Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen 978-0268035334

Table of contents :
List of Figures and Maps ix
Preface xi
Chr i s t i ani z at i on
One The Christianization of Medieval Marriage 3
Ruth Mazo Karras
Two The Christianization of Bohemia: 25
Revising the Narratives
Lisa Wolverton
Three The Cathar Middle Ages as an 58
Historiographical Problem
R.I. Moore
Four Authentic, True, and Right: Inquisition and 87
the Study of Medieval Popular Religion
Christine Caldwell Ames
Twe l f th-Cent u ry Cu l t u r e
Five Reconsidering Reform: A Roman Example 123
Maureen C. Miller
Six Otto of Freising’s Tyrants: Church Advocates 141
and Noble Lordship in the Long Twelfth Century
Jonathan R. Lyon
Seven Testimonial Letters in the Late Twelfth-Century 168
Collections of Thomas Becket’s Miracles
Rachel Koopmans
Eight The Counterfactual Twelfth Century 202
Dyan Elliott
Nine The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life 236
Giles Constable
J ews and Chr i s t i an S o c i e t y
Ten A Death in Wisdom’s Court: Poetry and 253
Martyrdom in Thirteenth-Century Castile
Susan Einbinder
Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree 272
Eleven Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter 280
William Chester Jordan
Twelve Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space 294
David C. Mengel
Lat e Medi e va l Re l i g i o u s Li f e
Thirteen In Praise of Faithful Women: Count Robert of 331
Flanders’s Defense of Beguines against the
Clementine Decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus
(ca. 1318–1320)
Walter Simons
Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition 353
to Pope John XXII
Fourteen The Effect of Papal Provisions to Oxford and
Paris Scholars on the Pastorate and Care of Souls
William J. Courtenay 358
Fifteen Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered 387
James D. Mixson
Sixteen John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises: 419
Equipping the Laity in Battle against Hussite
Radicals
Marcela K. Perett
Seventeen Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt: The Arrival of 436
Antichrist in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Daniel Hobbins
Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story 468
Eighteen Martin Luther: The Reformed Augustinian Beggar 474
Roy Hammerling
Publications of John Van Engen 501
Contributors 507
Index 512

Citation preview

Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages essays to honor JOHN VAN ENGEN

Edited by

D av i d C . M e n g e l a n d L i s a Wo l v e r t o n

Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages

Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages essays to honor JOHN VAN ENGEN

Edited by

D av i d C . M e n g e l a n d L i s a Wo l v e r t o n

university of notre dame press notre dame, indiana

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Christianity and culture in the Middle Ages : essays to honor John Van Engen / edited by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-03533-4 ( hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-268-03533-4 ( hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-268-08686-2 (e-book) 1. Christianity and culture —Europe — History — Middle Ages, 600 –1500. 2. Europe — Church history — 600 –1500. I. Van Engen, John H. II. Mengel, David Charles. III. Wolverton, Lisa. BR115.C8C44434 2015 274'.03— dc23 2014039308 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

Contents

List of Figures and Maps Preface

ix xi

C h r i s t i a n i z at i o n One

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage Ruth Mazo Karras

Two

The Christianization of Bohemia: Revising the Narratives Lisa Wolverton

25

Three

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem R.I. Moore

58

Four

Authentic, True, and Right: Inquisition and the Study of Medieval Popular Religion Christine Caldwell Ames

87

3

Tw e l f t h - C e n t u r y C u l t u r e Five

Reconsidering Reform: A Roman Example Maureen C. Miller

123

vi /

Contents

Six

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants: Church Advocates and Noble Lordship in the Long Twelfth Century Jonathan R. Lyon

141

Seven

Testimonial Letters in the Late Twelfth-Century Collections of Thomas Becket’s Miracles Rachel Koopmans

168

Eight

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century Dyan Elliott

202

Nine

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life Giles Constable

236

Jews and Christian Society A Death in Wisdom’s Court: Poetry and Martyrdom in Thirteenth-Century Castile Susan Einbinder

253

Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree

272

Eleven

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter William Chester Jordan

280

Twelve

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space David C. Mengel

294

Ten

L a t e M e d i e va l R e l i g i o u s L i f e Thirteen

In Praise of Faithful Women: Count Robert of Flanders’s Defense of Beguines against the Clementine Decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus (ca. 1318–1320) Walter Simons

331

Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII

353

Contents \ vii Fourteen

The Effect of Papal Provisions to Oxford and Paris Scholars on the Pastorate and Care of Souls William J. Courtenay

358

Fifteen

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered James D. Mixson

387

Sixteen

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises: Equipping the Laity in Battle against Hussite Radicals Marcela K. Perett

419

Seventeen Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt: The Arrival of Antichrist in Fifteenth-Century Italy Daniel Hobbins

Eighteen

436

Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story

468

Martin Luther: The Reformed Augustinian Beggar Roy Hammerling

474

Publications of John Van Engen Contributors Index

501 507 512

Figures and Maps

Figures for chapters 5 and 11 are reproduced in the gallery following pp. 250. Figure 5.1. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, dado of the Miracle at Cherson fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma. Figure 5.2. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Life of Saint Alexius fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma. Figure 5.3. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Miracle of Saint Clement’s Tomb at Cherson fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma. Figure 5.4. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Mass of Saint Clement fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma. Figure 5.5. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Translation of Saint Clement’s Relics fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma. Figure 11.1. Psalm 26, The Lord is my light / Dominus illuminatio mea, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

ix

x

/

Figures and Maps

Figure 11.2. Psalm 52, The fool said in his heart: There is no God / Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est deus, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.3. Psalm 68, Save me, O God / Salvum me fac deus, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.4. Psalm 80, Sing out your joy / Exultate deo adiutori nostro, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.5. Psalm 87, O Lord, the God of my salvation / Domine, Deus salutis, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.6. Psalm 109, The Lord said to my Lord / Dixit dominus domino meo, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.7. Annunciation and Visitation, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.8. Jews plotting Jesus’s arrest and execution, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.9. Women at the tomb and Noli me tangere, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark. Figure 11.10. Jesus Before Caiaphas, in the Salvin Hours. Image © British Library Board, Add. 48985. Figure 18.1. Jost Amman, Luther the Monk and Professor, late sixteenth century. Used by permission of Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, photo: Monika Runge. 475 Map 12.1.

Nuremberg during the reign of Charles IV

Map 12.2.

Prague during the reign of Charles IV

Map 12.3.

Nuremberg, detail of Jewish quarter

Map 17.1. Hermitages of medieval Tuscany

309 314

450

307

Preface

The life and thought of Robert of Liège defied the historical molds crafted by the historians who had already convinced us that his lifetime (ca. 1075–1129) had been—in one way or another— a time of profound and lasting change. The Walloon-speaking Benedictine oblate was a contemporary of Anselm, of Bernard of Clairvaux, of Peter Abelard, and of Hugh of Saint-Victor, and indeed the most prolific author of them all. Yet his writings did not exemplify the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, the Gregorian Reform, the Commercial Revolution, the Second Age of Feudalism, or the Origins of European Dissent; on the contrary, as a champion of the Black Monks against the reforming Cistercians and the enterprising canons regular, Robert seemed to belong among those unhappy reactionaries against whom modern scholars like to pit the progressive heroes of their historical narratives. But that was not quite right either, because this creative and controversial theologian, scriptural commentator, and reformer could not easily be slotted into the role of conservative foil to the protagonists of the schools, or even a straightforward proponent of Jean Leclercq’s monastic theology. This was the problem— the opportunity, really—facing John Van Engen as a graduate student in the 1970s, and much the way he formulated the situation in his first book, Rupert of Deutz (1983). ( You may ask John why he called him Rupert rather than Robert; he will be happy to explain.) With Rupert and a prizewinning monograph, John Van Engen made an extraordinary start upon a conventional (if already increasingly rare) career path, that of the medieval historian who is both university scholar and teacher. On the strength of Rupert of Deutz, Van Engen earned tenure at the University of Notre Dame, where he had been teaching since 1977. Then, in 1986, he published major review articles in both Speculum and xi

xii / Preface The American Historical Review; in the same year, he became director of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame and the number of doctoral students working with him began steadily to increase. But already he was in the process of taking a significant scholarly turn: in 1985, in Leuven with his family, he delved into the writings of late-medieval reformers and innovators Geert Grote and the Modern Devout. Rather than build directly upon his twelfth-century research, or even branch out modestly, he jumped to a different place and time to read quite different material, much of it in Middle Dutch. If a relatively neglected Rupert of Deutz had challenged the historiographical categories of the best-studied century of the Middle Ages, Van Engen’s new subjects belonged to movements and a time that neither medieval nor Reformation scholars quite owned; such late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century figures had appeared mostly in the epilogues or prefaces of their respective studies. An early result was a 1988 volume of translated writings related to the Modern Devout. Twenty years later, long after that stay in Leuven, he added his second monumental and prizewinning monograph, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life. Yet these two volumes and the two centuries of their subjects by no means encapsulate the range of Van Engen’s scholarly enquiries or contributions. Instead, his years directing the Medieval Institute witnessed a proliferation of articles and edited collections on an impressive range of subjects — listed, together with his books, near the end of this volume. From the christening of late antique Romans to the fifteenth-century church, Van Engen turned his careful eye and practiced pen to individuals both iconic and forgotten: Hildegard of Bingen, William of SaintThierry, Gratian, Dominic, John Nider, and Marguerite Porete, on the one hand; Theophilus Presbyter, Ralph of Flaix, Gerlach Peters, Friar Matthew Grabow, and Alijt Bake, on the other. Time and again, colleagues in the United States and abroad called on Van Engen to contribute to conferences and other collective scholarly endeavors, and he rose to the occasion whether the subject was the future of medieval studies, the exercise of power, medieval women’s voices, Jews and Christians, canon law, or the Carolingians. And all the while, his graduate students produced dissertations—and many now books—on an equally wide range of times, places, and subjects. From Jean Gerson to the miracle collections of Thomas Becket’s cult, from Hussites to the beatific vision,

Preface \ xiii from priests on military campaigns to Dominican inquisitors, from Catherine of Siena to German noble families, from the intellectual life of Italian nuns to politics in twelfth-century Bohemia, from late-medieval Prague to the Lord’s Prayer. A painstaking reader and editor of texts, Van Engen has long exhorted his students to read “against the grain”— even when, sitting around a seminar table, the most urgent challenge seems simply to produce a credible sight translation of whatever bit of canon law or Hildegardian vision falls to each one’s turn. The goal was never arcane or antiquarian, but rather profoundly humane: to bring again to life the long silent, to rewrap flesh around the flat words — whether scratched on parchment or preserved in one of the scores of printed volumes lining the Medieval Institute’s shelves. Read carefully and follow the text where it leads. Ask the simple and profound questions — the ones that elude easy answers, the ones that speak to the lived lives of canonical and noncanonical figures, women and men, Christians and Jews. This volume seeks to honor John Van Engen’s teaching career by mirroring topics and approaches that have characterized his scholarship. Two essays include editions, as do many of Van Engen’s own publications; some bring to light individuals and single texts, others genres and categories of people more broadly; several offer critical reviews of historiography, a leitmotif of Van Engen’s curriculum vitae represented with particular force by the 1986 American Historical Review article, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” which some authors here directly engage. Each essay connects with Van Engen’s own career in one or more ways, and by design. Contributors were invited to tie into one of three strands that interweave Van Engen’s scholarship: the Christianization problematic; twelfth-century culture; and late-medieval religious life. Those provided the framework for the sections into which we have sorted this volume’s essays. Admittedly the question of “Jews and Christian Society” is a less prominent theme in Van Engen’s extensive work—the dedicated topic of only an article or two plus a conference and a coedited book — but in this case we have followed the texts where they led, just as we have been taught. As the editors of this volume, we are glad to join our friends and eminent colleagues in honoring John Van Engen for the academic service

xiv

/ Preface

that he has contributed to our shared discipline. He himself has edited five such volumes of essays, and a significant portion of his own research has appeared in North American and especially European volumes such as this. It seems fitting that we — John’s peers and former students, all his friends — offer these essays and this volume with deep respect and gratitude for his long-standing and profound contribution to our collective exploration of medieval experience. We hope — indeed, we know— that he is not yet finished editing, synthesizing, explicating, and revivifying the Middle Ages. And so we offer it too as an encouragement for him to continue for many years to come.

Note The editors would like to thank Emily Rosenfeld Mengel for editing and formatting this volume; Jonathan Lyon, Roberta Baranowski, and the late Olivia Remie Constable for helping to organize the 2012 conference to honor John Van Engen’s thirty-five years of teaching at the University of Notre Dame; and all of the participants in that conference and the contributors to this volume.

One

Th e C h r i s t i a n i z a t i o n o f M e d i e va l M a r r i a g e ruth mazo karras

John Van Engen’s 1986 article, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” was the first piece of John’s work that I ever read and one that I have taught many times.1 There, he addressed the way scholarship had turned away from the idea that the Middle Ages were (for better or worse) dominated by the Church and Roman Christian belief, and toward a view that Christianity was only an elite veneer over a substratum of popular belief that remained pre- or non-Christian. Over the more than a quarter century since his account, the field has shifted toward what might be seen as a middle position—yes, Christianity did dominate the medieval Western world, but yes, many intellectual developments connected with “the Church” were restricted to the elite. These polarized views can be reconciled within a framework that now tends to speak of “Christianities,” recognizing not only the local variation across both space and time ( Van Engen identified attention to this variation as one of the important post–World War II developments), but also that individual believers could and did interpret Christianity for themselves. To name but a few of the most influential scholars, Caroline Bynum demonstrated that both lay and religious women constructed their own understandings 3

4 / Ruth Mazo Karras of the Eucharist and thus of the somatic relation of humans to God; a number of scholars, including Dyan Elliott, have shown that the lines between orthodoxy and heresy, or indeed between sanctity and heresy, could be quite indistinct; Eamon Duffy has argued for a conception of “traditional religion” that represented a deep and shared commitment among late medieval clergy and laity, neither dictated by the former nor ignored by the latter; and Van Engen, among others, has demonstrated the variety of ways of living a Christian life neither within established orders nor in rejection of them.2 Recent historiography, then, has followed the path Van Engen set in 1986 in recognizing that Christianity was central to medieval Europe as a shared language and set of assumptions, “routine” rather than “outlandish,” in which “specifically Christian teachings and practices shaped the cultural milieu of medieval folk both high and low,” although it has also recognized that this shared cultural language encompassed many different modes of life.3 However, while acknowledging its cultural pervasiveness, we need to beware of assuming Christianity directly and deliberately shaped everything that went on within medieval societies. Indeed, it may be precisely because of its cultural pervasiveness that this assumption is dangerous. Christianity in the Middle Ages was what feminist scholars, taking a term from linguistics, have called an “unmarked category,” that is, the default—like whiteness or heterosexuality in contemporary North America and like masculinity in most societies. Most white people do not notice most of the time that they are white and do not carry out the activities of daily life with whiteness in mind. Straight people don’t seek out a straight bar or a straight bookstore, nor do they look for a wedding planner who specializes in straight weddings, because that is not something they need to think about. Similarly, not everything that Christians do in a predominantly Christian society is necessarily understood by the subject who performs it as a Christian behavior or performance. Even those behaviors and performances that seem to us today to be explicitly Christian were not deliberately Christian. One of these contested institutions was marriage. The title of this chapter invites the question of what it might mean to Christianize marriage. Philip L. Reynolds interprets Christianization as referring not to “the actual married life of Christians . . . but rather the manner in which

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 5 men of the Church understood and regulated marriage.”4 Here I attempt to move a bit beyond that circle, at least for the later Middle Ages.5 The orally presented version of this essay claimed to address the question of when marriage became Christian, but that question may be answered in a great many different ways depending on one’s understanding of Christianization. If one interprets it as Reynolds does, “the process by which marriage became differentiated from its non-Christian origins and environment under the influence of Christianity itself,” we see that it was an ongoing process and one that was not complete in the Middle Ages.6 This chapter instead proposes to examine marriage, which was both an organizing principle of medieval political and social institutions and a governing metaphor of medieval religious culture, as a way of thinking about the question Van Engen posed in 1986 when he noted that it was not only a matter of “whether medieval culture was essentially Christian” but also of “what that might mean.”7 Van Engen focused on the rituals and practices by which a common structure of Christianity was expressed, particularly baptism and death rituals, but he noted that the process was rather different with marriage: “The result, typically, was an overlay of Christian and other notions of marriage, but to imagine wholly separate and distinct conceptions of marriage competing over centuries is an exaggeration.”8 In other words, we must think of the Christianization process not as a continuum across which the institution of marriage moved during the Middle Ages, with pagan marriage at one end and Christian at the other, but rather as an ongoing interweaving of aspects of marriage shaped by Christian beliefs and aspects that were not inherently Christian but existed within a Christian context. There are a variety of ways in which marriage, or any other practice, can be Christian (or mutatis mutandis, pagan, Jewish, or Muslim): because it takes place within a predominantly Christian society, because the rules governing it are controlled by the church(es), because the society understands it as something done at God’s command, because the ritual invokes God or scripture, or because the individuals involved see it as a religious act. This last, of course, is by far the hardest to get at. The second (church control) is what people often think of when they think of Christianization; the words of the ritual are perhaps the most measurable, but the degree to which marriage is generally understood as being for

6 / Ruth Mazo Karras spiritual rather than temporal purposes is an important key to understanding how “Christian” it is. Marriage in most societies has been a vehicle for the production of offspring to whom property could be transferred, whether or not the union was approved or sanctioned by a deity or a religious apparatus. In many cultures, any acknowledged offspring of the father may inherit his property; Christian societies, however, drew on both Roman and Jewish traditions in limiting inheritance rights to those born in formal marriage. In ancient Rome—the legal system on which law of the medieval church drew extensively, as did that of many kingdoms—matrimony was an institution into which a man entered in order to beget legitimate children. Roman-law marriage was a legal, contractual relationship, and it continued to be understood this way under Christian canon law. But Roman matrimonium was limited to unions between Roman citizens. Unions between slaves or freed persons, or between a free person and a slave, or even of elites who were not Roman citizens, were defined as outside the institution. Like Roman religion, then, marriage was intimately tied to the Roman civitas. Although some writing about marriage in pagan Rome referred to divine law, it did not require a religious ceremony. The confarreatio ceremony did involve a sacrifice to Jupiter, but by the time of Augustus it had lapsed and was used only by a few patricians. Certainly the expectation that women would marry could be considered a part of Roman civic religion, and the phrase “Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia,” used in connection with Roman marriages, was associated by some sources with religious ritual. There were also a variety of “small religious rites” which were known mainly by antiquarians.9 In general, however, when we speak of “pagan Roman marriage,” we mean marriage among pagan Romans, rather than marriage blessed specifically by pagan deities except (among upper-class marriages) through the taking of omens. The handing over of the bride and the dotal witnesses were more important than divine sanction, although still not legally required; what made a marriage legal was consent. Romans who became Christian tended to include an element of explicitly Christian ceremony to their marriages, seeking a nuptial bless-

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 7 ing based on God’s blessing of Adam and Eve.10 Initially this may have been a Christian gloss on an institution that in other ways—the betrothal, the marital assigns, the transfer of a woman from her father’s family to her husband’s—remained much the same as in pagan times. Roman marriage was monogamous, at least serially: only one union at a time could produce children who were capable of inheriting. Christianity brought changes in the kind of sexual behavior demanded of men within marriage— women were expected to be faithful to one man in both systems—but the process of marriage formation, like many other aspects of late antique Christian society, drew heavily on local law and custom, and in much of the Christian West that law and custom were Roman.11 The biggest change Christianity brought to Roman marriage, the idea of indissolubility, was quite slow to be accepted, although it was part of a package of Christian ideas about marriage that, as we shall see, the church promoted. The idea of the nuptial blessing may have come in part from the Jewish tradition. Whether marriage in the Second Temple period should be called Jewish in the modern sense or Judaean — that is, when the Greek iudaios or Latin iudeus came to be religious labels as opposed to ethnonyms—is arguable.12 Certainly the culture of the region of Judaea and its diasporic communities had distinctive customs. The community that shared these customs also shared a belief in a deity and the scriptural law he granted, but the extent to which there was divine involvement in their early marriage customs — whether a benediction was used at weddings and whether people understood themselves to be fulfilling a spiritual obligation as well as a familial one—is not clear. A strong promarriage religious stance appeared in Palestinian rabbinic literature, which emerged after the destruction of the Second Temple — God decrees everyone’s marriage partner before birth, it is a religious obligation to arrange marriages for one’s children, the betrothal is called qiddushin or “sanctification”— but this may have been influenced extensively by Greek and Latin writings, including Stoic defenses of marriage. Babylonian sources (the other rabbinic tradition) put more emphasis on marriage for the prevention of sin than on the commandment of procreation.13 The rules for marriage involved witnesses and a ketubah, or contract, not performance in a particular holy place or by a religious authority. The

8 / Ruth Mazo Karras Hebrew Bible prescribes no particular ceremonies, and surviving documents from the Jewish community at Elephantine from the fifth century BCE are concerned purely with economic arrangements. Blessings to be said on the occasion of a marriage appear in the Talmud; they are probably not an innovation of that time, but Michael Satlow argues that they were an attempt to “Judaize” marriage, in the sense of giving it more religious content than it had had in the Second Temple period.14 However, the blessings said at the marriage feast, like the Christian benediction of marriage, did not create the marriage. A marriage was Jewish or Christian because it belonged to that community, rather than because of the theology or practice involved: it was the parties who engaged in it and the legal rules they followed, rather than the ceremonial aspects, that made it Jewish or Christian. Indeed, prior to 388 CE, if Jews and Christians married each other, even though such marriages were forbidden by both communities, they were valid under civil law.15 By the central Middle Ages in Jewish communities, the combined ceremony of betrothal (qiddushin/erusin) and marriage (nisuin) was often performed at the synagogue.16 It certainly was distinctively Jewish and was considered as fulfilling religious precepts; the line between what belonged to communal custom and what had to do with belief may be even harder to draw here than for Christianity. For Christianity, certainly, the inclusion of a blessing in the marriage ceremony — whether it followed a Jewish pattern or was grafted onto a Roman one— was more than just a minor addition to an existing institution. In the eyes of Christian thinkers, marriage became no longer only an institution for the legitimation of reproduction or the creation of family alliances, but also the only way of permitting sexual activity and a way of creating a shared life of devotion. Ironically, it may have been the late antique emphasis on Christian asceticism and sexual renunciation that created the need for a Christian theology of marriage.17 Where renunciation was the ideal, there was a risk that those who could not or did not live up to it might despair of being good Christians, so it was necessary to reassure the married that there was an alternate Christian mode of life that allowed for sexual activity. The extent to which this idea of Christian marriage was internalized is uncertain, but within the Christian empire there was certainly the option of taking marriage seri-

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 9 ously as a Christian institution. Although Tertullian and other thinkers claimed that virgins were the true brides of Christ, Augustine of Hippo came to expound the position that married people were not to be disregarded as Christians.18 Augustine’s treatise On the Good of Marriage (401) was in one sense a reaction to his own work and that of others on virginity. Around ten years before, Jerome had written his highly influential Against Jovinian, in which he refuted the work (now lost) in which Jovinian had suggested that marriage could be as virtuous as virginity. Augustine too wrote in praise of virginity (and, later, of chaste widowhood), but he felt the need also to defend marriage as not just a lesser evil— a remedy against fornication or adultery—but as a positive good in itself. This was a relatively early work of Augustine’s, shortly after the completion of his Confessions. It also arose from a pastoral impulse to explain to ordinary Christians that they could lead a Christian life without rejecting the society in which they lived it. Between 419 and 421 he wrote another treatise on the subject, “On Marriage and Concupiscence,” which emerged in a somewhat different theological context, his controversy against the Pelagians. Augustine wrote for a married layman, Count Valerius; he was not as open as he had been earlier about the possibility of sex being a good thing within its proper marital context.19 However, even though continence was a greater good than marriage, marriage was still good for three reasons: procreation and mutual fidelity, which were natural goods, and the sacramental bond created by the “law of piety,” which did not disappear even in case of adultery or divorce.20 It was the third good, the sacramentum, that was particular to Christianity; yet, for Augustine, it was not incompatible with Roman forms of marriage. A Christian bond could very easily coexist with the desire to link families and pass property to heirs. The events of Augustine’s own life, as he told it in his Confessions, undoubtedly shaped his view. His mother, Monica, had planned a marriage for him with a girl of appropriate family, and although Monica was a Christian — as was Augustine by the time he wrote about it — it is quite clear that this young woman was selected for him not so that he would have the opportunity to participate in a Christian institution or sacrament, but so that he could perpetuate the family. When Augustine discussed his concubine in his Confessions,

10 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

he said not that their union was nonsacramental or not divinely sanctioned, but that it was not legitimate. He explained that marriage was a pact (foederatum) for the sake of offspring, contrasting it with other types of unions that were for the sake only of lust.21 This is a very Roman view and does not require Christianity. He did, however, make arguments that prefigured the high medieval theologians’ and canonists’ theories about consent making marriage; in other words, the sacrament of marriage did not necessarily require any ritual or performance. He wrote in On the Good of Marriage that even if two people come together to satisfy their lust rather than for the purpose of procreation, as long as it is their intention to remain faithful and not engage in intercourse with anyone else, “doubtless without absurdity it can indeed be labeled a marriage.” He went on to suggest that a concubine, “should she maintain sexual fidelity with [ her partner], and after he takes a wife she gives no thought to marriage herself and steels herself to refrain utterly from such sexual intercourse, I should not perhaps readily presume to call her an adulterer.” If her goal was not the satisfaction of lust but the procreation of children, “she is to be ranked higher than many matrons.”22 Dyan Elliott has suggested that he may be obliquely describing his own concubine here and suggesting that from her point of view, she participated in a Christian marriage, even though he did not. This passage suggests that fidelity creates the sacramental nature of marriage, even though it can also be considered a separate “good.” Augustine here marks a major change in comparison to Roman marriage: the expectation of fidelity from the husband as well as the wife. The Jewish tradition had also condemned men’s infidelity, but there was no male equivalent of the sotah ritual for the detection and punishment of adulterous women.23 The same would be true in Christian societies: throughout the medieval and indeed the early modern and modern periods, we see adultery by men taken less seriously in practice than adultery by women. When it is taken seriously, upon close examination most cases turn out to be men who adulterate other men’s marriages, that is, men who have sex with married women, not married men who have sex with women not their wives. Nevertheless, Christianity did innovate in promoting at least a notional equality in the degree of sinfulness that male and female adulterers incurred (and also male and female premarital for-

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 11 nicators, although fornication was less sinful than adultery). This was expressed not only by Augustine but also by Ambrose, who wrote that only single men and not married men should have concubines, and the Council of Toledo, which ordered much the same thing.24 Augustine went further than he had previously in suggesting that mutual fidelity was good not only in that it prevented both parties from committing fornication, but also in the bond that it created. Augustine assumed that the good of marriage most obvious to his audience would be that of proles, offspring, as in pre-Christian Roman society. But one might argue that Christian marriage actually came to run counter to the goal of begetting offspring because of its emphasis on indissolubility. In ancient, late antique, and early medieval Jewish society it was entirely permissible for a man to divorce a wife who was barren or, in some societies, to take an additional wife. Far from encouraging chaste widowhood, if a man died childless, halakha, or rabbinic law, required that his nearest male relative (even if already married) marry the widow or else ritually release her, and the first child born from the marriage would be accounted the child of the decedent.25 Islam at one time encouraged, and still permits, men to marry up to four wives and have children with all of them. Christianity turned against these practices. Without following Jack Goody in considering the minimizing of potential heirs a conspiracy by the church to accumulate more property, we can note that Christianity, while condemning contraception, never put so great a value on marital fertility as to allow the dissolution of a barren marriage, let alone forbid the formation of one.26 Goody argued that the church discouraged strategies for the creation of heirs by prohibiting divorce, plural marriage, marriage between relatives, and adoption. While medievalists agree that he went too far in attributing a coherent organization and purpose to the church’s regulation of marriage, it is clear that from at least the ninth century on, and with more success from the twelfth, the church was claiming authority over the institution. Georges Duby suggested that “two conceptions of marriage clashed in Latin Christendom about the year 1100. It was the climax of a conflict resulting in the introduction of customs that have lasted almost up to our own day.”27 The two conceptions to which he referred were indissoluble, church-sanctioned marriage on the one hand

12 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

and lay-controlled, dissoluble, dynastic marriage on the other. As Duby acknowledged, the tension between church and magnates began long before the twelfth century, although neither group was unanimous or consistent; individual cases often involved one group of lay magnates and their ecclesiastical allies against another. A number of marriage cases involving the Carolingian royal family, such as the marriages of Lothar II and those of Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, for example, involved men of the church on both sides of the controversy. This has often been read as an indication that “the church” did not have a consistent marriage policy at that time, or that lay magnates were successfully preventing the church from seizing control, but it can equally be read as an indication that lay magnates knew that whatever they did about their own or their children’s marriages, they needed to acquire the sanction of the church for it in some way, even if that meant the approval of their own tame clergy rather than of Rome. In the sense that there was a broad acceptance that the church could govern the terms of marriage — as discussed above, one of the common meanings of “Christianization”— we may suggest that marriage was Christian long before the twelfth century, and the spate of legislation about it from Carolingian councils (and even Merovingian ones) indicates that the church saw itself as in a position to legislate about it, even if this legislation tended to be roundly ignored. Nor did the twelfth century bring an end to controversies over clerical versus lay control of marriage. In later cases — the most famous, of course, being that of Henry VIII — lay magnates knew they needed the backing of the church to do what they wished, but they put considerable pressure on churchmen to provide that backing. What did change in the twelfth century were the detailed rules surrounding marriage, which were substantially clarified. Marriage was a major point of discussion among canon lawyers and theologians in the first half of the twelfth century, from Ivo of Chartres’s emphasis on the consent of the two parties rather than their families, to Gratian’s distinction between matrimonium initiatum and matrimonium ratum, to Peter Lombard’s treatment in the Sentences, with its definitive enunciation of the consent theory. Peter Lombard also argued, although he did not originate the argument, that marriage represented the union of Christ with the church, expressed through a sacramental physical union: “Since

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 13 therefore marriage is a sacrament, it is also a sacred sign of a sacred thing, that is to say, the conjunction of Christ and the Church. . . . As, therefore, between spouses there is a conjunction according to the consent of souls and according to the mixing of bodies, thus the church is coupled to Christ by will and by nature.”28 And, as the theology of the sacrament and the legalities of marriage were elaborated, they could not be trusted to laypeople. Though Gratian and the Lombard disagreed on some points, by the third quarter of the twelfth century the decretals of Alexander III solidified the latter’s position. Alexander’s statement of the law on marriage formation and indissolubility, as well as the impediments to marriage, remained normative for the rest of the Middle Ages, although there was of course disagreement among churchmen on how to apply it in practice. The church also “christened” marriage through extensive use of marital language and imagery in a wide range of contexts, which would have led the general community to understand marriage as a Christian institution. Close and indissoluble relationships were described—in sermons, treatises, and biblical commentaries — as marriages: the relation between a bishop and his church, between Christ and the church, between the soul and God. The use of marriage as metaphor, of course, brought with it connotations other than closeness: it implied an unbroken sacramental bond, but also a hierarchical ranking of the two parties. By putting forward a familiar relationship, marital language gave people a point of reference for understanding relationships that required a more complex understanding. David d’Avray has argued that the use of marital language for the relation between Christ and the church would have elevated marriage in the eyes of laypeople and helped lead them to view it sacramentally.29 While both processes — the sacramentalizing of marriage and the familiarization of Christian theology — were likely going on, the use of the everyday to explain the transcendent looms somewhat larger than the use of the transcendent to elevate the everyday. Marital language was also frequently used, as Dyan Elliott has shown, for relations between holy men and holy women. This helped to normalize the celibate by placing them within the context of an institution in which most medieval people participated or at least expected to participate. But the frequent references to spiritual unions that were spiritually, although

14 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

not biologically, fruitful did more than normalize celibacy. It celebrated it in a way that devalued carnal marriage: everything that carnal marriage could do, spiritual marriage could do in a higher and more virtuous way.30 Thus, while people may have been led to an understanding of marriage as Christian through its use as a metaphor for other relationships that were nothing but Christian, it is not so clear that it changed the terms in which ordinary people thought about their own marriages—or that, if it did change them, it did so in the direction of assimilating them to (rather than emphasizing their contrast with) the more spiritual ones. Through law, sermons, hagiography, and other means, then, the medieval church laid claim to marriage. Marriage was promoted as the universal state for those who had not vowed a religious celibacy. There remained, of course, those who did not or could not marry, but the church claimed fairly successfully to be able to determine who these were, that is, which unions should be recognized as marriage and what penalties should be assigned for those who entered them wrongly. Yet the body of rules articulated in the twelfth century did not entirely control the marital behavior of the public over the subsequent centuries. People were pushed to marry — by their families or their lords — in ways that could coerce consent. They self-divorced in the absence of a formal way of breaking up a marriage, often simply by leaving or being left by their partner, and remarried even though this was forbidden.31 Dowry was not required in theory to make a legal or sacramentally valid marriage, but it continued to be required in practice.32 Medieval Christian sources give us a coherent theory of marriage put forward by celibates, but we have little about marriage written by the married, except for married couples who agreed to live chastely (and even then, it is rarely in their own words). We have plenty of people who rejected marriage for Christian reasons, but no way of knowing how many people entered it for Christian reasons. Indeed, one of the few important twelfth-century writers on marriage to be married herself — Heloise — considered it more honorable to be called “friend” (amica, often translated as “mistress”) rather than “wife,” and claimed that she would rather be Abelard’s whore (meretrix) than the wife and imperial consort (imperatrix) of a Roman emperor. She said that “the name of wife may have the advantages of sanctity and safety, but to me the sweeter

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 15 name will always be lover [amica] or, if your dignity can bear it, concubine [concubina] or whore [scorta].”33 Heloise rejected marriage in favor of an unconstrained love, while others rejected it for a love of God alone, but none of the rejecters stressed the Christian aspects of the marriage they rejected. There is, in fact, remarkably little evidence until the time of the Reformation that individuals had a Christian purpose in their marriage; thereafter, we get former monks or nuns who chose to marry, or women who chose to marry priests. And even then—except for the rare woman such as Katharina Zell, who wrote about her decision to marry a priest and claimed that she did it deliberately for the good of the church— we do not know whether the choice to marry was a statement about belief or simply due to the fact that this new mode of Christian life required a spouse, for support in the case of a woman, for household management in the case of a man. During the Middle Ages, the closest we can get in terms of evidence of laypeople having Christian beliefs in mind when they chose to marry is often a grudging acceptance that marriage is something under the jurisdiction of the church. We can see this in the later Middle Ages with regard to the role of publicity in marriage. Christian culture inherited the idea that publicity was essential to a marriage from the Romans: there was nothing fundamentally Christian about it. In Roman law the fundamental difference between a wife and a concubine was the presence of maritalis affectio, marital affection or intent, but publicity was an important part of the latter: wishing and intending to be married involved holding oneself out publicly as married.34 The church also pushed publicity consistently, in part because the enforcement of indissoluble monogamy required the clear identification of unions as marriages. The church also related requirements for the payment of dotal transfers, which were not new, to publicity. The requirement of dowry or reverse dowry in order to validate the marriage might seem to be contrary to the principles of Christian marriage, which stressed personal consent rather than the familial consent demonstrated by a financial contribution. But the importance of dos was evidentiary. It was part of the publicity surrounding a union. In the later Middle Ages, where a dowry could be shown to have been negotiated, a woman would have a much easier time making a plausible case that the relationship was

16 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

a marriage. The most famous example is the mid-fifteenth-century story of Giovanni della Casa and Lusanna of Florence, described in Gene Brucker’s microhistory. In a complicated legal case, Giovanni won his claim that the two were not married; a private marriage ceremony had been held, which was all that the law technically required, but because it was not public and there was no dowry and no notarial record, Lusanna’s evidence was weak and she lost her case on appeal.35 But Christian adoption of the Roman idea of publicity in marriage did not fundamentally change the idea; it was a practical rather than a theological requirement. Pope Leo I, in 458 to 459, wrote in a muchrepeated letter that a wife had to be “legitimately endowed [dotata], and is seen to be made honest by public nuptials.” Carolingian councils drew on Leo’s dictum and required publicity in order to identify and avoid impediments to marriages. Yet Pope Nicholas I in 866 made clear that the rituals that normally constituted marital publicity — a betrothal agreement, a transfer of property via a document, an exchange of rings, a ceremony with a nuptial benediction — were not possible for everyone: “These are the laws of marriage, these, in addition to other things that do not come to mind, are the solemn pacts of nuptials; however, we do not consider it a sin if all these things do not happen in a marriage agreement . . . especially because such great lack of means oppresses some people, that they have no assistance in preparing these things.”36 By the later Middle Ages the system that had developed for ensuring the publicity of marriage and therefore the absence of impediments such as previous marriage was the proclamation of banns at the parish church for three Sundays before the marriage, which in one sense Christianized the publicity requirement by involving the church in guaranteeing it. Yet clandestine marriages, while illicit, remained valid. A clandestine marriage was one in which the banns were not called properly and the union therefore not properly publicized. My own research on Paris, that of Carole Avignon on northwestern France, and that of Shannon McSheffrey on London indicates that those unions labeled as “clandestine” were not necessarily those in which a couple entered into marriage vows in secret— although such marriages certainly existed. Theologians and canonists from the twelfth century onward listed a va-

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 17 riety of criteria of clandestinity. Hostiensis had one of the most detailed and widely followed typologies: first, those conducted without a blessing in facie ecclesiae; second, those conducted without witnesses and dowry; third, those conducted without episcopal license in cases that required it; and fourth, those without banns.37 In the fourteenth-century encyclopedia Omne Bonum, for example, the image for “clandestinum matrimonium” depicts a marriage being solemnized by a friar.38 In London, McSheffrey argues, there were a number of “extra-ecclesiastical” marriages formed in the homes of relatives or employers; however, the term “clandestine” tended to be used not for these, but rather for marriages solemnized at church but with some error in the procedure, such as lack of banns.39 In Paris there were many unions where the parties did not bother to enter into present-tense vows at all, essentially making future promises which constituted a betrothal and then living together as married, in addition to marriages in which the ceremony was conducted at a place other than the parish church or by someone other than the appropriate parish priest.40 To the extent that people were exchanging vows in the homes of their parents or employers, or even in fields or in stables, rather than at the church door, we might suggest that the church was not that important to them in their marriages and that there was nothing particularly Christian about them; the vow, “I take you as my wife/husband,” which was a legal contract, was not explicitly Christian. Some people, however, did choose to have their marriages celebrated in church, but not their own parish church, which was where canon law required the banns to be called, or even in their own church without banns. For example, “Jean David and Thomassine la Bouchiere now his wife, cited, made amends for espousals in a certain chapel in Villette-aux-Asnes in the diocese of Meaux, although they were parishioners of the Villetaneuse.”41 They could also make use of an exempt jurisdiction (generally monasteries not subject to the local bishop): as one of many examples, in Paris in 1492, “Jean Leguyot . . . and Pierrette his wife made amends for having solemnized matrimony at St.-Germain-en-Laye on St. Laurence’s day.”42 People could also be liable to a fine for attending a ceremony in an inappropriate church.43 One man claimed that he had solemnized marriage in

18 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

an exempt jurisdiction out of fear of his parents (strangely, not hers, although women’s families were in general more concerned about whom their daughters married than were men’s families).44 To the extent that couples were choosing to get married at church, even if it was the wrong church, and having a priest celebrate a nuptial mass for them, even when it was a priest who was not authorized to do so, we may conclude that these aspects were important to them, socially if not spiritually. There may have been various reasons for them to go to an exempt jurisdiction, including cheaper rates, a shorter delay without the banns, or indeed the avoidance of publicity about impediments, but they were still accepting, if not the church’s control over marriage, at least the idea that the church should be connected with marriage: if they were rejecting the church’s authority entirely they could have omitted solemnization, as many couples did, or performed a ceremony, with or without a priest, in a loco profano (that is, somewhere other than a church).45 These late fifteenth-century cases bear on several of the possible meanings of “Christian marriage.” If we assume that people were being married in a church, but clandestinely, because they did not grasp the difference and thought that the marriage was licit, then it is difficult to claim that they understood the union as being Christian. If the only formal and legal marriage available to the vast majority of people living in western Europe was a church-sanctioned one, we cannot assume that their entering into a Christian form of marriage was a result of their own beliefs. If, however, they were consciously violating the church’s rules by not marrying in their own parish, perhaps because there was some impediment that they did not want the banns to reveal or because they did not want to wait, then they did have a choice. They could just live together and hold themselves out as married (which some people certainly did). They could exchange vows in front of witnesses but not at a church (which a great many people certainly did), vows prescribed by the church but without explicitly Christian wording. Or they could have a nuptial mass celebrated at a church other than their parish church. The choice of the latter would seem to indicate that they had internalized a view of marriage as Christian in the sense of being connected with a church. Possibly they chose vows in a church because it was spiritually meaning-

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 19 ful to them, possibly because the community would accord higher standing to the union. When I presented this paper orally I made the not entirely facetious suggestion that marriage did not become Christian until non-Christian marriage became an option. Civil marriage was established in France in 1792, England in 1836, and the German states at various times in the nineteenth century, followed by Bismarckian legislation in 1875.46 Once it is the registration with the civil authorities that makes a marriage official, Christian marriage is no longer an unmarked category, but one that a couple has to make an effort to enter, although there may be social pressure to do so. If only those people who actively choose a Christian ceremony have one, and there is no penalty for not doing so, we may argue that for those people marriage is more thoroughly Christianized than in a situation such as the Middle Ages, when all marriage in western Europe was religious and therefore participation in it was a sign of the church’s control and not of personal commitment to Christianity. In the Middle Ages marriage was a social and economic act. The church had to keep after people constantly to follow the canon law rules, and property exchanges that were not legally required were nevertheless, among the upper and middling classes, socially critical. The thinking about marriage as primarily sacramental rather than social seems, as far as we can tell, to have been limited to the celibate. People were not marrying to imitate Christ and his church—not most of them, anyway— they were doing it to create households and rear offspring, neither a uniquely Christian goal. The roots of church-controlled marriage are in the Middle Ages, but older and more universal traditions about the purpose of marriage also continued, and modern theorists of Christian marriage rely much more on how medieval churchmen thought than how medieval couples actually formed their unions. Nevertheless, as the church successfully exerted control over the making of marriage, its monopoly may have meant that many individuals, and certainly the community as a whole, understood it as a Christian ritual. Marriage nevertheless remained different from other life course sacraments. Baptism took place on the occasion of birth, but it did not cause someone to be born (although adult baptism was, in the early

20 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

church and in some evangelical churches still, spoken of in terms of rebirth). Extreme unction was to take place on the occasion of death, but it did not cause death. Marriage, however, caused marriage; that is, the vows were performative and created a permanent and recognized union. Preachers throughout the Middle Ages ensured that the baptism and extreme unction, as well as confirmation, penance, and the Eucharist, were understood as the obligations of all Christians. Like holy orders, however, marriage was not for everyone. Unlike holy orders, there were many purposes for it other than religious ones. It is important not to equate “marriage” with “the formation of a union,” because there remained an unknown number of couples who could not or did not marry. But to guarantee the passing of wealth to the next generation, ensure economic support for the female partner and her children, and in many cases to guarantee social acceptability, marriage was needed, and its sacramentality was likely not the main point for many people. As Van Engen so forcefully argued, that does not mean that the Christian aspect was merely a meaningless superstructure. Rather, what we see is several different meanings of Christianization. Christian law was the law of the majority community, and from a legal and administrative view, marriage was under the jurisdiction of the church. Participating in Christian ritual around marriage was a matter of community, and people chose to do it even when they were in violation of the church’s law. Marriage was certainly Christianized by the end of the Middle Ages in these two respects. But we need to be careful about assuming that because it was Christian in terms of who made the rules and what set of customs joined the community together, it therefore brought with it the implications of individual faith and participation in a sacrament. People choose Christian marriage today because it is meaningful to them; in the Middle Ages, it was the default.

Notes 1. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 ( June 1986): 519– 52. 2. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 21 Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Richard Kieckhefer, “The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft, and Magic in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 355– 85; Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffälliger Frauen (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 2001); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 –1580 ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); John Van Engen, Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Late Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 3. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 536 – 37. Of course, not everyone in medieval Europe was Christian, but even Muslims and Jews living within Christian-dominated territories shared to some extent in this language and assumptions. 4. Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods ( Leiden: Brill, 1994), xiii. 5. This chapter develops some ideas I presented in Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), although it does not duplicate any part of that book. 6. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, xii; he does not argue that it was incomplete. 7. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 522. 8. Ibid., 543. 9. Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 161; see also 8– 9, 23, 27, 161– 70. 10. See Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 362– 85, on the benediction. 11. Kyle Harper, in From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), discusses in detail the way Christianity changed the double standard. 12. On the development of a Jewish identity and the meaning of iudaios, see Shaye H. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). This argument has been misapplied in a nonacademic context by some Christians who use it to deny that Jesus was “Jewish,” but some scholars use it to argue that the term “Jew” is anachronistic. 13. Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14, 26 – 27. 14. Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 68, 84, 178– 79.

22 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

15. Hagith Sivan, “Why Not Marry a Jew? Jewish-Christian Marital Frontiers in Late Antiquity,” in Law, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity, ed. Ralph W. Mathisen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 208–19. 16. Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman ( Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 49– 51, 196– 97. 17. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), is the classic work on late antique asceticism. 18. For Tertullian, see Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200 – 1500 ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 14 – 29. 19. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 392– 93. 20. Augustine, “De nuptiis et concupiscentiis” 1:19, in Corpus scriptorium ecclesiasticorum latinorum 42, ed. Carl Verba and Joseph Zycha ( Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1902), 231. 21. Augustine, Confessions, 4.2.2, ed. James J. O’Donnell, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1:33. I develop this further in Unmarriages, 28– 31. 22. Augustine, De bono coniugali, 5, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 11–13. 23. This ritual involved an ordeal of drinking “bitter waters.” There is little evidence of its being practiced in the Second Temple period, and it was abolished shortly thereafter; nevertheless, it is discussed extensively in the Talmud and medieval Jewish scholars were certainly aware of it. 24. Both cited in Augustine, Confessions, 2:384. 25. On levirate marriage, see Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 186 – 89; and Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 90 –101. 26. Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 27. Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 19. 28. Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, bk. 4, dist. 26, chap. 6, ed. Ignatius Brady, 3d ed. (Grottaferrata: College of St. Bonaventure, 1981), 2:419– 22. 29. David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 30. On marital imagery, see Elliott, Bride of Christ; D’Avray, Medieval Marriage; Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Megan McLaughlin, Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000 – 1122 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51– 91; and E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The

The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 23 Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), esp. 123– 50. 31. Sara McDougall, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), provides a survey on this topic. 32. On dowry, see Susan Mosher Stuard, “Brideprice, Dowry, and Other Marital Assigns,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth M. Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Diane Owen Hughes, “From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 262– 96; and many chapters in Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte Jr., To Have and to Hold: Marrying and its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400 – 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 33. Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings, trans. William Levitan ( Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 55. 34. On “affectio maritalis,” see Judith Evans-Grubbs, “Marrying and its Documentation in Later Roman Law,” in Reynolds and Witte, To Have and to Hold, 51; and John T. Noonan, “Marital Affection in the Canonists,” Studia Gratiana 12 (1967): 481– 509. 35. Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Thomas Kuehn, “Reading Microhistory: The Example of Giovanni and Lusanna,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 512– 34. 36. Nicholas I, Epistolae, 99, ed. Ernst Perels, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae 6 ( Berlin: Weidmann, 1925), 570. 37. Carole Avignon, “L’Eglise et les infractions du lien matrimonial: Mariages clandestins et clandestinité. Théories, pratiques et discours, France du nordouest du XIIe siècle au m ilieu du XVIe siècle,” Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris-Est, 2008, 94 – 95 on Hostiensis, 95–102 on other theologians. Avignon’s work provides great detail not only on legal practice on clandestine marriage in northwestern France, but also on the theological and canon law background. 38. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge: British Library MSS Royal 6 E VI– 6 E VII, 2 vols. ( London: H. Miller Publishers, 1996), 2:108– 9. The text for “clandestinum desponsacio” relied on Hostiensis. 39. Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 27– 32. 40. Karras, Unmarriages, 179– 86. 41. Paris, Archives nationales, Z/1o/19, fol. 83r, 1488. 42. Ibid., Z/1o/19, fol. 257v. 43. Ibid., Z/1o/18, fol. 12v. 44. Ibid., Z/1o/18, fol. 41v.

