As far as the Lyonnais onlookers were concerned, Diane de Poitiers was the king’s miraculously youthful mistress. But for the civic leaders who organized the entry and for those closest to the king, she was a political force, always on the side of the monarch, the king’s staunchest ally, invested in his success 49 Scève, The Entry of Henri II, 312. 50 Brantôme, Oeuvres complètes, 9:321. 51 Cosandey, La reine de France, 174-81.

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in a way that the foreign queen always potentially failed to be. To return to the point that the early royal entries sought to map the new Jerusalem onto the city, the existence of a powerful royal mistress, I suggest, was predicated on the opposite operation. Far from a ritualistic enactment of the dissolution of the time-space boundaries between the earthly and heavenly cities, the royal mistress required a world of her own in which to function, a space that she controlled, a space given meaning by a flexible and beautiful mythological narrative. Intelligent women were recognized as valuable political advisers both under feudal law and within the royal court. However, until the sixteenth century such a role was imaginable only within the context of the family: the mistress required a wholly different context to become a visible feature of court life. The paradoxical notion of women as intellectually equal but legally inferior to men of their rank, which made the role of female regency possible, could not in and of itself justify the king’s sexual partner’s serving as his political advisor. To gather an audience beyond the king alone, she had to be accepted into a wider system of political networks. The pantheon of classical deities which gained increasing popularity throughout the reign of François I offered new modes of self-representation for legitimating her status. But simultaneous with the flowering of mythology, the shift, much debated over the past century, in how humans experienced their relationship to the world, the turn to a theatrical perception of space, permitted the development of new worlds-within-worlds, along with the concomitant possibility of co-existing value systems, available to spectators who entered into them. This process, as I hope to have shown, is discernible in descriptions of the royal entries from Charles VII through Henri II. Agnès Sorel as a political player remained invisible to her contemporaries because she literally lacked a stage upon which to perform her role. For Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, however, the world had changed, becoming theatrical. From his youth, King François I had been exposed to manuscripts in which the huntress Diana played a starring role. The idea of a hunting companion who also served as a guide to proper kingly behavior thus would have been familiar to him, and he accepted Anne in this role – although she could not specifically enact Diana, because the politically active Diane de Poitiers, mistress of prince Henri, was already at court – depending on her for political support after the death of his mother, Louise of Savoy, in 1531 and still more heavily after the downfall of his friend and adviser, the connétable de Montmorency, in 1541. But the role of royal mistress was fully realized in Diane de Poitiers, who masterfully performed the paradoxical role of the chaste and beautiful goddess Diana, even into her sixties. True, the court

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was aware of the nature of the relationship between the king and Diane. However, the pair carried out their relationship as an open secret, setting the standard for future kings and their powerful mistresses.

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About the Author

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Tracy Adams is a professor in the School of Culture, Languages, and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, specializing in feminist studies of medieval and early modern women and queenship. She is the author of Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France (2014).

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Epilogue Peter Howard Abstract The epilogue offers an account of Constant J. Mews’ contribution to Monash University, as a teacher, researcher and colleague.

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Keywords: Monash University, Constant J. Mews

‘All learning takes place within some kind of community’. This observation was the organizing principle around a conference planned by Constant Mews in 2010, itself a wonderful example of a community of learning. The conference’s contributions were edited into a book by him and his friend and colleague, John Crossley, under the title Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500.1 The core insight was the idea that a communal network, whether it be a formal place of instruction, religious community, or an informal network of two or three friends, was a crucial framework for consideration when seeking to understand how ideas are developed and exchanged. Such communities are generally attached to a discipline of learning or to a particular set of texts, and those who participated often come to share a particular identity. But this does not mean that there is a homogenous view or unanimity of opinion in any specific community. At their heart are discussion, debate, continuing development, refinement, and, indeed almost inevitably, revision of current ideas. The way in which Constant Mews approached the idea of communities of learning can bookend this wonderful collection of essays in his honour: Constant thrives in contexts of the sociable, communal exchange of ideas. The studies to which this epilogue is appended gesture to the many communities of learning that have flourished under the inspiration of Constant Mews. The tributes of the authors stand as a testimony to his role 1

Crossley and Mews, eds. Communities of Learning.