24 /

Ruth Mazo Karras

45. Ibid., Z/1o/18, fol. 78r, 82r, 96v, the latter with a priest. These were “affidationes” rather than solemnization. 46. On France, see Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), esp. 47– 92; on England, Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 337– 38. See Probert, 2– 6, for the argument (contra Lawrence Stone) that the 1753 Marriage Act did not constitute a major change from previous procedure, as the Church of England had jurisdiction before as well as after that act.

Tw o

Th e C h r i s t i a n i z a t i o n o f B o h e m i a Revising the Narratives

l i s a wo l v e rt o n

“Christianization”: the term is widely used, and still widely contested.1 On the face of it, it evokes the abandonment, rejection, or simple decay of one set of religious and cultural beliefs and practices and the adoption of another, as well as the consequent transformation of a whole society. In contrast with a word such as “conversion,” it suggests the gradual nature of this change and stresses the process as much as the product. However, “Christianization” leaves opaque matters of agency: does it signify a process willingly engaged in or one imposed by others? While religious historians such as John Van Engen are inclined toward the former, I would argue that in the overarching narrative of early medieval history there exists an unmarked tendency toward the latter in accounts of how various “peripheral” regions, beyond the formerly Roman “core” of Christian Europe, became part of medieval Christendom.2 Moreover, in northern and east-central Europe, the period usually identified as crucial to Christianization—circa 1000, plus or minus a century—overlaps with either the expansion of the Frankish/East Frankish/German Empire or the coalescence of independent states in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe that survive to the modern day.3 Because of this overlap, Christianization 25

26 /

Lisa Wolverton

is chiefly treated, either outright or implicitly, as a political development rather than a religious or cultural one. The specific form such a functionalist approach takes in scholarship about the adoption of Christianity in Bohemia is my subject here. I take my cue—fittingly, I think—from Van Engen’s influential essay in the 1986 American Historical Review, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem.” In it he states that “Christianization required, in cultural terms, the putting in place of the means to structure Christian profession and practice, that is, the rituals and institutions deans and priests supervised.”4 Institutions, then, matter— and matter more, as Van Engen says, than the official baptism of a ruler or other elites. But institutions are inherently impersonal, and their study can become an end it itself; the unmarked tendency is to assume that the study of institutions such as monasteries, bishoprics, or parishes elucidates, even stands in for, the beliefs and practices these institutions were to encourage and support — and indeed does so sufficiently that little direct consideration of the latter is needed. Moreover, institutional control of resources and imbrication in structures of political power enable the subtle infiltration of functionalist assumptions. Van Engen talks of parishes, but the scholarship on central Europe in the early Middle Ages, especially in the Ottonian orbit, focuses on bishoprics — missionary bishoprics, colonizing bishoprics, national bishoprics, and especially archbishoprics. The presence of a bishop was unquestionably among the requirements for, or markers of, Christianization, for within the well-established hierarchy of the Roman church, the bishop oversaw and provided the basic framework for exactly the structures of ritual and practice Van Engen describes. Yet here again there is a tendency to float back up, into that world of kings and courtiers, ideology and political machinations, and away from belief and practice among everyday people on the ground. To some extent, these approaches have been rationalized by the sources, implicitly or explicitly: circa 1000 we often know very little of what the common folk felt and did, and non-Christian peoples and those on Latin Europe’s periphery had little recourse to writing in order to testify to the Christianization process as it unfolded among them.5 Yet, in this, Bohemia constitutes an exception — if one rarely noted in the scholarship: it is comparatively well served for written sources of local provenance, from

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 27 a series of tenth-century vitae of Saint Václav ( Wenceslas) to the twelfthcentury chronicles by Cosmas of Prague and his continuators.6 My aim here is to offer a reappraisal of Christianity’s institutional development in Bohemia, not only by rejecting the kinds of political arguments that currently dominate its study, but also by shifting our understanding of the relationship between politics and the Christianization process in general.7 I intend first to revise the narrative for the establishment of the bishopric of Prague, removing it from the world of Ottonian political scheming and situating it instead within an indigenous process of institution building and Christian practice on the ground in Bohemia. This will allow us to then trace a different set of contours for the adoption of Christian practices throughout Bohemia over three centuries and to consider the role of local political elites, including ( but not restricted to) the Přemyslid dukes of Bohemia, as patrons and facilitators of this process. Finally we must acknowledge that Bohemia’s exposure to Christianity — via travelers and immigrants, including priests, all anonymous to us — came from east as well as west, and thus that a bilingual liturgical Christianity was practiced at least through the end of the eleventh century. In considering the bishopric of Prague, the role of the dukes, and the place of the Slavonic liturgy, I propose to revise the three dominant narratives of Christianization in Bohemia: that of Ottonian missionary influence, that of autochthonous Přemyslid “state formation,” and that of a clash between two monolithic Christianities, Western Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox (in its Slavonic form). In each case, this will rest on a fresh appraisal of the evidence, considered from a groundlevel view.

A Bishop to Meet Local Needs The foundation of the see of Prague presents a conundrum: no contemporary text relates how it came about. Without question, it was subordinated from the outset to the archbishopric of Mainz. But while hagiographic and historical sources document and reliably date the reigns of Bohemia’s second and third bishops, little evidence survives to indicate when the first bishop of Prague was appointed or the bishopric itself

28 /

Lisa Wolverton

first constituted. We know only that it occurred sometime before 982.8 Writing in the early twelfth century, Cosmas, dean of the cathedral church in Prague, offered one version of the see’s founding, which I would like to discuss at some length. Cosmas cannot be treated as authoritative, not least because he composed his account roughly 150 years after the fact on the basis of sources, written or oral, that cannot be firmly reconstructed. Moreover, by comparison with other evidence, Cosmas’s dating is generally regarded as incorrect. Without Cosmas we have nothing; with Cosmas we have some problems. But let me first suggest that the absence of references to the bishopric’s establishment in any imperial source, narrative or documentary, is not merely an impediment but instead potentially revealing. Bohemia’s incorporation within the archdiocese of Mainz and the see’s likely foundation during the reign of Emperor Otto II have led to a wide range of speculative arguments about how and when this must have occurred within the realm of Ottonian episcopal politics.9 In treatments of the subject in scholarship on medieval Germany, Prague is often listed alongside Havelberg, Meissen, or Poznań — in other words, among the “missionary” bishoprics established on Ottonian initiative.10 Czech historians likewise posit an Ottonian context for the see’s foundation, for instance, presuming complicated negotiations between the bishops of Regensburg and Mainz regarding claims to Bohemia, even though the only evidence for Regensburg’s missionary rights over Bohemia is a brief remark in the mid-twelfth-century vita of Saint Wolfgang.11 Precisely because tenthcentury German chronicles make frequent mention of episcopal appointments, conflicts over bishops’ rights and resources, and high-profile efforts by the rulers to establish new sees, as at Magdeburg or Bamberg, their complete silence about Prague to me argues for minimal initiative or agency on the part of the Ottonians. Cosmas, given his exclusive focus on local Czech affairs and his criticism of German rulers’ meddling in Bohemian political life, not surprisingly eschews any wider imperial framework.12 In his telling, the see’s founding was a local effort approved directly by the pope, whose letter on the subject Cosmas reproduces. The letter itself, from a pope named John13 to Boleslav II, provides the chronicle’s first reference to the bishopric; Cosmas makes no previous mention of a plan, but the letter refers

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 29 to a request from the duke. The letter was delivered to Bohemia by Boleslav’s own sister, Mlada, who had gone to Rome to pray; “After some time,” Cosmas says, the pope, “wanting to help the new church,” made her an abbess and “gave her the rule of St. Benedict.”14 John’s letter thus reads: [Mlada] brought entreaties, sweet to our heart, on your [Boleslav’s] behalf: that, with our approval, it might be permitted for there to be a bishopric in your principality to the praise and glory of the church of God. We received it gladly and gave thanks to God, who always enlarges his church everywhere and extols it in all countries. Whence, by apostolic authority . . . we approve and highly praise, and indeed put in writing, that there be an episcopal see at the church of Saints Vitus and Václav, martyrs, [in Prague] and also that a community of nuns be established at the church of St. George the martyr under the rule of St. Benedict and in obedience to [Mlada]. Not according to the rite or sect of the people of Bulgaria or Russia, nor in the Slavic language, but rather following apostolic laws and decrees, at the will of the whole church you should choose someone more preferable for this work: a cleric well educated in Latin letters.15 According to Cosmas, the duke then did as the letter instructed: he sent messengers to a man he knew named Thietmar, described as erudite, a priest, a monk, and a Saxon, who had previously spent time in Prague “for the sake of prayer” and was fluent in Slavic. Then, “Boleslav convened the clergy, leaders, and people of the land and, through his own entreaties and admonitions, he brought it about that everyone by common assent elected Thietmar as their bishop. On the next day, as pleased the duke, everyone chose Thietmar as bishop by favorable acclamation.” Only after this election, portrayed as a communal event, was Thietmar sent to Emperor Otto I, Cosmas says, for ordination: “The emperor, as a lover of divine law, with the counsel of the dukes and princes but especially the bishops, and taking thought for the salvation and newness of these Christian people, ordered the archbishop of Mainz, who presided at court then, to ordain him bishop.” With this final clause, “who presided at court then,” Cosmas seems to construe as an accident the institutional arrangement whereby Prague became suffragan to Mainz.

30 /

Lisa Wolverton

Note here all the language about the “newness” of the faith in Bohemia, not referring to it as a mission field (i.e., as the object of outsiders’ proselytizing efforts at conversion), but as a region in which Christianity was still growing and needed support. And indeed, Cosmas immediately describes how Bishop Thietmar went about consecrating churches, “built by the faithful in many places to the praise of God,” and performing baptisms, thus furthering the process of making “the gentile populace faithful to Christ.”16 But could the bishopric have been founded this way? There are difficulties in the dating, suggesting that Cosmas has some of the facts wrong.17 And while it seems plausible that the unnamed archbishop of Mainz happened to be in residence at the emperor’s court, surely it is less likely that either Otto or his bishops made such a critical institutional decision so casually. Or is it? If the Czech entourage indeed appeared unannounced, might the emperor not make an expedient decision? Might it not have seemed a boon for the emperor to be offered, without any effort on his part, rights of confirmation over this new see? The procedure Cosmas describes for Thietmar’s election was the norm in Bohemia throughout the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries: bishops were chosen jointly by the duke of Bohemia and popular acclamation and then sent to the emperor for confirmation and investiture, as well as consecration by the archbishop of Mainz.18 While this certainly suggests that Cosmas was projecting backward the practices of his own day, it nonetheless remains the case that never in these centuries were bishops chosen by the emperor, nor was any bishop-elect sent from Bohemia ever rejected. ( The single exception, the third bishop of Prague, Thieddag, was appointed by Otto III at the request of Boleslav, who “asserted that no cleric worthy of episcopal office was to be had in all of Bohemia at that time.”)19 At no time, so far as we know, was this norm ever questioned by either party; the bishopric of Prague, in other words, was always understood to have a different relationship with the emperor than other sees, even those likewise subordinate to the archdiocese of Mainz. One might logically conclude that this exceptional situation originated with the see’s founding. Note too that neither at the time of foundation nor at any later date did the emperor possess any lands or rights in Bohemia with which to endow or invest the bishop of Prague.20 I would suggest, then, that the context for the establishment of

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 31 the see of Prague was not the Empire but Bohemia — and its founder was not Otto but Boleslav. To some extent, we must conclude from the absence of contemporary evidence that we simply cannot know how the Prague see came to be established. I would nevertheless argue that Cosmas’s account contains elements of plausibility when viewed from a Bohemian perspective. It is striking, if overlooked by all non-Czech scholars of the subject, that Cosmas explicitly links the see’s foundation with the establishment of the first Benedictine monastery in Bohemia: Saint George, situated within Prague Castle, directly behind the church of Saint Vitus (later the cathedral). The archive of Saint George seems the likely source of the letter from Pope John; Cosmas also mentions “a privilege of the church of St. George” that he declines to cite and is unfortunately now lost, but that apparently described twenty churches built and endowed by Boleslav II.21 Indeed, Cosmas consistently credits Boleslav with Christian piety, though less for his personal qualities than his patronage of the church. In addition to the usual platitudes about defending widows and orphans, he calls him a “supporter of clergy and pilgrims” and, above all, “an exceptional builder of God’s churches.”22 Hagiographical sources likewise emphasize church building among the chief Christian acts of patronage practiced by dukes, going back to the first Christian duke of Bohemia, Bořivoj I, in the late ninth century.23 Among Saint Václav’s many demonstrations of piety was his decision to build an exceptionally large church within Prague Castle (where two other churches, those dedicated to Saint Mary and Saint George, already stood). Here, in these small churches, are the institutions John Van Engen emphasizes, the crucial structures for Christian ritual practice and the work of priests. Dotting the landscape, their proliferation must have gone hand in hand with, and indeed facilitated, Christianity’s growth in Bohemia. Yet, canonically, churches can only be consecrated by bishops. Cosmas claims that Václav’s church, dedicated to Saint Vitus, stood unconsecrated at his death, and thus his fratricidal successor, Duke Boleslav I, had to offer many inducements to Bishop Michael of Regensburg to come consecrate it.24 Since Michael governed the church of Regensburg from 942 to 972, unless Cosmas is mistaken in the bishop’s name, Václav’s church must have stood unconsecrated for more than a decade

32 /

Lisa Wolverton

and perhaps much longer (for Boleslav I ruled until 967). Crescente fide indicates, however, and Cosmas repeats, that the remains of Saint Václav were translated from the site of his martyrdom to Saint Vitus a mere three years after his death,25 perhaps indicating that the Christian community made liturgical or other religious use even of unconsecrated churches. Nevertheless, Boleslav II probably realized that, for all his new buildings and any future ones, it would do well to have a bishop available locally to consecrate them. One imagines a kind of snowball effect: at a certain point, the example of consecration made meeting in unconsecrated places untenable. Whether influenced by exemplars abroad or increasingly aware of canon law, those pressing for conformity to external norms must still have been, in the early part of the Christianization process, faithful Christians within Bohemia. Only later, in the mid-twelfth century, do we begin to find papal legates imposing norms from outside (e.g., about clerical celibacy or abbatial elections).26 With a bishop in place, priests could be ordained as well. Christian practice in Bohemia initially required the cultivation of foreign priests. As one of the Václav legends testifies, “many priests from . . . Bavaria and Swabia flocked to him with relics and books” and received in return rich rewards.27 Half a century later Boleslav II may have established a bishopric precisely in order to relieve the Czechs’ dependence on priests from elsewhere, although it would be some time before a suitable episcopal candidate emerged from among the locals. All the earliest bishops of Prague were of German origin, but for Saint Adalbert (born Vojtěch), who was sent to Magdeburg for education.28 Here again, while the Czechs’ Christianization critically depended upon such contacts with neighboring regions where Christian institutions were more fully developed, the commitment to Christianity within Bohemia, whether to support outsiders financially or send natives abroad for training, was instrumental. Establishing a bishopric seems also to have facilitated the provision of permanent maintenance for this growing network of churches and priests. Cosmas notes that Bishop Thietmar instituted a tithe consisting of “two stacks of the harvest” (where a stack, he says, “holds fifty handfuls”).29 Later, around the turn of the eleventh century, Ekkehard, the fourth bishop of Prague, reformed this tithe: “Each person — whether

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 33 powerful, rich, or poor, whether he possessed arable land from his benefice or his allod — would pay the bishop two measures of five palms and two fingers, one of wheat and the other of oats.”30 It is unclear whether this represents a change in the amount owed, the grain rendered, or the categories of land tenure obliged to pay.31 Nonetheless, the Christian community could now be imagined to include the “powerful, rich, [and] poor,” both freeholder and tenant. Does “each person” mean that all inhabitants of Bohemia could now be expected to support the Christian church, whatever their own beliefs and practices? Rendering the tithe out of obligation scarcely indicates a deep commitment to Christianity— but nevertheless, it was crucial to the support and further development of its institutions, which in turn promoted and provided regular support for those who had, even partially, made such commitments. And by Cosmas’s account, the institution of a tithe — supporting the church materially from across all sectors of society, rather than ducal or other elite patronage alone—occurred only after the establishment of a bishopric and explicitly, even exclusively, on the bishops’ own initiative. Christianity was, by definition, a foreign import to Bohemia. Its theology and its rituals developed in the late Roman Empire and continued to evolve over succeeding centuries as new peoples embraced its message. This necessarily meant that its norms were initially established outside Bohemia. But how these were embraced by new adherents — how and how much they were integrated into, and eventually replaced, native practices — everywhere depended upon local context. Ideas and objects could be brought by any Christian passing through Prague, lay or cleric, merchant or pilgrim, and surely were. The Bohemians’ contacts with Christians reached back at least to Charlemagne’s day, and already in 845 the Annals of Fulda report that “fourteen among the leaders [duces] of the Bohemians, together with their men, accepted the Christian religion” and were baptized at the imperial court in Regensburg.32 On many occasions Frankish armies entered or passed through Bohemia, with the locals sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. And there is no question that by the mid-tenth century, Prague was a major long-distance trading center (see below). We have little record, of course, of most of these travelers and thus can only guess at the nature of their conversations and influence on the locals. Some among them must have been conscious missionaries,

34 /

Lisa Wolverton

though no evidence in the sources suggests that any secular or ecclesiastical leaders mounted a concerted missionary effort aimed specifically at Bohemia.33 The local veneration of Saint Václav, himself not a missionary but a pious exemplary duke whose murder was interpreted as martyrdom, surely made the largest contribution to the development of the new faith in Bohemia.34 It was his cult, most likely, that brought Thietmar to Prague “for the sake of prayer” well before his appointment as bishop; indeed, by the later tenth century, Václav’s cult was sufficiently well known outside the Empire for a new vita to have been commissioned by Otto II, based on Latin texts of Bohemian provenance.35 Eventually, then, the flow of individuals and influences into and out from Bohemia — nearly all of it beyond the reach of extant sources—influenced Christianity’s evolution and adoption there. But local institutions—churches, bishops, tithes— grounded the faith in daily observance, in the everyday lives of the local population, whether believers or mere observers. And, by all accounts, from their inception and in the months and years and decades that followed, these institutions were the work of locals.36

The Dukes’ Resources In the foregoing discussion of the institutions that supported Christian practice, successive dukes of Bohemia have loomed large; we have observed them building churches, patronizing priests, providing a personal example of Christian piety, and arranging for the establishment of a bishopric, thus taking a leadership role in establishing this new religion in their lands. But in shifting the focus of the narrative of Bohemia’s Christianization from outside influences to local initiatives, we must avoid yet another form of political functionalism whereby a narrative of internal political consolidation —“state formation”— subsumes, or even substitutes for, one about the incorporation of Christian belief and practices into everyday life.37 Having displaced the excessive emphasis on the agency of emperors and missionaries, we must not unwittingly cast dukes in that same role — at least not without careful consideration. Unfortunately, it is a commonplace among the Czech scholarship, as well

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 35 as within the broadly functionalist treatments of the Christianization of northern and eastern Europe, to presume that rulers supported and promoted, even introduced, Christianity chiefly for political reasons, whether to aid in the consolidation of their authority over rivals, to enhance their stature with foreign rulers, or to impose greater control over the populace.38 It is further argued that both the adoption of Christianity and the dukes’ support for it worked to foster the formation of a “state” in territories such as Bohemia.39 Yet, while Czech scholars routinely assert that the church formed the backbone of the duke’s administration, that the “Bohemian state” could not have existed without it, and that for this reason dukes supported Christian institutions, these contentions invariably rest on flimsy, even nonexistent, evidence.40 They emerge instead from flawed understandings of religious leadership, the structure of political power, and the nature of patronage. Implicitly— and wrongly—these scholars tend to equate institutions per se with administration, failing to recognize that the earliest Christian bishops or churches were only “institutional” in the Van Engen– inspired sense, that is, insofar as they supported “Christian profession and practice.” If we take a more skeptical view of the intersection of politics and Christian practice, rejecting teleological assumptions about the dukes’ ostensibly “statist” or supposedly political goals, we come to a better appreciation of what it meant for the Czech populace to embrace Christianity over many decades. The statist argument about the politics of Christianization in Bohemia tacitly rests on two core pieces of evidence: the impression that most of the earliest churches were located within fortifications, and a crucial passage of Cosmas’s chronicle that describes the legislation of Christian mores. Nearly all the oldest churches, whether they survive intact or as ruins, have been found within the walls of, or are described in texts in association with, fortified centers, especially those connected with the Přemyslids. Indeed, scholarly convention has long held that kostel, the Czech word for “church”— that is, the physical building rather than the institution or community of believers in abstract—derived from the Latin castellum. It is tempting, therefore, to elide assumptions about the function of fortresses with presumptions about the churches within them, for if one believes Přemyslid rule consisted in the domination of the

36 /

Lisa Wolverton

countryside from such fortifications, then the church too appears to be an instrument of domination. Meanwhile, the Cosmas passage includes provisions such as this: Concerning those who are accused of homicides, the archpriest will write down their names for the comes of that burg and the comes will summon them. And if they are rebels [and refuse], he will put them in prison until they perform a fitting penance or, if they deny it, until they are examined by hot iron or blessed water to determine whether they are blameworthy. Regarding fratricides, parricides, killers of priests, and those caught in capital crimes of this sort, the archpriest shall consign them to the comes or the duke, or he will eject them from the realm shackled by the hands and around the stomach, so that they might wander the earth as fugitives and wanderers in the likeness of Cain.41 Here Cosmas provides clear indication that the Christian archpriest performed a record-keeping service in the enforcement of the legal prohibition of murder, that he worked hand in hand with the duke’s secular representative, the comes, and that he himself could consign parricides and other malefactors to exile. All seem to constitute evidence that clergy worked on the duke’s behalf to enforce his coercive authority within Bohemia. However, framed within a somewhat broader context, these “facts” about the place of churches and clergy in the duke’s realm should be interpreted rather differently. To understand this passage in the Chronica Boemorum we need to look at its context, both the entirety of the preexisting text of legal strictures, often called “the Břetislav decrees,” and the narrative frame in which Cosmas has embedded it and outside of which it does not survive independently. The core text of the decrees lays out penalties for the violation of a number of Christian mores; in the outer frame, Cosmas ascribes these to Duke Břetislav, working together with Bishop Severus of Prague, as they beseech Saint Adalbert to allow the translation of his relics from Gniezno to Prague— an event Cosmas dates to the year 1039. As he tells it, the duke demanded that his assembled army swear to uphold the promise and commitments of baptism and thus to “cease alto-

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 37 gether from depraved works.”42 He then promulgated regulations concerning marriage, divorce, promiscuous women, and abortion; homicide, including of priests and close kin; taverns, “the root of all evil”; Sunday markets and work; and burial of the dead.43 Here then we observe crucial steps in the long process of Christianization: after the planting of churches, the provision of priests and necessities for ritual practice — and fully a century after Václav’s martyrdom— came the deeper, more difficult change in social mores. Indeed, Cosmas himself casts the decrees as Christianizing, that is, as a turning point when the community moved beyond, and indeed affirmed, Christian baptism by embracing a fuller commitment to Christian teachings through the renunciation of older practices that ought to be understood as “depraved.” For example, pre-Christian Czech custom patently allowed divorce and possibly polygamy,44 whereas Christianity demanded the restriction of sexual activity to the lifelong union of one man and one woman, with exceptions only in cases of severe abuse. The decrees deploy derisive language to mark the transition to Christian mores, for instance, by accusing the Czechs of treating their marriages as “brothels” and calling sexually active single women “harlots.” Beyond such rhetoric, they also prescribe harsh penalties for deviance from the new norms. Married men or women of any rank who abandon a spouse or separate are to be expelled from the realm, with no ability to return. Replacing this penalty with a monetary fee or reduction to “servitude” is expressly forbidden, “lest the taint of one small sheep spread through all of Christ’s sheepfold.”45 The aim, patently, was the acceptance of new, Christian norms across society and their communal safeguarding. To be sure, we here observe the duke committing his authority, his power to administer the law and apply coercive force in punishment, to compel adherence to Christian teaching. Where a monetary penalty is prescribed, payment is rendered to the duke’s fisc — if also shared with the clergy. For instance, “If someone should be discovered in any servile work, either on Sundays or on feast days, the accused shall be brought publicly to the church and the archpriest shall take away both the work itself and the draught animal found in the work. The offender will also pay three hundred coins into the duke’s treasury. Likewise, those who bury their dead in fields or forests: those so accused shall pay a cow to

38 /

Lisa Wolverton

the archdeacon and three hundred coins to the duke’s treasury. Then they should bury the dead anew in a cemetery of the faithful.”46 But the penalties here are clearly intended as disincentives, rather than as sources of enrichment for the fisc or church. In the process of compelling adherence to Christian teaching on marriage, the duke explicitly refused any income and indeed bore a double loss in exiling the offending subject altogether. Regarding taverns, the prohibited goods (i.e., the alcohol), were to be poured on the ground rather than assigned to any authority, “lest anyone be sullied by the accursed drink.”47 In both cases, then, weighing the potential effect of bad examples, the benefit to the Christian community came before profit. Moreover, rather than monopolize the income, where financial penalties are prescribed, the duke effectively created a financial endowment for the Christian church, one that would grow in inverse relation to the very success of the clergy’s efforts to change mores. Again the intended outcome was to strengthen the church more than materially, for, in handing a cow over to the archdeacon prior to reburial, the wrongdoers thereby acknowledged the authority of both Christian doctrine and the Christian clergy. Thus the decrees worked to strengthen the clergy’s position in society as well as Christian teachings about aspects of everyday life. As Cosmas would have it: whereas Saint Adalbert ostensibly fled Bohemia in frustration at his flock’s failure to translate Christian belief into Christian practice, almost half a century later, the duke stood behind a determined commitment to change. There is nothing particularly administrative in this, nor necessarily “statist”; it supports the clergy in matters doctrinal and social but not in the least political. What, then, about the homicide provisions quoted above? And the evidence regarding the archpriest working together with the duke’s comes to punish killers? We surely ought not to imagine that customary pre-Christian practices among the Czechs failed to prohibit the unjustified killing of others among them; few societies do. How, then, do these homicide provisions constitute Christianization? And why involve the archpriest in their implementation? Notably, the decrees make the murder of priests comparable to fratricides or parricides. But the answer to these questions seems to lie in prescribing the ordeal to reveal the guilt or innocence of the accused: “they are examined by hot iron or blessed water to determine whether they are blameworthy.” That ordeal

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 39 was regarded as a Christian practice, albeit one grounded more in custom than in theology, is reflected in the reference here to “blessed water.” The decrees also call for ordeal, referred to as “a judgment of God,” in determining whether abuse justifies the separation of a married couple.48 Thus Christian clergy are implicated in the exercise of justice, their rituals made part of customary procedures, at the same time as some of their teachings are enshrined in law.49 It must be said, then, that in addition to promoting the adherence to Christian mores among the population — and indeed, making Christian doctrine normative for all, regardless of personal belief — the ducal decrees seem intended to strengthen the clergy’s authority among the populace. The duke’s authority, his right and ability to punish wrongdoers, to collect fines, even to make law, is presumed and effectively backs the authority accorded the clergy. In other words, the presumption that Christianity — even the archpriest himself — helped to construct Přemyslid power has it exactly backward, for the duke did not involve the archpriest in homicide prosecution in order to enhance his own power, but rather to strengthen the archpriest’s social and religious authority. Let us turn now to the physical and textual evidence for the “statist” assumption that Bohemia’s earliest churches were located chiefly within fortresses and that this attests to the administrative and political utility of ecclesiastical patronage. The survival of physical remains is invariably uneven, dependent upon the original building materials, the fate of the site over centuries, and patterns of modern excavation; plain logic therefore argues against taking the apparent correlation between castle and church as causal. From the textual evidence, we have reason to expect that more churches existed than those excavated or still standing within the remains of fortifications. Most importantly, Cosmas reports of Boleslav II, “As we read in the privilege of the church of St. George, that faithful man built twenty churches for the Christian religion and generously endowed them with all the necessities that pertained to ecclesiastical uses.”50 The number of churches indicated here seems to outstrip the potential number of castles in Bohemia to house them, especially if one assumes — as seems sound — that Saint George was only granted a portion of all existing churches, that many known fortress churches could not be described as “new” at this time, and that these twenty churches

40 /

Lisa Wolverton

were unlikely to be situated at too great a distance from the women’s monastery itself. And this is the evidence of but one (now lost) privilege, one moment in one man’s patronage of one monastery. Moreover, Cosmas’s remark stresses not only the duke’s construction of churches, but also his care in providing them with resources. Even without knowing whether the phrase “generously endowed” indicates a financial endowment or the vessels, vestments, books, and other items necessary to ritual practice, the implication is still that Boleslav acted to benefit both the local churches and the convent. Nothing in Cosmas’s remark suggests that either the construction or endowment of these churches benefited Boleslav’s governance of Bohemia. Given the scanty evidence, it is nearly impossible to determine the degree to which the Přemyslids dominated the provision of Christianity’s necessities — a crucial issue if one imagines that the promotion of the new faith was intended to extend and consolidate the duke’s rule in the tenth century, itself a process otherwise wholly obscure. The extant written sources are deeply biased toward the Přemyslids, for the earliest evidence comes from the vitae of a Přemyslid saint, Václav, which not surprisingly show him moving between fortresses and worshiping in churches within the central Bohemian heartland of Přemyslid lordship. However, the only other elite non-Přemyslids we know of during the tenth century, the family of Saint Adalbert — usually in the historiography called the Slavníkids and cast as rivals of the Přemyslids, albeit without much evidence — were also Christian. The vitae of Adalbert, composed outside Bohemia, tell of his father sending him to Magdeburg for a Christian education, as well as of the family’s massacre by Duke Boleslav II’s men while gathered in their castle’s church for mass.51 Indeed, according to Cosmas, not only Adalbert’s relatives but “all the burg’s warriors” perished that day, suggesting more widespread adherence to Christianity among the elite.52 If we do not let the convergence here of fortress and church distract us, we notice instead the integration of Christianity—not merely its buildings, but also its rituals and calendar — into the political activities of the native elite, non-Přemyslid as well as Přemyslid. In general, I would argue, we need to rethink the meaning of the old equivalencies — of fortress and church, Přemyslid and Christian, Chris-

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 41 tianization and political advantage—by broadening our examination to understand better the social and economic functions of fortresses, whether as political strongholds of elite families or proto-urban centers of concentrated population, and thus the rationale for and consequences of siting churches within them. Take, for instance, Libice, the Slavníkid fortress in which Adalbert’s family and their followers were slaughtered: Cosmas calls it the “metropolis” of the saint’s father, Slavník, and describes Slavník’s “principality” as comprising a broad swath of southeastern Bohemia.53 Although Cosmas’s language does not clarify whether Slavník governed as a designate of the Přemyslid duke or independently, Libice was unquestionably no ordinary Bohemian castle. Rather, it stood as the heart—the capital, essentially—of the territorial holdings of a man of extensive wealth and political authority (the very assets that enabled him to send a son to Magdeburg for a formal ecclesiastical education). Since Slavník himself espoused Christianity, for a church to stand in Libice was both logical and of manifold significance. The same held for Prague, from the mid-tenth century the preeminent Přemyslid stronghold. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian holidays, most especially Saint Václav’s feast, brought the community of Czechs of all ranks together in Prague Castle for worship and, among the elite, to treat the affairs of the realm.54 At least three churches were located within Prague Castle itself in the tenth century: Saint Michael, the smallest and oldest; Saint Vitus, the larger church built by Saint Václav, where later his relics lay and which became the cathedral; and Saint George, the site of the women’s monastery. However, the many rotunda-style churches — Bohemia’s oldest form for ecclesiastical architecture in stone55— which still stand in the modern metropolitan area of Prague on both sides of the Vltava, dating to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, suggest that Christian worship was by no means limited to the castle itself. The prominence of Václav’s church, feast, and idealized patronage of Bohemia—which the Přemyslids unquestionably exploited56— should not lead us to conflate the adaptation of certain aspects of Christian practice to ideological or practical political ends with the independent evolution of Christian belief across Bohemian society. The more deeply embedded Christianity became in people’s lives at all social levels, the greater the role Christian churches, rituals, holidays, and teachings played in their collective activities. At both

42 /

Lisa Wolverton

Prague and Libice, elites were as much responding to as influencing the tendency of people to congregate centrally for all manner of political, economic, and cultural reasons. Indeed, across the land and in these same castles, a wide variety of economic developments must have been occurring, intersecting in crucial ways we can scarcely trace, with the emergence of political elites and the adoption of the new faith. Prague in particular was a thriving commercial center by the mid-tenth century. A Jewish traveler from Muslim Iberia, Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, noted the variety of long-distance trade goods passing through there and declared, “Their country is the best of all those of the Northern peoples, and the richest in provender.”57 Although we cannot know who built or paid for them, the many churches in Prague’s environs served the people flocking to profit from these economic opportunities. Other early churches appear in those burgs — Mělnik and Litoměřice on the Elbe, Plzeň on the road to Regensburg— where people clustered in proximity to trade routes. Libice too might have been such a burg, on the route to Moravia, before it faded in consequence. It likewise stands to reason that in the most populous and wealthiest settlements would stand the finest churches, those more likely to be built of stone and thus to last, even in ruins, for archeologists to discover centuries later. Only in Prague Castle do we know for certain that ducal patronage financed the construction of such churches, but we cannot know the degree to which the dukes did so in response to community needs, toward their own political ends, or some combination thereof. Duke Spitihněv committed, circa 1060, to constructing a new cathedral on the foundations of Václav’s old church, which, Cosmas says, was “no longer large and capacious enough for all the people flocking together” on the saint’s feast.58 Here again, he was not alone in sponsoring such projects: Cosmas also describes one of Spitihněv’s magnates, Mstiš, building and endowing a church in the suburbs of the burg entrusted to him, whose dedication both duke and bishop attended.59 Elites, including the Přemyslid dukes — far and away the wealthiest men in Bohemia, as all the available evidence attests — were in the best financial position to provide, in the words of the lost charter from Saint George, “all the necessities that pertained to ecclesiastical uses.” That they did so potentially had political consequences and possibly but not necessarily a political

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 43 impetus, but certainly always rested on their ready and preeminent access to economic resources. Stripping away functionalist assumptions, then, we can elicit a compelling, alternative narrative about Bohemia’s adoption of Christianity from Cosmas, who reveals crucial turning points and stages in a generations-long process. At every stage, the duke played a conspicuous role, but one that accorded naturally with the changing needs of the Czech community rather than a teleology of state formation. The first steps, as mentioned earlier, included building churches and supporting priests, establishing a bishop and a monastery, and later, legislating stricter adherence to Christian doctrine in everyday life. Without question, whether on account of or merely in tandem with these measures, the number of Christians continued to grow: by the mid-eleventh century a larger cathedral was required. So too was a second bishopric, established by Duke Vratislav (1061–1092) to meet the needs of his subjects in Moravia. Cosmas patently disapproved of this decision, and Vratislav’s own brother, Bishop Jaromír/Gebhard of Prague (1068–1090) fought it bitterly because establishing a new see at Olomouc in Moravia meant halving the diocese of Prague, but to no avail.60 About this same time, the bishop appointed a cathedral provost, a German named Mark, who reformed the education, daily life, and prebends of the clergy serving the see of Prague. “Previously,” Cosmas says, “the men there were without a rule, canons in name only, uncultured, unlearned, serving in choir in layman’s dress”— a reminder that the mere existence of native Christian clergy and institutions did not guarantee the highest standards, or even the basic norms, we associate with Christianity broadly.61 Finally, in 1092, again on the feast of Saint Václav: [ Duke Břetislav II] expelled all the magicians, prophets, and soothsayers from the midst of his realm. He also eradicated and consumed with fire the meadows and trees which the base commoners worshipped in many places. So also the superstitious practices which the villagers, still half-pagan, observed on the third or fourth day of Pentecost, offering libations over springs, offering sacrifices, and making offerings to demons; the burials they made in forests and fields; the plays they performed according to the pagan rite at crossroads

44 /

Lisa Wolverton

and crossroad temples as if for the suppression of spirits; and the profane jests, which they performed over the dead, rousing useless ghosts, wearing masks on their faces, and reveling. The good duke exterminated these abominations and other sacrileges, so they might no longer persist among the people of God.62 Old habits died hard, particularly, it seems, when it came to death rituals. For the first century or more, Christians in Bohemia not only lived side by side with non-Christians—even as their numbers dwindled—but themselves maintained some of their old ways.63 Yet decade by decade the Christian community grew, and these last vestiges of the old ways either disappeared or were assimilated and tolerated as local customs, even as, through the work of both native reformers and the influence of outsiders, the community simultaneously strove toward prevailing Christian, so to speak, best practices. After this time, of course, ecclesiastical institutions continued to develop, and the religious beliefs and practices of the Christian community never ceased evolving, but in the first two centuries of Christianity in Bohemia, the Přemyslid dukes — as Cosmas tells it — had helped assure it was firmly planted.64

A Slavonic-Latin Hybrid John Van Engen’s approach to understanding medieval Christianity has never hinged on institutions as conventionally defined; more important always were the teachings promulgated within and supported by them, as well as the enactment of belief in ritual practice and daily life. Yet, in narratives of Christianization and elsewhere, institutions often overshadow the ritual activities that occurred within them and in which the wider community surely participated.65 In part, that is a consequence of sources, material or textual, that compel an emphasis on externals — churches, grave sites, decorative forms, writings produced or copied, laws proclaimed— and give no access to internal thoughts and feelings. Thus, for Bohemia, aside from ample evidence of an abiding local reverence for Saint Václav, we can only assume that the doctrinal teachings offered by priests and espoused by Bohemian Christians accorded with those

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 45 typical of Roman Christianity elsewhere in the earlier Middle Ages, and that these were enshrined and reinforced by ritual and social practices likewise similar. Still, scholars have long acknowledged that everywhere in Christendom local permutations existed and even flourished, so long as they neither came to the attention of Rome nor tested the limits of received doctrine. Bohemia’s peculiarity was the coexistence, for at least two centuries, of two separate ritual languages and textual cultures, one Latin, the other Slavonic. This circumstance is normally omitted or minimized in narratives of the Christianization of East Central Europe framed as the region’s eventual incorporation into Western Christendom. At the same time, scholars of the broader Slavic world, stretching from the Elbe to the Balkans and east to Kiev and beyond, have tended to construct narratives that presume contending monolithic Christianities, Orthodox versus Catholic, East versus West, or, more particularly but nevertheless the same, Methodius and his Moravian disciples using Old Church Slavonic versus the German episcopacy, Bavarian missionaries, and Latinate clergy.66 To be sure, both views have their representatives in the sources. On the one hand, recall from above that the papal letter authorizing the Prague see’s foundation stated, “Not according to the rite or sect of the people of Bulgaria or Russia, nor in the Slavic language, but rather following apostolic laws and decrees, at the will of the whole church you should choose someone more preferable for this work: a cleric well educated in Latin letters.”67 We might read this as evidence of a view— whether Cosmas’s or the pope’s — that opposing Christianities indeed existed, were identifiable by their ritual languages, and stood as readily available options from which the Czechs might or were required to choose. Alternately, presuming it a genuine papal document, we might ascribe such a view merely to the Roman clergy, inclined to impose assumptions on a region little known to them. On the other hand, Cosmas, himself a native Czech and, as dean of Prague cathedral, indisputably well informed, omits any mention of Slavonic practice at all. His silence, beyond this letter, is absolute — and almost certainly deliberate. Other evidence suggests a situation more fluid on the ground, one the historiography ought better to reflect. To appreciate the place of Slavonic practice in Christian Bohemia, Cosmas cannot be our guide. But almost immediately after his death in

46 /

Lisa Wolverton

1125, the failings of his chronicle on this score were perceived by contemporaries and an effort was made to rectify them. A monk or monks at the Bohemian monastery of Sázava, to the southeast of Prague, noted the omission of this community and of Slavonic practice while copying Cosmas’s chronicle. The copyist thus inserted what appears to be a preexisting text, describing Sázava’s foundation by a hermit named Prokop, trained in Slavonic letters, and the vicissitudes of his community as subsequent monks and dukes sought to suppress or promote the Slavonic tradition.68 The story it tells — the one it implicitly faulted Cosmas for omitting — lionizes Sázava’s holy founder and first abbot Prokop, demonizes internal factions who, perhaps opportunistically, criticized Slavonic practice, and demonstrates how Bohemia’s dukes were called upon to resolve these disputes. It begins with Prokop, whose holy reputation spread such that followers swarmed to him, keen to reject the world.69 He then built a church and gathered his followers together to live “according to the example” of Benedict.70 Duke Oldřich (1012–1037) and his court supported these efforts, investing Prokop as abbot, and the duke’s son Břetislav I later endowed the monastery with property.71 However, after the deaths of Prokop and of Břetislav, internal dissention led some to conspire at Duke Spitihněv’s court until their “lies” reached the duke’s ears; they claimed that “through the Slavonic letters, openly wrong and altogether perverse men were a heretical and hypocritical sect,” and they called upon the duke to establish Latin monks there instead.72 The other party, the Slavonic monks, fled into exile, while a German abbot was appointed at Sázava. But when Duke Spitihněv, dying young, was succeeded by his brother, Vratislav, the exiled monks were recalled. Still, after a succession of holy abbots, there continued to be dissenters within the monastery (portrayed by the anonymous author as dissolute). Nonetheless, Duke Vratislav ( later king) held the abbot of Sázava in such great esteem that “he seemed superior in dignity to nearly all Bohemian abbots.”73 Indeed, Vratislav even allowed Abbot Božetěch to crown him on feast days, in place of Bishop Cosmas of Prague, who, the author tells us, was incensed.74 The abbot’s enemies within and outside the monastery, having waited until Vratislav’s death, took their complaints to Břetislav II, who expelled the abbot and his Slavonic brethren. The author thus laments, “The books of their lan-

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 47 guage, altogether effaced and ruined, will never again be read aloud in that place.”75 A second interpolation, inserted elsewhere in Cosmas’s text by an author with a different Latin style and different allegiances, records that it was in 1097 that Duke Břetislav and Bishop Cosmas together appointed the provost of Břevnov, Diethard, as abbot of Sázava; the abbot then bought and copied many books, presumably in Latin, since “he found none but Slavonic in that place.”76 This passage concludes by noting that Abbot Diethard reigned at Sázava for thirty-seven years, nine months, and eleven days — indicating 1135 as a date post quem for these insertions. The author of the first text plainly favored the Slavonic party, suggesting that while the community’s adherence to a Slavonic liturgy and the books that sustained it failed to survive into the twelfth century, some reverence for Slavonic practice persisted at Sázava as late as 1135, when the text was inserted into Cosmas’s chronicle. ( Thirteenthcentury efforts to win Prokop’s canonization likely hint at still longer memorialization.)77 The evidence from and about Sázava supplements the small corpus of extant texts of Bohemian origin in Old Church Slavonic (OCS), reaching back to the early to mid-tenth century.78 The so-called First OCS Life seems to have been written very soon after Václav’s death, perhaps as early as 940; it represents a distinct version and different spiritual emphases than the corpus of Latin legends, all of which it seems to predate. Although we can scarcely determine the relationship of literary Slavonic to the Czech vernacular spoken at this time, there is no question that these writings partake— and even played a seminal role—in a self-consciously textual tradition.79 Slavonic was written in a distinctive script, Glagolitic, said to have been devised by Methodius’s brother Constantine/Cyril, which then evolved into early Cyrillic, the script of the surviving manuscripts.80 The link between literacy and Latin that prevailed everywhere else in medieval continental Europe was, in Bohemia, not exclusive. Moreover, since even the script was not Latinate (unlike for Old English), there must have been some means to provide a separate education in it, as well as the resources to acquire and copy books. The Sázava text describes Prokop as a Bohemian “thoroughly trained in the Slavonic letters at one time invented by the most holy Bishop Cyril and instituted canonically.”81 And throughout its account of the community’s troubles,

48 /

Lisa Wolverton

it explicitly stresses books and makes no mention of ritual, doctrine, or even learning generally; litteras and libros are the key words it repeats. Thus, while a textual tradition unquestionably existed, the degree to which a distinct liturgical tradition, with different norms of ritual practice and doctrinal emphases, also existed cannot be determined. This Sázava text and the survival of a second OCS life of Václav, dating perhaps to the early eleventh century, indicates that Slavonic influences persisted long after Methodius’s death and the earliest stages of Christianization in Bohemia. Both also demonstrate that the Slavonic and Latin literary traditions flourished side by side in Bohemia, for the anonymous Second OCS Life is patently derived from Gumpold’s Latin vita.82 How many more texts, including translations of the Bible and liturgical books, were among those copied, preserved, composed, and ultimately burned at Sázava, we cannot know. Whatever the scope or quality of the Slavonic tradition, there is no question that—Cosmas’s silence notwithstanding—not one but two forms of literate Christianity existed for two centuries in Bohemia. Unfortunately, given Cosmas’s omissions, we cannot determine the relationship between the Slavonic and Latin traditions outside the vicissitudes of the community at Sázava.83 Were the churches built by Boleslav II devoted to the Latin liturgy, a Slavonic tradition, or both? Those clergy who immigrated to Bohemia from German-speaking lands surely, at least initially, performed Latinate rituals. Although scholars routinely— and quite logically — presume that Slavonic clergy also immigrated and thus came to preach and officiate at Christian services in Bohemia, we cannot really determine how many did so, where they came from, what kind of training they received and where, what books they brought with them or found in Bohemia, and how they were welcomed. Did some German-born clergy themselves acclimate to Slavonic practice? Even if we assume that bishops of Prague, as Pope John demanded, adhered chiefly to Latin — and there is no reason necessarily to assume so — we cannot know whether, to what degree, or under what circumstances they tolerated the ecclesiastical use of Slavonic. Sázava’s very existence suggests at least tacit episcopal sanction. Moreover, few other monasteries existed in Bohemia at the time of its foundation: the women’s convent of Saint George in Prague Castle; the Benedictine house at Břevnov

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 49 outside Prague; and another at Ostrov, further down the Vltava from Prague. Given their scarcity and late emergence, monasteries as institutions seem not to have played a significant role in Christianity’s early development in Bohemia.84 Nonetheless, that one of the first — and, for a long time, only — four monastic communities was a Slavonic preserve suggests contemporary acknowledgment of the significance of Slavonic practice to worship among early Czech Christians. It is only through the distorted lens of hindsight that Sázava appears as a marginalized, isolated outpost of Slavonic. By the later eleventh century the use of Slavonic alongside Latin came to be either a source of tension or exploitable as such, and the dukes felt the pressure most acutely. All the dukes involved in Sázava’s travails, one way or another, were also actively involved in ecclesiastical affairs, and the anonymous author from Sázava tells of local protagonists seeking their intervention as leaders committed to the faith. For their part, as Bohemia’s dukes and bishops moved more freely and frequently in Christian circles outside Bohemia, they may have become increasingly conscious that local, bilingual practice deviated from the norm elsewhere. In the midst of the long-running dispute between Duke Vratislav and his brother, Bishop Jaromír/Gebhard of Prague, over the newly established see in Moravia— which intersected directly with the Investiture Contest raging in the Empire85—Vratislav specifically asked for papal permission to encourage the Slavonic liturgy. In the letter copied into Gregory VII’s Register, the reformist pope refused.86 He argued, in keeping with long-standing doctrine, that vernacular practice might lead to error or “cheapen” scripture. While Vratislav’s original request does not survive, Gregory’s response suggests that the duke framed it in terms of pressures upon him from others: “We forbid that it should be done as is unwisely requested by your people, and we command you for the honour of Almighty God to resist this vain temerity with all your powers.”87 Such arguments were in the air in Bohemia too, for heresy is exactly what one faction of monks had alleged earlier at Spitihněv’s court. But so too was an alternative, the basis for Vratislav’s request that Gregory casually labeled “vain temerity.” The efforts of Vratislav’s son, Břetislav II — he who cast out the soothsayers — to eradicate Slavonic practice may have been intended to

50 /

Lisa Wolverton

follow through on official ecclesiastical proscriptions like Gregory’s, not only changing the composition of the community at Sázava, as Spitihněv had, but burning the books as well. The Sázava text does more than rectify the omissions in the Chronica Boemorum: it presents a wholly different perspective on Bohemia’s ecclesiastical history. Cosmas’s text is colored throughout by his own views of the character of the dukes whose deeds he chronicles, judged in part — if only tacitly — by their patronage of the see of Prague, whereas the anonymous author of the Sázava text inversely valorizes these same rulers, based on their attitude toward the Slavonic monks there. This suggests that today’s historians ought not to be seeking out a single hegemonic narrative of Christianization, but looking instead at the variety of ways and reasons that medieval authors shaped narratives of Christianization for themselves, whether as part of saints’ lives or chronicles.88 And, in looking beyond individual texts, we ought to avoid imposing monocausal, singular narratives of our own. This essay does not aim to replace any one of the currently prevalent narratives about the Christianization of Bohemia with another, drawn from Cosmas or some other source. Rather, I hope to have displaced some old answers, provided plausible alternatives, and above all raised the kinds of questions that can lead to a fuller understanding of early Christian practice as it shaped the lives of medieval Czechs. It seems that for centuries Bohemian Christianity on the ground was, exceptionally, multilingual and perhaps multi-liturgical; unexceptionally, it coexisted with pre-Christian beliefs and customs to varying and evolving degrees. Chiefly it was local, interwoven well or awkwardly with the everyday lives of people in very specific places and times. And the rulers who governed these localities — whose influence ought itself be a subject for nuanced consideration — embraced, supported, influenced, mediated, enforced, appropriated, or simply participated in Christian practice for many, probably changing, reasons and toward various ends, only some of them political. While broader models of the Christianizing process have their place, as do comparative perspectives, these ought to grow out from the particularities of local, lived experience. Only in this way can we, as scholars, fulfill one of the injunctions John Van Engen leveled at historians in his best-known essay: “take religion seriously.”89

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 51 Notes 1. The literature is vast and cannot be adequately summarized here. For a useful critique, especially of archeological approaches, see William G. Kilbride, “Why I Feel Cheated by the Term ‘Christianization’,” Archeological Review from Cambridge 17 (2000): 1–17. 2. The equivalence between adoption of Christianity and inclusion in a wider European whole, characterized by a cluster of shared political, social, economic, and cultural characteristics, is more often assumed than analyzed. An exception is Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 900 –1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). In scholarship on the “core” of Europe in the early Middle Ages, these simplistic older narratives have already been displaced; cf. Jonathan Couser, “Inventing Paganism in EighthCentury Bavaria,” Early Medieval Europe 18 (2010): 26– 42, esp. 27. 3. For recent treatments of this process in Scandinavia, see Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); and Saebjørg Walaker Nordeide, The Viking Age as a Period of Religious Transformation: The Christianization of Norway from AD 560 –1150/1200 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 4. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 541. 5. For an insightful analysis of the difficulties inherent in trying to remedy this evidentiary gap with the results of archeological research, see Simon Burnell and Edward James, “The Archeology of Conversion on the Continent in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries: Some Observations and Comparisons with AngloSaxon England,” in St. Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard Gameson ( Thrupp, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishers, 1999), 83–106. 6. Most are now available in English translation. See Marvin Kantor, The Origins of Christianity in Bohemia: Sources and Commentary ( Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990); also Cosmas of Prague, The Chronicle of the Czechs, trans. and intro. Lisa Wolverton ( Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009) [ hereafter CC ]. For comparison, Lars Boje Mortensen provides a useful table of the earliest writings produced in Hungary, Denmark, and Norway, all nearly a century later than in Bohemia: “Sanctified Beginnings and Mythopoietic Movements: The First Wave of Writing on the Past in Norway, Denmark, and Hungary, c. 1000 –1230,” in The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000 – 1300), ed. Lars Boje Mortensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 253. 7. For an overview of the arguments offered by recent Czech scholarship, see Petr Sommer, Dušan Treštík, and Josef Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” in Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900 –1200, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

52 /

Lisa Wolverton

2007), 214 – 62. This essay is severely flawed by both the presumptions of its interpretive framework and the tendency to present as the facts of early Bohemian society and Christianization conclusions wholly unsubstantiated by the extant sources. My essay here cannot begin to address these inaccuracies, which appear not just occasionally but often sustain the discussion for pages. I hope instead to outline a new approach, starting from scratch and grounded in the sources, however limited, and to address the assumptions that shape the narrative of Christianization per se (rather than those that yield or inflect the individual “factoids” on which Sommer, Treštík, and Žemlička’s analysis purports to rest). 8. The “obscurity” and difficulty dating the see’s foundation is well known. See Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800 –1056 (London: Longman, 1991), 164; he suggests “perhaps” 973 or 976, both dates conventionally offered in the scholarship. 9. See, for instance, David Kalhous, Anatomy of a Duchy: The Political and Ecclesiastical Structures of Early Přemyslid Bohemia ( Leiden: Brill, 2012), 146 – 56; he provides a summary and bibliography of previous interpretations as well as offering his own. Note also that this provides the framework for Ian Wood’s analysis of the Václav legends, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400 –1500 ( New York: Longman, 2001), 187– 206. 10. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 164 – 65 (e.g., “a bishopric was set up at Prague”; “some of the new bishoprics were clearly intended to cover a specific ethnic grouping: Prague for the Bohemians, Oldenbourg for Wagrians . . . , Meissen for the Misni.”) 11. Othloni Vita sancti Wolfgangi, ed. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 4 ( Hanover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1842), 538. Note that Othlo reports that Bishop Wolfgang was compensated by Emperor Otto for the loss of the Bohemian part of his diocese after Otto had given his approval for the establishment of a bishopric there. 12. For an introduction to Cosmas and his chronicle, see CC, 3–17; also Lisa Wolverton, Cosmas of Prague: Narrative, Classicism, Politics ( Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015). 13. Scholarly consensus presumes this to be John XIII (965– 972), since his reign dates overlap with Cosmas’s indirect dating of the events to 967. However, since the letter itself is undated, it could refer to John XIV (983– 984) or John XV (985– 996), or, less likely, to John XII (937– 964). Boleslav II was duke of Bohemia from 967 to 999. 14. CC, 71. 15. Ibid., 72– 73. 16. Ibid., 73. 17. Cosmas does not provide any date for the see’s foundation, perhaps deliberately, to subtly hide his own ignorance. But he dates Thietmar’s death “after not many days” to January 2, 969. But then, following the vitae, he links the begin-

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 53 ning of Adalbert’s episcopacy to Otto II’s return from the battle of Crotone, thus 982, and has Adalbert consecrated by Archbishop Willigis of Mainz (975–1011). These obvious inconsistencies created a space for the speculative construction of the standard scholarly narrative of political negotiation over the see’s founding. 18. Lisa Wolverton, Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 137– 41. 19. CC, 84. 20. Wolverton, Hastening, 229– 31; see also 118– 23 regarding ecclesiastical resources overall. 21. CC, 71. 22. Ibid. 23. See “Life and Martyrdom of Saint Wenceslas (Crescente fide),” in Kantor, Origins, 145; and “Life and Martyrdom of Saint Wenceslas and His Grandmother, Saint Ludmila (Legenda Christiani),” in Kantor, Origins, 171. 24. CC, 66 – 67. Here is some hint at a Regensburg connection, although Cosmas avoids suggesting any institutional relationship and instead emphasizes Michael’s personal friendship with Václav. Scholars, however, make a great deal of the relics of Saint Vitus, the patron saint of the influential Saxon monastery of Corvey, most especially to mount arguments for a political rationale for Václav’s murder (i.e., in opposition to his supposedly pro-Saxon policies). They also take the fact that the date Cosmas gives for Michael’s consecration of the church of Saint Vitus, September 22, is in fact the feast day of Saint Emmeram, to whom the most prominent monastery in Regensburg was dedicated; this ostensibly testifies to the “conflict” between Regensburg and Saxony over Bohemia as a missionary diocese. See, for instance, Henry Mayr-Harting, “Was the Identity of the Prague Church in the Tenth Century Imposed from Without or Developed from Within?” in his Religion and Society in the Medieval West, 600 – 1200 ( Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 271– 77. This “contest” between Saxony and Bavaria is a variation on the assumption of Bohemia as a contested mission field between Bavarian and Slavonic clergy (see below). 25. Crescente fide, in Kantor, Origins, 151; CC, 68. 26. Wolverton, Hastening, 125– 26. 27. Crescente fide, in Kantor, Origins, 148. 28. After Vojtěch/Adalbert, the first native-born bishop was Severus (1030 –1067), and thereafter the bishops of Prague were just as often Czech as German. 29. CC, 104. 30. Ibid. 31. On the debates over the nature of the early tithe in Bohemia, see Pavel Bolina, “Příspěvek k interpretaci Kosmových desátkových údajů,” Český časopis historický 103 (2005): 828– 60.

54 /

Lisa Wolverton

32. Annales Fuldenses, ed. G. H. Pertz and Friedrich Kurze, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 7 ( Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1878), 35. 33. Burnell and James likewise endorse a model of “Christianisation by osmosis” as an alternative to emphasizing “purposeful expeditionary missions.” “Archaeology of Conversion,” 92. 34. See Wolverton, Hastening, 149– 56. 35. Gumpold of Mantua, Passio sancti Venceslavi martyris, ed. F. J. Zoubek, Fontes Rerum Bohemicarum ( Prague, 1873), 1:146 – 66. On this text, see Wood, Missionary Life, 195– 97. 36. Thus tenth-century Bohemia looks much like eighth-century Bavaria, as described by Couser, including the duke’s efforts to “organize Christian religious life there” by means of bishops. Couser, “Inventing Paganism,” 33. 37. Cf., for instance, Jonathan Shepard’s discussion of Christianity in early Poland: while on the one hand he notes, “Polish Christianity, one must stress, was sui generis, and ideally it should be compared closely with that of the Czechs”; on the other he declares, “taking advantage of a remoter geographical location, trade routes, and political ties with the already-Christian Czechs, a Slav potentate [in Poland] gained dominance over many surrounding populations, using the Christian religion not only as an agent of dominion, but also to fend off the Christian Goliath [i.e., the German Empire] to his west.” Jonathan Shepard, “Slav Christianities, 800 –1100,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600 –c. 1100, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith, with Roberta Baranowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 38. Cf. Winroth, Conversion of Scandinavia, 138– 60. 39. For instance, David Kalhous states, “The role of church organisation was indisputable in the processes that led to the strengthening of the central power.” Anatomy, 143; similarly, 156 – 57. 40. E.g., Sommer, Treštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” 245– 46. 41. CC, 116. 42. Ibid., 115. 43. Ibid., 115–17. 44. Cosmas says of Duke Oldřich, upon meeting the beautiful Božena, “Sending for her immediately, he took her as his, although he did not dissolve his old marriage. At that time . . . it was permitted to have two or three wives. Nor was it a sin for a man to abduct the wife of another, or for a wife to marry another’s husband” (CC, 92). He uses similar language in describing the earliest inhabitants of Bohemia and conditions at the time of Adalbert’s episcopacy (CC, 37 and 79, respectively). However, all these passages show heavy literary influences and may be taken as descriptions of actual social practices only with caution. 45. CC, 115.

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 55 46. Ibid., 117. 47. Ibid., 117. 48. CC, 116: “let a judgment of God be held between them and let the one who is found guilty pay the penalty.” On ordeal, see Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), esp. 4 –12, on its Frankish origins and coalescence in the age of Charlemagne. 49. On a similar development in eighth-century Bavaria, see Couser, “Inventing Paganism,” 29– 30. 50. CC, 71. 51. Ibid., 80 – 81; Cosmas is following the lives by both John Canaparius and Bruno of Querfurt, who report this event similarly: S. Adalberti pragensis episcopi et martyris, ed. Jadwiga Karwasi ska, Monumenta Poloniae Historica, N. S., vol. 4, fasc. 1– 2 ( Warsaw, 1962–1969). 52. Ibid., 80. 53. Ibid., 77. Cosmas here apparently supplies information of his own, not found in the vitae. 54. Wolverton, Hastening, 155– 61. 55. For a brief overview in English, see Veronika Gervers-Molnár, “Origins of Romanesque Rotundas in East-Central Europe,” in Rapports du IIIe Congrès international d’archéologie slave, vol. 1 (Brno: Veda, 1980), 307–12. The fullest treatment is Anežka Merhautová-Livorová, Einfache mitteleuropäische Rundkirchen (Ihr Ursprung, Zweck und ihre Bedeutung) (Prague: Academia, 1970). For illustrations, see Anežka Merhautová and Dušan Třeštík, Romanské umění v  Čechách a na Moravě (Prague: Odeon, 1984), esp. 46, 54, 80 – 81, 85, 114 –15. 56. Wolverton, Hastening, 165– 85. 57. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe ( New York: W.  W. Norton, 1982), 145. 58. CC, 135. 59. Ibid., 138– 39. 60. See Lisa Wolverton, “Manipulating Historical Memory in Late Eleventh- and Early Twelfth-Century Prague,” Haskins Society Journal 23 (2011; appeared 2014): 71– 86. 61. CC, 145– 46. 62. Ibid., 184. 63. Such a long evolution and coexistence, as manifested in archeological remains, was also the norm elsewhere. Cf. Nordeide, Viking Age, on Norway; or, for an exceptionally thorough, localized analysis, Sam Turner, Making a Christian Landscape: The Countryside in Early Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex ( Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006). 64. Note that there exists a body of literature, mostly devoted to preChristian Slavic beliefs generally, that substitutes assumptions derived from anthropological models for either textual or archeological evidence. For a recent

56 /

Lisa Wolverton

example of this tendency, which likewise imposes assumptions about Christianity’s supposed political usefulness, see Przemysław Urbańczyk, “The Politics of Conversion in North Central Europe,” in The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300 – 1300, ed. Martin Carver ( New York: Macmillan, 2003), 15– 27. 65. Cf. Kilbride, “Why I Feel Cheated,” 4. 66. In the Czech scholarship, this manifests in an emphasis on the Great Moravian Empire and most especially on assumptions about its role as a precursor and model for subsequent Bohemian political and ecclesiastical developments— although the evidence for connections, much less continuity, between the Moravia of Svatopluk and Methodius and later Přemyslid Bohemia is very slim. See Sommer, Treštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” esp. 221– 25, 227– 28, and 251. 67. CC, 73. 68. These are published as appendices in Bretholz’s Latin edition of Cosmas (hereafter CB): Cosmas of Prague, Cosmae pragensis chronica boemorum, ed. Bertold Bretholz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, N. S. 2 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1923), 242– 51, 255– 56. Both the interpolations and the continuation have been published as Mnich Sázavský, Fontes Rerum Bohemicarum, 2 vols., ed. Josef Emler (Prague: Nakladatelství Musea Království českého, 1874), 2:407– 60. See also Wolverton, Hastening, 134 – 35. 69. CB, 242– 44. 70. Ibid., 244: “iuxta exemplar almifici patris Benedicti.” 71. Ibid., 244 – 45. 72. Ibid., 247: “scilicet dicentes per Sclavonicas litteras heresis secta ypochrisisque esse aperte irretitos ac omnino perversos.” 73. Ibid., 250. 74. Note that this Bishop Cosmas (r. 1091–1098) is not the same as the chronicler of the same name. 75. CB, 251: “libri lingue eorum deleti omnino et disperditi nequaquam ulterius in eodem loco recitabuntur.” 76. CB, 255. This passage appears in book 3, immediately after Cosmas introduces the date, 1097 (CB, 165). The entirety of the first interpolation, however, was inserted at the end of book 1, just after the notation dating Jaromír’s murder to 1038, and before Cosmas’s closing flourish (CB, 79). 77. See Michael Goodich, “Vision, Dream and Canonization Policy under Pope Innocent III,” in Pope Innocent and his World, ed. J. C. Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 160 – 62. 78. Translated into English and described in the introduction by Marvin Kantor, in Kantor, Origins. 79. Although most of these various texts survive only in later manuscripts of non-Bohemian provenance, scholars generally agree that they originated in

The Christianization of Bohemia \ 57 Bohemia. Regarding the First OCS Life, see Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 11–14, 18. On the others, see Kantor, Origins, 25– 30; he also provides a review of the scholarship (30 – 46). The relationship and dating of these and the Latin vitae remains a subject of much discussion, even dispute, and the conclusions offered by Kantor, most especially regarding the Latin lives, are by no means definitive. Indeed, many aspects of and assumptions about Slavonic practice in Bohemia remain contentious. Cf. František Graus, “Slovanská liturgie a písemnictví v přemyslovkých Čechách 10. století,” Českoslovenký časopis historický 14 (1966): 473– 95. 80. For an introduction, see Alexander Shenker, The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 81. CB, 242: “Sclavonicis litteris a sanctissimo Quirillo episcopo quondam inventis et statutis canonice admodum imbutus.” 82. Kantor, Origins, 19. 83. No evidence supports the assumption that Bohemian society, even in ecclesiastical circles, was riven between pro- and anti-Slavonic camps, much less that these corresponded to anti- or pro-German sentiments; thus Cosmas’s omissions should not be taken either as documenting them or as the “triumph of the Latinists.” Such views are common in the Czech (especially older) scholarship, and are also reflected in A. P. Vlasto’s overview of early Christianity in Bohemia, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom: An Introduction to the Medieval History of the Slavs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 107– 9; for the quote, 107. 84. Cf. Burnell and James, “Archaeology of Conversion,” on the comparatively different role monasteries played in the Christianization process in AngloSaxon England versus Alemannia and Bavaria (103). 85. Wolverton, “Manipulating Historical Memory.” 86. H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073– 1085: An English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 336 (Letter 7.11, January 2, 1080): “Now because your highness has asked that we would agree to divine service being performed among you in the Slavonic tongue, you should know that we can in no way favour this petition of yours.” 87. Ibid. 88. Cf. Couser, “Inventing Paganism.” 89. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 544.

Three

Th e C a t h a r M i d d l e A g e s a s an Historiographical Problem r. i. moore

If there is one thing that “everybody knows” about medieval Europe it is that the Cathars were the followers of a twelfth- and thirteenth-century heresy widely supported in the part of France now generally called the Languedoc, the target of the Albigensian crusade (1209–1229) and of the inquisitors brought in afterward to hunt down its fugitive survivors. From vacations and research trips, from films and novels—including much better novels than The Da Vinci Code—as well as for the small minority of the reading public that has taken university courses in medieval history, the pays cathare is familiar as a land of ruined castles once the home of splendid courts presided over by jovial lords and gracious ladies and beguiled by the lyrics of the troubadours. The idyll was destroyed when grim and merciless fanatics from the north brought the castles and their lords to ruin and burned the Cathars they had sheltered on the pyres of Lavaur, Minerve, and Montségur, from whose ashes was spirited away a treasure that may have been anything from a large quantity of gold and precious stones to the texts of the gnostic scriptures or the Holy Grail itself.1 Among the many obstacles placed in the way of this account by fun-hating historians, the simplest — though one of the most recently 58

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 59 articulated — is that nobody in the thirteenth-century pays cathare, accused or accuser, actually used the word Cathar.2 It does not occur in the large body of letters and sermons denouncing heresy in the region from the middle of the twelfth century, in the records of the region’s inquisitions, or indeed in any medieval source directly from it. The heretics — and let me immediately scotch one persistent misrepresentation of the revisionist tendency with which I associate myself by saying, firmly and unequivocally, that there were heretics, people who knowingly rejected the authority and some teachings of the church, in the region at least by the 1160s.3 They were known to their followers by the ubiquitous honorifics boni homines and bone femine.4 To the earliest Dominican inquisitors, who pursued them so tenaciously and interrogated them so closely and carefully, they were simply heretici, as distinct from the Waldenses who were also active in the region. Bernard of Clairvaux denounced Albi as a nest of heresy in 1145, and in the run-up to and during the crusade the term most widely used by outsiders to describe its targets was Albigenses.5 After the middle of the thirteenth century Albigenses was generalized by Capetian bureaucrats to describe what they considered the heresy par excellence of the conquered territories, and it remained the preferred designation until very recently.6 Charles Schmidt’s Histoire des sectes des Cathares ou Albigeois (1849)7 established “Cathar” as a name for the heresy, which he identified as a dualist religion of Balkan origin and distinguished definitively from Waldensianism, with which, since the fourteenth century, it had often been confused. Nevertheless, “Cathars” and “Catharism” were rare in mainstream scholarly discourse until after World War II, especially in France. Antoine Dondaine, O.P., on whose discovery and edition of key texts immediately before and during the war the modern study of “Catharism” is founded, published what he believed to be “les actes du concile albigeois de St. Félix de Caraman” in 1946, but in 1949 and 1950 wrote of “La hiérarchie cathare en Italie.”8 Arno Borst’s Die Katharer (1953) was the first scholarly history since Schmidt’s to use the word in its title.9 In France the Cathars broke free from the confines of regionalism, exoticism, and secret societies to join the national scene and the “séries de grande diffusion” with the appearance in the series Que sais-je? of Fernand Niel’s Albigeois et Cathares in 1955. Its opening words expressed concisely, and precisely, the most

60 /

R. I. Moore

important implication of the change: “L’hérésie albigeoise, qui se développa dans le midi de la France aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, n’est que la manifestation locale d’une mouvement beaucoup plus important, le catharisme.”10 The Cathars were at last cemented into the national legend in 1959 by Zoé Oldenbourg’s Le Bûcher de Montségur,11 in Gallimard’s prestigious collection Trente journées qui ont fait la France, whose envisaged authors included not only numerous academicians and instituteurs, but also two prime ministers of the Fourth Republic and a future president of France.12 As Jean-Louis Biget comments, the battle of Muret (September 12, 1213) might have been a better choice.13 Anglophone historians were commonly writing of “Cathars” and “Catharism” by the 1970s but did not feature them in book titles until a deluge in the late 1990s.14 The recency of the usage is worth stressing, not only because it may come as a surprise to anybody now approaching the subject for the first time, but also because some of the academic response to the criticism of it in recent years, which Mark Gregory Pegg has led with invigorating forensic élan, has itself become an intriguing, if minor, historiographical phenomenon.15 However, the new terminology registered not a new interpretation of the nature and history of the main heresy of the region between the Rhône and the Garonne, but the canonization and vulgarization (in the French sense) of an old one. Schmidt’s conclusions that it was Balkan in origin, dualist in theology, and part of a wider European heretical movement had been widely accepted and regularly repeated.16 To the extent that the vogue for calling it “Catharism” that grew up after World War II had a scholarly basis, it reflected what appeared to be the confirmation of his view, in dramatically clarified and systematized form, by three texts discovered and edited by Dondaine: the “Acts of the Council of St-Félix-de-Caraman”; the De heresi catharorum in Lombardia (as Dondaine called it), a fragment which he had found in a late thirteenthcentury manuscript but dated, with some ingenuity, before 1214;17 and a tractatus de hereticis from 1270 by a Dominican inquisitor, Anselm of Alessandria. If Dondaine’s intricately argued and closely interdependent provenances and datings were correct — and they stood unquestioned for many years — these texts added to the known documentation a lively and circumstantial description of the transmission of Catharism from

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 61 France (whither it had been carried from Constantinople by returning crusaders) to Lombardy in (it would appear) the 1160s. Its subsequent diffusion under the influence of contacts with the Byzantine world produced confusion and serial schism among the heretics in Lombardy, but a powerful, monolithic, and doctrinally radical Cathar church in the Languedoc. Adopted and elaborated by Borst and unreservedly endorsed by Grundmann,18 Dondaine’s account reigned unchallenged for a generation — except, as it happens, by that generation’s most formidable scholar of heresy in the region, Yves Dossat19— to underpin the acclamation and celebration of “Catharism” in late twentieth-century historiography. In a recent reassessment of the “war on heresy” between about 1000 and 1250 I concluded that this narrative, and with it “the Cathars” and “the Cathar church,” which have figured so prominently in accounts of heresy and its repression in the Europe of the high Middle Ages, were largely mythical, a unifying construct imposed by the literate elite on a multitude of local cults and enthusiasms both real and imagined.20 An academic invention of the mid-twelfth century, the term Cathari was brought into fairly regular use by Innocent III as a synonym for “Patarene.” Patarene had been coined in the 1050s to describe the followers of Ariald of Cucciago, Landolf Cotta, and Anselm of Baggio (from 1061 Pope Alexander II) in their campaign against the archbishop and clergy of Milan, whom they denounced as simoniac and Nicolaitan heretics. The movement quickly spread to other cities in Tuscany and Lombardy, financed in part by Archdeacon Hildebrand. As his and Anselm’s involvement makes vividly clear, it was intimately associated with what we now regard as the first phases of “Gregorian” or “papal” reform, whose urgent objective and key strategy was to delegitimize bishops and clergy of the old order by public denunciation and to secure their replacement, if necessary through popular action incited and led by charismatic preachers. So “Patarene” became a common description in Italy of those who opposed episcopal authority in their cities. By the middle of the twelfth century, as the new order rejected charisma in favor of reliance on the authority of the institutions that it had now largely captured, “Patarene” had come unequivocally to imply heresy. No particular theological error is specifically associated with the term, but it seems reasonable, to put it mildly, to suspect an association with denial of the sacraments of unworthy

62 /

R. I. Moore

or improperly consecrated priests: the medieval Donatist, bearer of the heresy that dare not speak its name, posed a far greater danger to the church than the medieval Manichee ever did. Hence the inclusion of the Patarenes among the heresies proscribed by the Council of Verona in 1184 which, in its decree Ad abolendam, demanded of the Italian bishops regular and exhaustive inquisition for heresy in their dioceses, directed not only at the heretics themselves, but also at their patrons and supporters and at clergy and lay officials who failed to prosecute them. Cathars also appeared on this list, along with Humiliati, Waldenses, Passagini, Josephini, and Arnoldists.21 They had been equated with Patarini by Lateran III (as they were not in Ad abolendam, which lists the two as separate heresies) in 1179: “In Gascony and the regions of Albi and Toulouse and in other places the loathsome heresy of those whom some call the Cathars, others the Patarenes, others the Publicani, and others by different names, has grown so strong that they no longer practice their wickedness in secret, as others do, but proclaim their error publicly and draw the simple and weak to join them.”22 Despite their explicit differentiation in Ad abolendam, it has been taken as read from these two decrees and their many reiterations that Cathars and Patarenes were one and the same heresy,23 already well entrenched by this date — many have thought much earlier — both in the lands of the Count of Toulouse and in the cities of northern and central Italy. It has invariably been taken to be a dualist heresy, though how and when it became so, and with what variations of doctrine and affiliation within it, are questions around which the enormous literatures — the singular seems hardly adequate to their volume and variety — devoted to them from the middle of the thirteenth century until the present day have been largely constructed. On this basis their history was investigated and recorded by Dominican inquisitors from the middle decades of the thirteenth century. One of the earliest and much the most influential of these accounts, written in 1250 by the Piacenzan Raniero Sacconi, asserts that there were sixteen Cathar churches in Italy and the Balkans, each with its bishop and his adjuncts; those in Italy included exiles from the recently conquered Languedoc. According to Raniero, they shared a common body of ritual and conduct, and all believed in two principles, though they differed among themselves as to whether the evil was

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 63 uncreated or the fallen creature of the good, as well as on various, less fundamental points. Raniero’s account has been, directly and indirectly, the starting point of almost all subsequent discussion of heresy in Italy and southern France in the two centuries before he wrote. My reexamination of the sources for the growth of heresy and heresy accusations up to his time, however, concluded that he was probably wrong on some important points. I found no persuasive evidence of the presence of avowedly dualist heresy anywhere in Latin Europe, or of the so-called Cathar churches, with their organized hierarchies, more than a few decades before Raniero wrote. The suggestion that theological dualism was of little or no importance until well after the Albigensian crusade is in harmony with the excellent French and Italian work of the last quarter century on which it largely rests.24 Nor could I see any justification for assuming that those who were identified as Cathars in Italy were followers of the same heresy as the victims of the Albigensian crusade and the persecution that accompanied and followed it in the lands between the Rhône and Garonne rivers. The Waldensian message seems to have reached Lombardy by the 1180s; the Poor Men of Lyons and the Poor Lombards had tried, and failed, to resolve their differences over the legacy of Valdès by 1218.25 But while a lively and persuasive picture can be painted, as Caterina Bruschi has done extremely well,26 of social and commercial connections among dissenters of various origins and tendencies stretching back to the years before the crusade and greatly intensified under the pressure of persecution after it, there is no convincing evidence of doctrinal identity, still less of organizational affiliations, between the people who were called Cathars by the Dominican inquisitors in Italy from the 1230s and the men and women of the midi whom their brethren of Toulouse and Carcassonne knew at the same time simply as “heretici”— and not, let it be emphasized, by the name of any heresiarch or sect, ancient or modern. Compelling as the reasoning and conclusions of The War on Heresy may be, it is just possible that every detail of them may not be immediately and unanimously embraced by the academic community. Nevertheless, I propose here to avail myself of the brief limbo between publication and the appearance of scholarly reviews to consider without further defense or more reiteration than I can avoid a question that immediately

64 /

R. I. Moore

arises from them: if the “Cathars” of the Languedoc and most of what goes with them are a myth, why has that myth been so fervently and so tenaciously embraced? The short and obvious answer, valid until only a generation or so ago, is that it was a beneficiary of what John Van Engen called “the common presupposition that medieval culture was essentially ‘Christian’ or ‘Catholic.’ ”27 Whether to be “vilified as so much superstition or revered as so much authoritative tradition,” the story of the dissemination, discovery, and eradication of a widespread, wellorganized, and theologically radical counter-church, comparable in scale and intellectual menace with the great heresies of antiquity, suited the church’s humanist, Protestant, and Enlightened critics quite as well as it did the church itself. On the other hand, when thanks to Schmidt the “Cathars” had once again been clearly distinguished from the Waldensians, with whom they had been intermittently confused from Bernard Gui onward, and firmly identified once again as theological dualists, there was nobody to embrace them— unlike the Waldensians or other apostolic or anticlerical movements — as spiritual forebears, or, until the emergence of self-conscious Occitanism in the nineteenth century,28 as historical antecessors. Nobody had any pressing reason to scrutinize the details of their supposed teachings or the historical foundations of the supposition until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ astonishing fecundity in fantasy of every kind brought them a bizarre assortment of celebrants, from the proudly regionalist to the deeply sinister and the merely dotty. The attendant notoriety served to marginalize them even further from the standpoint of serious scholarship of every stamp until Van Engen’s “dramatic shift downward in recent historiography”29 of the 1950s and 1960s, of which, in their different ways, Étienne Delaruelle and Norman Cohn were influential pioneers.30 That shift was anticipated by what turned out to be a fatal attack on the notion that popular heresy in the medieval West was an importation from the Byzantine world, launched in 1944 by Raffaello Morghen and sustained by his student Raoul Manselli. Morghen argued that the bodily austerities and anticlerical sentiments attributed to those accused in the early eleventh century’s handful of heresy cases, which included the first execution of heretics since antiquity, the burning at Orléans in 1022,

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 65 did not amount to a coherent or consistent expression of theological dualism and could be explained, without the need to invoke external stimulus, as manifestations of spiritual awakening within the Latin tradition.31 The subsequent debate on “the origins of medieval heresy” resulted by the mid-1970s in as complete a victory for the revisionists as scholarly debate ever does, for even the minority who continued to suspect an element of Bogomil influence in the early eleventh- or early twelfth-century West conceded that before 1143— a date to whose significance we will return — it was neither causal nor formative and could be confidently detected in no identifiable heretic or group of heretics.32 From the present perspective, the significance of that debate lies not so much in the details of the argument, now for the most part of little more than antiquarian interest, as in the fact that at one time or another for a quarter of a century it engaged an extraordinary array of scholars, of both the Latin and Greek traditions and of almost every conceivable theological and methodological persuasion. Morghen himself, a student of Ernesto Buonaiuti, wrote from the modernist perspective, as Van Engen explains,33 but it is well beyond the competence of the present writer to trace in the debate that Morghen launched the pervasive echoes of that controversy and its reverberations in the Catholic world in the decades immediately before and after Vatican II, still less in the contributions of more or less sympathetic observers and fellow travelers from Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant points of view. Engaging as it did an almost equally comprehensive array of social (or, in the terminology of the age, materialist) perspectives, including those of the East German Marxists34 and, since the Bogomils were central to the issue, their Bulgarian counterparts,35 the origins debate could still serve as an admirable introduction to the wider historiographical issues of those years. It figured prominently at the International Historical Congress of 1955 in Rome, where Delaruelle, Grundmann, and Morghen presented substantial contributions.36 All three did so again at the 1962 conference at Royaumont, whose proceedings, edited by Jacques Le Goff, were published (appropriately enough) in 1968 as Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe préindustrielle.37 From the patristic legacy ( Henri-Irénée Marrou) to heretical messianism in the eighteenth century (Gershom Scholem), its lists of contents and remarkably eminent

66 /

R. I. Moore

contributors and discussants offer a strikingly eclectic view of the field at the time and a palette of approaches that anticipated much of the agenda of the following decades. Hérésies et sociétés marked the reception of heresy among the laity into the mainstream historical agenda and the point from which its historiography can be subsumed into that which Van Engen analyzed so comprehensively in 1986. It is enough to mention the Waldensians, poverty and prophecy in thirteenth-century Italy, the Free Spirit, the Lollards or the Hussites, or indeed the Templars or the witch craze, to register the progress made during the 1970s and 1980s and how fully it reflected the critical and creative insights and techniques of modern historical scholarship. In effect, to put it in the broadest terms, the insights of Grundmann and his followers were combined with those of the Annales School. Almost all this work presumed that even individuals or movements condemned as heretical could be located on an apostolically inspired spectrum of Christian enthusiasm and were to be interpreted in their social context, though with varying emphases as to the relative priority of “religious” and “social” motivation. Indeed, an implicit truce between the clerically and anticlerically inclined, embodied in a tacit understanding that the independence and autonomy of those categories themselves were not at issue, might be considered emblematic of a broader reconciliation between the traditions and exponents of secular and church history that accompanied the progress celebrated in Van Engen’s famous paper, and of which his appointment at Notre Dame was a notable example. At least in retrospect, however, there is one striking exception. The “Cathars of the Languedoc” and those who worked on them are conspicuous in Hérésies et sociétés by their absence. Even in Philippe Wolff ’s communication ( barely more than a page) on “Villes et campagnes dans l’hérésie cathare,” and in a survey by Christine Thouzellier (a student of Augustin Fliche who had taken over Dondaine’s project when his order withdrew him from the field of heresy to direct the Leonine edition of Aquinas)38 of “Tradition et résurgence dans l’hérésie médiévale,” they get only passing mentions.39 Thouzellier offered an olive branch to the revisionists by conceding that in Christian history, heresy had regularly arisen from the impulse to reform and might even, “considering itself orthodox, hope to triumph in the name of evangelical truth.”40 That was

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 67 true of some of the heresies of the eleventh century, but others, she maintained, betrayed dualistic traces of the Bogomil proselytism that in the twelfth century transformed resurgent apostolic heresy “in effect into an affiliation which owed its patronage to the East.” Thouzellier’s formulation marked another step in the emergence of a consensus that, in retrospect, can be seen to have been gathering for some years, notably in Manselli’s L’eresia del male (1963) and, despite his unqualified endorsement of Borst’s unquestioning acceptance at face value of the assertions of the texts, by Grundmann, in his report to the Rome Congress and the second edition of Religiöse Bewegungen (1961).41 Most of those who continued to insist on the lurking Bogomil presence conceded that it contributed little or nothing to the apostolic enthusiasm of the early eleventh century or the wandering preachers of the early twelfth.42 It was now accepted on all sides that heresy up to the 1140s was either the product or (in Grundmann’s 1961 formulation) the beneficiary of the evangelical revival of the eleventh century, with its strong populist overtones, and that that movement was itself closely intertwined with tensions arising from commercialization and urban growth, as Cinzio Violante (a student of Morghen’s, also present at Royaumont) had shown in a major study of the Milanese Pataria.43 This quickly became the standard account of the first century or so of popular heresy in the Middle Ages. Christopher Brooke brought it safely to England through the fog of erudition that had cut the continent off for so long, and Jeffrey Burton Russell to North America; in the second edition (1992) of his influential synthesis, Malcolm Lambert substituted Gregorian Reform for Bogomil as the starting point of the Popular Movements in which medieval heresy was manifested.44 Equally, however, it was accepted on all sides that everything changed after 1143, the most commonly accepted date for the letter in which Eberwin of Steinfeld told Bernard of Clairvaux about two groups of heretics discovered in Cologne, of which, he said, one had bishops, a division between perfecti and credentes, a ritual closely resembling the consolamentum, and the memory of predecessors who had lingered in the Balkans since antiquity. In short, an organized sect of eastern origin—Cathars!—clearly distinguished by Eberwin from “the other lot, who deny our Pope but at least do not claim to have another one of their own.”45 Whatever differences of opinion there might have been as to how recently the people

68 /

R. I. Moore

described by Eberwin had reached the West, in which particular reports of heresy in the following decades they appeared, or whether they differed among themselves on particular points of doctrine, nobody doubted that from this point on “Cathars” were present in western Europe and that reports of people who expressed “dualist” opinions or values, or had practices that could be likened to the consolamentum, were to be taken as referring to them. This applied particularly to the lands of the Count of Toulouse, identified by the Council of Tours in 116346 as the source of the heresy whose leaders brazenly defied the regional hierarchy at a meeting at Lombers, near Albi, in 1165 and were exposed and humbled, though without lasting effect, by a papal mission to Toulouse in 1178.47 In this way, it quickly became accepted that eastern dualism was of little or no account in western heresy before the middle of the twelfth century, but of crucial and formative importance thereafter. As late as 2008 I myself, though always close to the skeptical end of the spectrum of opinion, had only begun tentatively to abandon it, remarking that “until recently nobody has questioned either the authenticity or the accuracy of Eberwin’s account, though it now seems that we must at least be prepared not to take it simply at face value.”48 In short, the old story stuck, modified, but in its essentials unchanged by the origins debate and the scholarly and historiographical developments from which it had arisen. It was, if anything, reinforced by the rapprochement between historiography sacred and profane at Royaumont. Heresy moved into the mainstream as a subject of study in its own right and was taken increasingly seriously as a manifestation of popular religious sentiment and solidarity, and therefore not only a symptom of social change but also an active element in it, notably for example in some brilliant passages of Georges Duby’s Les trois ordres (1978) and in a resurgence of interest in the Peace of God movement.49 But, as Van Engen’s analysis makes clear, the sources of the “downward shift” in the attention of Catholic historians that brought them to Royaumont had lain in “a conviction that the heart of medieval religious life lay in the ‘piety’ of the ‘people’ ” on the one hand, and in the impacts of urbanization and the socio-pathology of crowds on the other. Those were the dominant themes of Hérésies et sociétés and the main issues that engaged

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 69 the attention of general historians in the decades that followed. The Cathars of the Languedoc were not obviously central to either. Activity in the region itself, however, gained in scholarly credibility in these years.50 It had notoriously been dominated by variously motivated amateur enthusiasts, recently under the aegis of Déodat Roché’s Société du Souvenir et des Études Cathares, whose quarterly Cahiers d’Études Cathares, launched in 1948, published material of mixed quality and sometimes esoteric orientation. Tension between the more politically and the more intellectually inclined was always present in these circles, and in 1981 the latter, led by René Nelli, established the Centre Nationale d’Études Cathares at Carcassonne ( later known as the Centre René Nelli). With support from the département de l’Aude, it became a focus of much activity, including the increasingly useful journal Heresis (1982– 2008) under the capable scholarly direction successively of Anne Brenon and Pilar Jiménez-Sanchez. Associated with it was Jean Duvernoy, who from the 1960s published a stream of texts and translations of archival and other Cathar-related material. From the other side, Delaruelle, at the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, had in 1965 initiated in response to the excesses of the Cahiers d’Études Cathares an annual conference, bringing in a wide range of scholars from outside the region. The conference still provides a forum for systematic scholarly exploration of the religious history of the midi, published in Cahiers de Fanjeaux, predominantly but not narrowly or exclusively Catholic in approach and outlook.51 One of its stalwarts was Yves Dossat, also of the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, whose analysis of the early years of the Dominican inquisition, published in 1959, remains fundamental.52 Interest in the relations between heresy east and west had been somewhat muted since the origins debate had subsided, and especially since Henri-Charles Puech, the great scholar of Manicheism and coeditor of the fundamental text on the Bulgarian Bogomils, Cosmas the Priest’s treatise against the Bogomils,53 had firmly quashed the attempts of the Byzantinists Runciman and Obolensky, as well as of Dondaine, to describe the appearance of heresy in the eleventh-century West as an importation of dualism from the Byzantine world.54 In the third session at Fanjeaux, Dossat reignited it and raised what has become a pivotal issue

70 /

R. I. Moore

in current discussion of the nature of Catharism and the reality of “the Cathar church” by questioning the authenticity of the document that Dondaine had defended as a contemporary account of a council (of which there is no trace in any other source) convened by the heretics at SaintFélix-de-Caraman in 1167.55 According to Dondaine, the text recorded how, under the guidance of an emissary from Constantinople, Cathar bishops were appointed to dioceses with the same boundaries as the Catholic ones and the “absolute” form of dualism was adopted throughout the region. The document purports to be a copy made in 1232 for a “bishop” of the heretics, but it survives only as published, in 1660, by the antiquarian Guillaume Besse, who said he had a transcription of it from a canon of Toulouse who had since died. Showing that the document was riddled with inconsistencies and anomalies both of form and content, Dossat concluded, in brief, that Besse had made it up, as he had others, to embellish his history of the ruling house of Narbonne. Dossat himself minimized the importance of this conclusion, on the ground that the so-called charter in any case added nothing of importance to the documents that Dondaine had discovered and published subsequently, the De heresi catharorum in Lombardia and the treatise of Anselm of Alessandria. Apart from the implications for the chronology and organization of heresy in the region, of which those texts have nothing of substance to say, however, it was subsequently pointed out that Dondaine had used the supposedly vindicated charter to support his acceptance and interpretation of them, including his attribution of an early date, around 1200, to the De heresi catharorum. His reasoning, in other words, was circular in critical respects, and the mighty structure of his Cathar church stands or falls on the soundness of its foundations.56 Among the consequences of Dossat’s intervention was a response from the English Byzantinist Bernard Hamilton. His characteristically learned and subtle reexamination of the document (accompanied by a fresh edition and translation), concluding that “Besse published extracts from a genuine document drawn up for Peter Isarn, Cathar bishop of Carcassonne, on 14th August 1223,”57 was the first of what has become a long and influential series of contributions, including translations and editions of key texts, which consistently reflect how, as he put it a quarter of a century later, Hamilton “become more convinced that western

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 71 Catharism was a branch of Balkan and Byzantine dualism.”58 Hamilton is particularly interested in religious ideas and their transmission, and the main tenor of his work has been to identify resemblances between the thought and practice of dualist heretics, or those whom he identifies as such, in east and west, and to suggest, with an extraordinary breadth and minuteness of learning and remarkable ingenuity, ways in which they might have arisen from actual contacts between the two. He has shown great ingenuity also in finding reasons for accepting as trustworthy texts which others have dismissed as spurious or misleading, including not only the “acta” of Saint-Félix but, in the same paper, a letter of 1223 in which the papal legate Conrad of Porto informed the bishops of the province of Sens that the Balkan heretics had their own antipope, from whom the Albigensians were taking advice.59 The texts which Hamilton adduces for the nature and extent of eastern influence in the West (with the exception of the treatise of Hugh Eteriano) necessarily postdate the Albigensian crusade — as they must, for there are none earlier. The issue in respect of his conclusions, as of the wider debate, is how properly texts that predate the crusade can be glossed in the light of those that postdate it, and how reliably such evidence can be used as a guide to the situation in the region before 1209. Thus, he interpreted the appearance in inquisition records of names that occur in the Saint-Félix document as confirming its authenticity, and with it the existence as early as 116760 of a network of “Cathar” bishops and bishoprics in the region. A more skeptical reader might think that, while that supports acceptance of the document as authentically of the 1220s, it says nothing of its claim to be, or to incorporate, a contemporary record of something that happened in the 1160s. Hamilton’s student Claire Taylor, the doughtiest current champion of the traditional view, has used the same techniques in combination with great skill in the conventional sources and techniques of regional history to chart what she holds to be the implantation and diffusion of Catharism in the Agenais and Quercy.61 All this meant that, for the rest of the twentieth century, enlivened and in many ways greatly improved activity in the field of popular heresy appeared to confirm, and considerably to elaborate, the familiar story of “the Cathars” and the diffusion of their influence from an epicenter in and around Toulouse. What was overlooked in the bliss of that

72 /

R. I. Moore

dawn was that, proceeding as it did from the rapprochement of the 1960s between the new religious historiography inspired by Grundmann and Delaruelle on the one hand and the agenda and methods of the Annales School on the other, it was almost entirely based on the reinterpretation of a received body of texts, mostly garnered from the great printed collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and not on the fresh scrutiny of their provenance and transmission that true quellenkritik would have demanded. Thus, although my own selection and that of Wakefield and Evans62 were made quite independently and in mutual ignorance, they are to all intents and purposes identical — and identical also with those discussed by Malcolm Lambert in the first edition of Medieval Heresy (1977), which he was writing while these collections were in preparation. The same might be said of almost everything else that had been written on the subject, stretching back through Borst and Guiraud to Henry Charles Lea, and beyond. Morghen had shown that these texts could and should be read in wider spiritual, intellectual, and social contexts than they had been before, and with different presuppositions, but the very richness of the agenda he generated distracted attention from still more fundamental questions about how and why they had come into existence and remained at our disposal. There were exceptions. Manselli produced a series of studies and editions, though his texts and conclusions have not always survived renewed scrutiny.63 Arsenio Frugoni, yet another student of Morghen, produced in 1954 a study of Arnold of Brescia that proceeded by a scrupulous examination, in chronological order, of each of the sources for Arnold’s life and influence.64 It was not widely read however, until it was translated into French in 1993, nor was its significance generally appreciated: it was taken merely as rescuing Arnold from a political interpretation that made him a forerunner of the Risorgimento to place him in the spiritual one described by Grundmann and Morghen, rather than as posing questions that ought to have been asked in every case about when and why the sources had been written and preserved.65 Similarly, the lessons of Robert Lerner’s brilliant demolition of the fabled “Heresy of the Free Spirit” (1972) were not rigorously applied to the materials of the earlier period either by Lerner himself or by others.66 In 1975 Robert-

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 73 Henri Bautier — not a historian of religion or the church, but a distinguished expert on the study of documents and on the early history of the Capetian monarchy — published his conclusions about the burning at Orléans in 1022.67 Bautier’s close analysis of each text in the chronological order of their production, locating each author and actor precisely in every relevant context, transformed the first people to be burned as heretics in the medieval West from a coterie of obscure intellectuals dabbling on the fringes of mysticism and magic into the highly placed victims of a ruthlessly organized show trial. These were true pointers toward the final dismantling of the Cathar legend, but their lessons were slow to be learned. Many of those who worked on the social, political, and institutional history of the lands between the Rhône and the Garonne in the decades on either side of the Albigensian crusade, especially, perhaps, from outside the region, had no obvious reason to question whether the assertions of colleagues working on heresy were based on the same rigorous criticism of the sources that they routinely applied to their own.68 So it continued to be taken for granted that “the Cathar church,” or at least “the dualist heresy,” as denounced in Cistercian polemics and papal letters and confirmed by Dominican inquisitors, and described by their students, represented the most formidable expression, socially and politically as well as theologically, of religious dissidence around 1200, and as such supplied both the main rationale for the crusade itself and the substance of resistance to it. Even those who saw the extirpation of heresy in the region as the excuse rather than the reason for the assault assumed that the heresy itself was as the attackers and their successors described it. Pegg’s 2008 account was the first to reject those time-hallowed premises.69 In fact, however, similar doubts had been gathering for some time and from several directions, as a growing number of scholars whose attention was initially directed to the Cathars by other concerns found the received account at odds with their own expertise and methodologies. By the early 1980s, Monique Zerner’s questioning of the ancient equation of “bougre” and “Bulgar” as synonyms of dualist heresy, Guy Lobrichon’s discovery of an eleventh-century text of what had long been regarded as a vivid description of Balkan dualism at work in the Périgord in the 1160s, Dominique Iogna-Prat’s curiosity about how Peter the

74 /

R. I. Moore

Venerable’s polemic against Peter of Bruys fitted into a longer and broader tradition of Cluniac invective, and Jacques Chiffoleau’s observation of the role of heresy accusations in the reconfiguration of the management of ecclesiastical property in the later medieval Rhône valley, were reinforcing each other’s suspicions that denunciations could not simply be taken at face value as straightforward descriptions and “confirmed the urgency of considering the sources in the logic of their production.”70 This was the nucleus of the seminar convened by Zerner in Nice between 1993 and 1996. Its systematic review of the ways in which the discourse of heresy had evolved and been deployed since patristic times was published in 1998 as Inventer l’hérésie? Among the most significant of its conclusions was the uncovering of the pivotal role of the Cistercian order in the progressive demonization of the “Cathar” heresy, of the region between Rhône and Garonne as its center, and of the region’s lords as its patrons and protectors.71 Integral to that process was the collection and construction of a dossier of texts among which several — going back as far as the only surviving account of the synod at Arras in 1024 and 1025, for example, in a Cistercian manuscript of the late twelfth century72— were foundation stones of the accepted narrative of what we had naively known as “the birth of popular heresy.” The demolition of the “Council of Saint-Felix-de-Caraman” by members of the same group, discussed above, and with it the foundations of Dondaine’s account of the “Cathar church” in the Languedoc, followed in 2001.73 That of its prehistory in the appearance of “Cathars” in the Rhineland as described by the hitherto unassailable Eberwin of Steinfeld followed in 2006, when Zerner’s student Uwe Brunn demonstrated that they were in effect a by-product of conflicts within the Premonstratensian order in which Eberwin himself was deeply implicated.74 That is only one conclusion of a massive, closely documented and argued, though (it must be said) not unfailingly lucid study of heresy and heresy accusations in the archdiocese of Cologne between 1100 and 1233 whose implications, not just for the Rhineland but for Europe as a whole, will take some time to absorb, but which leaves nothing undisturbed. Inventer l’hérésie? served emphatic notice that it was no longer the case that, as Peter Biller has put it, “the elite medievalists of France —

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 75 and Paris — have left the study of Languedocian heresy and inquisition to non-French historians (Americans, English, and Germans) and to French amateurs, such as Jean Duvernoy, a jurist and autodidact historian, and Michel Roquebert, a former schoolteacher.”75 The news, however, was slow to reach some of the Americans, English, and Germans in question, for Biller was reviewing, in 2010, Jörg Feuchter’s important analysis of the consular elites of Montauban, Ketzer, Konsuln und Büßer. In this work Feuchter brilliantly combined the list of penances imposed in 1236 by the inquisitor Pier Seilan on the heretics—heretici and Valdenses— of Montauban with charter-based reconstruction of the elite families from which the former came, to illuminate not only their dealings with Seilan but also structures of power in Montauban since its foundation in 1145. Yet in doing so Feuchter accepted the traditional account of Catharism, as described by Borst and Duvernoy, most obviously in describing the heretici themselves as Vollkommenen (“parfaits”), that emblematic term of the old, old story for which there is no reputable authority in the sources.76 Some of the doubts that gave rise to Inventer l’hérésie? had been expressed before and some of its insights anticipated by others. Its principal conclusions in respect of “the Cathars” were independently reinforced from an entirely different direction when a historian of comparative religion with a strong background in anthropology, Mark Gregory Pegg, showed vividly how Bernart de Caux and Jean de Saint-Pierre, conducting the most extensive of all medieval inquisitions into heresy at Toulouse in 1245 and 1246, interpreted the values, customary behaviors and body language, and hesitant reminiscences of a peasant society, constrained by long-term ecological pressure and brutally disrupted by conquest and persecution, by fitting them to the stereotypes that, as outsiders to the region, they had been trained to expect.77 That major elements of that training came not simply from their order and vocation, but also from the foundational cultural and intellectual developments of the age, becomes ever more clear. The growing centrality of evil and its agents to the scholastic theology and pastoral preoccupations of the thirteenth century has long been a truism, but its roots in the twelfth and beyond are now increasingly prominent in discussion of heresy and its persecution. Iogna-Prat saw the dialectic evolving in the schools of Paris to construct a

76 /

R. I. Moore

flexible and comprehensive model of evil at work as molding Peter the Venerable’s definition of the boundaries of Christendom;78 Brunn that it inspired Eckbert of Schönau’s invention of the Cathars;79 Biget how it informed the nightmares of the Cistercian demonizers.80 Pilar JiménezSanchez traces the specter of dualism from commentaries as early as the ninth century to shape perceptions of the “Catharisms” which for her provided a series of models of dissidence for twelfth-century Europe.81 Hilbert Chiu is supplying a new genealogy for the “Catharism” of the thirteenth-century inquisitors in the formation, from the middle of the twelfth century, of an academic model of dualist heresy which, by its end, the well-formed clerk could hardly help mistaking for reality.82 David d’Avray, Peter Biller, and Biller’s student Lucy Sackville are pointing to ways in which perceptions and understandings of “Catharism” (irrespective of their relationship to mundane reality) fed into the wider formation of scholastic thought.83 In the last generation, increasingly sterile argument about the reality of witches and how intellectuals could believe in them gave way to a sophisticated understanding of how such beliefs related and contributed to the formation of ideas in many other fields.84 The signs that this one is turning its attention to “thinking with Cathars” are greatly to be welcomed. Inventer l’hérésie? has reset the historiographical clock in respect of the study of heresy in the high Middle Ages, and nothing connected with the subject that fails to take full account of its conclusions and those of its successors and descendants can now expect to be taken seriously. It may be seen as one of the ways, if a spectacular one, in which, as Van Engen observed, a great variety of approaches, each shaped by its own circumstances, has been brought to bear on his central question, whether medieval culture was essentially “Christian” and what that might mean. The question itself he saw as having emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century because historians were no longer ready to leave it to theologians, church historians, and members of religious orders.85 That immediately implies a departure from classification by ideas and a fascination with similarity over time to focus on temporal succession and change over time, and on different ways not only of reading evidence, but of testing and validating it. By such means do historians change the world.