Monagle, Clare (ed.), The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789462985933_epilogue

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338 Peter Howard

in developing and disseminating a seemingly endless array of ideas and projects. The names attached to the essays in this volume only hint at the number, richness, and eclecticism of the networks that he has engendered. As Clare Monagle wrote, when she invited me to write a coda to this volume: ‘Just like Constant himself, the contributions in his honor are an eclectic bunch’. Ideas of all kinds arouse his curiosity. Almost a leitmotif in any conversation about a person’s research or intended project is his rejoinder: ‘I am very interested in that!’ New ideas excite him, and with his capacious knowledge, he is instantly alert to many marvellous potential connections between what is known and what is proposed. Inevitably a new research grant initiative, or a conference, or a fresh collaboration would emerge. Most of these have emanated from Constant’s institutional context at Monash University, but others have been located around his own religious and intellectual commitment to the community of the Parish of St. Carthage at Parkville, where he has been actively involved over many years. There his wide-ranging intellectual enthusiasm has been invested in projects delving, for example, into the reasons behind the number of churches in Australia dedicated to St. Carthage (more in Australia than in Ireland itself!) and a study of a prayer book donated to the state library of Victoria in 1863. Much was made of the evidence of St. Carthage’s placement in the litany of saints in this particular text. More recently, this community has been responsible for pursuing research, conferences, and publications around former fellow parishioner and esteemed philosopher and public intellectual, Professor Max Charlesworth. Monash University was and is, however, Constant’s principal community of learning. In 1987 Constant joined Louis Green (d. 2009) and F.W. (Bill) Kent (d. 2010) and became a leading figure in developing what has been termed the ‘amazing Med/Ren Monash story’. Constant was interviewed by Green in London, and though his advanced studies were pursued in the United Kingdom and Europe (he taught Western Civilization in Paris for a time), by his own avowal, his most significant new insights into Christianity in Europe in the Middle Ages occurred to him not in Europe itself, but far away on the other side of the world. Upon his arrival at Monash, Constant was not content simply to fulfil the expected roles of lecturing, tutoring, supervising, and pursuing research. How the university functioned as a community underpinned his initiatives and commitments. For Constant, interaction and sociability have always been central to driving intellectual engagement. Constant has sought to promote areas of his own learning to further the intellectual agenda for promoting advanced medieval scholarship far

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Epilogue

339

from Europe. Access to the essential sources of such scholarly endeavors is through language, and Latin in particular. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s and beyond, a small group gathered weekly in his office to work with Latin texts and to develop translation skills to a high level. In recent years, this informal arrangement has been expanded and given institutional form as the Latin Reading Group, bringing together honors, postgraduate, and other colleagues. At these workshops, Constant is still central to the ‘nutting out’ of thorny questions of Latin grammar, translation, and interpretation. This is no dry task. Constant brings to the combined effort the furrowed brow, the questioning debates, and the pleasure – immediately apparent – of insight, resolution, and a challenge met. As the larger Latin group developed, the small group of enthusiasts, nonetheless, continued to meet, and still meet, on a Friday morning around texts related to musicology, thus revealing another of Constant’s enthusiasms: music (his father was the composer, organist, teacher, and church musician Douglas Mews, d. 1993). The unobtrusive, sustained efforts of the Grocheio Group (as it came to be known) eventually resulted in the publication of the prize-winning translation of Johannes de Grocheio’s Ars Musice (2011), not just making a text readily available to students and scholars alike, but also showing how the originality of Grocheio’s teaching, reflected in his text, makes his treatise an important document for understanding the intellectual, social, and musical environment of late thirteenth-century Paris. 2 As a community of learning, members of Constant’s Grocheio Group developed a number of studies around the transformation of chant in the thirteenth century. Since then, the group has gone on to devote their accumulated skills and developing insights into medieval musical culture and practice to further texts and musicological challenges. Constant Mews does not need to be the charismatic center of the various communities in which he is involved, but his passionate, questing mind is a constant driver of intellectual extension in any group. When she returned to Monash’s History Program in 2007 as a lecturer, Clare Monagle quickly moved to revive the Medieval and Renaissance Seminar for academic staff and postgraduates. Constant was, characteristically, a lively discussant, and, invariably, was quickest off the mark with telling questions and magisterial comments, so much so, that discreetly and respectfully, Clare introduced the practice of ‘questions from students first’, and only when there were no more forthcoming, were staff invited to field their questions and comments. His enthusiasm is evident, in the words of a colleague, ‘in 2

Mews, et al. Johannes de Grocheio.