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 77 Notes 1. On the legend and its uses, Jean-Claude Biget, “Mythographie du catharisme (1870 –1960),” Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme 14 (1979): 271– 342; Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Le catharisme à travers les mass-media,” in ibid.: 361– 80; Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in the Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (London: Pearson, 2000), 203– 25; Andrew Roach, “Occitania Past and Present: Southern Consciousness in Medieval and Modern French Politics,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 1– 22; and Philippe Martel, Les cathares et l’histoire. Le drame cathare devant ses historiens (1820 –1922) ( Toulouse: Privat, 2002). 2. See, by Mark Gregory Pegg, “On Cathars, Albigenses and the Good Men of the Languedoc,” Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001): 181– 95; The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15–19; “ ‘Catharism’ and the Study of Medieval Heresy,” in New Medieval Literatures 6, ed. D. Lawton, R. Copeland, and M. Scase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 249– 69; and “Heresy, Good Men and Nomenclature,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R.I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto ( Leiden: Brill, 2006), 227– 39. 3. Episcopal authority was overtly repudiated by boni homines, clearly figures who commanded local respect, at Lombers, near Albi, in 1165; Pier Maurand and others were convicted by papal legates at Toulouse in 1178 of denying the real presence in the mass. Theological dualism is another matter, but it is reasonable to suppose some continuity (though not necessarily uniformity) of heresy in the region thereafter: R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 188– 203. 4. Julien Théry, “L’hérésie des bons hommes. Comment nommer la dissidence non vaudoise ni béguine en Languedoc ( XIIe – début du XIVe siècle),” Heresis 36 – 37 (2002): 75–117. 5. Daniel Power, “Who Went on the Albigensian Crusade?,” English Historical Review 534 (2013): 1047– 85, at 1070 – 75, showing on the basis of charter evidence that the term was used much more widely, and earlier, than had previously been thought. On the demonization of the region in general, see Jean-Louis Biget, “Les albigeois: remarques sur une dénomination,” in Inventer l’hérésie?, ed. Monique Zerner ( Nice: Z’éditions, 1998), 219– 55; revised in Jean-Louis Biget, Hérésie et inquisition dans le midi de la France (Paris: Picard, 2007), 142– 69. This volume is now by far the best, and indispensable, introduction to its subject; an English translation is badly needed. 6. Christine Thouzellier, Hérésie et Hérétiques. Vaudois, Cathares, Patarins, Albigeois, Storia e Letteratura, Raccolta di Studi e Testi 116 ( Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969), 223– 62. For Pierre Belperron, La croisade contre les

78 /

R. I. Moore

Albigeois et l’union du Languedoc à la France ( Paris: Plon, 1942; repr. Perrin, 1967), 89 ff (“L’albigéisme fut constitué par deux hérésies distinctes, l’hérésie cathare et l’hérésie vaudoise . . .”). Cf. Pilar Jiménez Sánchez, Les catharismes. Modèles dissidents du christianisme médiéval (xiie.–xiiie. siècles) ( Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 21– 48. 7. Charles Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine des sectes des Cathares ou Albigeois, 2 vols. ( Paris: Cherbuliez, 1849); see Yves Dossat, “Un initiateur: Charles Schmidt,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme 14 (1979): 163– 84; and Bernard Hamilton, “The Legacy of Charles Schmidt to the Study of Christian Dualism,” Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998): 191– 214. 8. See Antoine Dondaine, “Les actes du concile albigeois de St. Félix de Caraman,” Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati V, Studi e Testi 125 ( Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1946), 324 – 55; “L’hiérarchie cathare en Italie, I, Le ‘De heresi catharorum’ ”; II, Le tractatus de hereticis d’Anselme d’Alexandrie OP; III, Catalogue de La hiérarchie cathare en Italie, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum XIX (1949): 280 – 312; XX (1950): 234 – 324, all reprinted in Antoine Dondaine, Les hérésies et l’inquisition, xiie.–xiiie. siècles (Aldershot: Variorum, 1990). On Dondaine and his work, see Yves Dossat, “La découverte des textes cathares: Le père Antoine Dondaine,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme 14 (1979): 343– 59; and, importantly, the unpublished observations of Jacques Chiffoleau summarized in L’histoire du Catharisme en discussion: Le ‘concile’ de St. Félix (1167), ed. Monique Zerner ( Nice: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2001), 49– 56. 9. Arno Borst, Die Katharer (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1953), trans. as Les Cathares ( Paris: Payot, 1974). Hans Söderberg, La réligion des Cathares: Étude sur le gnosticisme de la basse antiquité et du moyen âge ( Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1949), was a study in religious ideas rather than a historical account. 10. Fernand Niel, Albigeois et Cathares ( Paris: PUF, 1955), 5. 11. Zoé Oldenbourg, Le bucher de Montségur. 16 Mars 1244 ( Paris: Gallimard, 1959), trans. Peter Green as The Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). Note the unusual promptness of the translation. Weidenfeld and Nicolson were recently established, fashionable, and both ambitious and successful in publishing scholarly history for a general readership. 12. Edgar Faure, La disgrâce de Turgot ( Paris: Gallimard, 1961); and Edgar Faure, La banqueroute de Law ( Paris: Gallimard, 1977). Le coup d’état du 2 Décembre was initially advertised to be by Pierre Mendès-France and later by François Mitterand, but eventually appeared as Le sacre de Napoléon by José Cabanis ( Paris: Gallimard, 1970). 13. Biget, “Mythographie du catharisme,” 323. 14. Michael Costen, The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford:

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 79 Blackwell, 1998); Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in the Languedoc in the High Middle Ages ( New York: Longman, 2000); and René Weis, The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars 1290 –1329 ( London: Penguin, 2000). Andrew Roach’s Oxford D. Phil. dissertation (1989) was The Relationship of the Italian and Southern French Cathars, 1170 –1320. 15. For instance, Peter Biller ( Pegg’s most distinguished critic), “Cathars and the Material World,” in God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Suffolk: Ecclesiastical History Society/Boydell Press, 2010), 91– 92; and in response, Mark Gregory Pegg, “Albigenses in the Antipodes: An Australian and the Cathars,” Journal of Religious History 55 (2011): 577– 600. See also Biller’s review of Pegg’s The Corruption of Angels in Speculum 78 (2003): 1365– 70; and, on a closely related debate raising the same methodological and historiographical issues, Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?,” Past & Present 192 (2006): 3– 33. Through a mishap, probably my fault, my own review of The Corruption of Angels was never published; it may now be found at http://www.rimoore.net/PeggCorruption.html. I concluded, in contrast to Biller, that “This analysis deserves to kill stone-dead the myths and stereotypes of ‘Catharism’, ‘radical dualism’ and all the rest, ‘imported from the Balkans’, which have sustained the master-narrative of crusade and inquisition in the Languedoc at least since the ground for the conquest of the County of Toulouse began to be laid by the mission sent there by Alexander III in 1178, at the behest of Henry II and Louis VII,” and that “by cutting himself free of this sterile discourse Pegg has brought a far more interesting agenda to the fore.” 16. Including, notably, Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages ( New York: Harper, 1887); Jean Guiraud, Histoire de l’Inquisition au Moyen Âge, 2 vols. ( Paris: Picard, 1935– 38); and Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee: A Study of Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). 17. Dondaine, “Hiérarchie cathare” I, 287– 90. 18. Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 213–19. 19. Yves Dossat, “Remarques sur un prétendu évêque cathare du Val d’Aran en 1167,” Bulletin philologique et historique ( jusqu’à 1715), années 1955 et 1956 (1957): 339– 47; and “A propos du concile cathare de Saint-Félix: les Milingues,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Cathares en Languedoc 3 (1968): 201–14. 20. Moore, War on Heresy. 21. Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols., ed. Emil Albert Friedberg, 1:780 – 82. 22. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. ( Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:224. 23. Crucially, e.g., to the argument of Bernard Hamilton in Bernard Hamilton, Janet Hamilton, and Sarah Hamilton, Hugh Eteriano: Contra Patarenos (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 8ff.

80 /

R. I. Moore

24. Especially Gabriele Zanella, Itinerarie ereticali. Patari e catari tra Rimini e Verona, Studi storici 153 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1986); and the work of Monique Zerner and her associates, L’histoire du Catharisme en discussion, 131– 34. 25. Euan Cameron, Waldenses Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35– 60. 26. Caterina Bruschi, The Wandering Heretics of the Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519– 52, at 519. 28. In addition to the works cited in note 1 above, see Robert Gildea, The Past in French History ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 208–13. 29. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 535– 36; 523– 25. Van Engen rightly distinguished the approaches of these scholars and others concerned with religious movements as such from that of Grundmann, whose interest effectively stopped at the point at which the individual search for apostolic perfection gave way to the formation of groups and communities. (My own case is exactly the reverse.) However, though Grundmann’s Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter had appeared in 1935 ( Berlin: Emil Ebering Verlag, 1935), it was not widely known outside Germany until the second edition (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961). 30. Norman Cohn presented a stirring account of the impact of charismatic preaching on the “Disoriented Poor” created by urbanization from the twelfth century onwards: see The Pursuit of the Millennium, 3d ed. (London: Paladin, 1970). In Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry into the Great Witch Hunt (London: Chatto, 1975), Cohn broke what had been generally accepted as a direct link between the “Cathar” heresy and the witch beliefs of the later Middle Ages and exposed for the first time a tradition of demonization of heretics and other marginal groups with its origins in late antiquity. Both still deserve not only to be remembered but also to be read, which may be done with much enjoyment. The demolition in Europe’s Inner Demons of the views of Margaret Murray and her followers on the “witch cult” is a classic and exhilarating demonstration of how nonsense in academic garb should be dealt with. 31. Raffaello Morghen, “Osservazioni critiche su alcune questione fondamentali riguardanti le origini e le carraterri delle eresie medievali,” Archivio della R. Deputazione Romana della Storia Patria 67 (1944): 97–151, reprinted in Raffaello Morghen, Medioevo Cristiano ( Bari: Laterza, 1951), and followed by a series of papers culminating in “Problèmes sur les origines de l’hérésie médiévale,” Revue historique 336 (1966): 1–16; Raoul Manselli, L’eresia del male ( Naples: Morano, 1963). Manselli’s main interests lay in Franciscan spirituality and its deviations, but the list of his papers includes comment on almost every text relating to twelfth-century popular heresy (see note 62 below). On Morghen and his influence, see G. Cracco, “Eresiologia in Italia tra otto e novecento,” in Eretici ed

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 81 eresie medievali nella storiografia contemporanea, Bollettino della Società Valdesi 174, ed. G. Merlo ( Turin: Torrepellice, 1994), 15– 38, at 31 ff.; on the influence on him of the Modernist controversy, see Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages 1000 – 1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1998), 119– 20. 32. Dondaine defended his position, in more categorical terms than formerly, in “L’origine de l’hérésie médiévale,” Revista di storia dell chiesa in Italia 5 (1951): 47– 78. For full references and a survey of subsequent discussion, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, “Some Interpretations of the Origins of Medieval Heresy,” Medieval Studies 25 (1963): 25– 53; R.  I. Moore, “The Origins of Medieval Heresy,” History 55 (1970): 21– 361 (the first and somewhat naive published paper on this subject by an Ulsterman raised as a Unitarian); R. I. Moore, “Afterthoughts on The Origins of European Dissent,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society, ed. Frassetto, 291– 326, at 295– 306. 33. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 527– 28. 34. Werner Maleczek, “Le ricerce eresiologiche in area germanica,” in Eretici ed eresie medievali, ed. Merlo, 64 – 93. 35. Led by Dimitre Anguelov, Le bogomilisme en Bulgarie ( Toulouse: Privat, 1972). 36. “Movimento religiosi popolari ed eresie del Medioevo,” Relazioni del X Congresso internazionale di scienze storiche Roma 4– 11 sett. 1955, vol. 3, Storia del Medioevo ( Florence: Sansoni, 1955), 309– 402. 37. Jacques Le Goff, ed. Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe préindustrielle, 11e.– 18e. siècles ( Paris: Mouton, 1968), including at 407– 67 a comprehensive “Bibliographie des études récentes (après 1900) sur les hérésies médiévales” by Grundmann. 38. Dossat, introduction to Dondaine, Les hérésies et l’Inquisition, ix– x. 39. Le Goff, Hérésies et sociétés, 203– 4, 103–16. 40. Ibid., 106. 41. See notes 19 and 34 above. 42. A stimulating exception, regrettably achieved by ignoring all the critical discussion referred to in these paragraphs and the work on which it drew, is JeanPierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation ( New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991), originally La mutation féodale (Paris: PUF, 1980), 272– 308. 43. Cinzio Violante, La pataria milaneses e la reforma ecclesiastica. I Le premesse, (1045– 57) ( Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1955). 44. C. N. L. Brooke, “Heresy and Religious Sentiment, 1000 –1250,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); and Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); 2d ed., Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

82 /

R. I. Moore

45. Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 182, col. 680. The dating depends on whether Eberwin wrote before or after Bernard’s mission to the Languedoc in 1145. Like every other accepted view about this letter, it has been overturned by Uwe Brunn, Des contestataires aux ‘Cathares’. Discours de réforme et de propagande antihérétique dans les pays du Rhin et de la Meuse avant l’inquisition ( Paris: Études augustiniennes, 2006), 139– 50. 46. William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, Rolls Series 82, 4 vols., ed. R. Howlett ( London, 1884 – 89), 2:136. 47. Moore, War on Heresy, 182– 203. 48. R. I. Moore, “The War against Heresy in Medieval Europe,” Historical Research 81 (2008): 189– 210, at 203. In the original version of the lecture (2004), however, still ignorant of the work of Uwe Brunn, I had remarked that “[the first half of ] this comment is intended as a red rag to Guy Lobrichon,” in deference to Lobrichon’s critical alertness in respect of Cistercian texts (see note 71 below). 49. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), for instance, at 31ff., 130 ff., and 175– 77; Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response around the Year 1000 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Dominique Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu. La France chrétienne et féodale 980 –1060 ( Paris: Armand Colin, 1999). 50. Well described by Roach, “Occitania Past and Present.” 51. Delaruelle had also sketched a comprehensive program of inquiry in “Le Catharisme en Languedoc vers 1200: une enquête,” Annales du Midi 72 (1960): 149– 67. 52. Yves Dossat, Les crises de l’Inquisition toulousaine au xiiie. siècle, 1233–1273 ( Bordeaux: Imprimerie Bière, 1959). 53. Henri-Charles Puech and André Vaillant, Le traité contre les Bogomiles de Cosmas le prètre ( Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1945). 54. Henri-Charles Puech, “Catharisme médiévale et bogomilisme,” Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. . . . Atti di convegne xii, Oriente ed Occidente nel Medieo Evo ( Rome, 1956), 55– 84, 154 – 57; cf. Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee. A Study of Christian Dualist Heresy, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 115– 70; Dmitri Obolensky, The Bogomils (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 285– 89. 55. Dossat, “A propos du concile cathare de Saint-Félix.” 56. Jean-Louis Biget, in Zerner, L’histoire du Catharisme en discussion, 117– 21; cf. Dondaine, “Les actes,” 339– 41; “Hiérarchie cathare” I, 291–92. The ambiguity of the word church helps further to confuse these often somewhat arcane discussions. Dondaine had been scrupulous to insist that “Catharism is often spoken of as a religion, as a spiritual body hierarchically organized; it has even been discussed whether there was a Cathar pope, a supreme head of the

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 83 sect. This is a grave historical error. There were dualist sects, as much in the East as in Lombardy, which had no more in common than a more or less related doctrinal legacy” (“Hiérarchie cathare” I, 292– 93: Dondaine’s emphases, my translation). However, he also held that they shared history and ritual as well as theology, and for the most part accepted each other’s sacraments, and so constituted a church despite their divisions. 57. Bernard Hamilton, “The Cathar Council of St. Félix reconsidered,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 48 (1978): 23– 53, reprinted in Bernard Hamilton, Monastic Reform, Catharism and the Crusades (Aldershot: Variorum, 1979). The argument of this paper was first stated in an appendix Hamilton wrote for my The Origins of European Dissent (London: Allen Lane, 1977). It was replaced in the second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) by a summary of Bautier’s paper on the burning at Orléans in 1022 (see note 66 below) because it had been published elsewhere in full, not because I had yet come to disagree with it. Although (as he also has commented) our positions on this matter have steadily diverged, I owe a very great deal to Hamilton’s writing and conversation over almost half a century. 58. Bernard Hamilton, “Bogomil Influences on Western Heresy,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society, ed. Frassetto, 93–114, 93. Other major contributions include Bernard Hamilton, “Wisdom from the East,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1050 –1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61– 82; Bernard Hamilton, “The Legacy of Charles Schmidt,” 191– 214; Janet Hamilton and Bernard Hamilton, Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650 –c. 1405 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); and B. Hamilton, J. Hamilton, and S. Hamilton, Hugh Eteriano. Bernard Hamilton is now preparing an edition and translation of the sermons of Eckbert of Schönau, which will be of great significance, fundamentally though he and I disagree as to why. 59. B. Hamilton, “Cathar Council of St. Félix,” 44. 60. Dossat had pointed to the date 1167 as one of the many contradictions in the document, and Hamilton actually preferred a date between 1174 and 1177 for the meeting (“Cathar Council of St. Félix,” 34 – 35, 50), but those who rely on his authority for its authenticity almost always give the more familiar though doubly discredited one. 61. See, by Claire Taylor, Heresy in Medieval France: Dualism in Aquitaine and the Agenais 1000 –1249 ( Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2005); “Authority and the Cathar Heresy in the Northern Languedoc,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society, ed. Frassetto, 139– 94; and Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Medieval Quercy ( Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2011). 62. R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy ( London: Edward Arnold, 1975); Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The same is true of similar collections in other languages, such as James Fearns, Ketzer und Ketzerbekämpfung

84 /

R. I. Moore

im Hochmittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968). Fearns, a student of Christopher Brooke, had produced a modern edition of Peter the Venerable’s attack on Peter of Bruys: James Fearns, Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos. Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis ( Turnholt: Brepols, 1968). 63. See Raoul Manselli, Studi sulle eresie del secolo XII (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1953); “Il monaco Enrico e la sua eresia,” Bulletino dell’Istituto storico Italiano per il medio evo 65 (1953): 1– 63; and “Eckberto di Schönau e l’eresia catara,” Arte e Storia: Studi in onore di Leonello Vincenti ( Turin: Giappichelli, 1965), 311– 38. On his work on the “debate” between Henry of Lausanne and William the Monk, see Monique Zerner, ed., Guillaume monachi: Contre Henri schismatique et hérétique, Sources chrétiennes 541 (Paris: Cerf, 2011). 64. Arsenio Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia nell fonti del secolo XII, Studi storici 8– 9 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1954), trans. Alain Boureau as Arnaud de Brescia dans les sources du xiie. siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993). 65. Except by Beryl Smalley, rightly portrayed by Van Engen (“Christian Middle Ages,” 521, 526) as one of the outstanding talents of her generation, who in a very generous review of The Origins of European Dissent (English Historical Review 93 [1978]: 853– 56), remarked mildly that I had missed the importance of Frugoni and the traces of Neoplatonism in the reports of the Orléans trial—thus pinpointing with characteristic acuteness exactly where the old story would begin to unravel. When we met a short time afterward she chided me for having been insufficiently critical in my own review of Lambert; I had not been uncritical. 66. Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Lerner, a student of Joseph Strayer, knew Grundmann in the 1960s and was profoundly influenced by him; see his memoir and introduction to Religious Movements, ix– xxv. It seems fair to comment that the training of Strayer was also reflected in a critical acumen still rarely deployed in the history of religion. I was not myself directly influenced by Lerner’s work at that time, but was greatly encouraged to find in it endorsement of the principles that I was applying (much less skillfully) to what became The Origins of European Dissent. 67. R. H. Bautier, “L’hérésie d’Orléans et le mouvement intellectuel au début du XIe. Siècle. Documents et hypothèses,” Actes du 95e. Congrès national des sociétés savantes, Reims, 1970, Section Philologique et historique jusqu’à 1610 ( Paris: Bibliotheque nationale, 1975), 63– 88. 68. A point especially pertinent to the work of John H. Mundy, as in “Une famille Cathare: les Maurand,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilizations 29 (1974): 1211– 23; The Repression of Catharism at Toulouse: the Royal Diploma of 1279, Studies and Texts 74 ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1985); and Society and Government at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars, Studies and Texts 129 ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1997).

The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 85 69. Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 70. Zerner, Inventer l’hérésie?, 7– 8. Cf. Monique Zerner, “Du court moment où on appela les hérétiques des bougres et quelques déductions,” Cahiers de Civilization Médiévales 32 (1989): 305– 24; Guy Lobrichon, “The Chiaroscuro of Heresy,” in Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes, 80 –103; Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaisme et à l’Islam ( Paris: Aubier, 1998), trans. Graham Robert Edwards as Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000 –1150) ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà: les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age, vers 1320 –vers 1480 ( Rome: École française de Rome, 1980). 71. Jean-Louis Biget, “Les albigeois.” On the directly related issue of Cistercian acquisition and exploitation of property in the region and the disputes to which it gave rise—directly comparable with Chiffoleau’s conclusions for a later period— see also Constance H. Berman, Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside and the Early Cistercians: A Study of Forty-Three Monasteries, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 76 ( Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), 5; Constance H. Berman, The Cistercian Evolution. The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), passim; and Elaine Graham-Leigh, The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), especially ch. 4. Demonization was not, however, the work of Cistercians alone: see Alessia Trivellone, L’hérétique imaginé. Héterodoxie et iconographie dans l’occident médiévale de l’époque carolingienne à l’inquisition, Collection d’études médiévales de Nice 10 ( Turnholt: Brepols, 2009); and Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bibles moraliseés ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 105–10 and passim. 72. Guy Lobrichon, “Arras, ou le vrai procès d’une fausse accusation,” in Inventer l’hérésie?, 65– 85. The extent to which the traditional account of the growth of heresy between ca. 1170 and ca. 1240 depends on Cistercian sources has been generally under-recognized. But see also Yves M.-J. Congar, “Henri de Marcy, abbé de Clairvaux, cardinal-évêque d’Albano et légat pontifical,” Analecta Anselmiana 43 (1959): 1– 90; Beverley Mayne Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145–1229 ( Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2001); and L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations ( Woodbridge: York University Press, 2011), 53– 60. 73. Zerner, L’histoire du catharisme en discussion. 74. Brunn, Des contestataires aux ‘Cathares’. 75. Peter Biller, review of Ketzer, Konsuln und Büßer: Die städtischen Eliten von Montauban vor dem Inquisitor Petrus Cellani (1236/1241), by Jörg Feuchter,

86 /

R. I. Moore

H-Soz-u-Kult, April 4, 2010, http://www.hnet.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30164. It should be added that the importance of the Zerner group’s work was not widely appreciated before it was published, even within the region: Mark Pegg, who was active there during the 1990s and reaching very similar conclusions, did not hear of it until after the publication of his own The Corruption of Angels ( personal communication). 76. Cf. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics, 201– 2. Feuchter appears not to have had access to Inventer l’hérésie? and L’histoire du catharisme en discussion, neither of which is mentioned in his discussion of the historiography of Catharism (Ketzer, Konsuln und Büßer, 20 – 25). 77. Pegg, Corruption of Angels, 92–103. 78. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 120 – 47. 79. Brunn, Des contestataires aux ‘Cathares’, Part 2, especially at 285– 321. 80. Biget, Hérésie et inquisition, 15–16. 81. Pilar Jiménez-Sanchez, Les catharismes: Modèles dissidents du christianisme médiéval xiie.–xiiie. siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2008), 75– 89. 82. Hilbert Chiu, The intellectual origins of medieval dualism, M. Litt. thesis, University of Sydney, 2009; publication of a revised and expanded version is forthcoming. 83. David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 65– 72; Biller, “Cathars and the Material World”; and Sackville, Heresy and Heretics, notably in chapter 2, seem to me to point in this direction — though it is beyond my competence to develop. 84. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 85. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 522.

Fo u r

A u t h e n t i c , Tr u e , a n d R i g h t Inquisition and the Study of Medieval Popular Religion

c h r i s t i n e c a l dw e l l a m e s

I must beg John Van Engen’s forgiveness. My thoughts here are inspired— as those of so many of his students and peers have long been—by a piece that he may be weary of revisiting, so enduring have been its reverberations in our field: “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” published in The American Historical Review in 1986. There, Van Engen surveyed radical developments in the study of the European Middle Ages: most simply, “the emergence of medieval religious life as a field of historical inquiry”; more strikingly, the revision of the former “Age of Faith” into a world barely touched by Christianity at many social levels and marked rather by persistent folklore, popular beliefs, magic, or “paganism.” As Van Engen summarized, “the study of medieval religious life has . . . come full circle. Practices that earlier generations of Protestants and enlightened liberals dismissed as so much superstition, and many Catholics quietly downplayed or entirely overlooked, have been taken up enthusiastically— with a heavy debt to anthropologists and folklorists— as the authentic (and non-Christian) religion of the people.”1 However, rejecting the idea of a “wholly distinct religious culture” of the people, “not somehow amalgamated into Christian practice,” Van Engen 87

88 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

recommended instead recognizing the shared religious territory of “elite” and “popular,” the practical means by which Christianity had penetrated medieval life at all levels and stages, and, finally, “the reality of Christianization as crucial to the formation and flowering of medieval religious culture.”2 For a student of my particular field — the history of heresy inquisitions in medieval Europe —Van Engen’s piece has some special resonances, echoing from that very sense of “authentic” religion. The scholarship to which the article partly responded, that of “popular religion,” has long been complexly and strangely bound to inquisition. The first and most obvious sign of their binding, and a crucial component of the overarching problem Van Engen addressed, is that “popular religion” was greatly indebted for its discovery, both in the Middle Ages and by modern historians, to the work of inquisitors.3 As Van Engen noted, given the dominance of clerical elites in furnishing our premodern sources, popular religion’s diverse manifestations were to be found especially in the cracks and interstices of learned texts, including episcopal visitations, penitentials and confession manuals, synodal statutes, exempla collections, sermones ad status, and canonization proceedings.4 And, as Pierre Boglioni averred in a survey of sources for uncovering “popular religion,” inquisitorial texts seemed particularly to allow access to “le monde intérieur” and to provide source material for elusive, invisible popular beliefs and activities.5 To name the most famous instances, Jean-Claude Schmitt’s The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century used a single exemplum from Dominican Étienne de Bourbon’s Tractatus de materiis praedicabilibus (ca. 1260) — resulting from this inquisitor’s tour of the Dombes circa 1235— as a prompt for deep analysis of the cult of the dog-saint Guinefort. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s study of the “ecology” and “archeology” of Montaillou was based upon the register of Bishop Jacques Fournier, who conducted heresy inquisitions in Pamiers with the sometime assistance of Dominican friars Gaillard de Pomiès, Jean de Beaune, Jean Duprat, and Bernard Gui. The work of early modernist Carlo Ginzburg on the benandanti and on the creative miller Menocchio used the trial transcripts of Giulio d’Assisi and Felice da Montefalco, successive Franciscan inquisitors of Aquileia and Concordia.6

Authentic, True, and Right \ 89 Conventional judgments of inquisitorial sources as purely instrumental usually permitted the quick jettisoning of their clerical-elite producers from the discussions of “popular religion” they enabled. As Renato Rosaldo commented of Montaillou, Ladurie’s “liberat[ion]” of “the document from the historical context that produced it” meant that after the introduction, Jacques Fournier “does not again make a significant appearance in the rest of the book.”7 Dominick LaCapra similarly observed of Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms that the author’s “empathy with the oppressed induces a piecemeal, evanescent perception of the oppressors, whose own problems, anxieties, and motivations remain covered by a veil of silence.”8 After Schmitt’s initial section on “The inquisitor,” Étienne de Bourbon exits The Holy Greyhound. Inquisitors were other than the “people,” and the sources they produced were reflective chiefly of someone else’s piety and religious mentality. Recent scholars of heresy have disputed with great energy the contention that the inquisitorial confrontation and its documentation allow access to an individual’s “interior world” or to collective religious beliefs and practices. This is so not only because of the mediating obstructions of that confrontation — language, translation, interrogation formulae, memory — but also because of the ecclesiastical essentializing of heresy, the unreflecting imposition of rigid categories upon diverse actions and thoughts.9 The larger intellectual process of constructing heresy trickled down to the immediate confrontations between inquisitor and deponent that were mined so enthusiastically for “popular religion.” Yet both recent skepticism about how religion can be reassembled from inquisitorial sources and scholars’ ejection of inquisitors from those sources take us to a second and more substantive link between medieval heresy inquisitions and scholarship on popular religion. While the popular-religion scholarship so dominant in the 1970s and 1980s often offered implicit critiques of heresy inquisitions, it nevertheless continued a long genealogy of religious discernment concerning beliefs and practices of “the people” to which medieval inquisitions themselves belonged. Natalie Zemon Davis has remarked upon “the historian’s propensity to sort religious behavior into approved and disapproved categories.”10 In this propensity, the modern historian differs little from the medieval

90 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

inquisitor. Scholars of popular religion tacitly assumed a familiar authority to discern and to define good and bad, true and false religion, developing their own judgments about and criteria for “authentic” religion. As Davis and André Vauchez both observed, popular religion could perpetuate older discerning dichotomies of authentic/inauthentic Christianity by excising as “folkloric,” “superstitious,” “magical,” or “preChristian” certain beliefs from “real” religion, or, in Robert Scribner’s words, by imposing “a derogatory value judgment, seeing ‘popular religion’ as an inferior and distorted version of a ‘higher’ or ‘superior’ form of religion.”11 But these judgments could also be reversed, with a naturalized popular religion juxtaposed to an inferior, elite Christianity. Indeed, the “real,” proper religion often proposed by scholarship on popular religion was precisely the opposite of inquisitors’ own. It was authentic not just because it was what people believed and did when freed from watching eyes and was the default to which they returned no matter how much instruction or compulsion countered it; it also satisfied modern criteria— which we will explore below—for what religion was and did. With their complementary implication that Christianity did not satisfy those criteria, these scholarly constructions were important for our understanding not just of how Europe became Christian, but also of Christianity itself as a historical phenomenon. So to think about the future of medieval Christianity as a field, as Van Engen’s article still compels us to do, we might consider the seeming inevitability of making religious judgments when excavating common beliefs and practices, recognizing that criteria can shift and even upend over time. In what follows I will re-view, with the lens of an inquisition historian, some of the scholarship that Van Engen surveyed, arguing that from Christianity’s origins there have existed categories and criteria for its authentic and inauthentic forms, and by extension those of authentic and inauthentic religion. “Popular religion” has long been a tool for creating those categories, and historians have followed inquisitors in creating them. What particularly shows the tenacity of this process is that even the modern historiography that reversed premodern churchmen’s judgments about popular religion nevertheless still judged, categorized, and sorted. How do historians of Christianity stop doing that, or do we even need to?

Authentic, True, and Right \ 91 Defining Popular Religion If in 1955 Étienne Delaruelle could remark of popular piety in the eleventh century that “aucun ouvrage n’a étudié cette question dans son ensemble,” he would have been well satisfied twenty years later.12 By the mid-1970s, few topics in medieval and early modern religious history were as seductive as “popular religion” and its concomitants, “popular belief,” “popular piety,” and “folk religion.” The period witnessed an explosion not only of studies but also of a hyperaware concern over how to treat, and what constituted and delimited, this putatively new field. In 1973, for example, the editors of Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité noted that “le sujet [of ‘les spiritualités populaires’] est ‘dans l’air’ ” and issued a questionnaire seeking to refine topical and methodological problems.13 M.-H. Vicaire’s introduction to the eleventh Cahiers de Fanjeaux collection ( published 1976) broached “un thème presque trop neuf . . . son étude n’a encore suffisamment fixé ni sa méthode, ni sa problématique, ni même son langage, sans parler de ses sources propres.”14 Jean-Claude Schmitt, in a critique of Delaruelle appearing in Annales the same year, observed that “les travaux sur la ‘religion populaire’ se sont multipliés ces dernières années.”15 In Anglophone scholarship, meetings of Britain’s Ecclesiastical History Society in the early 1970s studied “Popular Belief and Practice,” while in the United States, the Davis Center research seminar at Princeton chose as its theme in 1973 “the history of popular religion, a new and promising field of enquiry.”16 Who were the “people”: all medieval Christians — the populus Christianus— or only the “lowest,” as defined by social and economic class, literacy, and education? Did the rural peasant belong to “the people,” but not the urban merchant? What of the wealthy layman and the impoverished parish curé ? One might ask other questions: Did a categorization as “popular” depend upon the nature of beliefs and action themselves, or rather upon the status of who held or did them? Were criteria for an identification as “popular” the original form or instead the eventual character of such beliefs; their degree of prescription or of spontaneity; who promoted them or for whom they were intended? To generalize, in answer to such questions a rather uneven consensus formed of

92 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

the constitution, source base, and methods of this “new and promising field.” The “popular religion” emerging in this work ranged widely from devotion soundly bound to the Latin church’s orthodox theology (saints, the Virgin Mary, prayers and masses, miracles) to paraliturgical, marginal, or “superstitious” forms of that devotion (charms, incantations, use of consecrated hosts) and to religious manifestations of “folklore” (seasonal feasts, rites of passage) that tended to fuse in scholarship with— although they were not necessarily identical to—pre-Christian “pagan survivals.”17 While some scholars flirted with the idea that “popular religion” connoted beliefs and practices common to all Christians in the premodern West, its usual definition was the domain of lower economic, social, and educational classes: anticlerical, antiwritten, antielite, antidoctrinal.18 Although the use of inquisitorial sources (and the taxonomic questions above) weighed down the study of popular religion with heavy methodological problems, some scholars emphasized rather the thrills of innovation and departure. James Obelkevich, for example, used the words “new,” “novel,” and “newer” repeatedly in his introduction to an essay collection resulting from the Davis seminar—its work, he claimed, exploded the narrow, desiccated channels of “ecclesiastical history” by making the invisible visible, the unheard heard, the marginal central.19 Yet the sudden birth of “popular religion” in the 1970s was a bit phantasmatic. The topic had emerged both amid and from a remarkable confluence of strands with longer tenure: an interest in folklore that slurred into the “religious aspects of folk culture”; attention to lay Catholic experience that would also be reflected in the Second Vatican Council; and the importation into medieval religious history of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, all of which had long attended to religion.20 Changing demographics in the American academy, and perhaps the British and European as well, also contributed, as a less homogenous body of academics drifted toward the “margins” and away from the elite for topics.21 Something else that made that “novel” scholarship not so novel was its place within a long tradition — which I will sketch only cursorily — of religious discernment, of turning ethical, theological, pastoral, and taxonomic eyes upon popular religion. That tradition included the very inquisitors who so prominently furnished sources for the study of popular religion. Even though popular-religion scholarship tended to remove

Authentic, True, and Right \ 93 these inquisitorial predecessors from studies based on their records, it nevertheless maintained some of their premises about distinguishing authentic from inauthentic religion.22 But while that tradition began with learned Christians who conceptualized particular practices as errant, its most recent representatives found learned Christianity liable to that same charge.

Popular Religion as Religion As is well known, the condemnation and excision of particular beliefs as “vulgar” or “superstitious” was deeply interwoven, both rhetorically and substantively, with early Christianity’s formation of unity and identity. In Arnaldo Momigliano’s words, late-antique Christians “set up their palisade between religion and superstition to coincide with the frontier between Christianity and Paganism.”23 Peter Brown famously chafed against the modern “two-tiered model” in which scholars presented “popular religion . . . as in some ways a diminution, a misconception or a contamination of ‘unpopular religion’ . . . best intelligible in terms of a failure to be something else.” Yet as Brown remarked, that diminution was indebted to late-antique Christians themselves, who refashioned and recategorized Christian piety in the terms of the Roman urban elite: “the upper class culture of Europe would always measure itself against the wilderness of a rusticitas which it had itself played no small part in creating.”24 Rusticitas, superstitio, and traditional Roman religion gradually coalesced in the condemnatory thinking of Christian elites in late antiquity and was not identical to the heresy that in earliest Christianity was usually doctrinally sophisticated and abstruse. Those elites then set the stage both for later “popular religion” and for more immediate repression, as their recategorization introduced and enabled attempts to eradicate “superstitious” elements from elite Christianity. We need not rehearse how various elements — legal theory, papal monarchism, religious dissent, heresiology, pastoral reform— combined to create the office of inquisitio hereticae pravitatis in the high-medieval Roman church. But it is worth revisiting how inquisition perpetuated the late-antique legacy of treating, and perhaps creating, putatively erroneous

94 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

popular belief as an authenticating foil. As specialists in medieval heresy have instructed us, antiheretical writers in the high Middle Ages specifically cited early Christian rhetoric and terminology about heresy, using it to organize and to attack scattered nonconformity and dissent. More generally, polemicists and inquisitors adopted late antiquity’s construction of Christianity itself as default religion. In medieval western Europe’s atmosphere of Christian hegemony, however, attention to popular belief was part of broad and ambitious ecclesiastical efforts at spiritual discipline. Although rusticitas was not the chief target of medieval heresy inquisitors, Étienne de Bourbon’s thirteenth-century encounter with the “holy greyhound” demonstrates how inquisition’s attention to popular religion lacquered its double task of discernment and correction with a pastoral gloss. In Étienne’s Tractatus, the Guinefort exemplum appeared in the book De fortitudine, under the subhead “De superstitione.” Étienne recounted there his discovery, through several confessions, that village women brought their ill children to Saint Guinefort, whom the inquisitor learned was a greyhound once slain unjustly by its master, who mistakenly believed the dog had killed his son. “Certain rustic people, . . . seduced by the devil and deluded in that way many times, so that by this he might lead people into error,” honored the dog as a martyr. The cult’s key ritual, leaving the sick infant, a supposed changeling, overnight at Guinefort’s shrine to be exchanged for the genuine child, horrified Étienne, who attempted to destroy the cult by instruction, interdict, and razing the shrine. To Étienne, Guinefort worship was not heresy, but one of the “superstitions contumelious to God, . . . attribut[ing] divine honors to demons or to any other created thing, as idolatry does.” It was a diabolical trick whereby the devil attacked the “populus Christianus, dragging behind him with the tail of deceitful seduction innumerable souls of the foolish, whose number is infinite.”25 We see here the crediting of “rustic” error to devilish sabotage, the salvific value of instruction, and, incidentally, of investigating such belief. In the original legend of the slain greyhound that Étienne recorded, its master’s grievously tardy queries exculpated the dog only after the summary injustice of its death (“inquirentes . . . veritatem autem facti agnoscentes, et dolentes de hoc quod sic injuste canem occiderant”). But Étienne’s own sober “inquiry” into the

Authentic, True, and Right \ 95 truth was able beneficially to deflect that “deceitful seduction” from the populus Christianus. Through its appearance in an exemplum for preaching, Étienne’s inquisitorial lesson — popular superstition was a diabolical trick on the foolish, and “seeking [it] out” had pastoral use—could be repeatedly and more widely taught. While Étienne’s pastoral aims in naming and eradicating “superstition” inherited late-antique constructions of rusticity, it also reflected contemporary constructions of heresy by fellow inquisitors and ecclesiastics: identifications of behavior and beliefs that undergirded high-medieval pastoral reform and heresy inquisitions. If various strategies against the practices of the “people” buttressed ecclesiastical power, they did so by firmly placing such practices within Roman Christianity’s theological and legal frameworks, rather than expelling them as wholly other.26 Superstition, heresy, and unusual practices and beliefs were all targeted by a broad complex of spiritual discipline (including confession and penance as well as inquisition) that paid increasingly close attention to the internal and external constitutions of the populus Christianus. For a medieval inquisitor such as Étienne, attending to the “popular” was inextricable from the salvific demand to be intolerant. While that attention to popular religion, and the accompanying process of discerning authentic from inauthentic religion, continued, its relationship with inquisition and toleration would radically alter. By the eighteenth century, for instance, even fewer people than in the Middle Ages agreed that intolerance and persecution were Christian values. The role of heresy inquisitions in Enlightenment arguments for religious toleration, as bloody proof of the evils of forced conformity, is well known.27 Some Enlightenment critics of religion, including Voltaire, posited that “the people’s” superstitions harmfully kept alive Christianity’s intolerant institutions.28 But David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) — an early appearance of the term “popular religion” in English— saw the relationship between popular religion and toleration differently, despite sharing a low opinion of most people’s religious impulses. The Natural History argued against the theory of degradation, that is, that humans’ original theism had deteriorated into polytheism. Hume’s progressive religious history contended rather that polytheism refined itself over time into theism. But it was not so simple, as most “people,” everywhere and

96 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

in all eras, were superstitious, instinctive, and nondogmatic, naturally resistant to a rational theism. Hume used the phrase “popular religion” repeatedly, generally equating it with polytheism and with “vulgar” beliefs and practices.29 Hume prefigured later scholarly assumptions about popular religion by arguing that religion’s origin was found in “anxious concern,” “the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind,” and a lack of control over the “unknown causes” of life’s vagaries.30 The Natural History also anticipated later analytical conventions in the study of religion by observing the commonalities of universal religious experience; by proposing a progressive model of human development; and by comparing “our present experience concerning the principles and opinions of barbarous nations” to the European past, which featured idolatry or “polytheism, the primitive religion of uninstructed mankind.”31 But Hume’s European present was not immune: “the vulgar, in nations, which have embraced the doctrine of theism, still build it upon irrational and superstitious opinions,” demonstrating the “flux and reflux” by which “ignorant and uninstructed” persons, encountering the tidy theism that had slowly emerged from polytheism, dragged it back down into idolatry.32 Even “at this day, and in Europe . . . the vulgar” would cheaply explain God’s existence by accidents and fortune, “so inveterate are the people’s prejudices” toward “superstition.”33 So far, medieval heresy inquisitors might be nodding in agreement. So too might many Christian ecclesiastics of late antiquity. But Hume’s Natural History departed from them and again anticipated later studies by associating that unsophisticated, polytheistic popular religion with toleration. The superstitious instincts of the “vulgar” had at least one value: “The tolerating spirit of idolaters, both in ancient and modern times, is . . . obvious,” while “the intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of god, is as remarkable.”34 While the former “naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity,” competing theistic sects, each persuaded of its own correct notions of the “unity of god” and worship, “fall naturally into animosity.”35 ( This was then a historical as well as a conceptual argument.) If Hume congratulated his contemporary English and Dutch Protestantism for “embrac[ing] the principles of toleration,” he conceded that only the “steady resolution of the civil magistrate” obstructed the repressive in-

Authentic, True, and Right \ 97 stincts of “priests and bigots.”36 If inquisitors such as Étienne de Bourbon held up the practices of the populus Christianus against their conception of right religion and found them culpably amiss, in Hume’s discussion of “popular religion” those inquisitors were now on the other side. To Hume, the best examples of theism’s repressive impulses were “the inquisition and persecutions of Rome and Madrid,” both of which were, of course, still active when Hume wrote. These superseded even “the human sacrifices of . . . barbarous nations” by joining their “effusion of blood” to inquisitors’ hatred of “virtue, knowledge [and] love of liberty,” ultimately destroying not just the body of the condemned heretic, but also society itself. Thus, while “idolatry” had its disadvantages, intolerant monotheism exceeded them in its “pernicious” effect on “political society.”37 Did Hume know that the “inquisitions of Rome and Madrid,” and the medieval inquisitions whose offspring they were, had preceded him in turning an eye to “irrational and superstitious opinions”? Regardless, Hume departed from how previous Christian observers had judged the moral value of and the religious lessons taught by “vulgar” beliefs and practices. To borrow Étienne de Bourbon’s language, to Hume “diabolical seduction” had fallen upon those ready to rend social and political communities, to spill blood and to persecute, for their one god. A messier and more diffuse popular religion, less committed to unity, conformity, and doctrine, was better suited to human cohesion and happiness than was intolerant monotheism. It is striking how often we hear echoes of Hume in the popularreligion scholarship of the twentieth century. This is so in part because of other trends that developed in Hume’s wake, particularly, as John Van Engen noted, the influence of the nineteenth-century disciplines of comparative religion and folklore upon the study of medieval religion. We might add specifically that the progressive theories of development embraced by nineteenth-century anthropologists of religion such as E. B. Tylor, William Robertson Smith, and James George Frazer foreshadowed later scholars’ structural links between non-European peoples and premodern Europeans.38 Late twentieth-century scholarship on popular religion maintained firm faith in the “survivals” of folkloric and primitive practices and beliefs and that the core of religion was a response to the uncertainty of life. James Obelkevech listed as one contributor to the

98 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

field’s novelty “the influence of the social sciences, ranging from classic sociology (including Marx) down to contemporary anthropology.” 39 For example, in the Davis seminar collection, Robert Muchembled argued that witches of the Cambrésis were “expiatory victims chosen by their fellow villagers to satisfy a confused, ritualistic need for sacrifice”; “the witch hunters . . . engaged in a ritualistic purging of their own fears . . . demanded scapegoats.” Muchembled depended here on a model of acculturation, which was also used by Jean-Claude Schmitt in a study of the medieval custom of young men’s festive dance with a wooden horse. Schmitt would also explicitly “situate” The Holy Greyhound “within a scientific anthropological perspective.”40 In a supposition impugned by Leonard Boyle as an example of how anthropology’s allure led scholars astray, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie insisted that fertility cults must have existed in Montaillou, if “unspoken” and even unrecognized by the villagers’ consciousness.41 Anthropology’s influences, ubiquitous in the scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, are well known. But I would like to emphasize how, despite the importation of new methods and vocabulary, the field of popular religion perpetuated traditional kinds of religious judgments and distinctions between good and bad, authentic and inauthentic religion. That perpetuation was also, in a sense, indebted to anthropology, even as it inherited the habits of medieval inquisitors. Two things had particularly enabled the extension of anthropology’s methods, language, and premises to premodern European Christianity and the excavation of its own “primitive” forms. First was the contention that premodern Europe was the civilizational equivalent of modern nondeveloped, nonliterate, nonindustrialized cultures, which we glimpse as early as Hume.42 Second was a premise of structural unity and similarity among religions that leveled Christianity as an object of analysis. The anthropologist E. E. EvansPritchard observed that for many of his predecessors, “primitive religion was with regard to its validity no different from any other religious faith . . . they sought, and found, in primitive religions a weapon which could . . . be used with deadly effect against Christianity.”43 That leveling had broader applications beyond the history of the Middle Ages. But in medieval studies, anthropology’s leveling of Christianity — supported by its structural commonalities with some “primitive” religions — would

Authentic, True, and Right \ 99 have extra bite amid the often-confessional legacies of “church history” and the “Age of Faith,” stripping away any exceptionalism that Christian scholars had attached to their subject. This was the important converse of the historiographical development from which Van Engen’s piece sprang: if medieval religious life now joined politics, warfare, and economics as fit topics of investigation for scholars who were not theologians or monks, it did so in large part because Christianity had been brought down to earth.44 This meant, then, that by the twentieth century, two things could be combustibly brought together: one, a long history of defining and judging “religion” by persons examining popular beliefs and practices; and two, Christianity identified as merely one of many religions to be dismantled and analyzed. When this marriage took place, Christianity lost. If previously Christianity itself had provided and constituted the criteria for a true religion for the late-antique polemicist or the medieval heresy inquisitor, now other criteria deriving from anthropologists, sociologists, and scientists of religion were in play, against which Christianity might fall short. This leveling inclusion of Christianity within the category of an analyzable religion was accompanied by the stronger infusion into its history of universalist norms about what “religion” is and does. These included helping persons confront uncertainty and lack of control; naturalizing or diminishing economic forces; and cohering and glorifying society.45 While functionalism especially was not new, it was crucial in the scholarly elevation of popular religion over “elite” Christianity amid competing definitions of real religion. Let’s look more closely at the criteria undergirding those definitions. Most important was the situation of “popular religion” within prehistory. Religious anthropologist (and Anglican priest) E. O. James, in an article discussing the influence of folklore on the study of religion, repeatedly divorced folklore, particularly in its orality, from temporality: “from time before memory things have been ordained in this manner,” “through the ages,” “from time immemorial,” “from age to age,” “a heritage extending back beyond the confines of history and written records.”46 Although Schmitt wished to establish precisely the social, political, and cultural contexts in which the Guinefort cult, as Étienne encountered it, arose in the high Middle Ages, he also argued that the cult

100 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

“involves ritual practices of very ancient provenance, whose ‘origins’ cannot really be traced.”47 Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou repeatedly evoked the “very ancient”: “the emergence of pre-existing folklore elements, pre-Christian, non-Christian or anti-Christian . . . traditional rural naturalism”; “the collective unconscious which was always, though often silently, concerned with ancient rural beliefs”; a village sexual ethics “deriv[ing] directly from an ancient source of popular peasant wisdom.”48 For Ginzburg, as for James, timelessness was inextricable from oral tradition, which reached back irretrievably into the past, “transmi[tted] from generation to generation.”49 Particularly through orality, an undefined “paganism” or religious folklore was thus naturalized as the religious system: “It is this [oral] tradition, deeply rooted in the European countryside, that explains the tenacious persistence of a peasant religion intolerant of dogma and ritual, tied to the cycles of nature, and fundamentally pre-Christian.”50 This timelessness of lost origins was inevitably linked to the functional; for John Shinners, “what worked, worked — as it had in the past.”51 “What worked” in this paradigm—what seemed to be real religion— was the concrete and the emotionally, psychologically, satisfying.52 If nineteenth-century scientists of religion tended to explain “survivals” by models of uneven cultural development, now, in a return to Hume, survival was explained functionally by the transhistorical demands of human needs. Timelessness, orality, and the immediate, material quality that was credited to popular religion all promoted the gratification of desires and assuaging of fears that were posited as the sociological and psychological origin— and as the core purpose—of “religion.” As André Vauchez observed, scholars of medieval popular religion commonly defined it as a collection of folkloric survivals that responded “à un certain nombre de besoins fondamentaux de l’individu et du groupe.”53 To John Shinners, popular religion was “starkly functional . . . religion was a way of coping with the world; medieval people grabbed for whatever tools, natural or supernatural, that seemed to work best under the circumstances.” Shinners described the Guinefort cult discussed by Schmitt specifically in these terms: “When lives and times are hard, people — medieval and modern alike — turn for relief to what they think will best work, leaving theologians and historians to sort out the finer points about

Authentic, True, and Right \ 101 what is orthodox and what is not.”54 Popular religion’s apt functionalism gave it a humanist superiority over a more cerebral and formal elite faith; it “addressed feelings of genuine need, so it came from the heart, was emotionally focused, and intensely human.”55 The emotional immediacy of this natural faith was consequently “free from the academically narrow categories placed on something as encompassing, amorphous, and mysterious as religious belief. . . . [O]rdinary Christians . . . had a better grasp of religion’s fluid boundaries than thinkers who restrained pious impulses by academic or doctrinal fetters.”56 The absence of such restraints and fetters was important. The natural religion that emerged as popular belief was capacious, nondogmatic, and tolerant. To Robert Scribner, “because it is less structured and more fluid, popular devotion is a kind of liminal area where beliefs are volatile and susceptible to new suggestions and influences.” As Hume would agree, that fluidity and susceptibility was of humanist benefit, less likely to, in Hume’s words, “provoke men’s spleen and indignation.”57 The organic impulses of this satisfying and timeless faith were absent doctrine; hence it was incompatible with compulsion, which the “intensely human” never required for a successful inculcation among resistants. As Dominick LaCapra noted, Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms identified religious tolerance and endorsement of nondogmatic religion as key elements of oral peasant culture. In another echo of Hume, Ginzburg located the miller Menocchio’s “statements in favor of religious tolerance” within the “obscure, almost unfathomable, layer of remote peasant traditions.” Again, this naturalized religion was “free of dogmatic requirements . . . [and] didn’t call for confessional restrictions.”58 To Ginzburg, that tolerant peasant religion was “intolerant,” properly, of only two things: “dogma and ritual.”59 Several scholars have challenged or softened the more boldly drawn lines of these depictions of premodern religious life.60 For example, can we assume that the complex Guinefort ritual — which, as Étienne de Bourbon tells us with seeming truth, often led to dead infants — was what “worked best” when confronting a child’s illness? But the point here is that as scholarship on popular religion continued a venerable tradition of, to recall Natalie Zemon Davis’s words, “sort[ing] religious behavior into approved and disapproved categories,” it likewise embedded

102 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

assumptions about what religion is and what authenticates and commends it. The “historian’s propensity” to validate and to reject, to form criteria for religion’s definition and authenticity, was shared with, and partly inherited from, inquisitors.61 But in modern scholarship on popular religion, traditional attention to the practices and beliefs of “the people” joined constructions of religion that were reflective of post-Enlightenment humanism.62 “Approved” religion would now be unrecognizable both to the early Christian elites who recategorized traditional Roman religion as superstition and to the medieval inquisitors who sought to excise “diabolical deception” through repression. Real religion was now that very rusticitas, which both fit and in turn helped to shape scholarly criteria for authentic religion. But to appreciate best the consequences for how we understand inquisition specifically and Christianity generally, we need to examine briefly what was “disapproved.”

Medieval Christianity as Religion If in scholarship timelessness, naturalism, orality, and an ability to fulfill human needs were interpenetrating and validating aspects of “popular religion,” they were countered by Christianity’s opposite failures. First was time. “The pattern of daily life as molded by Christianity” was unnatural, arrhythmic, dissonant. To Le Roy Ladurie, “the time of the humble people [was] only partially annexed by the Church.” This was obviously a matter of the calendar, of time in a daily and yearly sense, with Christian rituals, feast days, and liturgical seasons sitting with effort upon natural cycles.63 But the problem of time was also more serious: unlike the timelessness of an oral culture that reached back irretrievably into the past, Christianity was bound in time. It had entered history and had joined human experience at a certain point—rather than being organic, psychologically and sociologically determined, constant, “before memory”—and, consequently, Christianity would struggle to succeed. It had an origin and recorded beginnings, while the natural religion neatly expressive of humanity was contemporary with, and inseparable from, the human expe-

Authentic, True, and Right \ 103 rience. The intimation, obviously redolent of psychology, was that human sensibilities and sentiments were hardwired and unchanging over time. Together with its temporality, Christianity’s arid, abstract quality rendered it unable to satisfy human needs—that is, to serve as emotional, social, and psychological balm for individuals and communities. This also ensured its failure among (most) people. This, for example, provided a key argument in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, which analyzed both late-medieval Catholicism and early modern Anglicanism as grappling differently with the enervating pull on doctrinal Christianity by the centrifugal forces of fear and anxiety.64 Schmitt went further. His analysis of a popular wooden-horse dance argued that Christianity not only did not cohere and aggrandize the community, as Emile Durkheim famously posited as the purpose and genius of religion, but actually rended it by disrupting its folkloric unity.65 Christianity’s inability to fulfill what religion “did,” or the purposes for which religion had originated among humans, therefore explained the broad persistence of pre-Christian religion. To Ludo Milis, the latter’s survival was “necessary to Christianity, to fill the gaps in its own concepts and ideas.”66 In this scholarship, Christianity’s written character was a disadvantage. Writing of course played a key role in scholarly depictions of elite and popular cultural conflict, as a central component of social and economic class, of a clerical/lay divide, and generally of cultural difference between those with power and without it. We also glimpsed above the issues of writing, mediation, and authority at hand in the inquisitorial sources mined for information. But the written was also incompatible with the timeless in a way the oral was not. Just as scholarship on popular religion linked timelessness and orality, Christianity’s temporality was inseparable from writing: as in, for example, those recorded beginnings. And as the written fixes, dates, and stakes out historical origins, it also limits and doctrinally restricts, creating those “doctrinal fetters,” mentioned above, that restricted people’s “pious impulses.” Hume had also anticipated this in contrasting the tolerance of “vulgar” religion, with its orally circulating and competing traditions, with scriptural religions more likely to spawn violence and repression. The written enabled orthodoxy, and its consequent repression, in a way the oral did not, making repression

104 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

inherent in rather than an accretion of Christianity.67 Combined with its inevitable “gaps” in addressing core human needs, Christianity’s “specific doctrine”— which since late antiquity had shaped orthodoxy and heterodoxy in tandem — generated the persecution that was alien to and unnecessary in popular religion. Those familiar with scholarship on popular religion know that standard explanations for Christianity’s improbable success in premodern Europe are syncretism and acculturation. The church occasionally accommodated, or appropriated, popular practices and beliefs, attempting tactically, as Ginzburg and Schmitt thought, to “reassert control over the masses.”68 In this view— however paradoxically — popular religion was a tool to ensure the success of the very religious system whose otherwise inevitable failure that tool’s tenacious existence proved.69 But what the ecclesiastical sources to which scholars appealed showed, most dramatically and clearly, as a means to that success was not acculturation, but rather repressive force. Heresy inquisitions such as those of Étienne de Bourbon were the darkest extent of the bicultural opposition, painfully imbalanced in power, between “clerical culture and folk culture.” Inquisition sought the excision of popular elements, obviated through the arm of force Christianity’s necessary failure, and targeted popular culture as an “object of repression.”70 Inquisition’s own attention to the “folk” had preceded that of scholarship on popular religion, and its own sources had been a foundation of those studies. But inquisition was also, in that work, itself an argument to be raised against elite Christianity and in favor of the fluid, tolerant natural faith that the church had tried at best to coopt and at worst to extinguish.71 Most significant then for students of medieval heresy inquisitions is how deeply in these depictions Christianity — particularly in its written and doctrinal character, ostensibly neither functional nor “from the heart”— structurally intertwines with compulsion and coercion. The theme of “mis-fit” often present in popular-religion scholarship implicitly posited repressive hegemony as endemic to a Christianity that presumably meshed poorly with everyone, not just low social classes or the illiterate. Van Engen noted in “Christian Middle Ages” the troubled matter of “the extent of the ‘Christianization’ of medieval society, that is, the degree to which specifically Christian teachings and practices shaped

Authentic, True, and Right \ 105 the cultural milieu of medieval folk both high and low.”72 The question the historian of inquisition might ask, after reading about Christianity’s difficulties and shortcomings, was not how medieval people became better Christians through instruction, preaching, confession, and so on, but rather how anyone became Christian at all. Even learned clerics had their own “human needs.” Why would they embrace a faith that could not satisfy those needs without borrowing from traditions outside of it? If Christianity was so unsuited to medieval Europeans, only various hegemonic social, political, and economic forces can explain Christianity’s dominating presence in medieval Europe. At the same time, positing a stark conflict between a popular religion and an elite church culture that repressed it could also mean underestimating the pervasiveness, reach, and power of ecclesiastical repression in premodern Europe. Ginzburg described the “permanent confrontation between different cultures” as the “essence” of anthropology, and belief in that permanent confrontation was crucial in imagining and describing premodern popular religion. In the sources mined by scholars of popular religion, inquisition’s literally and figuratively dialogic character — the personal encounter between inquisitor and deponent — well supported an anthropological “two cultures” model.73 However, this meant sharpening cultural differences between clerical inquisitor and lay witness; as Van Engen observed, those “two distinct cultures” were not so distinct in background, interests, or religious sympathies and habits.74 Anthropology’s influence upon popular-religion scholarship surely encouraged the deepening of cultural and devotional divides between clerical and lay Christians, of various social and economic classes, in medieval Europe. In retreating from an exaggerated cultural divide and looking differently at ecclesiastical persecution, we might ask how scholarship on popular religion that posited a protolayer of natural faith would respond to recent arguments about constructions of heresy. When Van Engen wrote, R. I. Moore’s paradigm of the persecuting society, with its ramifications for our understanding of ecclesiastical conceptualizations of heresy and of the encounter between inquisitors and laypeople, was not yet entrenched in medieval studies. In dominant scholarly interpretations today, medieval heterodoxy was the result of clerics’ categorizations and constructions, rather than a reality continued from human origins, as it was to

106 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

many scholars of popular religion. Power was gained and increased by churchmen who fashioned and refashioned stereotypes in order to excise outsiders, rather than in play through the clash of two truly distinct religious faiths. Arguments about heresy, its construction, and its essentialized character in the high Middle Ages themselves show the influence of anthropology, particularly through the contention that categorizing heresy and the resulting repression pursued purity by creating marginalized outgroups.75 Those arguments are also unquestionably premised upon the significance of culture and class. But they also encourage us to view the disciplinary aims of churchmen and inquisitors as more ambitious and wide-ranging. Inquisitions and other forms of spiritual discipline were not tools wielded only against popular beliefs branded heretical or superstitious, or against folk culture. The “two cultures” model rested on the idea that one culture was the repressor and the other the repressed. But we might instead focus on the exhaustiveness, the totality, of spiritual discipline and repression throughout later-medieval religious culture. Heresy inquisitions were directed against clerics, too; more broadly, ecclesiastics at all levels were subject to discipline in both the immediate and the more theoretical sense. Inquisition was one component of an ambitious complex of spiritual discipline that did not discriminate socially against the bodies and souls it sought to subjugate. The definitions and constructions that marked the scholarship on popular religion to which John Van Engen responded had other implications for Christianity as a historical phenomenon. There, medieval Christianity could be many things— an institution, an elite social class, a hegemonic cultural force—but its ability to be a “religion,” as many scholars now understood that term, was diminished. But in a sense, when that scholarship cut medieval Christianity in two, it gave its “elite” version too much credit. As Obelkevich said of the Davis seminar papers, “Religion appears . . . less often in its doctrinal or ecclesiastical purity than with the impurities and accretions of particular social contexts.”76 We can appreciate his attempt to distinguish the study of popular religion from that of high theology and acknowledge the need still to do so in 1973. But Obelkevich, like much of this scholarship, wrongly implied that “non-popular” Christianity as a historical entity was not variegated and impure, not a

Authentic, True, and Right \ 107 composite, and not influenced by social contexts. In scholarly contrasts of popular dynamism to elite purity, Christianity became less organic, vulnerable, and evolving: as if only literate intellectuals had antiseptically birthed and nurtured it from its antique origins in the Greek east; as if doctrinal orthodoxy was uncreated, hermetic, and exhaustive; as if Christianity’s character and content were immune to historical circumstance; as if the normative beliefs and practices that gradually and controversially developed over the faith’s first (and non-hegemonic) centuries did so divorced from “human needs.” A pure, unitary, and self-evident Christianity is an image that Étienne de Bourbon would have warmly endorsed.77 But it never existed. To capture the diversity and breadth of medieval religious life, we cannot diminish the roles of contingency and construction in the most “elite” Christianity and in Christian orthodoxy, or forget how Christianity, from its origins and at all levels, was a congeries of difference, conflict, creativity, the oral and the written, the rending of bonds as well as sealing them, making life harder as well as making it easier.

Conclusion Of the two religions that emerged from scholarship on premodern popular religion, one of them matched expected norms for an essentialized religion resident in the human experience and was therefore viewed as healthily self-perpetuating. One did not and was not, and so tactically created the persecution that, in turn, justified its condemnation as unnatural, irreligious, and antihumanist.78 Visible was a contrapuntal clash not just between two cultures, but also between the pervasive Christianity that had ostensibly comprised the “Age of Faith” and the now-discovered natural religion so dissimilar to it. It was between authentic religion and what appeared not to be a religion at all. This clash was the same as that of Étienne de Bourbon, but the tables had turned; now the inauthentic religion was the one that failed to unite communities, to smooth hardships, and to help persons assuage fear and anxiety. It was the religion that was restrictive rather than inclusive. This long genealogy of finding and observing “popular religion” (under its various names) consistently did so in pursuit of a truer religion

108 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

and consistently claimed to discern this religion authoritatively. However, over that time, there was inconsistency and tension in what these observers saw as the purpose of investigating popular beliefs and practices. For some the value was pastoral and disciplinary. For example, we might add to inquisitors such as Étienne de Bourbon some representatives discussed by Van Engen: the early twentieth-century development in Germany of religiöse Volkskunde, indebted to the “practical, pastoral concern” of a Lutheran clergy seeking better to tend its flock, and the Catholic religious sociology of Étienne Delaruelle and Gabriel Le Bras.79 But for others it was humanist and ethical. For Hume, for nineteenth-century “scientists of religions,” and for anthropologists of religion, the benefits of attending to the religion of the people fell not to those who possessed it — that is, by correcting or by educating them — but rather to those both inside and outside the tradition. Of course, those with a pastoral interest were often Christian clerics, and those with a more broadly humanist interest were generally not. But if Christian scholars believed that the souls of the populus Christianus could be saved through investigating such practices and beliefs, their colleagues who did not share explicitly pastoral or confessional aims nevertheless presented their own analyses as having moral value. Attending to the “people” could beneficially increase comparative understanding among world religions, could loosen a stifling Christian hegemony, and could further the humanist value of rethinking religion’s very purposes and utilities. It is not difficult to see in the scholarship so prominent in the 1970s and 1980s the ethical interest in proving genuine religion to be, simply, religion that was tolerant.80 If we have so far emphasized some shared premises between medieval inquisitors and modern scholars, we must note a crucial difference. Even if we want to argue that “the historian’s propensity to sort religious behavior into approved and disapproved categories” continues a pattern from the inquisitorial enterprise, this is not to equate the two. There is a stark difference between writing about something and persecuting it. No matter how implicitly or explicitly critical scholars might be about a “non-popular” Christianity that seemed to violate their criteria for authentic religion, unlike medieval inquisitors they were not empowered to exterminate it. And I am not arguing that Christianity in its medieval Latin

Authentic, True, and Right \ 109 form was indeed successful at doing all of the things that now seemed to define religion — cohering communities, easing anxieties, and so on — a matter that John Van Engen’s article is a powerful starting point for considering. My point in evoking this long history, in which the beliefs and practices of the “people” were a landscape against which to work out and to assert authoritative definitions of religion, is to consider its ramifications for our understandings of medieval inquisition and Christianity more generally, and to ask whether that process is escapable. Again, the fundamental questions raised by Van Engen’s article— what was the content and character of medieval Christianity, how have the broad strokes of its depictions changed with scholarly shifts, and what suppositions must we hold to access it?— are perennial, even as “popular religion” has become less fashionable in medieval studies.81 Those questions, and the depictions of Christianity, religion, and medieval persecution offered by scholarship on popular religion, are perhaps especially pertinent for inquisition historians. This is so precisely because since the high Middle Ages inquisition has been a powerful gauge of religious (in)authenticity, and because inquisition historians are sensitive to our disconcerting resemblances and debts to the inquisitors we study and whose sources we use.82 It is also because we are regularly confronted in our research by the encompassing place medieval Christianity made, among all kinds of Christians, for repression, pain, and discipline. One key question prompted by “popular religion” for students of inquisition, and for medievalists, then is: In writing the history of Christianity, including the history of heresy inquisitions, how do we break from a schema of discernment and authority about “right” religion — that “propensity to sort religious behavior into approved and disapproved categories”— that is indebted, in part, to inquisitors themselves? The scholarship considered above reminds us how difficult it is to construct and to delimit religion and Christianity as historical subjects and to define Christian orthodoxy as an interpretive category. Whether we perceive a popular religion that we excise from Christianity (or vice versa), affirm a singular Christianity, or embrace Vauchez’s “plusieurs variétés de christianisme,” we still inherit a legacy of discernment in which both “religion” and “Christianity” are self-reflective.83 We know what medieval

110 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

inquisitors were trying to do with their discernments and categorizations; what we are trying to do can be less clear. It will always be the task of medievalists to ask ourselves whose souls we are trying to save in our studies. But what I think John Van Engen has done, both in that article and beyond it, is to shed that propensity and to encourage us to shed it, too.

Notes 1. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986), 519– 52 (quotations 522, 529). 2. Ibid., 530, 552. 3. Ibid., 530 – 31. 4. Pierre Boglioni, “Pour l’étude de la religion populaire au moyen age: le problème des sources,” in Foi populaire foi savante. Actes du Ve Colloque du Centre d’études d’histoire des religions populaires tenu au Collège dominicain de théologie (Ottawa) ( Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1976), 93–148. Schmitt: “Stephen of Bourbon’s exemplum gives us a totally unprecedented opportunity to attend to both a legend and a folk rite. This was an almost unheard-of piece of luck.” JeanClaude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 171. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 530 – 31. 5. Boglioni, “Pour l’étude,” 136 – 37. 6. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le saint lévrier: Guinefort, guérisseur d’enfants depuis le XIIIe siècle ( Paris: Flammarion, 1979), translated into English as The Holy Greyhound (see note 4 above). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 ( Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975; rev. ed., 1982); translated into English as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray ( New York: Scolar Press, 1978). Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 7. Renato Rosaldo, “From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 81. 8. Dominick LaCapra, “The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian,” in History and Criticism ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 61– 62.

Authentic, True, and Right \ 111 9. R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012); Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Monique Zerner, ed. Inventer l’hérésie?: Discours polémiques et pouvoirs avant l’inquisition ( Nice: Université de Nice Sophia-Antopolis, 1998). For countering arguments, see Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?,” Past and Present 192 (2006): 3– 33; L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations ( Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011); and Claire Taylor, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Medieval Quercy ( York: York Medieval Press, 2011). 10. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Obermann ( Leiden: Brill, 1974), 311. Her concern was rather in evoking relational meanings in acts and beliefs. 11. Davis, “Tasks and Themes,” 307; André Vauchez, “Conclusion,” in La Réligion populaire en Languedoc du XIIIe siècle à la moitié du XIVe siècle, Cahiers de Fanjeaux 11 ( Toulouse: Privat, 1976), 435; R. W. Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, no. 1 (1984): 48. 12. Étienne Delaruelle, “La pietà popolare nel secolo XI,” in Relazioni del Xo congresso internazionale di scienze storiche, t. 3 ( Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1955), 309n1. 13. N. A., “Une enquête sur les ‘spiritualités populaires,’ ” Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité 49 (1973), 493. 14. M.-H. Vicaire, “Introduction,” in La Réligion populaire en Languedoc du XIIIe siècle à la moitié du XIVe siècle, Cahiers de Fanjeaux 11 ( Toulouse: Privat, 1976), 7. 15. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “ ‘Religion Populaire’ et Culture Folklorique,” Annales: ESC 31 (1976): 941. 16. G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker, eds., Popular Belief and Practice: Papers Read at the Ninth Summer Meeting and the Tenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); James Obelkevich, ed., Religion and the People 800 – 1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 17. The 1970s produced numerous introductory, synthetic articles attempting to define and to delimit the field. See Pietro Boglioni, “Élements d’un Bilan,” in Les religions populaires: Colloque international, 1970, ed. Benoît Lacroix and Pietro Boglioni (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1972), 53– 63; Michel Mollat, “Les formes populaires de la piété au moyen age. Introduction au colloque sur la piété populaire,” in La piété populaire au Moyen Âge. Actes du 99e congrès national des Sociétés Savantes, Besançon 1974. Section de philologie et d’histoire

112 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

jusqu’à 1610, t. 1 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1977), 7– 25; André Vauchez, “La piété populaire au moyen âge: État des travaux et position des problèmes,” in La piété populaire au Moyen Âge, 27– 42; Raoul Manselli, La religione popolare nel medioevo (Sec. VI–XII) ( Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1974), 1–10; Raoul Manselli, La religion populaire au moyen âge: Problèmes de méthode et d’histoire. Conférence Albert-le-Grand 1973 ( Montréal: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1975), 11– 41; Vicaire, “Introduction,” and Vauchez, “Conclusion,” in La Réligion populaire en Languedoc, 7–11, 429– 444; Davis, “Tasks and Themes,” 307– 36; Leonard E. Boyle, “Popular Piety in the Middle Ages: What Is Popular?” Florilegium 4 (1982): 184 – 93; Schmitt, “‘Religion populaire’ et Culture Folklorique” and “Une enquête sur les ‘spiritualités populaires.’” For a concise summary of the field’s diversity— and the interesting observation that little work on popular religion has appeared in Germany— see Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion,” 47– 48. Davis later took stock of the concept’s evolution throughout the 1970s: Natalie Zemon Davis, “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures,” in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven Ozment (Saint Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 321– 41. 18. John Shinners, “Introduction,” in Medieval Popular Religion 1000 –1500: A Reader ( Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1997), xvi; Boyle, “Popular Piety in the Middle Ages.” Robert Scribner: “Popular belief may, in general, be regarded as the belief held by the mass of the people, by contrast to that held by the religious elite who make up the clerical hierarchy of the Church, the ‘professional men of religion’. But this distinction should not be too rigidly drawn.” Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 95. 19. For example, Obelkevich: “The authors have broken with the related discipline of ecclesiastical history and have abandoned its confines and conventions.” Obelkevich, “Introduction,” 3. Schmitt criticized Delaruelle, and the “popular religion” scholarship following in Delaruelle’s more conservative train, for failing to recognize that folkloric culture undergirded the daily, religious life of the “masses,” and for limiting his conception of folklore to the medieval West. Schmitt, “Religion populaire et culture folklorique,” 944 – 45. Incisive sourcemethodological critiques of scholars dwelling in “popular belief ” have come from LaCapra, “Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian,” 45– 69; Leonard E. Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited: Mentalité and Methodology,” in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. Ambrose Raftis ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), 119– 40; Rosaldo, “Door of His Tent,” 77– 97; and Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg,” Journal of Modern History 48, no. 2 (1976): 296– 315. 20. E. O. James, “The Influence of Folklore on the History of Religion,” Numen 9, no. 1 (1962): 1–16; Julio Caro Baroja, “Del folklore religioso europeo como disciplina histórica,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 21 (1965): 370 – 79; Don Yoder, “Toward a Definition of Folk Religion” and “Introductory Bibliography on Folk Religion,” Western Folklore 33, no. 1 (1974): 2– 34. On the

Authentic, True, and Right \ 113 influence of the lay interests of Delaruelle and Gabriel Le Bras, see André Vauchez, “Étienne Delaruelle Historien,” in Étienne Delaruelle, La piété populaire au Moyen Age ( Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1980), 5–19; M.-H. Vicaire, “Liminaire. L’apport Étienne Delaruelle aux études de spiritualité populaire médiévale,” in La religion populaire en Languedoc, 23– 36; Peter Biller, “Popular Religion in the Middle Ages,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley ( London: Routledge, 1997), 224 – 26, 236. As Gábor Klaniczay observes, many scholars investigating popular religion were inspired by the popular-culture analysis of Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 2– 3, 10 – 27. Bakhtin’s most influential book was first published in English in 1965: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). 21. Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 677– 704; John Van Engen, “Practice Beyond the Confines of the Medieval Parish,” in Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John Van Engen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 151. 22. A methodological problem to remain unaddressed here is the degree of disconnect between medieval ecclesiastics’ definition of “superstition” and this term’s deployment by modern scholars of popular religion. See Michael D. Bailey, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 14 – 24. 23. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late Roman Historians,” in Cuming and Baker, Popular Belief and Practice, 11. On paganism as a “category of difference” created by early Christians and the difficulties this has provided for subsequent scholars, see James Palmer, “Defining Paganism in the Carolingian World,” Early Medieval Europe 15, no. 4 (2007): 402– 25. 24. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 17– 22, 124. 25. “de supersticione vani cultus divinacionum, incantacionum, sortilegiorum, ludificacionum demonum diversarum, per que dyabolus impugnat populum christianum, trahens post se cum cauda fallacis seductionis innumerabiles [animas] stultorum, quorum infinitus est numerus.” Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques légendes et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, Dominicain du XIIIe siècle, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche ( Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1877), 314. The Guinefort exemplum is found on pages 325– 28. 26. Biller argues that “popular heresy” has often been wrongly conflated with “popular religion,” observing the misleading weight of our inquisitorial sources on knowledge of “heretical laity.” Biller, “Popular Religion in the Middle Ages,” 235– 40.

114 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

27. Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance (1763), which included a brief imagined dialogue with a Dominican inquisitor, was typical, asking “si Jésus-Christ a établi des lois sanguinaires, s’il a ordonné l’intolérance, s’il fit bâtir les cachots de l’Inquisition, s’il institua les bourreaux des auto-da-fé.” Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance à l’occasion de la mort de Jean Calas, available at http://athena.unige.ch /athena/voltaire/voltaire_traite_tolerance.html. A handy overview of Enlightenment views on religious liberty and toleration is found in Simone Zurbuchen, “Religion and Society,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols., ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2:779– 813. 28. Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance; see especially chapters 10 (“Du danger des fausses légendes et de la persécution”) and 20 (“S’il est utile d’entretenir le peuple dans la superstition”). Verbuchen, “Religion and Society,” 793. 29. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Principal Writings on Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 151, 165– 66, 176, 178– 80, 182, 184. 30. Ibid., 139– 40, 176. 31. Ibid., 135, 138. “Our [Christian] ancestors in Europe” believed in elves, fairies, and goblins, as polytheism “still prevails among the greatest part of uninstructed mankind” among “the savage tribes of America, Africa, and Asia” (143– 44). 32. Ibid., 158– 60. 33. Ibid., 153, 180. 34. Ibid., 161– 62. 35. Ibid., 160 – 61. 36. Ibid., 162. 37. Ibid., 162– 63. 38. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 529. Scholars such as Tylor, Smith, and Frazer built important foundations for later scholarship on premodern popular religion with their progressive, linear models of religious development. These models posited that identical stages of evolution proceeded in a staggered fashion; what the “primitive” did now gestured dependably toward the European past. These progressive models defined the “savage” as unwritten, undoctrinal, visceral, and responding to the mysteries of life, whether this appeared in the long-ago European past, in the non-European present, or was even, in some cases, barely covered in the European present by a thin drape of ethical, scriptural, learned faith. This evolutionary progressivism was influenced not just by Darwin, but also by geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875). To Smith, the “record of religious thought of mankind . . . resembles the geological record of the history of the earth’s crust, the new and the old are preserved . . . layer on layer.” William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 2d ed.

Authentic, True, and Right \ 115 ( Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1894), 24. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890) (the first of three exponentially longer editions). This “science” of religions could lean heavily on the discipline of folklore, as in Frazer’s work, although folklorists originally ignored religious practice as not pertinent to their field. Wolfgang Brückner, “Popular Piety in Central Europe,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5 (1968): 159. 39. Obelkevich, “Introduction,” 3– 4; see also Biller, “Popular Religion in the Middle Ages,” 227– 28. 40. Robert Muchembled, “The Witches of the Cambrésis: The Acculturation of the Rural World in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Religion and the People 800 –1700, 222, 273. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “‘Jeunes’ et danse de chevaux de bois: le folklore méridional dans la littérature des ‘exempla’ ( XIIIe – XIVe siècles),” in La Religion populaire en Languedoc, 152; Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 7– 8. The intersection of magic and popular belief in premodern Europe was a natural and powerful channel for anthropology’s influence: most obviously, Keith Thomas and his student Alan MacFarlane both depended upon EvansPritchard’s study of witchcraft among the Azande for their own analyses of early modern English magic and witchcraft. On Evans-Pritchard’s attractions for European historians, see Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 157– 58; and Rosaldo, “Door of His Tent.” See also Jean-Pierre Dedieu, “The Archives of the Holy Office of Toledo as a Source for Historical Anthropology,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 158– 89; and William H. Beik, “Searching for Popular Culture in Early Modern France,” Journal of Modern History 49 (1977): 266– 81 (which defines the popular as “the bulk of the nonelite population” counter to “the ruling elite”). 41. Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited,” 139– 40. 42. “The peasant like the primitive is a plain unsophisticated practical person full of common sense but very much aware of the mystery and rhythm of life, often living under precarious conditions of climate and environment over which he has little if any control.” James, “Influence of Folklore,” 3. The first sentence of Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic established this equation: “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England was still a preindustrial society, and many of its essential features closely resembled those of the ‘under-developed areas’ of today.” Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 3. 43. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 14 –15. 44. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 522.

116 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

45. For a classic instance of religious functionalism, see Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays ( Boston: Beacon, 1948), which departed from the evolutionary progressivism of nineteenth-century “scientists” of religion. 46. James, “Influence of Folklore,” 3– 4, 6, 10, 14 –16. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 277. 47. Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 73 (“how ancient and how enduring these practices were”), 159. 48. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 140, 151, 297, 322. Boyle is bitingly critical: “Montaillou Revisited,” 139– 40. 49. Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, 33, 58, 117. 50. Ibid., 112. 51. On the shepherd Pierre Maury’s sense of fate: “In him as in others it is simply a very old peasant idea quite natural in societies where there is no growth and where people literally have no choice.” Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 133. 52. Cf. Étienne Delaruelle, “Dévotion populaire et hérésie au moyen age,” in Hérésies et Sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle, 11e– 18e siècles, ed. Jacques Le Goff ( Paris: Mouton, 1968), 150. 53. André Vauchez, “Conclusion,” in La Religion populaire en Languedoc, 431– 33. 54. Shinners, “Introduction,” xvi, 460. 55. Ibid., xvii. 56. Ibid., xvii. 57. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 95. From Hume: “Another cause, which rendered the ancient religion much looser than the modern, is, that the former were traditional and the latter are scriptural; and the tradition in the former was complex, contradictory, and, on many occasions, doubtful; so that it could not possibly be reduced to any standard or canon, or afford any determinate articles of faith. . . . The less importunate and assuming any species of superstition appears, the less will it provoke men’s spleen and indignation.” Hume, Natural History of Religion, 172– 73. 58. “A different religious concept, rooted in the Gospels, free of dogmatic requirements, and reduced to a core of practical precepts.” Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, xxiii, 9. “This was an explicit recognition of the equivalence of all faiths, in the name of a simplified religion, free of dogmatic or confessional considerations” (51). On universalism, see 49. 59. Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, 112. 60. See note 17 above. 61. See note 10 above. 62. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269.

Authentic, True, and Right \ 117 63. James, “Influence of Folklore,” 12–13. Le Roy Ladurie: Christian feastdays “often involved some folkloric or even pagan elements”; Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 308, 347. Cf. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 543– 44. 64. Seventeenth-century English divine Herbert Thorndike observed of his contemporaries that “People weary of their Christianity because it easeth them not of the little discontentments of their estate in this world which they meet with.” Herbert Thorndike, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England ( London, 1659), 3:290, quoted in Keith Thomas, “An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6, no. 1 (1975): 101. 65. Schmitt, “ ‘Jeunes’ et danse de chevaux de bois,” 152. 66. Ludo J. R. Milis, ed., The Pagan Middle Ages, trans. Tanis Guest ( Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 10. One cannot pass by church historian and Jesuit Norman Tanner’s remark that upon seeing Milis’s brief book, “my first reaction was to feel that if this is all the paganism that can be found in the Middle Ages, there cannot have been so very much of it.” Norman Tanner, The Ages of Faith: Popular Religion in Late Medieval England and Western Europe ( London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 193. See too, coming from a perspective very different from Milis’s, Boyle, “Popular Piety,” 189. Cf. Delaruelle: “Il est pourtant un domaine où la dévotion populaire recouvre l’hérésie et où l’on voit celle-ci se maintenir sous ce masque: c’est le domaine de la superstition, témoin du paganisme antique qu’elle entretient. . . . le mot d’hérésie n’a-t-il pas été employé par les hommes du Moyen Age pur définir cette fidelité aux traditions ancestrales, mais l’on sait que certains des vieux cultes antérieurs au christianisme ont survécu à l’évangelisation et restèrent vivaces jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Age. Ils entretiennent tout un monde de sentiments, de pensées, de comportements moraux, profondément étrangers à la foi catholique.” Delaruelle, “Dévotion populaire et hérésie au moyen age,” 151. 67. Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 1, 7, 177. For nuanced discussions of the place of literacy and the written in heretical movements that engaged different social levels, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, eds., Heresy and Literacy, 1000 –1530 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 68. Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg,” 307. A good example of this is Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, 126; see also Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 7; and Schmitt, “ ‘Religion Populaire’ et Culture Folklorique,” 948. Peter Biller incisively remarked that Schmitt’s opposition of “ruling ideology (Christianity)” to “folkloric culture,” and the former’s tactical récuperation of the latter, served to broaden Friedrich Engels’s arguments about medieval sociopolitical dissent. Rather than seeing opposition in scattered and irregular heresies, Schmitt located it in a folkloric culture “ubiquitous in time and place,” thus broadening and universalizing conflict between rulers and ruled. Biller, “Popular Religion,” 229. For a milder

118 /

Christine Caldwell Ames

and more positive view of Christianity’s “adaptation” of folk elements, see James, “Influence of Folklore.” 69. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 548. Ginzburg (Cheese and the Worms, xv) was skeptical of a too-reductive monodirectional model of acculturation. So was Manselli; Manselli, La religion populaire au moyen âge, 19. 70. Schmitt, “ ‘Religion Populaire’ et Culture Folklorique,” 948– 50; and Schmitt, “ ‘Jeunes’ et danse de chevaux de bois,” 127– 28. 71. Crucially, Le Roy Ladurie aligned “Cathar and peasant values” together against “Catholic and urban” ones. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 68. 72. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 537. 73. Schutte links Ginzburg’s fondness for a conflict model of “two cultures” to his anticlericalism. Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg,” 304 – 8. 74. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 529, 531– 32, 550. 75. Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger was an obvious influence upon R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950 –1250, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). 76. Obelkevich, “Introduction,” 4. 77. Since late antiquity, after all, a prevailing definition of Latin-Christian orthodoxy — self-consciously formulated within anti-heretical polemic — had been “what is believed everywhere, always, by all” [id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est]. Vincent of Lérins, The Commonitorium of Vincent of Lérins, ed. Reginald Stewart Moxon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 10. 78. Ginzburg, “Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” 159. Vauchez, “Conclusion,” 441. 79. Theologian and minister Paul Drews (1858–1912) first used the phrase religiöse Volkskunde in 1901. Brückner, “Popular Piety in Central Europe,” 161; Don Yoder, “Toward a Definition of Folk Religion,” Western Folklore 33, no. 1 (1974): 2– 5; Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion,” 47. Vauchez, “Étienne Delaruelle Historien,” 5–19; Vicaire, “Liminaire. L’apport Étienne Delaruelle,” 23– 36; Biller, “Popular Religion,” 224 – 26, 236. Scribner posited that the extremes to which National Socialism took the nationalist character of folklore helped explain why religiöse Volkskunde never developed into vibrant German scholarship on popular religion: Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion,” 47. On the other hand, Joshua Trachtenberg’s analysis in 1939 of Jewish “folk religion” made the fascinating, keen, and even poignant argument that “The Jews were an integral part of medieval Europe and their culture reflected, as in a measure it influenced, all the forces operative in the general culture of the period. This was especially so in Germany — and nowhere more notably than in the folk beliefs that constitute the commonest denominator between peoples.” Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion ( New York: Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1939), xxx. Trachtenberg’s definition of “folk religion” was

Authentic, True, and Right \ 119 practice that “expressed the common attitude of the people, as against the official attitude of the Synagogue, to the universe” (xxviii). 80. And thus a religion more accordant with secularism. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 81. As Van Engen has argued in another piece, numerous studies showing the “success” of Christian instruction at the local/parish level have helped return the pendulum. Van Engen, “Practice Beyond the Confines of the Medieval Parish,” 151– 52. As early as 1982, Davis argued that “historians . . . are becoming increasingly unwilling to adopt [‘magic,’ ‘superstitious,’ and ‘pagan’] as terms for interpreting religious practise.” Davis, “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures,” 324. A recent work emphasizes shared culture: Elite and Popular Religion: Papers Read at the 2004 Summer Meeting and the 2005 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory ( Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006). 82. Ginzburg, “Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” 156 – 64; John H. Arnold, “The Historian as Inquisitor: The Ethics of Interrogating Subaltern Voice,” Rethinking History 2, no. 3 (1998): 379– 86. 83. “Il y ait eu plusieurs variétés de christianisme, adaptées à des types différents de mentalité . . . il a pu y avoir dans le passé des façons différentes d’être chrétien.” Vauchez, “Conclusion,” 435. Vauchez, unsurprisingly, avoided an “imposition” model, arguing for scholars’ confusion of “origin” and nature: many beliefs and practices are not “popular” in origin, but are certainly “popularized.” Vauchez, “Conclusion,” 433– 34.

Five

Reconsidering Reform A Roman Example

maureen c. miller

Historians have been discontented with “reform” as a category of analysis for some time now.1 Yet the term seems as irreplaceable as it is problematic. While early modernists and Carolingianists have endeavored to develop more nuanced narratives, historians of the eleventh- and twelfthcentury movements, often reductively called “Gregorian” after Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), have been slower to seek alternatives. In 1987 Karl Morrison lamented the “immobilization of interpretive discourse” on this “central theme in European history,”2 but little movement has occurred since. Fortunately, visual sources and approaches offer opportunities to clarify the problems we confront in using the term and to posit solutions. From the 1970s to the present, art historians have drawn upon the research of historians to try to connect the ideas of “reformers” to the art and architecture of Rome and northern Italy in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.3 This has been a fruitful endeavor, but one that throws into high relief the insufficiencies of the historical approaches that the art historians are drawing upon. The interpretive movement to define an “art of reform” highlights the pitfalls of what I will here call “dichotomy 123

124 /

Maureen C. Miller

creep.” This problem derives from the prominence of the investiture contest in historical studies of reform in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Reform and the investiture contest, of course, were not unrelated. But the dichotomies perceived in the investiture conflict—by contemporary historical actors and by historians—have crept into historical discussions of reform across the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This is not helpful in capturing the complex and varied demands for ecclesiastical renewal that were advocated across the period. There were two allegiances only from 1076 on, and more clearly from 1080 with the election of Wibert of Ravenna as Pope Clement III: only then is it possible to discern supporters of the emperor and an imperial pope, on the one hand, and, on the other, supporters of Pope Gregory VII and his immediate successors. This dichotomy, although real, was not necessarily widespread: many in western Europe avoided taking sides or did so for motives not necessarily related to the issues noised about by polemicists.4 The most common way the dichotomy that emerged from the schism, and the polemical literature it generated, has crept into ecclesiastical histories of the period is the tendency to speak of a reform party or reformers and to identify it or them with popes such as Leo IX and Gregory VII and their visible supporters. This implicitly defines anyone else, particularly anyone questioning or opposing some of their ideas and goals, as unreformed or against reform. Further, the members of the reform “party” are usually assumed to share a set of ideas that was the party’s “program,” which often consists in an ill-defined set of changes advocated by different individuals over the eleventh century.5 The art historical movement to define an “art of reform” reveals how untenable and unproductive this dichotomy creep among historians is. The solution to dichotomy creep, I argue, is to abandon entirely the categories of papal/imperial, reform /unreformed when considering ecclesiastical change and ideas about reform in the eleventh century. The model of two “parties” is bankrupt; a fractious family model is much more accurate and useful. Such a conceptualization is warranted for a number of reasons. First, from its origins Christianity used familial language to describe relationships among believers, as when Gregory VII addressed Henry IV as his son.6 Even those excommunicated during the great battles of eleventh-century reform still believed themselves to

Reconsidering Reform \ 125 be Christians and, therefore, part of the family. Second, demands for moral and institutional renewal in the eleventh century focused on social practices — with whom priests lived, whether money was given in exchange for appointments — thought by believers to threaten purity and spiritual efficacy. A conceptual language drawn from modern politics effaces the complex ramifications of the ecclesiastical changes sought, which were about more than temporal power. Finally, the complexity of relationships within families—their capacity to change over time as well as in different situations, their potential for emotional intensity — is better suited to religious relationships than the more programmatic and calculating categories of politics. Approaching the church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a fractious family is, at the very least, an interesting model to explore and perhaps a means to produce more nuanced appraisal of ecclesiastical change in these crucial centuries. Visual culture, moreover, can contribute to our understanding of this particular fractious family. The eleventh-century frescoes of the lower basilica of San Clemente in Rome offer a particularly clear example, one I will use to set out— and critique—the key arguments of the effort to define an “art of reform.” I will then analyze the San Clemente frescoes in order to reconstruct the lay views on reform that shape their rendering. These views combined support for some ideas associated with the papal “party” with opposition to other actions of the same “reformers.” They venerated the papacy but rejected the stricter separation of the clergy and laity associated with Gregory VII and his specific policy of eliminating “quasi-lay” clerical orders within the Roman church. Indeed, the frescoes used images and stories about families to comment on debates within the late eleventh-century Christian family.