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the tense anticipation with which he waits for questions to be thrown open to the floor!’ The energy of Constant’s intellectual engagement has many outlets within the larger, more formal learning community of the university. He is perceptive, critical, yet supportive of colleagues’ work in the meeting of any staff research group to which he is assigned – his intellectual curiosity is not limited to the medieval. As Kathleen Neal, his junior colleague, has shared with me (in private correspondence) about Constant’s intellectual generosity in providing research mentoring and sharing opportunities for funding and publication: ‘So while it’s clear that he hasn’t come anywhere near exhausting his own curiosity about the medieval past, he is obviously already thinking actively about how to bequeath the value of his experience to the next generation of medievalists. That in itself is a wonderful example to us all’. It is noteworthy that since 2000 Constant has been engaged in nine Australia Research Council-funded projects, eight of them involving collaboration, especially with early career colleagues and emerging researchers. At risk of the community of learning topos becoming a banality, it readily encompasses Constant’s unrelenting endeavors in this respect. Indeed, until recent years, I used to come to expect the lengthy emails that came into my ‘inbox’ from Constant on a Sunday afternoon. They were without exception brimming with enthusiasm and ideas and of a scale about how to bring people together in research configurations which left me wondering how to respond. The community of postgraduates that gather, and have gathered, under Constant’s tutelage have similar comments about the level of his engagement and support, and the degree to which he fosters independence of mind: ‘incredible’ is the epithet applied. At all times he is never anything but supportive of their particular projects and work. All of them experience supervision meetings as having an atmosphere that feels more collegial than necessarily that of a supervisor and student. At the same time, he shows the skill of the advanced mentor, subtly teaching them to be rigorous and attentive scholars. Constant always turns around materials that have been sent to him almost by return email, as I myself, as a series editor, have found when I have sent manuscripts to the editorial board of which he is a member. This is also characteristic of the speed at which he turns around drafts from his postgraduate and honors students. One, Steve Joyce, lauds ‘their detail and immediacy’. But as Diane Jeske remarks, rather dryly: ‘He was thorough in reading drafts and turned these around in such quick time I often sometimes wished he’d take a bit

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Epilogue

longer so that I could have more of a “break”, as it were’. Constant cares for students themselves as much as for their ideas, as Hannah Skipworth observes with words that articulate the view of a cohort too large to individuate: ‘Whether it is a hasty response to a time-sensitive email, the quick turnaround of a chapter, or the academic connections he is willing to draw upon for his students, Professor Constant Mews gives generously and passionately’.

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*** One function of an epilogue is to cover the loose ends of a story. One such loose end is Constant’s role in religious studies and interfaith dialogue. His interest in the latter was sparked by a visit with his wife to a famed guru. He often recounts how going to India and living for a time in an ashram taught him more about the Middle Ages than any of his studies in Oxford or Paris, since the experience opened up for him in a new way the meaning of his own religious inheritance. Indeed, his near-death experience in the late 1980s – when I first came to know Constant, and indeed met his musician father and future wife Maryna – sparked a new appreciation for Augustine, for the way of life of the trappist monks at Tarrawarra, just out of Melbourne, and for the appreciation of the genuinely holy person, for holiness cuts through all social classes. So since assuming the position of Director of the Center for Religious Studies at Monash in 1995, Constant has worked tirelessly in promoting studies in religion, with a strong interest in interfaith endeavors. Apart from formal scholarly efforts around Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, he has sought to create reflection days which join the various religious traditions. Enumerating these initiatives, however, would preface a volume of collected tributes different from the one which I am here drawing to a close. This volume reflects the indebtedness of so many to Constant Mews and his role in generating many communities of learning, local and global. But perhaps he would wish me (though I have not asked him) to conclude with another tribute. A community of learning is inevitably nourishing and creative, and can be (by his own words) ‘an informal network of [even] two…’. Maryna Mews, Constant’s wife, has been his support and muse since I first met them together soon after their arrival in Melbourne. Like me, many have enjoyed the hospitality of their home and table, a place and space in which so much learning and so many communities intersect. That thought with its eucharistic overtones heralds a wish for them both as they approach their third age: happiness and a blessing.