The “Art of Reform” at San Clemente Mentioned by Saint Jerome in the late fourth century, the ancient titulus of San Clemente was restored and rebuilt several times.7 The church still in use today, usually called the “upper basilica,” was built between 1100 and 1118, and its surviving apse mosaics date from this period.8 Earlier phases of the site’s history were unearthed from the mid-nineteenth

126 /

Maureen C. Miller

century,9 and the images under discussion here survive in a space usually called the “lower basilica.” This excavated space, beneath the floor of the present basilica, contains the remains of the early Christian church that preceded it. This church was renovated in the Carolingian era and again in the late eleventh century,10 just before it was abandoned and filled in with rubble to form the foundation of the surviving early twelfth-century basilica. Four large murals survive from the eleventh-century renovation, one depicting scenes from the Life of Saint Alexius and three others dedicated to Saint Clement: the Miracle of Saint Clement’s Tomb at Cherson, the Translation of Clement’s Relics, and, in the nave of the church, the Mass of Saint Clement. The church’s ties with major figures in late eleventhcentury Rome are well documented. Shortly after his arrival in Rome in 1049, Pope Leo IX appointed a member of his entourage, Hugh Candidus, as cardinal priest of San Clemente. This entourage also included Hildebrand, who as Pope Gregory VII removed Hugh Candidus in 1076 ( later excommunicating him) and appointed Rainerius as cardinal priest of San Clemente.11 In 1099 in the basilica of San Clemente this Rainerius was elected pope and took the name of Pascal ( II).12 Art historians have posited two main connections to reform, and both have been argued for the San Clemente frescoes. The first is classicizing elements evoking the early Christian church that many reformers sought to restore. In support of such a program at San Clemente, Hélène Toubert pointed to the clipeus portrait of Clement — that is, a bust image of the saint enclosed in a roundel — in the lower portion of the Miracle at Cherson panel, the decorative bands with acanthus leaves and other motifs inspired by ancient mosaics, and the dedicatory plate mimicking an antique lapidary inscription (figure 5.1; see gallery for ch. 5 figures).13 The second connection to reform hinges on the depiction of particular saints whose cults were favored by prominent advocates of reform. At San Clemente, the panel dedicated to the life of Saint Alexius supports this connection, for Pope Leo IX composed a poem in honor of this lay ascetic, and Peter Damian wrote a sermon on his virtues.14 Alexius, the son of a Roman senator, fled an arranged marriage in order to live in chaste poverty and wandered as a beggar in Syria. The panel depicts first his return to Rome, where he is unrecognized by his father (on horseback), and then his death and recognition by his family — aided by the

Reconsidering Reform \ 127 pope, who discovers the rotulus in his hand that identifies him and tells the story of his life of penance (figure 5.2). This second connection, the visualization of models of sanctity, an important strain of which was the veneration of past popes, has gained more assent than the connection between classicizing stylistic elements and reform. Francesco Gandolfo and Peter Cornelius Claussen, for example, have both argued that such antique elements were part of a continuing Roman artistic lexicon, and Claussen has published several compelling sculptural examples from the early eleventh century (at San Giovanni a Porta Latina and San Gregorio Nazianzeno). Indeed, Gandolfo goes further, dating the antique revival to the late tenth century and linking it to the Ottonian renovatio imperii.15 But there were other problems with the easy ascription of these frescoes to the reform “party” that reveal the consequences of dichotomy creep. The most widely accepted dating of the San Clemente frescoes, based on the construction of the walls they were painted upon and on stylistic factors, places them circa 1090 to 1100.16 Those who see an “art of reform” in them suggest an association with Rainerius, whom Gregory VII appointed as cardinal priest of the church in 1078 after excommunicating Hugh Candidus. But did Cardinal Rainerius preside over the church while the frescoes were being painted? Gregory VII was chased from the city in 1084, dying in Salerno in 1085, and although his successor Desiderius/ Victor III was elected in 1086 in the deaconry of Santa Lucia, he immediately had to beat a hasty retreat from the city. Victor III spent the rest of his pontificate at Monte Cassino, save for a few days in 1087, when a Norman army briefly liberated Saint Peter’s for him to be consecrated, and then again for a few more days when summoned by Matilda of Tuscany as her troops occupied the Leonine city and Trastevere. The imperial pope Clement III ( Wibert of Ravenna), however, recaptured Saint Peter’s — when Matilda’s forces took to fighting the Normans — and held most of the city until his death on September 8, 1100, forcing Urban II, for his very brief stays in Rome, to shelter with the Pierleoni. Given Rudolf Hüls’s reconstruction of the presence of pro-imperial cardinals in the city, it seems highly unlikely that Rainerius was at San Clemente in the period in which the frescoes were probably painted.17 The fact that three of the four panels were dedicated to Clement

128 /

Maureen C. Miller

and that the imperial pope controlling the city had taken Clement as his papal name — both points underscored in the work of Cristiana Filippini — seems telling in this political context.18 Recently, Serena Romano has reasserted the connection with Rainerius by suggesting the frescoes date to 1078 to 1084.19 The effort to connect Rainerius with the frescoes foregrounds some of the assumptions undergirding the art historical argument for an “art of reform.” A clerical patron is assumed to contribute the ideology of the decorative program and, because of an association with Gregory VII, is also assumed to advocate the “reform party’s program”— even if, as in the case of Rainerius, we have no evidence of his views in the 1090s. The presumption that the reformers comprised Gregory’s circle underpinned the arguments of art historians positing an “art of reform.” Thus, when Filippini called attention to the difficulties with assuming Rainerius presided over San Clemente in the 1090s, a hypothesis of “Ghibelline Art” visualizing the perspectives of imperial supporters emerged. This hypothesis foundered immediately because works associated with supporters of Clement III and supporters of Gregory VII or Victor III or Urban II look much alike stylistically. Interestingly, our colleagues in art history are now roughly at the same place as some historians. Ian Stuart Robinson, for example, has pointed out that both the supporters of Clement III and those of Gregory VII wanted to revive a golden age: for one side it was the age of Charlemagne and Otto I, for the other it was the era of Constantine the Great, Pope Sylvester I, and Pope Gregory the Great.20 Classicizing features in art can be found to support either appeal to the past. William Tronzo, in reconsidering Toubert’s argument about the antique decorative motifs in the San Clemente frescoes, pointed out that only some of them are specifically early Christian, whereas others are quoting imperial monuments of the first to third centuries.21 Robinson has also shown that the supporters of both Clement III and Gregory VII endorsed reform: Sigebert of Gembloux and Wido of Ferrara, for example, likewise opposed simony and clerical unchastity, even though they condemned Gregory’s attempts to persuade the laity to boycott the masses of married priests and to compel obedience to Rome using military force. Some objected to Gregory’s methods, not his aims.22 The concept of a reform party that assumes support for

Reconsidering Reform \ 129 reform came only from close associates and vocal advocates of popes such as Leo IX and Gregory VII is simply untenable. If there was an “art of reform” in Rome, it was not the creation of a “party.”

Laypeople and Reform Stepping back from these disputes, we discover instead that these visual sources can help us understand the complexity of peoples’ views and their experiences of the struggles over reform in the eleventh century. What gets sidelined in attempts to discover an art of reform in the San Clemente frescoes is that we actually know who the patrons of these paintings were: Beno de Rapiza and Maria Macellaria, a married couple, who appear not only in the Mass of St Clement panel, but also with their two children in the dado of the Miracle fresco. The emphasis on Rainerius as the artistic patron behind the frescoes was primarily motivated by the need to find a link with the reform party and its program. But it also reveals an assumption that laypeople just provided the financing, not the ideas, which somehow had to be supplied by a cleric. Why not read the frescoes as the expression of these patrons’ ideas? When we do, a series of emphases and interests emerge, the most important of which is the prominence of laypeople and their families. At the center of the Miracle panel is a mother and child. According to the acta of Saint Clement, he was martyred for his missionary efforts in the Crimea by being thrown in the Sea of Azov, bound to an anchor. Angels created an undersea tomb for the saint that was miraculously revealed by the ebbing tide annually on his feast day. According to the legend, on one of these occasions, a child was caught in the tomb by the returning tide, only to be discovered the following year miraculously alive and well in the tomb. This is the scene depicted at San Clemente (figure 5.3). Not only is the reunion of mother and child at the very center of the image and directly above the clipeus portrait of Saint Clement, but the mother and child are depicted twice—once as the mother bends to scoop her son into her arms and again as she turns to greet the ecclesiastical procession arriving to celebrate the saint’s feast. We’ll return to this procession and its clergy below.

130 /

Maureen C. Miller

The story from the acta depicted in the Mass of Saint Clement also focuses on laypeople (figure 5.4). It tells the story of the devout believer Theodora and her non-Christian husband, Sisinnius. The husband becomes suspicious of his wife’s absences, follows her to the Christian meeting place, and is struck blind and deaf for having profaned sacred space. You see him on the right in this debilitated state, having to be led by a servant out of the church.23 On the other side of Clement we see the donors of the murals, Beno de Rapiza and Maria Macellaria, offering candles; an inscription below this central scene records their patronage, and Beno’s name is inscribed on the fresco near the hem of his garment.24 Gerhard Wolf has noted the didactic opposition set up between the good behavior of layman Beno and the censured behavior of Sisinnius.25 Yet I would also underscore the visual prominence of the virtuous wife Theodora: closest to the altar, she is emphasized by the gesturing figure next to her and dressed in the same yellow/gold color as the altar cloth, Clement’s dalmatic, and Maria Macellaria’s gown (although greater correspondence is signaled between the latter and Clement through a patterning to indicate silk). The Alexius panel also tells a story about lay virtue. Rather than fulfilling the worldly expectations of his elite Roman family, Alexius spurns an arranged marriage and becomes a wandering ascetic. Returning home, unrecognized by his natal family, he continues his ascetic life by working in their household as their humblest servant. This model of lay piety differs from the one depicted in the Mass. Interestingly, it privileges visually not Alexius’s wandering in Syria, but his return home to be with his kin. Notice the visual prominence and role of the clergy in these panels. At the very center of the panel (figure 5.2), between two images of Alexius (one alive, one deceased), are the pope and his clerical entourage discovering the identifying rotulus. They are depicted again in the final scene as they officiate at the bier of the dead saint while his family mourns their long-lost son. The pope and his clergy reveal to the family the saint in their midst but also identify him as their kinsman — not only so they can properly mourn and inter him, but also so they can take his example to heart and benefit from his virtue. The clergy are also visually and narratively prominent in the other frescoes. They dominate the scene of the Translation of Clement’s Relics

Reconsidering Reform \ 131 (figure 5.5). Although peripherally placed in the Miracle panel, they recognize and legitimate the miracle: the bishop leading the procession gives the viewer the open-handed gesture used to draw the viewer’s attention to the miraculous. In the Mass of Saint Clement (figure 5.4), they present the patrons Beno and Maria to the saint as he celebrates the Mass at the altar. The inscriptions on the book lying open on the altar — “The Lord be with you” ( Dominus vobiscum) legible on one page, and on the other, “May the peace of the Lord be with you always” ( Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum)— identify the liturgical moment as that of the Eucharistic prayer. The posture of the saintly celebrant, his arms outstretched in the orans position, underscores the priest’s role as alter Christus.26 Here the clergy again make the holy manifest to the laity — in the Eucharist actually confecting the saving body and blood of Christ to help bring them to redemption. The clergy, in sum, are accorded very important and necessary roles in these frescoes, but they are positioned in service to the laity, facilitating in particular the devotion and salvation of parents and their children. This seems to me highly significant in light of efforts at reform over the eleventh century and of the real and violent divisions in Rome and the broader church in the 1090s over the role of the laity. A papal saint is celebrated in the Clement frescoes and an important role for the clergy acknowledged. But lay piety and devotion are central to these depictions of the early church, and lay figures are interspersed with clerics. This mixing is particularly pointed in the Mass scene, since the architectural frame of the scene resembles contemporary images of Ecclesia from Exultet rolls. The Monte Cassino Exultet from the very beginning of the twelfth century illustrates a common representation of the Church: the personification of Ecclesia takes the place of the celebrant while men and women participate in their architecturally distinct compartments. The equation of the celebrant (priest/pope in Clement’s Mass) with the Church would seem to reflect a tendency in many reformers to replace the more capacious Carolingian notion of Ecclesia as clergy and people with a more restricted sense of Church as priestly hierarchy. An eleventhcentury roll now in the Vatican shows the iconography becoming dominant over the period in which the clergy and the laity are rigorously separated.27 In the Mass of Saint Clement, however, the artist(s) and patrons

132 /

Maureen C. Miller

invoke conventions that would appear to reflect well-known reform themes and then resist or complicate them in the details of the composition. The architectural frame of “Church” is used, and the clergy and people are generally separated, but the laypeople do not stay on their side of the church, and women are visually prominent here as models of piety. Another detail of the Mass fresco also shows resistance to efforts, associated with Gregory VII, to more sharply delineate the clergy from the laity. The two clean-shaven and tonsured figures just behind the donors, escorting them to the altar, are subdeacons: both wear tunicles rather than diaconal dalmatics and have maniples draped over their arms. These short, scarf-like ornaments were worn by the major clerical orders of priests, deacons, and subdeacons, but were particularly associated with the ordination rite of subdeacons, who received the maniple upon passing from the lower orders of the minor clergy to the major orders serving at the altar.28 The two figures behind the subdeacons, however, are more mysterious: they are tonsured but bearded. Given the hierarchies of status inscribed in these panels, both in the size of figures and in their arrangement, it seems reasonable to conclude that these figures are below the rank of subdeacon.29 But their beards, and the hooked crosiers they hold, do not accord with the depictions of clerics in any of the canonical minor orders of porters, acolytes, lectors, or exorcists. The Roman church, however, also had numerous offices held by persons who were tonsured but not ordained. Among these were mansionarii and virgarii, what we might call sacristans, who maintained the church building, especially its lighting, guarded its treasure, and rang bells, but also had liturgical roles (holding candles, sprinkling holy water, preparing chrism). I suggest that the back two figures are virgarii because they are bearing crosiers, and virga means “staff ” or “shepherd’s crook.”30 Pope Gregory VII and others in his circle saw these semi-clerical or quasi-lay Roman church offices as an abuse needing to be reformed, for they blurred the line between the clerical and lay estates. Bonizo of Sutri referred to these officials as a pessima consuetudine of the Roman church that Gregory VII had tried to extirpate cum magna difficultate.31 Yet one can imagine reasons laypeople such as Beno and Maria may have valued them: they were likely more available and accessible to the laity than those training for the priesthood. Their presence at the Mass of Saint Clement is further evidence that

Reconsidering Reform \ 133 its lay patrons accepted some, but not all, of the ideas advocated by Gregory VII and his circle. They accorded great prominence to the papacy and very important roles to the clergy in these frescoes, but they also visually challenged an ideal of the clergy as a separate and higher caste. Laypeople too are models of virtue, clerics and laypeople act together, and pious laypersons who serve the church’s daily needs are valorized. The proper relation between the clerical hierarchy and laypeople — particularly lay elites who built, endowed, and patronized churches — was at the heart of the investiture struggle. Kings such as Henry IV believed they had a right to choose the bishops whose churches they had richly endowed. They also, along with many of their subjects, believed kings had a sacred status and a special, divinely sanctioned role in caring for God’s people. Gregory VII, of course, challenged both beliefs, famously asserting not only that there is “nothing in this world more preeminent than priests” but also that “a greater power is granted to an exorcist when he is constituted a spiritual emperor to drive out demons than may be bestowed upon anyone of the laity on account of secular domination.”32 To Gregory, the king was a layman, just as the unordained virgarii who tended Roman churches were laypeople. Beno and Maria’s frescoes offer us precious evidence of some lay views on the subject. They do not accord with simplistic dichotomies: they celebrate papal and other saints favored by associates of Leo IX and Gregory VII and show devotion to the Eucharist and to the clergy, but reject a vision of the church that equates it with the clergy alone. This visual advocacy for the role of the laity in the church may have been fostered by supporters of Clement III in the 1090s and may be one reason the recently restored and refrescoed basilica was leveled just after 1100. But the frescoes also include many elements that accord with the ideas and texts circulated among associates of Gregory VII.33 Such a mix of ideas makes sense if we conceive of these struggles as a fractious family disagreement rather than as a conflict between clearly defined parties. Beno’s and Maria’s ideas about reform, as articulated in the frescoes they commissioned, do not neatly match up with either the imperial/unreformed “party” constructed in historical discourse or the papal/reform “party” and its “program.” Thinking of Christian communities as more familial than political may help us as historians to recognize

134 /

Maureen C. Miller

and give historical weight to complex views and their potential to develop, strengthen, or weaken over time. Why do we need to give diverse and changeable ideas about reform historical weight? Because neither a “papal program” nor an “imperial party” won at Worms in 1122. The results of the reform movements and the investiture conflict were more varied and gradual than the results of a contest between parties. They emerged over generations and were as much products of compromise and accommodation as of ideological struggle. Framing our understanding of reform as a contest between two coherent, opposing ideological and political groups does not help us capture the ongoing interaction, debate, and compromise that produced the church of the twelfth century. Imagining reform conflicts played out among individuals who believed they were supposed to love one another, break bread with one another, and care about one another’s salvation just might. The goals of experimenting with such a conceptualization would be to understand the varied ideas in play and the combinations in which they were held; to isolate more clearly the events and positions that caused real war and schism; and to construct a compelling narrative of how the schism was healed and the church transformed. Notes 1. Gerhart B. Ladner, “Terms and Ideas of Renewal,” and Giles Constable, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life: Concepts and Realities,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable, and Carol D. Lanham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982; repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Medieval Academy of America, 1991), 1– 33, 37– 67; I. S. Robinson, “Reform and the Church, 1073–1122,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, c. 1024–c.1198, Part I, ed. David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 268– 334; Julia Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600 –c. 1100, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 345– 62. 2. Karl F. Morrison, review of Brigitte Szabó-Bechstein, Libertas ecclesiae: Ein Schlüsselbegriff des Investiturstreits und seine Vorgeschichte, 4.– 11.Jahrhundert, Speculum 62 (1987): 999.

Reconsidering Reform \ 135 3. Ernst Kitzinger initiated the discussion with his essay “The Gregorian Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 22 (1972): 87–102. The most significant rejoinders have been Hélène Toubert, Un art dirigé: réforme grégorienne et iconographie ( Paris: Cerf, 1990), a volume collecting essays that Toubert published from 1969 to 1987, and an Italian version, Un’Arte orientata: Riforma gregoriana e iconografia, trans. Lucinia Speciale ( Milan: Jaca, 2001), that added some essays from the early 1990s; Christine Verzár Bornstein, Portals and Politics in the Early Italian City-State: The Sculpture of Nicholaus in Context ( Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’Art Università di Parma, 1988); Gerhard Wolf, “Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder im italienischen Kirchenraum des Mittelalters: Überlegungen zu Zeit- und Bildstruktur der Fresken in der Unterkirche von S. Clemente (Rom) aus dem späten 11. Jahrhundert,” in Hagiographie und Kunst: Der Heiligenkult in Schrift, Bild und Architektur, ed. Gottfried Kerscher (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993), 319– 39; Valentino Pace, “Riforma della chiesa e visualizzazione della santità nella pittura romana: i casi di Sant’Alessio e di Santa Cecilia,” in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 46 – 47 (1993–1994): 541– 48; Nino M. Zchomelidse, Santa Maria Immacolata in Ceri: Pittura sacra al tempo della Riforma Gregoriana / Sakrale Malerei im Zeitalter der Gregorianischen Reform ( Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1996); Anat Tcherikover, “Reflections of the Investiture Controversy at Nonantola and Modena,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60 (1997): 150 – 65; Kristin Noreen, “Lay Patronage and the Creation of Papal Sanctity during the Gregorian Reform: The Case of Sant’Urbano alla Caffarella, Rome,” Gesta 40 (2001): 39– 59; Serena Romano and Julie Enckell Julliard, eds., Roma e la Riforma gregoriana: Tradizioni e innovazioni artistiche (XI–XII secolo) (Rome: Viella, 2007); Massimo Mussini, “Pievi e vita canonicale nei territory matildici. Architettura e riforma gregoriana nelle campagne,” in Matilde e il Tesoro dei Canossa tra castelli, monastery e città, ed. Arturo Calzona (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana, 2008), 27– 53; Dorothy F. Glass, The Sculpture of Reform in North Italy, ca. 1095–1130: History and Patronage of Romanesque Façades (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010). 4. Many also seem either not to have known about key events in this struggle or to have heard only garbled versions: Hanna Vollrath, “Sutri 1046— Canossa 1077—Rome 1111: Problems of Communication and the Perception of Neighbors,” in European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 132– 70. 5. The reform /unreformed dichotomy was most influentially established in Augustin Fliche, La Réforme grégorienne, 3 vols., Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniensis, Études et documents 6, 9, 16 ( Louvain: Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniensis, and Paris: E. Champion, 1924 –1937); and it continues to form general accounts: Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 – 1250

136 /

Maureen C. Miller

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), especially 79–133; Giulia Barone, “La riforma gregoriana,” in Storia dell’Italia religiosa 1: L’antichità e il medioevo, ed. André Vauchez (Rome: Laterza, 1993), 243– 70; Sylvain Gouguenheim, Réforme grégorienne: De la lutte pour le sacré à la secularization du monde (Paris: Temps Présent, 2010), 103, 123, 125— where the Dictatus papae is called “un programme,” “une plateforme d’action,” and Pope Urban II’s supporters are “le camp réformateur” and Henry IV’s the “parti laïc.” 6. Megan McLaughlin has insightfully explored the uses of such language in this period in Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000 –1122 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 7. A wonderful introduction to the church is Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., A Short Guide to St. Clement’s, Rome ( Rome: Collegio San Clemente, 1960; repr. 1989). Jerome’s reference to the ecclesia of San Clemente is in his De viris illustribus, ch. 15, in Patrologia Latina 23, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 633. 8. Joan Barclay Lloyd, The Medieval Church and Canonry of S. Clemente in Rome, San Clemente Miscellany III ( Rome: San Clemente, 1989), 118–121; see also Sible de Blaauw’s important review of this volume in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51, no. 4 (1992): 454 – 57. The consecration date of this church has been much debated. Lloyd thinks that “it must have been consecrated by 1119” because Pope Gelasius II (1118–1119) granted an indulgence to those who visited the church. Her source for the indulgence is a fifteenth-century description of an inscription: Lloyd, Medieval Church, 121, 67– 70. Boyle describes the tortured history of scholarly opinions on this point, concluding that the earliest sure record of the church’s dedication or consecration was Boniface VIII’s 1295 indulgence: Leonard E. Boyle O.P., “The Date of Consecration of the Basilica of San Clemente,” in Art & Archaeology, San Clemente Miscellany II, ed. Luke Dempsy, O.P. (Rome: San Clemente, 1978), 1–12. 9. First by the intrepid prior of the Irish Dominicans then resident at the church, Father Joseph Mullooly, and in the past century through the work of Eduardo Junyent, Federico Guidobaldi, and Joan Barclay Lloyd: on the earliest excavations at San Clemente, see John Osborne, Early Mediaeval Wall-Paintings in the Lower Church of San Clemente ( New York: Garland, 1984), 8–10, 46; Eduardo Junyent, Il Titolo di San Clemente in Roma (Rome: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1932); Federico Guidobaldi, San Clemente, 2 vols., San Clemente Miscellany IV ( Rome: San Clemente, 1992); an overview with an English summary is Federico Guidobaldi, “Il Complesso Archeologico di San Clemente,” in Art & Archaeology, 215– 303; Lloyd, Medieval Church. 10. Some scholars still see this late eleventh-century renovation as necessitated by the violence and destruction attending Robert Guiscard’s rescue of Pope Gregory VII in May of 1084 from the Castel Sant’Angelo, where the pontiff had been stranded since Henry IV’s capture of the city the previous year. Archeological work at San Clemente, however, has revealed no evidence of a fire at the

Reconsidering Reform \ 137 church, and the idea that the Norman forces “sacked” the city has been called into question on textual grounds as well: Lloyd, The Medieval Church, 55– 57, 117; Louis I. Hamilton, “Memory, Symbol, Arson: Was Rome ‘Sacked’ in 1084?” Speculum 78 (2003): 378– 99. 11. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 70 – 71; Lloyd, Medieval Church, 54. 12. The association of San Clemente with reform, however, goes beyond individuals. Joan Barclay Lloyd has demonstrated that a canonry to house the clergy was built at San Clemente in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries; it incorporated some monastic architectural elements but is most comparable to other structures built specifically for secular clerics sharing a communal life. Lloyd, Medieval Church, 59, 181– 86, 195– 201. 13. Hélène Toubert, “La Renovatio gregoriana a Roma e Montecassino,” in Un’Arte orientata, 163– 68. 14. Pace, “Riforma della Chiesa,” 543– 44. 15. Francesco Gandolfo, “La pittura romana tra XI e XII secolo e l’Antico,” in Roma, centro ideale della cultura dell’Antico nei secoli XV e XVI: da Martino V al Sacco di Roma 1417–1527, ed. Silvia Danesi Squarzini ( Milan: Electa, 1989), 21– 32. 16. John Osborne, “Proclamations of Power and Presence: The Setting and Function of Two Eleventh-Century Murals in the Lower Church of San Clemente, Rome,” Mediaeval Studies 59 (1997): 162– 65. 17. After his ordination as cardinal priest of San Clement, we have notice of Rainerius in Terracina (March 12, 1088, with Urban II), and in Spain and Gaul as a legate (1089, 1090). He was in Rome at Santa Maria Nuova with Urban II on February 6, 1094, in Salerno in September 1098, and at St Peter’s March 24, 1099. Only on August 13, 1099, does he appear at San Clemente. Rudolf Hüls, Kardinäle, Klerus und Kirchen Roms 1049–1130 ( Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1977), 160 – 61. 18. Cristiana Filippini, “La leggenda di sant’Alessio nella chiesa di S. Clemente a Roma: genesi e funzione di una narrazione pittorica al momento della Riforma gregoriana,” in Roma e la Riforma gregoriana, 298– 99. 19. Serena Romano, La Pittura medievale a Roma, corpus volume 4: Riforma e tradizione 1050 –1198 ( Milan: Jaca, 2006), 129– 30. The author invokes both stylistic factors and “fatti storici attestati in rapporto alla basilica e ai suoi personaggi chiave” at the opening of her discussion of the frescoes’ date, but mentions only events related to Rainerius in explaining the proposed date range circa 1078 to 1084 and highlights the clerical knowledge she sees as necessary to account for liturgical details in the frescoes. Her stylistic analysis is much more general and not linked directly to these dates. 20. Robinson, “Reform and the Church,” 281– 86.

138 /

Maureen C. Miller

21. William Tronzo, “On the Role of Antiquity in Medieval Art: Frames and Framing Devices,” in Ideologie e pratiche del reimpiego nell’alto medioevo, 16– 21 aprile 1998, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 46 (Spoleto: CISAM, 1999), 1085–1111, especially 1097– 99. 22. Robinson, “Reform and the Church,” 276 – 82. 23. Depicted below is the sequel: Clement, out of compassion for Theodora, goes to the couple’s home afterward and restores Sisinnius’s sight and hearing. The husband, however, is enraged to find Clement in his home and orders the holy man tied up and dragged away. The servants are miraculously led to mistake a column lying about for Clement, and you see them here tying up the column and trying to remove it. The inscriptions, famous for being one of the earliest examples of vernacular Italian, record Sisinnius’s exhortations: “Pull, you sons of whores! Heave away, Gosmai and Albertel! You, Cavoncelle, get behind with a lever!” ( Fili dele pute, traite. Gosmai, Albertel, traite. Falite dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle.). A Latin inscription records Clement’s words: “Because of the hardness of your hearts you have merited to pull building materials away instead of me” (duritiam cordis vestris saxa traere meruistis). Toubert, “La Renovatio,” 152– 53; Boyle, Short Guide, 56 – 58; Eileen Kane, “The Painted Decoration of the Church of San Clemente,” in Art & Architecture, 86 – 88; Patrick Geary, “ ‘Pull You Sons of Whores!’: Linguistic Register and Reform in the Legend of Saint Clement,” in Promoting the Saints, ed. Ottó Gecser ( Budapest: CEU, 2010), 41– 49. 24. “EGO BENO DE RAPIZA CU( M) MARIA UXOR [sic] MEA P( RO) AMORE D( E)I ET BEATI CLEMENTI(S) P( IN)G( E)R( E) F( ECI)” ( I, Beno de Rapiza, with my wife Maria, caused this to be painted for the love of God and of blessed Clement). The donors and their two children are depicted below the Miracle at Cherson mural with another inscription. Osborne, “Proclamations,” 158– 59, 162– 63n29. The inscription near Beno’s hem is visible in Josef Wilpert’s plate of this fresco. Wilpert used photographic enlargements made from negatives shot shortly after the frescoes were excavated and then had an artist, Carlo Tabanelli, apply gouache colors or gold and silver tints in front of the originals. In the late 1970s, Per Jonas Nordhagen conducted a minute comparison of several of Wilpert’s plates with originals recently restored or newly accessible, concluding that the plates are “highly accurate and convey a truer picture of the refinements of the original than any black and white photography.” Nordhagen also gave Wilpert’s plates “high marks . . . for their precision both in the delineating of the subject matter and in the rendering of colours.” Given the deterioration of many of these works of art since their excavation and Wilpert’s attention to evidence of restorations and alterations, the plates in his Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV.–XIII. Jahrhundert, 4 vols. ( Freiburg: Herder, 1916 –1917), provide important documentation. Per Jonas Nordhagen, “Working with Wilpert: The Illustrations in Die

Reconsidering Reform \ 139 römischen Mosaiken und Malereien and Their Source Value,” Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artivm Historiam Pertinentia, Series Altera in 8o 5 (1985): 247– 57. 25. Wolf, “Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder,” 325. 26. “D(OMI)N(U)S VOBISCUM / PAX D(OMI)NI SIT SE(M)P(ER) VOBI(S) CUM.” Joseph A. Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum Sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner, 2 vols. ( New York: Benziger Brothers, 1951), 2:85, 311–14; Toubert, “La Renovatio,” 153; Wolf, “Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder,” 322– 25; John Osborne, “Framing Sacred Space: Eleventh-Century Mural Painting in the Churches of Rome,” Analecta romana instituti Danici 30 (2004): 145. 27. Hélène Toubert, “La rappresentazioni dell’Ecclesia nell’arte del X– XII secolo,” in Un’Arte orientata, 49– 50. 28. These figures have been misidentified as priests ( Toubert) and deacons ( Wolf ). Neither wears the characteristic attire of the priestly order (chasuble, stole) or the diaconate (dalmatic), an identifying visual language that the artists of these panels use with other figures. In addition to the correct liturgical garb of the subdiaconate (tunicles and maniples), one of the figures is holding a thurible and incense vessel. Thurifers, when they are identified in the Ordines romani, are either acolytes or subdeacons. Toubert, “La Renovatio,” 153; Wolf, “Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder,” 322; Roger E. Reynolds, “Image and Text: The Liturgy of Clerical Ordination in Early Medieval Art,” Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hierarchy and Image (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1999), 8: figures 14 –17; Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani au haut moyen age, 5 vols., Spicilegium sacrum lovaniense, Etudes et documents, fasc. 11, 23– 24, 28– 29 ( Louvain: Spicilegium sacrum lovaniense, 1931–1961), 5 (Ordo L): 228 (XXV.109), 305 (XXXII.9). 29. In the Translation of Clement’s Relics, for example, the pope, flanked by the priests Cyril and Methodius, heads a crowd of other clerics trailing off behind to the left; from the other side, the order reads pope/celebrant, deacon, and then the acolytes bearing the bier and candles. Both in the Miracle at Clement’s Tomb and the Saint Alexius scenes, the pope or bishop is at the head of a mass of clerics. Rank order among the various grades of clergy is underscored in the Roman pontifical of the twelfth century: “ordinent se lectores, ostiarii, acoliti, et subdiaconi et stent in ordine suo, secundum eos gradus ubi ascenditur ad altare.” Michel Andrieu, Le pontifical romain au moyen age, 5 vols. ( Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1938– 41), 1:223. 30. Roger E. Reynolds, “Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hierarchies and Functions,” Clerics in the Early Middle Ages, 1:7–13; Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, Il clero di Roma nel medioevo: Istituzioni e politica cittadina (secoli VIII–XIII) ( Rome: Viella, 2002), 138– 40. 31. The control these officials exerted over sacred objects, combined with their lack of celibacy, was what earned the mansionarii and virgarii reformist ire. Bonizo also describes them as “cives romani uxorati seu concubinari, barba rasi

140 /

Maureen C. Miller

et mitrati”; I have no explanation for why they are represented as bearded here. Carpegna Falconieri, Clero di Roma, 144 – 45. 32. The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073–1085, trans. H. E. J. Cowdrey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 391 [8:21]. 33. Bonizo of Sutri’s Libellus de sacramentis (ca. 1089), for example, attributed the canon of the Mass to Pope Clement I and reconstructed a Clementine mass, and the fresco in San Clemente, particularly the book open on the altar quoting passages from the canon, seems to quote this work. Toubert, “La Renovatio,” 154.

Six

O t t o o f F r e i s i n g ’ s Ty r a n t s Church Advocates and Noble Lordship in the Long Twelfth Century

j o n a t h a n r . lyo n

During the years between 1050 and 1215, the intellectual elite in western Europe did not debate the nature of tyranny with the same intensity as ancient Greek philosophers had — or late medieval and early modern legal theorists soon would. John of Salisbury discusses tyrants at length in his Policraticus, but as modern scholars have noted, he was exceptional in this regard; another century would pass before Thomas Aquinas addressed the subject of tyranny in detail.1 Despite twelfth-century authors’ disinterest in this topic, some medieval historians have nevertheless been drawn in recent years to the language of tyranny in the sources from the period. For these scholars, the indiscriminate employment of this kind of language in chronicles and other narrative works is evidence for the endemic problem of violent lordship during the central Middle Ages. Abbot Suger of Saint Denis’s The Deeds of Louis the Fat is often cited in this context, because Suger frequently uses the words “tyrant” and “tyranny” in his complaints about capricious lords.2 Indeed, at times Suger seems to use the term “tyranny” as a synonym for what historians today call “lordship.”3 Other twelfth-century authors writing in the 141

142 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

Anglo-French sphere were equally unreflective in their use of this language.4 Thus, as Thomas Bisson suggests in his 2009 book The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, “tyranny” was a generic concept for twelfth-century church writers: “There was nothing technical in the use of this emotive term, which often corresponded to circumlocutions for violent or coercive power of equal rhetorical force.”5 The aim of this paper is to complicate these arguments about the relationship between tyranny and lordship by examining the works of one of the most famous twelfth-century authors from the German kingdom, Bishop Otto of Freising. As I will argue here, Otto does not use the language of tyranny indiscriminately. On the contrary, when employing it to discuss noble lordship during his own lifetime, he reserves its usage for the Wittelsbachs, the Bavarian noble lineage that controlled the position of church advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt) for his bishopric and was thus responsible for exercising judicial authority over his church’s lands. A close reading of Otto’s other uses of the language of tyranny in his works— when combined with a consideration of how other contemporary German chroniclers also employed this language— suggests that he was one of numerous German authors who drew an explicit connection between tyranny and church advocacy. Otto’s complaints about the Wittelsbach lineage thus provide important evidence for an understudied facet of local lordship and power dynamics in the medieval German kingdom— and highlight some key differences between Anglo-French and German authors’ uses of the language of tyranny. Otto of Freising (d. 1158) is best known to medieval historians for his authorship of two narrative works of history: the Chronica, spanning the years from Adam’s creation to 1146 AD, and the Gesta Friderici, an account of the early years of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa’s life and reign. Especially for the middle decades of the twelfth century, Otto is an invaluable source on the German kingdom and the empire. No other German chronicler covers the 1140s and early 1150s in such depth, and Otto provides important details about German politics thanks to his strong ties to the imperial court. As a member of the Babenberg lineage of Austrian margraves and dukes, a half-brother of King Conrad III (1138–1152), and a paternal uncle of Emperor Frederick I (1152–1190), he belonged to the uppermost echelons of the German aristocracy. Fur-

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 143 ther enhancing the value of Otto’s historical works was his educational background; he was one of the few German churchmen to spend time in Paris in the 1120s, and he became a monk and abbot at the early Cistercian foundation of Morimond in the 1130s.6 Otto thus moved in some of the most elite intellectual circles of his day. This combination of political and religious connections made him a multifaceted — and frequently contradictory — figure whose complex background can make it difficult to understand fully his historical works.7 Frequently overlooked (especially in the Anglophone world) amid all of these biographical details is his career as bishop of the small diocese of Freising in the duchy of Bavaria. Between 1138 and his death in 1158, he spent much of his time in this bishopric performing the roles of prelate and ecclesiastical lord. As a result, managing local diocesan issues — not writing chronicles or participating in imperial politics — frequently occupied his days.8 While the surviving sources permit only occasional glimpses of this aspect of Otto’s career, his activities as bishop of Freising are essential to understanding not just his historical works, but also what those works can tell us about the twelfth-century German kingdom. Some of the ways in which Otto’s local interests affected his writings are evident in a striking passage that appears in book VI of his Chronica, where he briefly departs from the chronological structure of his narrative while describing the 955 Battle of Lechfeld. It is here that he uses the language of tyranny to attack some of the Wittelsbachs, the lineage who controlled the church advocacy for Freising and exercised significant influence within his bishopric.9 According to Otto, the Hungarians had been almost completely annihilated at the famous battle because the Bavarian count of Scheyern had secretly conspired against them and led them to their deaths.10 Rather than praising the count for his role in the victory of the German king, Otto I, however, Otto of Freising emphasizes the price the count and his family paid for his treachery. First, the Hungarians killed him as a traitor. Then King Otto I confiscated some of his lands ( presumably because of his original decision to side with the king’s enemies), and certain bishops placed the count’s remaining properties under anathema. At this point, the chronicler digresses and looks forward two centuries to his own day, to the count of Scheyern’s descendants:

144 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

Because many tyrants [tyranni] have arisen thus far from this source [i.e., the count], Count-palatine Otto [ I of Wittelsbach]— an heir by no means dissimilar from his perfidious and wicked father and one who exceeds all his predecessors in sinfulness — does not cease to persecute the Church of God up to the present day. For, amazing to say and by what divine judgment I do not know, almost all of that man’s [i.e., the count’s] descendants have been given over to a reprobate mind. And so none of them— or very few— of either sex, of whatever profession or rank, may be found but those who either rage in open tyranny [tyrannide] or who, utterly infatuated with and unworthy of every honor both ecclesiastical and secular, devote themselves to thefts and robberies and lead a miserable life begging.11 Among historians who have studied the works of Otto of Freising and the history of twelfth-century Bavaria, this is a well-known passage because the rhetoric is unusually sharp for the chronicler.12 Indeed, these sentences are missing from many later manuscripts of the Chronica, particularly those written after several members of the Wittelsbach lineage became influential figures at Barbarossa’s court.13 To contextualize the language of tyranny that Otto employs in this passage, it is therefore necessary to pay close attention to some of the local concerns that shaped his writing — though neither his Chronica nor Gesta Friderici has traditionally been viewed as a work of local history. Because Otto of Freising had close ties to the Staufen dynasty and was himself a member of the upper aristocracy, he was not an unbiased observer of German politics. Moreover, as a Cistercian monk, he had strong opinions about how secular rulers and lords ought to act. In both of his chronicles, therefore, he praised those who conformed to his political views and his high standards of behavior and criticized those who did not. Some of the most frequent targets of the bishop’s wrath were the German noblemen of his own day. Thus, the various lords who laid claim to the title of duke of Bavaria during his twenty-year episcopate, including two of his own brothers, were often blamed for their failure to bring peace to the duchy. Early in the Chronica, for example, Otto inserts into the middle of his account of ancient history a lament about the duchy’s difficulties in the 1140s: “A clamor is heard in all lands, but especially in

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 145 our province, which the nobleman Welf [ VI] recently invaded in a hostile manner, laying waste to the fields and plundering the goods of God’s churches. . . . Indeed, because there is a dispute over the duchy between him and Duke Henry [ Jasomirgott] of Bavaria, both of whom are exemplary youths of impetuous courage, what can be expected from either of them . . . other than the ruin of the poor and the devastation of churches?”14 Elsewhere, Otto mockingly dismisses the claims of one of the Staufens’ territorial rivals, the Zähringens, to ducal authority in the south of the duchy of Swabia: “Berthold [II of Zähringen (d. 1111)], then bearing the empty name of duke, left it to his descendants as if it were hereditary. For all of them, up to the present day, are called dukes but hold no duchy, sharing in the name only without the substance — unless there is someone who says the county between the Jura Mountains and the Great Saint Bernhard Pass is a duchy. . . .”15 Thus, Otto of Freising’s Wittelsbach neighbors were not the only German nobles whom the bishop criticized sharply in the Chronica and Gesta. The attack on the Wittelsbach lineage in book VI of the Chronica is nevertheless unique when viewed alongside Otto’s other complaints about contemporary lords, because none of these other German nobles is ever labeled a tyrant in his works. Nor are any of their actions ever described as tyrannous. As I will argue here, his choice of words directed against the Wittelsbachs is therefore significant. Indeed, the distinctiveness of Otto’s complaints about the lineage becomes even clearer when his other uses of the language of tyranny are considered. In general, Otto of Freising employs tyrannus, tyrannis, and related terms infrequently in both his Chronica and his later Gesta Friderici. The majority of his references to tyrants and tyranny appear in the early books of the Chronica, when he is recounting the history of the ancient world and early medieval Europe. Thus, tyrants include various rulers of ancient Sicily and the Roman Empire as well as Attila the Hun and the Gothic king Theoderic. For the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, he singles out the Breton ruler Nominoë, the Beneventan duke Adalgis, Duke Arnulf of Bavaria, and King Berengar II of Italy for their tyrannous actions.16 In many of these cases, Otto is simply copying the language of his sources, most notably Orosius, Rufinus’s Latin translation

146 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

of Eusebius, Regino of Prüm, and Frutolf of Michelsberg.17 When discussing the reign of Emperor Constantine (d. 337), for example, Otto borrows from Rufinus’s Latin translation of Eusebius and labels Constantine’s rival, Maxentius, a tyrant: “And so the pious emperor Constantine, already protector of the Christian faith, prepared to wage war against that most wicked tyrant [ Maxentius].”18 Otto then calls Maxentius a tyrant in two subsequent sentences while discussing the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Because most of these references to tyrants are taken from other sources, it is difficult to draw any clear conclusions from the early books of the Chronica about Otto’s own understanding of tyranny. In book VII of the Chronica and in his Gesta Friderici, both of which concern his own lifetime, Otto is not as dependent on other sources in constructing his narratives. There, he most frequently uses the terms “tyrant” and “tyranny” when discussing the political situation in Italy. King Roger II of Sicily in particular is accused of tyrannical behavior on numerous occasions.19 And Otto, who is often critical of the independent-minded cities of northern and central Italy in his works, also attacks them for preferring to be governed by tyrants than by their rightful Frankish and German overlords. He puts into the mouth of Emperor Frederick I, in a speech to the Romans, the complaint that it was not Charlemagne and Emperor Otto I but “Desiderius and Berengar, your tyrants [tyranni tui], in whom you gloried, on whom you relied as if on princes.”20 What patterns, if any, can be discerned in Otto’s employment of the language of tyranny? In many cases, he conforms quite closely to traditional usage. Isidore of Seville writes succinctly of the difference between kings and tyrants “that the king is moderate and temperate, but the tyrant cruel [crudelis].”21 This straightforward definition is mirrored in various passages in the Chronica and Gesta, where Otto draws clear connections between tyranny and cruelty.22 He is most explicit in this linkage when he describes King Roger II of Sicily’s actions as “works of cruelty [crudelitatis opera]” similar to those “of the ancient tyrants [tyrannorum] of Sicily.”23 Thus, in some places, Otto of Freising relies on a conventional understanding of tyrants and tyranny when crafting his narrative. However, cruelty was not the only attribute that prompted Otto to employ the language of tyranny when describing various rulers in his

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 147 works. He also labels as tyrants those who, in his opinion, exercised their power and authority illegitimately. Attila the Hun, Odoacer, and Theoderic were not simply cruel; they had also seized possession of territories that rightly belonged to the Roman Empire. Otto makes this point explicitly in his extended discussion of Theoderic’s victory over Odoacer and Theoderic’s seizure of Rome. Here, in one of the only places in the early books of the Chronica where he diverges from his sources and adds his own comments, he writes, “See the state wretchedly destroyed. See that people [i.e., the Romans], who by their wisdom and strength were formerly lords of the world, weakened to such a great extent that — downtrodden by a barbarian tyranny [tyrannide] and delivered up to a harsh domination — they cannot be freed except by a barbarian. They submissively and gladly receive a tyrant [tyrannum] in order to escape the domination of another tyrant [tyranni].”24 Similarly, Otto follows his source Frutolf of Michelsberg in labeling King Berengar II of Italy a tyrant in order — at least in part — to justify the Ottonian king (and future emperor) Otto I’s invasion of northern Italy and seizure of territories south of the Alps.25 Another pattern discernible in Otto of Freising’s usage of tyrannical language also deserves mention. Unlike Isidore of Seville— and many of the ancient sources Otto uses for the opening books of the Chronica—he does not limit his definition of the tyrant solely to kings and emperors. He follows Regino of Prüm in describing Duke Adalgis of Benevento as a tyrant, partly because Adalgis refused to acknowledge Carolingian authority over this Italian duchy.26 Later, Duke Arnulf of Bavaria is labeled a tyrant as a result of his virtual independence from Ottonian royal authority; he controlled the selection of bishops in Bavaria during the early tenth century and was frequently opposed by those bishops who favored stronger royal control over the Bavarian church.27 Thus, lords below the level of king and emperor who exercised too much independent authority from the rightful rulers of the German kingdom and empire could also be tyrants. Through this broader sense of tyranny, it is possible to see similarities between Otto and two of his most famous contemporaries, Suger (d. 1151) and John of Salisbury (d. 1180). In his Deeds of Louis the Fat, the abbot of Saint Denis does not hesitate to employ the language of tyrants

148 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

and tyranny when describing various counts and lesser lords who were devastating the region around Paris and refusing to accept Louis VI’s royal authority.28 John of Salisbury is likewise quick to label as a tyrant anyone who acts in opposition to the law. In the Policraticus he notes, for example, “And of course not only kings practise tyranny; many private men are tyrants, in so far as the powers which they possess promote prohibited goals.”29 And, most significantly, he also argues, “For tyranny is an abuse of the power conceded to man by God. . . . It is therefore evident that tyranny exists not among princes alone, but that everyone is a tyrant who abuses any power over those subject to him which has been conceded from above.”30 Otto of Freising’s decision to label the Wittelsbachs, the descendants of the treacherous Bavarian count of Scheyern, as tyrants fits within this broader twelfth-century milieu of authors claiming that non-kings could also be called tyrants. However, the Wittelsbach counts-palatine do not conform neatly to any of the other, broader patterns visible in Otto’s references to tyrants. Most significantly, the only other Frank or German whose actions are labeled tyrannical in either of his works is Duke Arnulf of Bavaria. Arnulf, however, is only identified this way in a chapter heading, “Concerning the Tyranny [tyrannide] of Duke Arnulf of the Bavarians.”31 In the body of the Chronica and the Gesta, every other king, emperor, and lord who is called a tyrant lived prior to or outside of the Carolingian/Ottonian/Salian/Staufen empire—or refused to accept the authority of its rulers. The Wittelsbachs, living in the heartland of the German kingdom in the duchy of Bavaria, are anomalous from this perspective. They also differ from many of Otto of Freising’s other tyrants, past and present, in that they were the legitimate possessors of their title to the county-palatine of Bavaria.32 Count-palatine Otto I had not usurped this position, and Conrad III — the king when Otto of Freising wrote his invective in book VI of the Chronica—recognized his and his heirs’ authority as holders of the title.33 Otto of Freising thus singles out the members of the Wittelsbach lineage for a distinctive type of criticism when he calls them tyrants. The key to unlocking Otto’s choice of words is the unique relationship that the bishop had with the members of the Wittelsbach lineage. Count-palatine Otto I of Bavaria and his son Count-palatine Otto II

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 149 were more than just his neighbors in western Bavaria. They were also the advocates for the episcopal church of Freising during his lifetime. In labeling his church’s advocates as tyrants, Otto of Freising was therefore making a specific kind of accusation, one that finds echoes in several monastic chronicles written in the late eleventh- and twelfth-century German kingdom. The authors of these works also tended to reserve the language of tyranny for their complaints about the behavior of their own advocates, and these sources therefore can help better contextualize Otto of Freising’s attack on the Wittelsbachs in book VI of the Chronica. Before turning to these sources, however, it is necessary to consider briefly the history of the Freising bishops’ relationships with their advocates. Church advocates first begin to appear in the extant sources in western Europe during the Carolingian period.34 The advocates of the late eighth and ninth centuries were tasked with representing bishops, abbots, and abbesses at secular courts— and with serving as legal agents and advisors to these ecclesiastics. The office of advocatus was thus closely tied to the canon law tradition that churchmen should not attend courts presided over by laymen. The driving force behind the creation of church advocacies seems not to have been churchmen, however, but rather the Carolingian rulers, who promoted them as part of their broader efforts at ecclesiastical reform. Kings and emperors granted to monasteries and bishoprics the right to choose their own advocates from among the local lay community, and these laymen appear in the Carolingian sources arguing cases before missi dominici and pressing claims concerning property disputes at local courts. Although the extant evidence on individual advocates is meager, there are a few sources that suggest some of these advocates may have had real legal expertise, making them vital figures for the churches they represented.35 The church advocates of the Carolingian period seem not to have played a prominent role in acting as judges for their religious communities on ecclesiastical lands that were immune from royal jurisdiction.36 If this is the case, then Carolingian advocates differed fundamentally from their successors in later centuries. Tracing the development of church advocacy through the tenth century, especially the decades immediately following the collapse of Carolingian authority in the East Frankish kingdom, is virtually impossible because of the lack of surviving evidence.

150 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

However, when advocates begin to appear more regularly in the German sources again during the eleventh century, their roles as the secular lords tasked with maintaining order on church lands have clearly expanded.37 Bishoprics and monasteries, which frequently received immunities from kings and emperors guaranteeing that their lands were exempt from royal authority, needed laymen to inflict corporal punishment on people who committed violent crimes on their estates. Increasingly, this seems to have become one of the chief functions of a church advocate. Thus, Timothy Reuter goes so far as to label the advocate of the central Middle Ages “the private count” of the bishop, abbot, or abbess whose lands lay outside royal jurisdiction.38 Much of what we know about church advocates in this early period survives in the unusually rich sources from the bishopric of Freising, where there had been advocates since the early ninth century and perhaps even earlier. Thanks especially to the diocese’s extant collections of tradition notices—brief, summary records of the gifts of property to the religious community — many of these advocates are quite well documented.39 The first about whom we know anything was named Lantfrid and appears in sources from the early 800s.40 In the 860s and early 870s, the advocate was named Karthario and can frequently be seen fulfilling one of the most commonplace roles of the church advocate, namely acting as a guarantor whenever property moved into or out of the church’s possession. For example, a tradition notice recording an exchange of moveable properties between Bishop Anno of Freising (855– 875) and the abbot of Tegernsee states, “And so the praiseworthy bishop, with his legitimate advocate by the name of Karthario, gave to the same noble abbot one female serf and her two children. . . . On the other side, in compensation for this female serf, the noble abbot, together with his advocate Cundbald, gave to the same bishop one male serf, who is called Wolfram, two cows and a liturgical robe.”41 A century later, the advocate Poppo is named in almost one hundred Freising tradition notices during the prelacy of Bishop Abraham (957– 972). In the overwhelming majority of these cases, Poppo can be seen playing the same role as Karthario. Anytime the bishop was involved in a property donation or exchange, the property was given “into the hands of the bishop and his advocate, Poppo.”42 Again in the mid-eleventh century, we see in the same posi-

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 151 tion another Freising advocate, named Otto, this one an early ancestor of the later Wittelsbach counts-palatine. For example, a property exchange was made “into the hands of Bishop Nitker and his advocate Otto” sometime between 1047 and 1053.43 Thus, for more than three hundred years before Bishop Otto of Freising wrote his invective against the Wittelsbachs, there had been a tradition of local nobles performing the duties of the Freising church advocate. Even Count-palatine Otto I of Wittelsbach, who seems to have come into possession of the advocacy for Freising at some point in or shortly before 1130, is named in a small number of tradition notices playing the typical role of the advocate.44 In 1135, for example, three years before the other Otto became bishop, a Freising tradition notice records a property exchange that occurred “with the common counsel of clerics and laymen and with the consent of the lord Otto, the church’s advocate.”45 During the early years of Bishop Otto’s prelacy, the count-palatine continued to occasionally carry out his normal duties. Sometime between 1141 and 1147, he is named as confirming a property donation that two nobles made to the church.46 And during the same period, he and his son Otto II witnessed a property exchange involving the cathedral chapter.47 Other sources, however, indicate that Bishop Otto was also beginning to come into conflict with his Wittelsbach advocate during the early 1140s. Otto suggests in the harsh passage of book VI of his Chronica that members of the Wittelsbach lineage had behaved tyrannically toward Freising for generations prior to the advocacy of Count-palatine Otto I. It is therefore unsurprising that the bishop would try to limit the family’s influence within his diocese. Some historians have also suggested a more specific reason why the 1140s became a flashpoint in the history of bishop-advocate relations in Freising. For them, the key to the conflict is the extended vacancy in the see of Freising between the death of Bishop Henry of Freising in late 1137 and Otto’s consecration sometime in the autumn of 1138. Count-palatine Otto I of Wittelsbach seems to have used this period to assert greater control over the church’s rights and properties. Specifically, he succeeded in drawing many ministerials — unfree knights and tenants and their families — away from the church of Freising in order to bring them into his own household. In the process, he severely weakened the church’s economic base.48

152 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

During the earliest years of Bishop Otto’s episcopacy, he focused significant energy on reasserting his church’s rights. On May 3, 1140, less than two years after his consecration, he used his close connections to his half-brother King Conrad III to obtain a new royal privilege for his church. The charter includes the statement, “And so we decree by our royal authority that the ministerials of the same church [Freising] should remain in that liberty, in which royal ministerials and those of other churches [remain], and in the aforesaid diocese no one may mint coinage except the bishop.”49 The following year, Otto received a new papal privilege that included the wording, “Furthermore, since the advocates are appointed for the purpose of the defense of the church, we forbid to the advocates of that church in every way, lest they presume to inflict any harm on the same place or the things pertaining to it, or presume to demand anything from them except their right.”50 The most explicit evidence for the growing dispute between the two Ottos over the rights of the advocate appears in a second royal privilege, this one dated to 1142. In part, it states, “Therefore, let the diligence of every present and future person know that Count-palatine Otto [I] of Wittelsbach, following our [King Conrad III’s] suggestion, denied wholly the judicial authority, which he seemed to have over the ministerials of the church of Freising.”51 When these royal and papal privileges are viewed alongside Otto of Freising’s complaints about the Wittelsbachs in his own chronicles, it becomes clear that the two Ottos were deeply divided over the role of the advocate within the diocese. The count-palatine seems to have been using the office of advocate to expand his own lordship into regions traditionally controlled by the church of Freising. The bishop, in contrast, was doing everything he could to limit the rights of the church advocate. Since modern scholars typically date Otto of Freising’s invective against the Wittelsbachs in book VI of the Chronica to circa 1143, the passage can plausibly be read as an expression of the bishop’s frustration in this key period when he was seeking both royal and papal support in the conflict with the count-palatine.52 Here, and only here, in his two chronicles does he use the language of tyranny to complain about the behavior of someone with whom he was in direct conflict. Under King Conrad III, the bishop gradually won the upper hand— at least partially — thanks to his own kin connections to the ruler and the

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 153 somewhat weaker ties between the king and the Wittelsbachs.53 This is suggested in one Freising tradition notice from the year 1147, in which an agreement drawn up at the royal court between Bishop Otto and an abbess identifies a minor noble as the bishop’s advocate.54 Otto of Freising’s gains in this conflict during the 1140s may also explain why Countpalatine Otto I’s son Otto II resorted to threats and violence in an attempt to regain his lineage’s position in the diocese. On November 21, 1150, Pope Eugene III wrote to the archbishop of Salzburg, We have heard the serious grievance on behalf of our venerable brother Bishop Otto of Freising against Otto [II], the son of CountPalatine Otto [ I of Bavaria], who assailed him with harsh insults while he was celebrating Mass and — disregarding the reverence of God — disgracefully laid hands on him. Prudent and wise men cannot ignore the fact that he must be punished with as serious and as severe a censure as possible. Therefore, lest such a great offence against the church of God remain unpunished, . . . we charge to your fraternity through the present letters that you sternly admonish the aforesaid Otto [ II] that he make suitable amends to our aforesaid brother on account of such a great offence. But if he refuses to yield to your admonitions, you will declare the same Otto excommunicated, and you will preserve the sentence of excommunication and make certain it is observed steadfastly until he gives suitable satisfaction to God and the church on account of such a great offence.55 This letter is one of the best pieces of extant evidence for just how protracted and bitter the conflict between Otto of Freising and members of the Wittelsbach lineage had become. If Otto of Freising is to be believed, Otto II’s actions ultimately failed; he was threatened with excommunication and, according to the Gesta Friderici, the king soon “outlawed Count-Palatine Otto [ I] on account of his sons’ crimes. [ The king] laid siege to his nearby castle called Kelheim . . . and, at this place, forced him to give one of his sons as a hostage.”56 The dynamic between the bishop and the Wittelsbach lineage shifted with the death of Conrad III in 1152 and Frederick Barbarossa’s subsequent election as king. Count-palatine Otto I and especially his son

154 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

Otto II became regular visitors to Barbarossa’s court and effectively cultivated Königsnähe (a close connection to the king). As early as 1163, five years after Bishop Otto’s death, Count-palatine Otto II of Wittelsbach was acting as advocate of Freising.57 He also emerged as one of the emperor’s most trusted agents south of the Alps, and his loyal support of Frederick earned him a substantial reward in 1180: the duchy of Bavaria, which the Wittelsbachs would possess until 1918. As noted previously, the Wittelsbachs’ growing influence during the 1150s is likely the reason why the harsh passage in book VI is missing from many later manuscript copies of the Chronica.58 According to some scholars, the turning of the tide against the bishop of Freising may also be an important clue toward unraveling Otto’s motivations for writing his second work, the Gesta Friderici. In the mid-1150s, he may have been looking to regain the advantage in his long-standing dispute with the Wittelsbachs by writing a flattering account of Frederick Barbarossa’s early reign, one that would win him Königsnähe and give him more influence at the imperial court.59 Read from this angle, the Gesta was intended to impact local politics in western Bavaria rather than make a grand statement about imperial history. Viewed from the wider perspective of the history of the bishops of Freising and their advocates, we can see that Otto of Freising’s accusations of tyrannical behavior against the Wittelsbachs came at a crucial moment. In the early 1140s, as he was struggling to regain properties and rights lost to the advocates in earlier years, he expressed his frustration in the Chronica by using the language of tyranny in a way he does nowhere else in his works. For Otto, who tends to be much more traditional in his employment of the language of tyranny in both of his narrative works, this is an especially striking piece of evidence for his critical attitude toward his church’s advocates. His reluctance to label other contemporaries within the German kingdom as tyrants suggests that this was a particularly harsh criticism for him to level against his Wittelsbach advocates, and not one that he leveled lightly. There was a clear basis for this usage, however, because other, contemporary German monastic chroniclers also employed the language of tyranny in their complaints about their own advocates. The conflict between Otto of Freising and the members of the Wittelsbach lineage was not unique. During the late eleventh and early

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 155 twelfth centuries, many bishops and abbots clashed with their advocates. On the one hand, churchmen needed secular advocates on their estates because they could not wield the sword of secular authority themselves and bloody their own hands executing violent criminals. On the other hand, once these secular advocates had gained access to ecclesiastical estates and ecclesiastical sources of income, they frequently looked to take advantage of their positions. Rather than limiting themselves to their judicial roles, many of these nobles exploited their advocatial authority and transformed it into an instrument of personal lordship.60 In the historiography of the German kingdom, this transformation of church advocacy maps neatly onto the narrative of the decline of royal authority in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Because the later Salian rulers and their successors did not have the ability to exert their authority effectively on the ground everywhere in the kingdom, monasteries and other churches had no other defenders beyond members of the local nobility. However, these local lords had little if any reason to fear royal intervention if they chose to exploit their positions as advocates. Churches could certainly bring their complaints against their advocates to the imperial court — and many did — but the kings and emperors were rarely in the position to bring swift justice to bad advocates.61 There is a large body of eleventh- and twelfth-century source material, most of it written inside monastic communities, that supports this general picture of German nobles using their advocatial authority to advance their own interests and those of their families. The language of these texts is invaluable when trying to understand why Otto of Freising labeled his own Wittelsbach advocates as tyrants. Here, I will focus on two monastic chronicles that offer especially rich evidence — and striking parallels with Otto’s Chronica. The Casus monasterii Petrishusensis is a history of the monastery of Petershausen in Constance, in the duchy of Swabia near the present Swiss-German border. Written by a monk of the community in the midtwelfth century, in the decades after the monastery had come under the influence of the Hirsau reform movement, the text begins with the earliest days of the community in the late tenth century. Because the monks of this house had developed close ties to the church reformers of the eleventh century and to the Swabian nobles opposed to King Henry IV

156 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

(1056 –1106) during the Investiture Controversy, the author is especially critical of this Salian ruler and his supporters. In the history’s entry for the year 1075, the author begins, “King Henry [ IV] was living tyrannically [tyrannice] in every way and feared neither God nor men.”62 Later, when complaining about Henry IV granting the patriarchate of Aquileia to one of the king’s relatives and closest allies, the monastic author complains, “He [the patriarch] exercised tyranny [tyrannidem] against the members of the catholic faith.”63 The language of tyranny appears on only two other occasions in this work, which fills more than fifty pages in the printed edition. Once, when the author is describing the background to the Second Crusade, he refers to the tyrannus Zengi’s capture of Edessa.64 The second occurrence comes when he is discussing the actions of one of the monastery’s advocates, specifically a count, Henry, who was another supporter of King Henry IV in the tumultuous years around 1100: “Henry . . . , advocate of the Holy Mountain [i.e., Petershausen], assembled a multitude of his men and came and exercised tyranny [tyrannidem] in the monastery of Saint George [i.e., Petershausen]. For these rash men forcefully seized the brothers’ food supplies, tested their swords in the brothers’ animals, and committed many disgraceful acts.”65 Thus, like his contemporary Bishop Otto of Freising, the monk writing the Casus monasterii Petrishusensis uses the language of tyranny sparingly — but does not hesitate to use it, in the context of local history, for the behavior of one of his own church community’s advocates. A similar situation is evident in the text known today as the Chronicon Laureshamense, a twelfth-century chronicle of the monastery of Lorsch. This monastic house, an eighth-century foundation, is located to the east of the Rhine River near Worms and is well known for its important Carolingian-era annals. The Chronicon, which was written by a monk of the community who had access to a wide range of earlier charters and narrative sources for Lorsch, covers the years 764 to 1167; a second author then continued it to the year 1179. The first author uses the language of tyranny on only three occasions in his portion of the text, which is almost one hundred pages in the printed edition. In the earliest section of the chronicle, concerning the Carolingian period, he refers to “the tyranny of the Lombards” when describing the Italian campaigns of

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 157 Charlemagne’s father, Pippin.66 Later, he quotes in full a letter written by the monastic community and addressed to emperor and pope, in which the monks complain about a property dispute that has led their opponents to act like “tyrants.”67 When discussing the eleventh- and twelfthcentury history of his monastery in his own words, he reserves this language of tyranny for only one person, namely the community’s advocate, Berthold. According to the chronicler, Abbot Anselm (d. 1102) helped to rebuild the church at Lorsch after a fire and to recover many of its most valuable possessions. But these were not the only reasons he deserved to be praised: Not content with these things, he [Anselm] also began to support and defend his church’s household manfully against its oppressors, especially against the tyranny [tyrannidem] of the advocate Berthold, who was the sinful root of those sorts of exactions that flourish even up until now. The same Berthold perceived that the abbot was superior not only militarily but also in righteousness and industriousness. Because he was not able to lay hold of him by force, he endeavored to lay hold of him by deceit. Therefore, at a fortunate moment, he was able to approach the abbot, who was unaware and unprepared, in the church of the blessed Mary at the priory at Michlinstat, and to seize the surprised abbot deceitfully. With the consent of his relative Count Egeno, he imprisoned him in the castle of Vehingen.68 The abbot was soon released, but the story calls attention to the kind of behavior that so many monastic communities found objectionable in their advocates. Various other monastic authors writing in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries offer similar descriptions of the tyrannical actions of their advocates.69 We could, for example, mention Abbot Rupert of Deutz. Though not born in the German-speaking regions of the empire, he seems to have shared with the abbots of other German monasteries a disdain for advocates. In his De Incendio, he avoids identifying his community’s enemies by name and does not explicitly refer to his church’s advocate as a tyrant. Nevertheless, modern interpretations of

158 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

this complicated text generally agree that his advocate was one the targets of the harsh language of tyranny he employs in some passages. Specifically, his multiple references to the tyrannical behavior of the Old Testament ruler Nimrod, who was the first great warrior and the founder of several cities, may well be a veiled critique of his advocate’s efforts to build new fortifications near the monastery of Deutz.70 Although there are other monastic sources that also deserve careful analysis for the study of church advocacy, the Casus monasterii Petrishusensis and Chronicon Laureshamense, in combination with Bishop Otto of Freising’s Chronica, suffice here to highlight the general trend. The authors of these works tended to use the language of tyranny infrequently but to employ it consistently when complaining about their own church’s advocates. This pattern may suggest that monastic authors of the period perceived their community’s relationship with its advocates in distinctive terms that set this relationship apart from the community’s interactions with other local lords. When that relationship soured, special language was necessary to call attention to the inappropriate behavior of advocates. How did ecclesiastical writers expect the relationship between church and advocate to function? Detailed, theoretical discussions of the nature of church advocacy are rare in the sources from the German kingdom of the central Middle Ages. In many cases, all that we know about the advocates of any given monastery or bishopric are their names and — as suggested by some of the sources cited above — the worst offenses they committed against their church communities. Nevertheless, there are a few sources that make it possible to develop a clearer picture of the proper relationship between an advocate and a religious house, at least from the perspective of the community’s members. Church chroniclers frequently expressed very clear expectations about the behavior of their community’s advocates. As a result, when an advocate abused his authority, he was considered to be much worse than simply a capricious lord run amok. To appreciate the reasons for this special status of the advocate, let us briefly consider the chronicles written by the monks Ortlieb and Berthold from the Swabian monastery of Zwiefalten and the Gesta of Archbishop Albero of Trier.

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 159 Ortlieb’s chronicle, written in the years between 1135 and 1139, survives in a twelfth-century manuscript and is a rich, detailed source for the earliest years of the monastic community at Zwiefalten.71 The work includes a lengthy description of the events that transpired after the death of the monastery’s first advocate in the opening decades of the 1100s: Count Kuno of happy memory, so long as he lived, administered [administravit] the advocacy of this place by his own proprietary right. Until the day of his death, he took care to defend the monastery in the manner of a pious father. After he died, his brother Count Leopold did not have the strength to bear the burden of this kind of care, because he suffered from the pain of gout. For this reason, by his counsel and with his consent, the whole community of brothers elected Duke Welf [ V] of Bavaria as advocate . . . on the condition that the [monastery’s] liberty, acquired through privilege, remain inviolate. Namely, he [ Welf ] should know that he only has this charge so long as he is willing to benefit this place. If, however, he should be injurious, the community has the free power to elect another advocate.72 Ortlieb’s careful choice of words makes it clear that he considered the monks of Zwiefalten to have complete control over their monastery’s advocacy because they were in possession of a papal privilege that granted them the right to choose their own advocate.73 Moreover, the monks also claimed the right to remove an advocate if he failed to exercise his advocatial authority appropriately. These aspects of monastic advocacy come into even better focus in the chronicle of Berthold of Zwiefalten. Berthold wrote his chronicle during the same period that Ortlieb was writing his, namely the later 1130s, and the two authors discuss many of the same events. Berthold also expands on many issues covered only briefly in Ortlieb’s chronicle, and as a result, his chronicle offers many important additions to Ortlieb’s. According to Berthold, the monks eventually grew to dislike the behavior of Welf V’s nephew and successor as advocate, Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria (d. 1139). As a result,

160 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

[ Henry’s] brother Welf [ VI] was elected by the common consent and counsel of the brothers and was substituted for him as [our] fourth advocate. But first, on the relics of the saints, in the presence of the whole community, he confirmed by oath through three of his ministerials that, should he ever be repudiated by us for a just reason, he would not retain this dignity beyond seven days against our will; in addition, [ he confirmed] that he would preserve as inviolate our charter of privilege to the extent that it pertained to him; and in addition, [ he confirmed] that none of his knights would be placed at the head of our household unless elected by us in accordance with our petition. If one of his knights, having been placed at the head of our household, should exercise tyranny [tyrannidem] and lay waste to our properties against our will, or for whatever reason be justly repudiated by the community, he should step down and remove himself from such an office [praefectura] before the end of seven days.74 Ortlieb’s use of the verb administrare and Berthold’s use of the term praefectura, combined with the long description of Welf VI’s oath, indicate that both chroniclers saw advocacy as an office and the advocate as a sworn officer of the monastic community.75 As a result, the nobles who held the position of advocate were expected to conform to a certain set of standards. If they chose instead to exploit their position at the expense of the monastic community, they were not simply being bad lords. They were breaking their sworn oath to the monks. Confirmation for this view of the significance of the oath sworn by a church advocate can be found in the Gesta Alberonis. Written by a churchman named Balderich, this biographical work concerning Archbishop Albero of Trier (1131–1152) is a rich source for the relationship between nobles and ecclesiastical communities in the far west of the German kingdom. In the author’s account of a conflict between the archbishop and his advocate, Count-palatine Herman of the Rhine, Albero gives a stirring speech to his troops on the eve of battle with the countpalatine’s forces: Then, holding the archiepiscopal cross in his hands, he began to make an exhortatory oration to the ranks of his soldiers in such a

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 161 manner: “Oh you friends of the blessed Peter! Oh defenders of the Holy Church, who today for God and for justice have set your mortal bodies against the enemy’s sword. Now may the blessed Peter come to you in spirit, for you are his knights today. Believe that he with a great heavenly host protects you today by their invisible shields. Be certain of victory. Behold this sign of the cross, this sign, I say, terrible for the adversaries of Jesus Christ. This is the cross upon which Herman, Count Palatine, swore fidelity to me on that day when I made him an advocate of our Church, on that day when I conferred on him those powers and that authority by which he now attacks me. I told him then that in this cross is a piece of the Lord’s cross, upon which He, whose sacrosanct image shines here, triumphed over the enemy of the human race; and I pointed out that the relics of many other venerable saints were contained in this cross. Indeed, that same Count Palatine, holding his hands upon this holy image, swore to me with these words: ‘I give to you, lord archbishop, this Lord, He who was crucified for us, as my guarantor, and I swear to you by His virtue that I shall never do anything against you, and that I shall assist you faithfully in all your interests with all my military forces and with all my strength.’ Let everyone know that this guarantor, namely Lord Christ, I shall now bring before the count in this his sacred image. I shall thrust it before his eyes; I shall show this witness of his oath to him.”76 Balderich’s point here is clear. By going to war with Albero, the countpalatine was violating the oath he had sworn to the archbishop as advocate and was therefore abusing the authority that the archbishop had conferred upon him. The Zwiefalten chronicles and the archbishop’s Gesta help to explain better why advocacy and tyranny were sometimes connected in works written by German churchmen in the twelfth century. Advocates who exploited their positions for personal gain were not just abusing their power or using illegitimate force; they were also violating the unique bond that connected them to a prelate and a church community. A monastery or diocesan church’s relationship with its advocate was one of the most important relationships that a religious community could have

162 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

with any secular lord. As a result, bad advocates were viewed as much worse than any other bad, local lords who might threaten the community or attack its lands. This is why religious writers employed the especially sharp rhetoric of tyranny when these nobles turned against them. As this article has shown, Otto of Freising’s employment of the terms tyrannus and tyrannis—in both his Chronica and his later Gesta Friderici— does not support the assertion that twelfth-century authors used these terms indiscriminately to complain about capricious lords. Nor do the usages of the language of tyranny by many other German monastic chroniclers of the period. Instead, these authors consciously chose to single out their advocates as tyrants and their advocates’ behavior as tyrannical. This language of tyranny thus held a special meaning for these churchmen; it was especially inflammatory language reserved for criticizing those secular lords who were supposed to be the strongest protectors and defenders of a church’s rights and properties. Otto of Freising’s works— and their milieu—therefore offer a cautionary note for those scholars who wish to see tyranny as a loose term during the long twelfth century. Some medieval authors, including most notably Suger, may have used tyranny as a generic synonym for lordship, but others clearly did not. Moreover, since Otto was educated in Paris and spent several years at the Cistercian monastery in Morimond, it is impossible to dismiss him and his works as simply a German exception to an Anglo-French rule; he must have understood at least some of the ways the language of tyranny was being used west of the Rhine. That Otto of Freising chose to label the Wittelsbachs as tyrants therefore calls attention to the special significance of church advocacy for the exercise of noble lordship in the German kingdom. For Otto and other German authors to identify this institution, in particular, as the principal source of tyranny in their lifetimes suggests that modern scholars have not yet fully appreciated the role of church advocacy in this society. More work on this understudied institution is essential if historians hope to understand why even a prominent member of the pan-European aristocratic and intellectual elite such as Otto could find his local church advocate to be such a thorn in his side. The tyrannical behavior of Otto’s Wittelsbach advocates is thus an important reminder that churchmen living in different parts of Latin Christendom could have very differ-

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 163 ent experiences with the Renaissance, Reformation, and Crisis of the Twelfth Century.77

Notes 1. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also C. Stephen Jaeger, “John of Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century,” in European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 514 –15; and Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1968), 359– 60. 2. Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. and trans. Henri Waquet ( Paris: Champion, 1929), 26, 128– 30, 174 – 76, and 232. 3. John Van Engen, “Sacred Sanctions for Lordship,” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 223– 24. 4. See, for example, Gregory A. Smith, “Sine rege, sine principe: Peter the Venerable on Violence in Twelfth-Century Burgundy,” Speculum 77 (2002): 25; and Edmund King, “The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 34 (1984): 135. 5. Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 281 and, more generally, 278– 87, where he describes “tyranny” as being synonymous with “bad lordship” and “tyrant” as synonymous with “public enemy,” among other terms. 6. For Otto’s biography, see Hans Werner Goetz, Das Geschichtsbild Ottos von Freising: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Vorstellungswelt und zur Geschichte des 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984), 22– 49; and Cornelia KirchnerFeyerabend, Otto von Freising als Diözesan- und Reichsbischof ( Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990). 7. Karl F. Morrison, “Otto of Freising’s Quest for the Hermeneutic Circle,” Speculum 55 (1980): 207– 8. 8. This can be seen most clearly in Alois Weissthanner, “Regesten des Freisinger Bischofs Otto I. (1138–1158),” Analecta sacri ordinis Cisterciensis 14 (1958): 151– 222. 9. For more on the office of church advocate, see below. 10. For this story, see Christof Paulus, Das Pfalzgrafenamt in Bayern im Frühen und Hohen Mittelalter (Munich: Kommission für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 2007), 196– 97; and for the battle more generally, Charles R. Bowlus,

164 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

The Battle of Lechfeld and its Aftermath, August 955: The End of the Age of Migrations in the Latin West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 11. Otto of Freising, Chronica sive Historia de Duabus Civitatibus, ed. Adolf Hofmeister, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 45( Hanover: Hahn, 1912), VI.20, 283– 84. See also ibid., VII.25, 350. 12. See, for example, Paulus, Pfalzgrafenamt in Bayern, 197; Doris Hagen, Herrschaftsbildung zwischen Königtum und Adel: Die Bischöfe von Freising in salischer und frühstaufischer Zeit ( Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 172– 73; and Odilo Engels, “Friedrich Barbarossa im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen,” in Stauferstudien: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Staufer im 12. Jahrhundert, ed. Erich Meuthen and Stefan Weinfurter (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1988), 226 – 27. 13. Otto of Freising, Chronica, xx– xxiii. 14. Ibid., “Prologue,” book II, 68. See also Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici I. Imperatoris, ed. Georg Waitz and Bernhard von Simson, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 46 ( Hanover: Hahn, 1912), I.30, 47– 48. 15. Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, I.9, 25– 26 (emphasis mine). 16. See, for example, Otto of Freising, Chronica, II.19, 90; IV.1, 184; IV.9, 195; IV.25, 216; V.1, 229; VI.2, 263; VI.4, 266; VI.19, 280; and VI.21, 284. Duke Arnulf of Bavaria is described as exercising tyranny only in a chapter heading, not in the body of the text (see note 31 below). The reign of Antichrist is similarly described as a tyranny only in the chapter headings: Chronica, 35. 17. For more on this point, see Goetz, Geschichtsbild Ottos von Freising, 55– 59. 18. Otto of Freising, Chronica, IV.1, 184. 19. Ibid., VII.20, 338 and VII.23, 346 – 47; and Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, II.49, 157. 20. Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, II.30, 137. See also ibid., II.25, 130. In the Gesta, he also cites a papal letter that describes the “tyranny” exercised by the infidels in the Holy Land: I.36, 56. For a similar usage of the language of tyranny, see below. 21. Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), I.xxxi. See also, II.xxix.7 and IX.iii.19– 20. 22. See, for example, Otto of Freising, Chronica, II.19, 90 and IV.9, 195. 23. Ibid., VII.23, 346 – 47. 24. Ibid., V.1, 229. 25. Ibid., VI.19, 280 and VI.21, 284 – 85. 26. Ibid., VI.4, 266; and Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. Friedrich Kurze, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 50 ( Hanover: Hahn, 1890), 104. See also Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians 751– 987 ( London: Longman, 1983), 69.

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 165 27. Ludwig Holzfurtner, Gloriosus Dux: Studien zu Herzog Arnulf von Bayern (907– 937) ( Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 73– 81. 28. See note 2 above. 29. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.17, 191. 30. Ibid., VIII.18, 202. See also Van Engen, “Sacred Sanctions for Lordship,” 224 – 25. 31. Otto of Freising, Chronica, 29. The chapter headings are present in all of the earliest manuscripts of the Chronica, and they more than likely were written by Otto. See Otto of Freising, Chronica, cvii. 32. For this title, see Paulus, Das Pfalzgrafenamt in Bayern. 33. Ibid., 282– 302. 34. I base this very general overview of Carolingian advocates on Charles West, “The Significance of the Carolingian Advocate,” Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009): 186 – 206. 35. Warren Brown, Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest, and Authority in an Early Medieval Society ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 75– 78. 36. West, “Significance of the Carolingian Advocate,” 203. 37. Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800 –1056 ( London: Longman, 1991), 219. 38. Ibid. 39. The classic study of these texts remains Oswald Redlich, “Ueber bairische Traditionsbücher und Traditionen,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 5 (1884): 1– 82. See also Peter Johanek, “Zur rechtlichen Funktion von Traditionsnotiz, Traditionsbuch und früher Siegelurkunde,” in Recht und Schrift im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Classen, Vorträge und Forschungen 23 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1977), 131–162; and John B. Freed, “German Source Collections: The Archdiocese of Salzburg as a Case Study,” in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 80 –121. 40. Brown, Unjust Seizure, 77. 41. Theodor Bitterauf, ed., Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2 vols., in Quellen und Erörterungen zur bayerischen Geschichte, neue Folge 5 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1967): 1:684, no. 867. See also ibid., 1:676, no. 853. 42. For this example, ibid., 2:83, no. 1157. 43. Ibid., 2:308, no. 1054. For this Otto, see Kirchner-Feyerabend, Otto von Freising, 93. 44. There is no consensus in the scholarship regarding the year when Otto became advocate. Compare Kirchner-Feyerabend, Otto von Freising, 93, and Stefan Weinfurter, “Der Aufstieg der frühen Wittelsbacher,” in Gelebte Ordnung—Gedachte Ordnung: Ausgewählte Beiträge zu König, Kirche und Reich, ed. Helmuth Klager, Hubertus Seibert, and Werner Bomm (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2005), 142– 43.

166 /

Jonathan R. Lyon

45. Bitterauf, Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2:531, no. 1742. 46. Ibid., 2:541– 42, no. 1763. 47. Ibid., 2:542– 43, no. 1764. Besides the aforementioned examples, Countpalatine Otto I is only identified as advocate in ibid., 2:361, no. 1528, and 2:363, no. 1532b. 48. Hagen, Herrschaftsbildung zwischen Königtum und Adel, 147– 48; KirchnerFeyerabend, Otto von Freising, 39– 46; and Weinfurter, “Aufstieg,” 146. 49. Die Urkunden Konrads III. und seines Sohnes Heinrich, ed. Friedrich Hausmann, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Die Urkunden der deutschen Könige und Kaiser 9 ( Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1969), 77– 78, no. 46. 50. Codex Diplomaticus Austriaco-Frisingensis, ed. J. Zahn, Fontes Rerum Austriacarum 2:31 ( Vienna, 1870), 99, no. 101. 51. Urkunden Konrads III., 145– 49, no. 83. 52. Otto of Freising, Chronica, xii; and Hagen, Herrschaftsbildung zwischen Königtum und Adel, 172– 73. 53. Stefan Weinfurter, “Die kirchliche Ordnung in der Kirchenprovinz Salzburg und im Bistum Augsburg 1046–1215,” in Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 3 vols., ed. Walter Brandmüller (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1998), 1:279– 83. 54. Bitterauf, Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2:367, no. 1537. 55. Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung des 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. Helmut Plechl, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 8 ( Hanover: Hahn, 2002), 122– 23, no. 92. 56. Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, I.69, 97– 98. 57. Bitterauf, Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2:388, no. 1557e. 58. See above and the strikingly different version of this passage preserved in one later manuscript of the text: Chronica, VI.20, 282– 83. 59. Engels, “Friedrich Barbarossa im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen,” 226 – 27. 60. Bisson, Crisis of the Twelfth Century; Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 328– 38; and Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 298– 300. 61. Benjamin Arnold, Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 83– 85. 62. Casus monasterii petrishusensis, ed. Heinrich Friedrich Otto Abel and Ludwig Weiland, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 20 ( Hanover, 1868), II.28, 645. 63. Ibid., III.29, 656. 64. Ibid., V.27, 674. 65. Ibid., III.30, 656. 66. Chronicon Laureshamense, ed. Karl August Friedrich Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 21 ( Hanover, 1869), 343.

Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 167 67. Ibid., 433– 34. 68. Ibid., 429. 69. See, for example, Die Annalen des Klosters Einsiedeln, ed. Conradin von Planta, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 78 (Hanover: Hahn, 2007); and Henry of Tegernsee, Passio sancti Quirini, in Johann Weissensteiner, “Tegernsee, die Bayern und Österreich: Studien zu Tegernseer Geschichtsquellen und der bayerischen Stammessage: Mit einer Edition der Passio secunda s. Quirini,” Archiv für österreichische Geschichte 133 (1983): 247– 87. 70. See the edition of this text in Herbert Grundmann, “Der Brand von Deutz 1128 in der Darstellung Abt Ruperts von Deutz: Interpretation und TextAusgabe,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 22 (1966): 452– 54; and Grundmann’s own comments on pages 409–18 and 424 – 28. See also John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 253– 61. 71. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. hist. quart. 156. 72. Die Zwiefalter Chroniken Ortliebs und Bertholds, ed. and trans. Luitpold Wallach, Erich König, and Karl Otto Müller (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1978), 68. 73. The right to elect the advocate appears in many monastic foundation charters issued by the popes of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. 74. Zwiefalter Chroniken, 236. 75. For oaths of office more generally in this period, see Bisson, Crisis of the Twelfth Century, 358– 64. 76. A Warrior Bishop of the Twelfth Century: The Deeds of Albero of Trier, by Balderich, trans. Brian A. Pavlac ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008), 67– 68. 77. For these terms, see John Van Engen, “The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom,” in European Transformations, 17– 20.

Seven

Te s t i m o n i a l L e t t e r s i n t h e L at e Tw e l f t h - C e n t u ry C o l l e c t i o n s o f Th o m a s B e c k e t ’ s M i r a c l e s rachel koopmans

In an article on the preservation patterns of early medieval letters, Mary Garrison has pointed out the extraordinary differences between the letters we know from medieval letter collections, which usually concern politics, theology, the monastic life, and other interests of the religious elite, and those few letters recovered from “the garbage dump”—letters written on wood, slate, and other materials found in archeological contexts. Such “garbage dump” letters provide examples of “entire categories of written communication [that] either do not survive or else are barely attested,” such as ephemeral business notes and other pragmatic correspondence.1 In this essay, I examine a rare cache of pragmatic correspondence preserved in a highly unusual context: two miracle collections for Thomas Becket composed at Christ Church, Canterbury, in the 1170s, which between them contain the texts of forty-two letters ( listed and numbered in table 7.1).2 The Becket miracle collections are no garbage dumps, but, importantly, they are also not letter collections. The unusual nature of this source and the special conditions of the early Becket cult favored the 168

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 169 preservation of a category of written communication that most medieval letter collectors saved in small numbers or disregarded entirely: the testimonial letter—that is, letters of introduction, recommendation, or reference written by a person of high standing for someone of lower status.3 None of the originals of the forty-two letters found in the Becket miracle collections survive, and only two are known from other sources.4 The letters saved in the miracle collections are valuable for a number of different studies, perhaps most obviously for their relationship to the Becket correspondence,5 but my interest here is in what they reveal about the use of the testimonial letter itself in the late twelfth century. The writers of the forty-two letters, all male, and nearly all hailing from England or north-central France, include the occasional monk, canon, priest, or layman, but are mostly religious men in a position of leadership—priors, abbots, and bishops.6 These men describe an impressive variety of healings, recoveries, and other miraculous incidents in their letters. Strikingly, though, these miracles almost all happened to other people, not to the writers themselves.7 In more than half of the letters, the man or woman who had actually experienced the miracle is named as the letter’s bearer (marked in bold in table 7.1) and would have carried the testimonial letter to Canterbury himself or herself.8 The reasons why the Becket collectors decided to save a large number of such letters are the subject of the first part of this essay. These collectors clearly saw and read far more miracle testimonials than are now found in their compositions. They made direct copies of some of them in part because the letters could speak to their own concern with truth and authoritative testimony, but also simply because they became exhausted by the scale of their collections and, toward the end, found it easier to copy in letters than to compose their own accounts of a miracle. About half of the letters preserved in the collections concern miracles experienced by monks, clerks, and other religious men of middling or low status. I focus on this set of letters in the second part of the essay, arguing that they are best seen as a part of a widespread and firmly established use of testimonial letters among the religious in the late twelfth century. Though testimonials about miracles were written only in special (miraculous!) circumstances, it seems very likely that a significant portion of a prominent religious man’s time would have been swallowed up by writing

170 /

Rachel Koopmans

testimonial letters for his underlings and responding to those sent to him. One of the very last letters sent to Thomas Becket, in fact, was from a bishop urging Becket to listen favorably to the petition of a clerk, and contemporary letter collections preserve other scattered examples of testimonials requesting clemency or favor for the bearer, recommending the bearer’s services, supporting the bearer’s position in a dispute, and so on.9 The miracle testimonials for religious men preserved in the Becket collections, then, appear to be a subset of a much larger discourse. The rest of the letters preserved in the Becket collections, a little over one-half the total, concern the miracles of lay men and women. Testimonials for lay bearers for any purpose are quite difficult to find in contemporary letter collections. In the third section of the essay, I will argue that these intriguing letters appear to reflect a new development and expansion of the use of testimonials in the late twelfth century. Most of these lay testimonials were, again, written by religious men, but usually by bishops, deans, or priests rather than abbots or priors. A majority of them were composed in response to outgoing inquiries from Canterbury or on a bishop’s or abbot’s own initiative, but some were clearly written at the request of the lay bearer himself or herself. These requested testimonials function much like those written for religious bearers, and I will discuss these particularly interesting letters at some length. At the close of the essay, I will turn to the smallest set of letters found in the collections, those written by laymen for laymen. There are only three such letters preserved in the collections (nos. 2, 35, and 39), and they were probably the least common type of testimonial letter seen by the miracle collectors as well. Notably, these letters lack the warm greetings and amicitia rhetoric one finds in the testimonials written by religious men. These three letters read rather more like certificates than letters, and they, especially, point to a world in which the use of testimonials was moving out of the preserve of the religious. John Van Engen has argued that letters were “the primary expression of written culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”10 The exchange of letters, Van Engen writes, created a sense of belonging, conveyed news, and bound together men trained in the schools as nothing else could, but it even did more than this: the words and forms of expression in these letters also “creat[ed] the reality upon which people based their lives and

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 171 upon which events turned.”11 Van Engen is speaking here primarily about relationships between well-placed schoolmen and the events of high politics and intellectual movements. But when one considers the function of the testimonial letter in this period, it becomes clear that what Van Engen has described went well down the social scale. Bearers of testimonial letters were usually middling- or low-status individuals, which is part of the reason the texts of these letters rarely survive. Such letters carried little intellectual cachet, then or now. But for their bearers, both religious and lay, these letters were precious documents, crucial for the success of their personal petitions. How those letters were written and received by their superiors very much created the reality on which they based their lives. When we envision what scholars have termed “friendship circles,” the networks created by the exchange of letters between the elites,12 it is important to realize that testimonial letters were riding piggyback on the entire system, with clerks, monks, and canons— and an increasing number of lay men and women too—hoping to capitalize on the connections and status of their betters by means of such letters.