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342 Pe ter Howard

Bibliography Secondary Sources Crossley, John and Constant J. Mews, eds. Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500, Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Mews, Constant J.; John Crossley; Catherine Jeffreys; Leigh McKinnon; Carol Williams, ed. and trans., Johannes de Grocheio: Ars Musice, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011.

About the Author

Copyright © 2021. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Peter Howard is Director of the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University. He is a scholar of renaissance Italy and medieval thought.

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Index Abelard, Peter compassio 26-39 Historia calamitatum 33-35, 39, 100-101, 228 Planctus 99-123 Theologia ‘Scholarium’ 12, also cited as Theologia christiana 228, 238 Albero of Montreuil 86, 95 Albert the Great 55, 57 Algorism 214-221 Aquinas, Thomas relics 157-167, 171-185 sacramental theology 151-157 Summa Theologiae 46, 150 Arienti, Giovanni Sabadino degli 299-300 De triumphis religionis 309-311 Gynevera de la clare donne 297-310 patronage 19, 299-300, 304-306, 312 arithmetic 215-223 Augustine of Hippo 63-69, 293 Confessions 250 De musica 262-263 Avignon papacy 173, 179-180

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Becket, Thomas 131-146 hairshirt 135-137 monasticism 138-143 Bernard of Clairvaux 38, 84-85, 87-90 De gratia et libero arbitrio 63-66, 72-77, 87 Boccaccio 229, 242 De mulieribus claris 297-299, 306, 310 Boethius 50, 109, 156, 160, 166, 214 De institutione musica 215-216, 221, 252 De institutione arithmetica 216-219 Cassian 64-68 Collationes XXIII 67-71 Charles VII (king of France) 318-327 Christine de Pizan 241-243 The Book of the City of Ladies 241, 280 Othea epistre 280-295 Cicero 93, 239, 250, 257, 260, 264, 318 Dante Alighieri 154, 229, 239, 261, 265-269 d’Andrea, Giovanni 240-242 d’Aragona, Eleonora 299-301, 311-313 d’Arezzo, Geri 234, 239 d’Este, Isabella 298, 301-308, 310-313 Diane de Poitiers 319, 323, 329-331 Diana 318-319, 323-326, 328-331 Durand de Champagne Speculum Dominarum 279, 283 Elias, Raymundus 172-173 Engelbert von Admont 238-239

Fleurs des toutes vertues 280, 284, 286, 289-295 grace 38-39, 65-71, 76-77 Grim, Edward 133-136, 138-140 Gonzaga, Francesco 302-305 Guernes de Pont-Saint-Maxence 142-144 Guiard of Laon 193-212 Guy of St. Denis 121-122 Heloise 30, 33-37, 39, 99-106, 122-124, 147-149, 227-228, 235, 242 Henry II, (King of England) 133, 136, 140 Hugonis, Raymundus 178-179, 183 Innocent II, (Pope) 85-86 Jacobus de Ispania 215-219 Speculum musicae 219-224 Jean de Meun Roman de la Rose 147-148, 149-150, 158-167 John of Salisbury 133, 136-138, 141 Lombard, Peter Sentences 43-44, 47-48, 50-56 Lovato, Lovati 230-233, 236-237 Metel, Hugh 83-86, 89-90 Mews, Constant J. 9-24, 337-342 Mews, Maryna 21, 341 Mussato, Albertino 230-236 Order of Preachers 171, 173, 175, 182 Ovid 235, 238, 318 Pagus, John 45, 48, 50-51, 55 Petrarch 235, 242-243, 249-250 Secretum 261-269 Plato Republic 252-256 Proclus 256-660 Pythagoras 219-220, 251 Relics 148-158, 161, 166, 167, 174-185 Rigaud, Odo 45, 48-51, 53-57 Seneca 28-33, 39, 64, 136-138, 234 Sorel, Agnès 319, 321-323, 326, 323 Stephen of Poligny 45, 48, 50-53 theology 37-39, 43-58, 67, 85, 87, 194-197, 205-208, 310 Vergil 260-261, 265-269 Virtue 28-31, 69-71, 250-252, 261, 264, 268, 281-292, 300-304, 311-312

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