The Preservation of Letters in the Christ Church Miracle Collections Letters concerning miracles are found sprinkled here and there in twelfthcentury letter collections and occasionally in miracle collections as well, but no letter or miracle collection of the period contains anything like the dozens of miracle testimonials found in the two Becket collections.13 Benedict of Peterborough, a monk of Christ Church who wrote his collection of Becket’s miracles circa 1171 to 1173, included the texts of ten letters in his collection. He was later to become prior of Christ Church (1175–1177) and abbot of Peterborough (1177–1193). William of Canterbury, also a monk of Christ Church and the author of a lengthy vita of Becket, compiled his collection of Becket’s miracles between circa 1172 to 1177. He copied in thirty-six letters.14 Four of William’s letters are repeats of letters found in Benedict’s collection (marked with an R in table 7.1), resulting in the total of forty-two letters between the two collections. This is many times more letters than one finds in all other high

172 /

Rachel Koopmans

medieval English miracle collections combined, most of which include no direct copies of letters whatsoever. One reason the Becket collectors included so many letters in their texts is simply that they were seeing a lot of them, certainly more than most miracle collectors of the era. During the dispute between Henry II and Thomas Becket, many hundreds of letters were sent between many different individuals over considerable distances, very frequently over the Channel. The same contacts and networks consolidated in the 1160s could be — and were — used to exchange news about Becket’s last days, the fate of Becket’s enemies, Becket’s miracles, the question of canonization, Becket’s relics, and so on, in the 1170s. The letters Benedict and William copied into their collections from John of Salisbury, Peter of Celle, and John of Canterbury were all continuations of conversations via letter that had started long before Becket’s death.15 One revealing passage about the flow of letters after Becket’s death is found in Peter of Celle’s letter (no. 9), in which he speaks of how a “letter of miracles” had “come to us from England” (ab Anglia carta miraculorum sancti Thome ad nos deuenerat), and how he, in turn, had passed the letter on to the monks of Mont Dieu, located a few miles away from Peter’s own monastery. The circulation of this “letter of miracles”— now lost, and evidently not written by a Christ Church monk—points to the ready-made, cross-Channel audience for Becket’s cult, an audience habituated to receiving and sending news by letter. Both Benedict and William refer to letters about Becket’s miracles that they had received and read but did not include in their texts, and there is little doubt that what these men preserved represents just a subset of letters sent to Canterbury in the years they were actively creating their collections.16 Still, it is important to note that in the overall context of the collections, direct copies of letters appear rarely. Under 4 percent of the chapters of Benedict’s collection include letters, and a little over 10 percent of William’s. Most of the letters, moreover, are found late in the collections — in the last books or in additions composed after the main body of the collection was complete (the line between nos. 35 and 36 in table 7.1 marks the division between William’s sixth book and a later addition he made to the collection circa 1176 –1177).17 Often letters appear at the beginning or close of the collector’s own, quite distinct

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 173 account of the miracle, accounts that can be much longer than the letters themselves (see especially nos. 2, 5, 10, and 17). Benedict and William clearly did not envision themselves as letter collectors. They were writing narrative compositions meant to be akin to saints’ lives, and they were uncomfortable including direct copies of letters without some introduction or mediation by their own authorial voice.18 In one chapter, Benedict took this mediation to such an extent that he silently cut off the salutation of a letter and lightly revised the text to hide its origins in a letter (see no. 9). We know what Benedict did only because William later happened to copy the same letter in full in his collection, so giving us the name of the writer (Augustine, a monk of Reading).19 There are strong indications that William, too, cut off salutations and silently copied lengthy passages from the texts of letters.20 We should, in fact, think of the fortytwo letters identifiable in the Becket collections as the known letters—both collectors certainly drew on more letters than these.21 Especially when the collectors include a story of a miracle in a religious house with no indication of how the story came to Canterbury, we should wonder whether the collector was silently lifting text from a letter.22 The fact that Benedict decided to copy only nine letters directly (the tenth, as noted above, he disguised), whereas William copied in more than three times as many, signals some marked differences between the two men’s use of letters and intentions for their collections. Benedict started his collection first. He was working from around 1171 to 1173, in the period when Becket’s cult was taking root, and he aimed to create a collection of miracles that could convince any doubters. For him, direct copies of letters were primarily intended to reinforce the authority of his collection and to illustrate what he termed his “examination of the truth.”23 No less than five of the ten letters Benedict included in his collection (nos. 1, 3, 4, 7, and 9) were replies to requests or letters of inquiry sent out from Canterbury for more information, and a sixth, from the burgesses of Bedford (no. 2), was solicited by Hugh Puiset, the bishop of Durham, who would later write a testimonial of his own about a similar miracle (no. 24). None of these outgoing letters of inquiry has survived, unfortunately, though Benedict clearly sent out more than just the ones that resulted in these responses. Benedict concludes a very lengthy chapter, for instance, by writing, “We secretly wrote about these things to the

174 /

Rachel Koopmans

priest, and he brought forward testimony to the truth, writing back that the boy was definitely dead and resurrected from the dead.”24 In this case, Benedict did not include a copy of the priest’s letter in the chapter (it is very possible, though, that he lifted passages from it). Benedict’s point in discussing these outgoing letters of inquiry and making direct copies of some of the letters written in response was to prove how seriously he was taking his task. Two of the unsolicited letters he included in his collection were written by William Turbe, the bishop of Norwich (no. 5), and by Silvester of Lisieux, a member of Thomas Becket’s former household (no. 6). Letters from these men added weight and authority to his collection. Only two of the known letters in Benedict’s collection were unsolicited and written by men without high religious standing. One of these — by Augustine, the monk of Reading — was the letter Benedict rewrote to disguise its origins (no. 8), and the other, by the dean of Gloucester, appears as supplementary testimony at the close of Benedict’s own very lengthy account of the miracle (no. 10), a chapter that appears in a short addition Benedict made to his collection circa 1173. William, who started his collection as Benedict was finishing his, sometimes included letters as supplementary testimony in the same way that Benedict did (see especially nos. 10 and 17). However, William never speaks of sending out letters of inquiry to check up on rumors or confirm people’s healings, and it is likely that he never bothered to do so.25 By the time William was writing the bulk of his miracle collection, around 1173 to 1177, the cult had found its footing. There was no one left to convince, not even Becket’s most hardened enemies, and pilgrims were pouring into Canterbury. William aimed to create a miracle collection that would be a great “feast” for the reader.26 He created the longest miracle collection to survive from the period, nearly 425 chapters long—truly a sumptuous banquet of stories. We know from the repeated letters that William inherited some notes and letters from Benedict at the beginning of his project, and since he worked when the cult was more mature and over a longer time frame, he must have seen considerably more letters arrive at Canterbury. William, moreover, already had experience working with letters. By 1174 he had completed a major vita of Becket in which he drew very extensively on letters from the dispute, often quoting from them in part or in full.27 Nevertheless, in the first five books of his collec-

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 175 tion, William utilized direct copies of letters sparingly. Not counting the prefatory letter affixed to the collection (not written until ca. 1175), in these first five books there are just nine direct copies of letters, and four of these are letters Benedict had already integrated into his collection. As he wrote these books, William must have been drawing on considerably more letters than these nine. At one point, for instance, he apologized for including direct copies of letters from the abbot of Shrewsbury and a monk of Reading by writing, “Let it be said without my labor [absque labore meo] what benevolence the churches of Shrewsbury and Reading have found in the martyr,”28 implying very strongly that he was putting in the labor to rework other letters. At the beginning of his sixth book, William wrote a more extensive apology. He warns the reader that he is about to insert miracles “written by other hands.” His own hand is like a horse weary of its burden, and “that which knows not how to rest knows not how to last.”29 He then copies in seven letters, the texts following one after another with no input or introduction (nos. 18– 24). Five more copies of letters appear in the next twenty chapters (nos. 25– 29), and five more appear later on in the sixth book (nos. 30 – 32 and 34 – 35). In an addition William made to his collection around 1176 or 1177, there is another remarkable run of seven copied letters (nos. 36 – 42). In all, William included twenty-five direct copies of letters in his collection’s sixth book and the later addition. These include kinds of letters that one suspects William would have reworked very considerably, had he not been tired out and trying to rest his “horse.” He copied in two letters that testify to a writer’s truthfulness, rather than a miracle (nos. 20 – 21); three letters that were not addressed to anyone at Canterbury (see nos. 26, 27, and 34); letters so long they had to be broken up into separate chapters (nos. 23 and 41); and two letters relating to a conversation about miracles at a council (nos. 30 – 31). Letters from ordinary priests, monks, and laymen are sandwiched together with letters from abbots and bishops; letters about different kinds of miracles appear willy-nilly together. To all appearances, what William was doing in these latter parts of his collection was working through piles of letters that had accumulated on his desk. Instead of reworking and rewriting all of these letters, as he might well have done before, he now simply copied many of them directly

176 /

Rachel Koopmans

into his collection. While one cannot treat these letters as a representative sample of the letters arriving at Canterbury about Becket’s miracles, they seem closer to such a sample than those found in the earlier parts of William’s collection or in Benedict’s text. They are certainly more varied and include unusual letters that we are fortunate to have preserved at all. If we take William’s complaints about his weariness seriously— and there seems no reason not to— we chiefly have William’s exhaustion to thank for the unique and extensive cache of letters found in his collection. Testimonials for Religious Men Turning now from the collectors to the letters themselves, it is important to note that neither Benedict nor William categorized or sorted the letters in any discernable way. The forty-two letters appear very much in an ad hoc manner in the two collections and are quite varied in terms of style, length, rhetoric, subject, and so on. One constant, though, is that most of the letters concern a single individual’s miracle. To understand how these letters functioned as testimonials, it is helpful to group them into and analyze them in two major categories: those written for a religious man (no known letter for a religious woman, unfortunately, is preserved in the collections),30 and those written for a lay man or woman. The letters for religious men, the subject of this section, are noticeably more homogeneous in tone and intent than those written for the laity. This is in part because many of them were written by the religious man’s immediate superior — by his own abbot, prior, or religious community as a whole, people who knew the religious man well. There are thirteen letters from immediate religious superiors preserved in the Becket collections, seven of which name the brother who experienced the miracle as the letter’s bearer.31 These in-house testimonials make up the most coherent block of letters preserved in the collections (some 30 percent of the letters overall). The letter written by Adam, the abbot of Shrewsbury, concerning a monk of his house, Richard (no. 13), is a good example of such an inhouse testimonial. Adam warmly addresses the letter “to our lord and friend, by the grace of God, the venerable prior Odo, and the holy convent of that place . . . greetings in the fullness of devoted affection.” Adam

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 177 then enthuses about Becket’s miracles in general and one in particular that “gladdened our hearts” and that “we can make known to you with certainty.” “And so behold,” he writes, “the bearer of the present letters, our beloved son Richard, the precentor of our church: [it is] he himself, I say, in whom the martyr marvelously worked this thing, and we have sent him to you that he might make faith in our words through his living voice, and give thanks for the benefits the martyr performed for him.” Adam then describes in considerable detail how Richard had been given up for dead but recovered his health by means of Becket relics recently acquired by Shrewsbury. He concludes in the same warm vein in which he began the letter: “may your holiness, most beloved, fare well forever.”32 Abbot Adam seems to have had previous contact with Odo (prior at Christ Church from 1167 or 1168 to 1175), but the precentor Richard, to all appearances, did not. Without his abbot’s letter, Richard might have had to deal with awkward questions about his identity and remarkable miracle story when he arrived at Canterbury. Nearly all of the testimonials preserved in the miracle collections were written by men and about people who lived at a considerable distance from Canterbury. Half of the letters were written by men who lived on the Continental side of the Channel, and nearly all of the English writers lived at least one hundred miles away from Canterbury. Shrewsbury itself was over two hundred miles away from Canterbury. If Shrewsbury had been closer to Canterbury, Adam might simply have accompanied Richard on his thanksgiving pilgrimage, making the composition of a testimonial letter unnecessary. It is also notable that Richard had nearly died before Becket revived him. Many of the testimonials preserved in the miracle collections concern near-death experiences or recoveries from serious, long-lasting illnesses such as leprosy or epilepsy.33 People who recovered from less serious problems probably were not seen as needing testimonials in the same way. With his abbot’s letter, Richard could be confident of a warm welcome at Canterbury. A considerate abbot or prior would likely have regularly written letters to aid subordinates setting off on errands or pilgrimages to destinations where they were unknown. In Anselm of Canterbury’s letter collection, for instance, there is a set of five letters Anselm wrote on behalf of a group of monks from Bec who were heading to Saint Neot’s, in England, to found a new monastic community. Anselm urges the

178 /

Rachel Koopmans

recipients to guide and protect his monks; three of his letters conclude with the exact same line: “I commend to your paternal charity and charitable paternity our brothers and yours whom we are sending to England so that, whenever necessary, they may be sustained by your help and guided by your counsel.”34 Many religious men on the road probably carried analogous types of letters, for many different purposes. In 1169, in the midst of the Becket dispute, Henry II had mandated that no cleric, canon, monk, or lay brother was to travel overseas without a letter of permission from the king (“nisi habeat litteras domini regis de passagio suo”).35 No letters of permission resulting from the 1169 decree have survived, but the very fact such an order was given is suggestive of how commonplace the composition and use of letters would have been.36 One testimonial preserved in the Becket collections functioned quite explicitly as a travel permit. Written by Abbot Ralph of Cluny, the letter describes the miraculous healing of the bearer, Daniel, a monk of Cluny, and expressly grants him permission to travel in England (“in Angliam licentia nostra peregre proficiscitur”) so that Daniel might fulfill his vows and give praise to the martyr (no. 27). Abbot Ralph addressed the letter “to all the priors, dear sons, to whom these letters might come,” and clearly expected Daniel to travel to Canterbury by way of Cluniac priories. Such testimonials explained the bearer’s pilgrimage and were intended to evoke hospitality, good wishes, and trust in the bearer’s story. Some testimonials preserved in the Becket collections go still further and request the reader to give gifts of relics or alms to the bearer. Abbot Eustace of Saint Peter’s, for instance, asks the Christ Church monks to provide relics to the bearers of his letter—“whatever kind and however much as would please you”— so that they could take them home and “a memorial might be made among us” for celebrations of the martyr’s feast day (no. 37).37 In a letter written by Prior Stephen of Taunton, addressed to “all the faithful” (no. 26), the prior explains how “this John, our brother, the bearer of the present letter,” had recovered from leprosy at Becket’s tomb (no. 26). “Hear [ John’s] petition,” the prior urges the reader, since “he greatly desires to alleviate the poverty of those ill people among whom he dwelt for a long time by his labor and your alms. To all those who, in the sight of divine piety, contribute something of their resources to him, we grant fraternity with our congregation.”38

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 179 Very similar letters requesting alms for a traveler can be found in contemporary letter collections. One interesting example was written by Raymond, the master of the Hospitallers in Jerusalem, who composed a letter for an unnamed bearer who had received “serious, painful wounds for Christ” fighting in a battle in the Holy Land in 1177. Like Prior Stephen, Master Raymond addressed his letter to “all the Christian faithful,” and he asked the reader “to consider [the bearer’s] needs, so that by your generous alms and his work and our prayers, he may complete his journey to the community of martyrs.”39 The late twelfth-century letter collection of Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London and Becket’s chief religious opponent, is a gold mine for letters like these.40 Gilbert wrote letters on behalf of “brothers Adam, G. and G.,” who were appealing for funds for Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, on behalf of an unnamed bearer appealing for funds for Saint Leonard’s Hospital in Northampton, on behalf of bearers appealing for funds for the building of Prittlewell priory, and many others.41 As the letters in Gilbert’s collection demonstrate, a religious man could seek testimonials from people besides his immediate religious superior, and a number of the testimonials preserved in the Becket collections were written on behalf of religious men with whom the writer had an acquaintance but no formal oversight (see, e.g., nos. 41 and 42). The most interesting and revealing examples of such letters preserved in the Becket collections are numbers 19 through 21, a set of three interconnected letters found at the beginning of William’s sixth book. The first letter, carried to Canterbury by Gerald, a clerk of Liége, was written by Reginald d’Etampes, who introduces himself as the former prior of Bermondsey (no. 19).42 Reginald explains how he had come to know Gerald when the clerk was raging mad in a poorhouse near Provins, in northern France, which was where Reginald himself was living at the time. Reginald took pity on Gerald, procured the water of Becket for him, and supervised his cure. At the letter’s close, Reginald discusses the seal he had put on the letter, telling the readers at Canterbury that since they were not likely to recognize it, they should check with the brothers of Bermondsey to confirm his truthfulness. So far this is a fairly standard-sounding testimonial, but what comes next in William’s collection is surprising. There are two letters testifying

180 /

Rachel Koopmans

to Reginald’s veracity, testimonials Reginald had sought for himself. It appears that Reginald first went to the Cistercian abbey of Jouy, about five miles away from Provins, and persuaded the abbot there, Peter, to write a letter confirming that Reginald would never assert anything that was untrue (no. 20). Abbot Peter of Jouy seems to have written his letter on the same parchment that contained Reginald’s letter and, at Reginald’s request, added his seal to the parchment too. Reginald then went to the small Cluniac priory of Reuil, some thirty miles north, and asked the prior there, Haymo, to write a letter and add his seal to the same parchment. Prior Haymo did so, assuring the readers at Canterbury that Reginald was well known to him—he and Reginald had converted to the monastic life together— and that Reginald’s word could be trusted (no. 21). Reginald then seems to have been satisfied that these two testimonials would make the Christ Church readers accept his word. The healed Gerald was dispatched to Canterbury carrying a parchment that actually contained more information about Reginald than about his own miracle. Reginald’s quest for more letters and more seals is suggestive of just how entrenched testimonial letters were in this culture and how important they could be in establishing someone’s credibility. As a former prior, possibly living in disgrace (we do not know why he left Bermondsey), Reginald felt he needed buttressing testimony from his friends. Friendship rhetoric often permeates the testimonial letters found in the Becket miracle collections. Abbot Peter of Pontigny, for instance, confidently appeals to connections between his monastery and Christ Church in the preamble of his letter about his monk Pontius (no. 38): “Made happy not long ago by great and delightful joy, we thought it worthy to summon you to be a participant in our happiness, so that you might share in our joy, we who once shared tribulations and pains” ( Becket spent much of his exile in Pontigny).43 The more the writer and the recipient of a testimonial were on friendly terms, the more the bearer was likely to be well received and have favors granted to him. Bernard of Clairvaux’s letter collection contains many examples of letters written in the hope that a well-placed friend could help a deserving individual, including one for the young John of Salisbury addressed to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. “I am sending to your Highness John, the bearer of this letter,” Bernard writes. “He is a friend of mine and of my friends, and I beg that

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 181 he may benefit from the friendship for which I count on you.”44 This letter worked: John of Salisbury became part of Theobald’s household and in that capacity would write many testimonial letters for underlings himself. His letters, too, were often infused with friendship rhetoric.45 The relationship between the writer and the recipient of a testimonial was so important that a potential letter writer might decide that another religious man, someone with closer ties to the intended recipient of the letter, would be a better writer than himself. A case in point is the letter carried to Canterbury by Osbern, the miraculously healed servant of Roger son of Ain, a canon of Lisieux (no. 6). Canon Roger, surely, could have written a letter for his servant to carry to Canterbury, but instead it was written by another canon of Lisieux, Silvester. Silvester had been a member of Thomas Becket’s household, and he could address his letter “to the beloved brothers and friends in Christ, the prior and sacrist and the rest of the brothers” of Christ Church. With these kinds of connections, Silvester was clearly a much better writer in these circumstances than Roger would have been.46 The extent to which people would go to gain testimonials for their favorites is suggested by a fascinating letter sent by Anselm of Canterbury to Queen Matilda. Anselm wrote Matilda to reject a request for a testimonial. “The bearer of this letter brought me your seal with a letter from you,” he writes. “This indicated to me that you wish his disgrace to be driven from him by the testimony of my letter . . . [such] that through my intercession he might regain from my lord the King what he had lost on the King’s order.” Anselm tells the queen that he cannot supply such a letter. He knows nothing about the matter, “nor is it for me to intercede for someone whose life and character I know nothing about.”47 Anselm’s scruples were probably unusual. When John of Canterbury, then the bishop of Poitiers, was asked by a delegation of religious men to write a letter to the Christ Church monks concerning the miracle of a hanged man he did not know (see no. 17), he did so without apology. Moreover, he even urged the Christ Church monks, whom he knew well, to grant the letter bearers some relics of Thomas Becket.48 By the late twelfth century, the traffic in testimonial letters appears to have been intense, with religious men writing for their subordinates, protégés, and acquaintances, and sometimes also for their friends’

182 /

Rachel Koopmans

subordinates, protégés, and acquaintances. We have no firm evidence about how the miracle testimonials would have been treated at Canterbury, but it seems highly likely that they would have been read aloud, quite possibly before the bearer himself would have told his own story. This is the impression given by Abbot Peter of Pontigny’s letter (no. 38), which concludes, “If the account of these events is too shortly described in this letter, the present bearer [Pontius], in whom these things were done, will tell them at more length in his living voice.”49 Such subordination of the living voice to the written authority of a superior’s letter is also clear in Abbot Adam of Shrewsbury’s letter on behalf of his precentor Richard. “We have sent him to you,” Adam tells Prior Odo, “that he might make faith in our words through his living voice.” Richard could not have become a precentor without having considerable facility with his voice, and he—not Adam—was the one who had actually fallen sick and recovered his health through Becket’s merits. In this situation, though, Richard’s speech serves as a mere supplement to his abbot’s written authority. That was the whole point of the testimonial—to carry along a superior voice, one with more authoritative power than one’s own. When the bearer of a testimonial was a lay man or woman rather than a religious man, the authoritative gap between writer and subject became even more stark. This gulf in status is underlined by the fact that the lay bearers, unlike the religious, would not ordinarily have been able to read the testimonials they carried. Testimonials for Lay Men and Women More than half of the letters preserved in Benedict’s and William’s collections concern the miracle of a lay man or woman, most of them written by bishops, deans, and ordinary priests. Nine of these letters explicitly identify the lay man or woman who experienced the miracle as the letter’s bearer.50 Two things in particular distinguish the testimonials written for lay individuals from those written for the religious. First, the connections between the writers and the people who experienced the miracles are markedly less personal and more unequal. The writers and bearers of these testimonials often had no acquaintance with each other whatsoever before the miracle occurred. Even the few letters written by priests, men closest in social status to the lay bearers, often make it clear that the priest

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 183 had been in a highly controlling position in the course of a miracle (see nos. 14 and 33). Second, the writers’ own interests in writing the letters— whether to boast about a wonderful local miracle, to aid the Christ Church monks in investigating a rumor, or to renew or establish friendly connections and conversation with the religious at Canterbury—often dominate these texts. These letters, in other words, were often written more for the purposes of the writers and recipients than their bearers, even though the letters were about miracles the bearers had personally experienced. These differences are especially marked in the three letters about lay miracles that were written in response to inquiries from Canterbury (nos. 3, 4, and 8). One of them concerns a layman named Humphrey, a leper from the region of Chesterton who had recovered at Canterbury but failed to tell the Christ Church monks about it. When the monks heard rumors about this miracle, they requested a letter confirming that it did indeed happen. Saffrid, the dean of Chesterton, located Humphrey and wrote a letter about his miracle (no. 3), a letter he made Humphrey carry back to Canterbury: “I send him back to you,” the dean writes grimly, “so that he might supply the saint what he did not do.” Humphrey appears to have had very little say in the matter. Given the tone of Saffrid’s letter, Humphrey may well gotten tongue-lashings for his negligence both at home and on his arrival at Canterbury. In another case, when Albinus, the abbot of Darley, received a letter from Christ Church asking about a miracle that occurred in a layman’s house involving an ampulla of the Becket water, he too took it upon himself to investigate the miracle (no. 4). “Having been requested for the truth, we therefore bring forth testimony to the truth; we know that our testimony is true,” Abbot Albinus writes, with the stress on truth telling that is a feature of many of the letters about lay miracles. “I and Henry and William and Osbern, priests, and Nicholas and Odo, deacons, and the aforementioned woman Aileva and her son Nicholas, saw and testify to these things.” Here again, the lay men and women involved in the miracle seem to have felt little impetus themselves to get word to Canterbury about the miracle. Inquiries prompted the letters from Saffrid and Albinus; in other cases, religious men investigated lay miracles entirely on their own initiative. For example, Hugh Puiset, the bishop of Durham, wrote a long letter addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury concerning a certain

184 /

Rachel Koopmans

“most simple” (a phrase often meaning mentally disabled) young man named Roger (no. 24). Roger had been punished for a crime by being blinded and castrated, but later, Hugh writes, he could see again. Bishop Hugh had heard about young Roger’s restored vision late on the day of the miracle and had clearly never met him before. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any other situation in which a bishop would seek out and talk with a mentally disabled young man convicted of a crime. He did because Roger’s recovery reminded him of Eilward of Westoning’s famous miracle of restored vision, a story “we heard had been done by [ Becket] once in Bedford and we now know to have been repeated afterwards in our city, namely, Durham. . . . [ W]e know and testify this to have happened in Durham, and by our writing we have taken care to transmit it to the notice of posterity.”51 The letter by Richard Peche, the bishop of Coventry, about a deacon who had been wounded and castrated by a jealous lover (no. 25), is very similar in tone. Peche, who had clearly had no contact with this lowly deacon before he was attacked and miraculously healed, rejoices that Becket “had visited the diocese of Coventry with a great miracle [magno miraculo].” He was so enthusiastic about the deacon’s healing that he included poems celebrating the miracle at the end of his letter and sealed it three times.52 Letters from much less exalted writers, such as the one written by a prior and priest about a parishioner named Odo (no. 16), often have the same air of local pride. The prior and priest conclude their letter about the wayward parishioner (who had slept with a prostitute and had been miraculously punished for breaking a vow) with the plea: “We seek, holy fathers, that this thing happening among us be added [ascribi] to the rest of the miracles of the precious martyr.” These letters tell us a lot about the pains religious men were willing to take to investigate lay miracles and why they thought it was important that the news be known at Canterbury. They tell us nothing about how the lay bearers viewed these letters and the lengthy trips they required. The “most simple” Roger from Durham is not named as the bearer of the bishop’s letter, though he certainly went to Canterbury; Hugh Puiset may well have entrusted the letter, and Roger himself, to some other traveler.53 Richard Peche, though, specifically names the castrated deacon as the letter bearer, and he seems to have compelled the jealous lover to make

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 185 the trip to Canterbury too: he had confessed to the attack, Peche tells the archbishop, “just as it will be confessed in your presence.”54 In another case, an entire delegation seems to have been making its way up to Canterbury with Girald, a man who had survived a hanging on the gallows near Perigueux (see no. 17). The hanged Girald, the castrated Thomas, the vengeful lover, the simple Roger, the lecherous Odo, the former leper Humphrey— were they pleased, or bemused, or unhappy to have attracted so much attention from these religious men? While these must remain open questions, there are three examples preserved in the collections in which the lay bearers had more personal investment in the letters they carried, more along the lines of what one sees with the religious bearers. One of these was written by Henry, the bishop of Bayeux, and is addressed “to all the clerks in the bishopric of Bayeux” (no. 34). Bishop Henry describes how William, a layman from Rouen, had been cured of leprosy in the course of a stay at Becket’s tomb at Canterbury. William still had remnants of the disease visible on his body, but, the bishop tells the reader, “you should not turn him away,” for he was truly cured. It seems likely that William of Rouen had petitioned the bishop for this testimonial. Bishop Henry’s letter had obvious value for William wherever he went in the bishopric of Bayeux. He must have kept the letter on his person and showed it to the Christ Church monks on a return visit to Canterbury, where it had the added value of authenticating his miracle story. Perhaps it was not unusual for a recovered leper to acquire some such letter (see also no. 26, the letter from Prior Stephen, discussed above, which requests alms for John, a former leper). The letter concerning the laywoman and former leper Mabel of Dudley (no. 15) was also brought to Canterbury by Mabel herself, who had already made a pilgrimage there. In the second book of his collection, William wrote a single sentence about Mabel of Dudley’s cure from leprosy.55 In the fourth book of his collection, written perhaps a year or so later, William repeats the same sentence ( he must have looked back to find it) and then copies in a letter from Humbald, the prior of Much Wenlock, a Cluniac monastery in the West Midlands located about thirty miles west of Dudley.56 In the letter, Humbald describes how Mabel had been cured at Canterbury “without doubt, we believe, by the blessed Thomas.” He assures the Christ Church monks that no less than eight of

186 /

Rachel Koopmans

the brothers of Much Wenlock “knew for certain” that Mabel had been a leper and that he himself was writing “so that, with all scruples of hesitation buried, this might be noted down with the rest of the great deeds of the saint [caeteris hoc ipsum annotetis magnaliis].” The prior adds that one of the brothers of Much Wenlock, Osbert, a man of good reputation who knew Mabel well and had supported her with a stipend, was going to “write at more length to you” about Mabel’s illness and cure.57 Reading between the lines, Mabel must have traveled to Canterbury, recovered, and been disappointed by how her story was received — with skepticism and “scruples,” as Prior Humbald’s letter suggests. On her return to Dudley, she must have complained about her treatment to someone at Much Wenlock, Osbert being the most likely candidate. She cared so much about the matter that she was willing to make a second trip to Canterbury—over one hundred and fifty miles away—to get Prior Humbald’s letter into the hands of the Christ Church monks. It is possible that she also carried a letter from Osbert, but if she did, William did not copy it into his collection. There’s a hint of sullenness about William’s treatment of Prior Humbald’s letter. He simply inserts it, making no comment himself about Mabel’s cure aside from the repetition of the sentence he had written earlier, a silence perhaps suggestive that he was not pleased with Mabel’s determination to make him take her story seriously.58 Mabel brought letters to Canterbury after a skeptical reception, and it could be that William of Rouen, too, returned to Canterbury with the letter from Bishop Henry of Bayeux in part to prove to the Christ Church monks that he was indeed cured. One of the most interesting letters preserved in the collections, written by the bishop of Norwich, William Turbe, about a young woman named Cecilia, was definitely requested to circumvent a skeptical reception (no. 5). “The bearer of this letter, Cecilia, daughter of one of our men, was held by the sickness of cancer for a long time,” writes Turbe in a letter addressed to the prior and convent of Christ Church. He then briefly describes Cecilia’s miracle and concludes, “We send her to you, along with our written testimonial [cum scripti nostri testimonio], to the glory of such a miracle.” Neither Benedict nor William thought the bishop’s letter described Cecilia’s miracle at sufficient length, which is fortunate, since it is in their accounts that the circumstances of the letter’s composition are explained. Cecilia’s fa-

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 187 ther, Jordan of Plumstock, “went into the presence of his lord the bishop of Norwich, indicating the course of the event and asking for testimonial letters [petensque litteras testimonia], lest, coming to Canterbury and telling about the miracle, he might be thought to speak beyond good opinion and faith, without authority.”59 In addition to speaking with Jordan and his daughter Cecilia, the bishop called in “the priest and others who had been present to witness the event, as well as two matrons of good reputation, who examined the vestiges of the cancer.” Eventually, by means of “careful examination,” the bishop “removed all doubt” about the matter. This sounds very much like the investigations undertaken by Bishops Hugh Puiset and Richard Peche, but done, in this case, at Jordan’s request rather than on the bishop’s own initiative. Moreover, it could well be that Jordan, like Mabel of Dudley, came to Canterbury carrying more than one letter. Parallel passages in Benedict’s and William’s descriptions of Cecilia’s miracle strongly suggest that they were both silently copying from yet another letter, possibly written by a priest, Godwin, who was involved in the miracle. Both Jordan and Mabel had established connections with religious men before they needed a letter, and both worked those connections to gain letters in much the same way a clerk or canon might. From the sampling of letters preserved in the Becket collections, it appears that determined lay men and women could gain testimonials for themselves in the late twelfth century, but it also appears to have been a more fraught process. If a lay man or woman did not have established connections with a religious figure, moreover, obtaining such a letter might have been quite difficult: it does not yet seem to have been a widely established practice for laymen to write such letters. Only a few types of testimonials issued by laymen for laymen are known from late twelfth-century England. Though none of the actual texts survive, we know that diplomatic couriers or envoys needed royal letters to ensure safe passage across the Channel, a system that Nicholas Vincent terms “an early form of passport control.”60 Moneylender’s bonds were, in Michael Clanchy’s words, “by far the commonest form of certificates” in this period: the earliest surviving examples of these date to circa 1166.61 In the Becket miracle collections, there are just three letters composed by laymen. One was written by the burgesses of Bedford at Bishop Hugh Puiset’s request about the miracle

188 /

Rachel Koopmans

of Eilward of Westoning, the most famous miracle of Becket’s early cult (no. 2); the second was written by Roger of Berkeley about a madman (no. 35); and the last by William, the castellan of Saint-Omer, about a hanged man who survived his punishment (no. 39). All three of these letters are short and entirely lack the fraternizing tone common in the letters written by religious men. The letter from Roger of Berkeley reads, in full: To the convent of Canterbury and all the sons of the church, greetings from Roger of Berkeley. Let it be known to your amiability that the present bearer was so vexed by a demon that, spurning human company for the habits of beasts, he frequented the dens of wild animals. When discovered by certain of the faithful, he was taken to a chapel of St Thomas. By his merits, it is believed, he was brought back to sanity. The dean and the chaplain of this church and their parishioners with me bring forward testimony to this thing. Farewell.62 This is a stripped-down authentication document. The letter from the castellan of Saint-Omer is slightly longer, but it, too, has an entirely businesslike tone. “Let it be known to your sanctity,” he writes, “as much by the presence of the bearer as the presence of this letter that my steward and certain of my servants captured a thief near Fauquembergues, and he was condemned to death for the crime by my steward and burgesses.” The castellan then describes how the thief, who is never named, was hanged, but, due to invocations to Saint Thomas, was later found alive by his steward. “Lest this miracle of God be hidden from you,” the castellan writes, “we bring forward this testimony with the impression of our seal. Farewell.”63 Neither Roger of Berkeley nor William the castellan seems to have had previous acquaintance with bearers of their letters or been an eyewitness to these miracles. Like the religious men writing for the laity, they too wrote as local authorities, men who had looked into the matter and whose word could be trusted. Many questions remain unanswered. Why the dean and chaplain mentioned in Roger of Berkeley’s letter did not write letters themselves is an interesting conundrum. Did they, perhaps, accompany the recovered madman to Canterbury, and so acquire the letter from Roger of Berkeley to bolster the authority of their story?

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 189 In the castellan’s description of the miracle of the hanged man, the steward seems to have taken a leading role: it was he who captured the thief, hung him, and found him alive again. Could it be that the steward sought a letter about the event from his castellan, and that the steward, too, intended to accompany the thief to Canterbury? In any case, the fact that the hanged man carried a letter from a castellan rather than a local abbot or prior is notable and gestures to a future in which more and more workaday texts would be written by laymen. ——— Most testimonials had ephemeral value. Written for very specific and often quite personal purposes, they were of little use once an errand was completed. These were texts destined for the rubbish bin, however much they were sought after, carried on long journeys, and protected from weather, thieves, and mischief. But though we have lost nearly all of these texts, our sense of letter writing in the high medieval period is incomplete without them. Giles Constable has noted that the messengers who delivered the letters of the medieval elite should be thought of as “much more than delivery boy[s],” since the bearers of letters were often called upon to articulate their superior’s cause or to convey messages too sensitive to entrust to text.64 This is an important corrective, but the Becket miracle testimonials take us one step further. They show us that people of low status often carried letters about themselves, letters concerning their own needs, petitions, status, and stories, letters testifying to their good faith and seeking favor from the recipient of the letter. In the late twelfth century, traveling clerks, monks, and canons were the people most likely to have such testimonials. Yet a fair number of lay travelers, even then, appear to have been carrying letters about themselves. In the late twelfth century, there were scripts in some pilgrims’ “scrips,” the pouches pilgrims carried at their belts. The snubbed Mabel of Dudley, the anxious father of Cecilia, and maybe, too, the steward of Saint-Omer who found a hanged man alive, seem to have been as dogged in their pursuit of letters as any clerk or monk. They would probably be pleased to know that their testimonials were preserved, but whether these letters brought all the results their bearers hoped for is something that the bare texts, for all their miracle of preservation, cannot tell us.

Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide’s, Oxford (occ. 1140x1174)

Burgesses of Bedford

Saffrid, dean of Chesterton

Albinus, abbot of Darley (occ. 1151x1176)

William Turbe, bishop of Norwich (1146 –1174)

Silvester, treasurer of the church of Lisieux A., prior of Corbie, and convent

Augustine, monk of Reading

Peter of Celle (d. 1183), then abbot of Saint-Rémi, Reims

BP 2.52

BP 4.2 and WC 1.17

BP 4.4

BP 4.11

BP 4.65 and WC 1.49

BP 4.84

BP 4.85

BP 4.86 and WC 2.12

BP 4.87

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Sender

Chp(s) in Coll(s)

No.

Prior of Canterbury; greetings at the letter’s close to the convent and master John of Salisbury

Odo, prior of Canterbury

Prior, sacrist, and brothers of Canterbury Odo, prior of Canterbury

Prior and convent of Canterbury

Odo, prior of Canterbury (ca.1168– July 1175)

Convent of the church of Canterbury

Convent of Canterbury and all the faithful

[ Removed: originally addressed to “brother Benedict”]

Addressee

( BP=Benedict of Peterborough; WC=William of Canterbury)

Geoffrey, monk of Mont-Dieu ( healed of dropsy by touching to his body a carta miraculorum that had come from England via SaintRémi). [A longer version of this letter is also in Peter of Celle’s letter collection.]

Osbern, servant of canon of Lisieux, Roger son of Ain (healed of hernia at Lisieux after vow of pilgrimage). John, young man of Valenciennes (caught for theft in Corbie and healed there after judicial blinding). Geoffrey of Wallingford, a monk of Reading ( healed at the brink of death in Reading). [ Benedict cuts the salutation, William does not.]

Cecilia, daughter of Jordan of Plumstock in diocese of Norwich (resurrected from death by cancer). [ Letter requested of the bishop by Jordan, Cecilia’s father.]

Water turned into blood at Stafford (30 miles east of Darley) at the home of Reinard, and another case of water turning into blood.

Humphrey, from diocese of Coventry ( healed of leprosy at Canterbury).

Eilward of Westoning ( pauper healed of blinding and castration in Bedford). [ Letter written in response to inquiry from Hugh of Puiset, bishop of Durham, see also no. 24.]

The writer, Robert of Cricklade ( healed after a visit to Canterbury). [ Text of letter also known from late 14th-century Icelandic saga, which drew on Robert’s otherwise lost vita et miracula for Becket.]

Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

Table 7.1 Letters in the Christ Church Miracle Collections for Thomas Becket

Geoffrey, dean of Gloucester

Convent of the church of Christ, Canterbury

Richard, abbot of Sulby in Welford, occ. 1155x1174

see above, no. 2 ( Bedford)

see above, no. 5 ( Norwich)

see above, no. 8 ( Reading)

Adam, abbot of Shrewsbury (occ. 1168x1175), and brothers

Paganus, chaplain of Louin

see above, no. 10 (Gloucester)

Humbald, prior of Much Wenlock (1168x1175), and all the convent

Brother Fulk, prior of St Leonard of Beaumont-sur-Oise, and Hugh of Praeres, priest

WC 1.1

WC 1.10

WC 1.16

WC 1.49

WC 2.12

WC 2.13

WC 2.37

WC 3.1

WC 4.23

WC 4.25

11

12

[R]

[R]

[R]

13

14

[R]

15

16

Sender

BP 6.1, and WC 3.1

Chp(s) in Coll(s)

10

No.

Richard, monk and precentor of Shrewsbury (restored by relic water in Shrewsbury when on the brink of death).

[ Repeat, Geoffrey, monk of Reading]

[ Repeat, Cecilia of Plumstock]

[ Repeat, Eilward of Westoning]

Vision of an unnamed brother of Sulby concerning the celebration of Thomas as a martyr.

William of Canterbury, with accounts of his visions impelling him to write a collection.

William of Gloucester (workman buried at Churchdown, a town five miles west of Gloucester, while building an aqueduct for archbishop Roger of York).

Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

Prior and convent of the church of Canterbury

Odo, prior, and all the convent

Odo “of our parish” ( layman struck with leprosy after sex with a prostitute; struck a second time after broke vow not to eat meat until he arrived at Becket’s tomb).

Mabel of Dudley (cured of leprosy at Canterbury). [ Mabel’s cure also described in WC 2.22.]

[ Repeat, William of Gloucester]

Eustace, monk of Canterbury Wimarga of Louin (cured of blindness in Louin using Paganus’s relics).

Odo, prior of Canterbury, and the holy convent

[ Removed, but said by William to be composed by the abbot’s “own hand.”]

Henry, king of the English, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou

Prior of Holy Trinity of Canterbury and all the convent

Addressee

Clerks of church of Exeter

Reginald of Etampes, former Prior of Holy Trinity of prior of Bermondsey (occ. 1166); Canterbury residing near Provins

Peter, abbot of Jouy

Haymo, prior of Reuil, in diocese of Meaux

Pons, bishop of Clermont Prior and convent (1170 –1189), former abbot of Clairvaux [see also nos. 28 and 31]

Anselm, monk of Reading, possibly subprior Anselm occ. 1185x1186

Hugh Puiset, bishop of Durham (1153–1195)

Richard Peche, bishop of Coventry (1161–1182)

Stephen, prior of Taunton, occ. 1158–1189x91

Ralph of Sully, abbot of Cluny (1173–1176)

WC 6.2

WC 6.3

WC 6.4

WC 6.5

WC 6.6

WC 6.7, 6.8 and 6.9.

WC 6.10

WC 6.14 – 6.16

WC 6.17

WC 6.21

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

To all the priors, dear sons, to whom these letters may come

To all the faithful in Christ to whom these letters may come

Richard, archbishop of Canterbury

Richard, archbishop (1174 – 1184), prior and convent

Jeremy, monk of Christ Church Canterbury

Prior of Holy Trinity of Canterbury

Prior of Holy Trinity of Canterbury

Prior Odo and brothers of the church of Canterbury

Odo, prior

John of Canterbury, or “aux Bellesmains,” bishop of Poitiers 1162–1181 (see also no. 29)

WC 5.2

Addressee

17

Sender

Chp(s) in Coll(s)

No.

Daniel, monk of Cluny and abbot’s notary (cured of quinsy when near death).

John, brother of Taunton (cured of leprosy at Canterbury).

Thomas, deacon of bishropic of Coventry (wounded and castrated by jealous lover while setting up altar to Thomas).

Roger, a “most simple” young man ( blinded and castrated in Durham for theft).

Three stories of Reading monks: 1) Anselm’s own horse rescued; 2) Elias, leper monk from Reading [also told in BP 4.72]; 3) Richard, monk, saved from dangerous illness.

Daughter of John Sistercius, a wealthy burger of Le Puy-en-Velay (cured of a fistula on her hand).

Character of Reginald of Etampes (see no. 19 above). The cell of Reuil was located about 30 miles north of Provins.

Character of Reginald of Etampes (see no. 19 above). The abbey of Jouy was located about 5 miles northwest of Provins.

Gerard, clerk of Liége (healed of dangerous illness under watchful eye and by water provided by Reginald of Etampes near Provins).

Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161–1184), and his household (all recovering from illnesses, including story of vision of William, nephew of archbishop Theobald).

Girald of La Tour Blanche (hung on the gallows near Perigueux but survived).

Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

Pons, bishop of Clermont [see also nos. 22 and 31]

John of Canterbury, bishop of Poitiers [see also no. 17]

John of Salisbury (d. 1180), “least of priests of Christ,” then at Bourges

Pons, bishop of Clermont [see also nos. 22 and 28]

P[ayne], abbot of Sawtry, occ. 1164x1179

A., minister of “Stocatoniensis ecclesiae”

Henry de Beaumont, bishop of Bayeux (1165–1205)

Roger of Berkeley ( perhaps the grandson of Roger of Berkeley of the Conquest)

WC 6.23

WC 6.26

WC 6.57

WC 6.58

WC 6.59

WC 6.67

WC 6.84

WC 6.86

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Sender

Chp(s) in Coll(s)

No.

Convent of Canterbury and all the sons of the church

To all the clerks in the bishopric of Bayeux

Brothers of the church of Canterbury

Prior and convent of the church of Christ

Prior and convent of Canterbury

Odo, prior, William, subprior, and all the brothers

Odo the prior and the convent

Archbishop and chapter of Canterbury

Addressee

Unnamed madman (cured in a local chapel of St Thomas).

William of Rouen (a leper cured after visit to Canterbury).

Unnamed poor woman who became ill and vowed a calf to the martyr; calf sent to Canterbury.

Alfwin, lay brother of Sawtry (cured of a rupture), and Richard, cellarer of Sawtry (cured of illness).

John Scot, from Clermont ( healed of leprosy at Canterbury), see no. 30 above.

Stories told at council at Bourges, one by Pons, bishop of Clermont about leper John Scot; another told by canons of Saint-Aoustrille in Bourges about their servant, Bucecius.

Candles miraculously relit during a procession when John returns home to Poitiers with relics from Canterbury.

A young woman of the diocese of Clermont (cured of muteness at Meyssac, in Limousin, about 80 miles southwest of Clermont).

Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

Eustace, abbot of St Peter “de Clincurce”

Peter, abbot of Pontigny (1174?–1180)

William, castellan of Saint-Omer Prior and chapter of the church of Canterbury

Abbot of La Sie-en-Brignon or Brignon-la-sie

A[ lard], abbot of Trois-Fontaines Benedict, prior, and the Abbey (ca.1173–1181) and convent [ Milo], the abbot of HauteFontaines

Master A. of Asti

WC 6.124

WC 6.125

WC 6.126

WC 6.127

WC 6.128– 6.134

WC 6.135

37

38

39

40

41

42

Richard, archbishop of Canterbury

Benedict, prior, and all the religious serving under him

Benedict, prior and the convent

Benedict, prior (1175–1177), and the convent

Convent of Canterbury

Convent of Osney

WC 6.123

36

Addressee

Sender

Chp(s) in Coll(s)

No.

Surleo (struck in the head while bell-ringing two miles away from Asti).

Seffrid, monk of Himmerod (Cistercian), whose self-castration was healed, and stories of eight other miracles taking place at a Becket chapel near Himmerod with relics brought from Canterbury by Ludwig of Deudesfeld and his wife.

Unnamed worker ( blinded when reached into a glass vessel containing bones and black earth that he found while digging).

Unnamed thief ( hung on gallows at Fauquembergues, about 12 miles southwest of Saint-Omer).

Pontius, monk of Pontigny (revived when seemingly dead).

Robert, brother of the house (cured of paralysis).

William, canon of Osney (cured of epilepsy after a visit to Canterbury).

Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 195 Notes 1. See Mary Garrison, “ ‘Send More Socks’: On Mentality and the Preservation Context of Medieval Letters,” in New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. Marco Mostert ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 69– 99, at 69– 71. 2. BP on the listing in table 7.1 stands for Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula S. Thomae, ed. J. C. Robertson, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Rolls Series, vol. 2 ( London, 1876), 21– 281; WC stands for William of Canterbury, Miracula S. Thomae, ed. J. C. Robertson, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Rolls Series, vol. 1 (London, 1875), 1–137. I have listed the letters in the order they appear in the collections and by book and chapter number. For some of the letters found in William’s first and second books, I have followed my renumbering of chapters as listed and explained in my book Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 271n1 and appendix 3. By Robertson’s numbering, WC 1.16 is 2.2; 1.49 is 2.35; 2.12 is 2.50; 2.13 is 2.51; and 2.37 is 2.75. I have attempted to identify the writers and their locations as far as possible, but I have not yet been able to identify which town is meant by “Stocatoniensis” (no. 33), nor which monastery is meant by Saint Peter “de Clincurce” (no. 37). I have not included a charter from Henry II found in William’s collection in the listing because I do not think that it was part of William’s original text (see William, Miracula 6.98, 494 – 95; and my Wonderful to Relate, 155). 3. This category of letter is not mentioned in most surveys of high medieval letter writing. I have chosen to dub them “testimonial” letters because this reflects terms used by the miracle collectors themselves: see especially how the collectors introduce nos. 5, 14, and 17. The best overview of letter writing in the medieval period remains Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age Occidental 17 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1976); see also the recent review of eleventh- and twelfth-century letter collections in Samu Niskanen, The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury, Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia 61 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 41– 71. There has been surprisingly little study of letter bearers: for one recent contribution, see John R. C. Martyn, Pope Gregory’s Letter-Bearers: A Study of the Men and Women who Carried Letters for Pope Gregory the Great ( Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012). 4. These are Robert Cricklade’s autobiographical letter (no. 1), found as part of a late fourteenth-century Icelandic saga that drew on Robert’s (lost) miracle collection (see Eiríkr Magnússon, ed. and trans., Thómas Saga Erkibyskups: A Life of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Icelandic, 2 vols., Rolls Series 65 [London, 1883], 2:93–101); and the letter from Peter Celle (no. 9). A longer version of Peter’s letter was preserved in his letter collection (see note 6 below). 5. See Anne Duggan’s recent edition of 329 letters sent to and from Becket, The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170, 2 vols., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Duggan’s edition halts with

196 /

Rachel Koopmans

Becket’s death. Post-martyrdom letters concerning Becket have not been edited or examined as a body, though Alan of Tewkesbury included many such letters in the fifth and final book of his famed collection of the Becket correspondence. For an excellent study drawing principally on post-martyrdom letters, see Anne Duggan’s 1998 article “Diplomacy, Status, and Conscience: Henry II’s Penance for Becket’s Murder,” reprinted in Thomas Becket: Friends, Networks, Texts and Cult (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2007), chapter 7. I am very grateful for Anne Duggan’s comments on an earlier version of this article. 6. Despite the eminence of some of the letter writers, these texts are hardly ever mentioned in the historical literature. Ronald Finucane commented on the existence and importance of these texts, but only very briefly, in his Miracles and Pilgrims ( New York: Macmillan, 1977), 159– 60. The letters from Peter of Celle and John of Salisbury (nos. 9 and 30) are edited in the Oxford Medieval Texts editions: see Julian Haseldine, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter of Celle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), no. 142, 522– 25 (Haseldine misdates this letter to Benedict’s rather than Odo’s priorate); and W. J. Millor, S.J., and C. N. L. Brooke, eds., The Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 2, The Later Letters (1163–1180) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), no. 323, 794 – 99. The most thoroughgoing study of any of the letters concerns no. 41, a very long narrative with accounts of multiple miracles occurring near Himmerod: see S. K. Langenbahn,“Die wiederentdeckten Himmeroder Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis (1175). Zugänge zur frühesten narrativen Quelle zur Geschichte von St. Thomas/Eifel,” Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 41 (2001): 121– 64. 7. Compare the “sender” and “subject” columns of table 7.1. Just three of the forty-two letters are autobiographical: no. 1, a letter written by Robert Cricklade about his own healing (a text requested by Benedict); the first part of no. 23, in which Anselm, a monk of Reading, recounts a miracle involving his horse; and no. 29, a letter in which the bishop of Poitiers describes how candles lit up in the presence of a Becket relic he had acquired from Canterbury. 8. Other letters that were probably carried to Canterbury by people closely involved in the miracle (though a bearer is not explicitly named) are no. 2, no. 18, nos. 20 and 21 (which seem to have been copied on the same parchment as no. 19), and nos. 24, 32, 33, 36, and 41. 9. The letter, from Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux, was written on behalf of “Master Everard, the bearer of this letter.” See Frank Barlow, ed., Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Camden Third Series 61 ( London: Royal Historical Society, 1939), no. 57, 102– 3; also edited (from the same manuscript used by Barlow) and translated in Duggan, Correspondence of Thomas Becket, vol. 2, no. 321, 1336– 37. Both scholars suggest that Master “Errardus” (Barlow’s reading of the manuscript) or “Evrardus” (Duggan’s reading) was Edward Grim. If so, one of Becket’s last actions may have been to read this testimonial, and Grim’s brave defense of Becket might have been motivated by Becket’s response to his petition.

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 197 10. John Van Engen, “Letters, Schools and Written Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohen Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Kolloquien 27 ( München: Oldenbourg, 1997), 97–132, at 118. 11. Van Engen, “Letters, Schools, and Written Culture,” 128. This article should be read in conjunction with Van Engen’s equally absorbing and important essay on Hildegard of Bingen’s letter collection, “Letters and the Public Persona of Hildegard,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred Haverkamp, Internationaler wissenschaftlicher Kongreß zum 900jährigen Jubiläum, 13.–19. September 1998, Bingen am Rhein ( Mainz: Trierer Historische Forschungen, 2000), 375– 418. I am most grateful to John Van Engen for his help and long-standing interest in my work on the Becket miracle collections. 12. On such networks, see the work of John McLoughlin, “Amicitia in Practice: John of Salisbury (c.1120 –1180) and his Circle,” in England in the Twelfth Century: Proceedings of the 1988 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams ( Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), 165– 81; Julian Haseldine, “Understanding the Language of amicitia: The Friendship Circle of Peter of Celle (c.1115–1183),” Journal of Medieval History 20 (1994): 237– 60; and Walter Ysebaert, “Medieval Letter-Collections as a Mirror of Circles of Friendship? The Example of Stephen of Tournai, 1128–1203,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 83, no. 2 (2005): 285– 300. 13. For three contemporary English examples, see the letter written by Osbert of Clare in Liber Eliensis, ed. E. O. Blake, Camden Third Series 92 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1962), bk. 3, ch. 43, 281– 83 (this text was also included in Osbert’s letter collection; see E. W. Williamson, ed., The Letters of Osbert of Clare, Prior of Westminster [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929], no. 33, 116–19); a letter written by a brother Christian at Pershore Abbey, in Worcestershire, about a local miracle attributed to William Thomas of Monmouth, in The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), bk. vii, ch. 18, 283– 89; and a letter from the dean and rector of Chilwell about a miracle of Gilbert of Sempringham in The Book of St. Gilbert, ed. Raymonde Foreville and Gillian Keir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 319– 23. 14. For the careers of these collectors and this dating of their collections, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 139– 58. 15. See the numerous letters to and from these men edited by Duggan, Correspondence of Thomas Becket. 16. See, for example, Benedict, Miracula 3.40, 4.52, 4.64, and 4.66; William, Miracula 5.2 and 6.115. Letters about miracles continued to arrive at Canterbury after William finished his collection, as we know by the chance preservation of a letter from John of Salisbury about a miracle in Chartres. The letter is found in abbreviated copies of Benedict of Peterborough’s miracle collection in two fifteenth-century manuscripts: see Raymonde Foreville, “Une lettre inédite de

198 /

Rachel Koopmans

Jean de Salisbury, évêque de Chartres,” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 22 (1936): 179– 85; and Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 2, no. 325, 803– 7. These editors take the text from Vatican MS lat. 1221; it also appears in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 464, at ff. 89v– 91v. 17. On this later addition and its dating, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 154 – 55. 18. Notably, both Benedict and William cut the salutations of the first letters they included in their collections (see nos. 1 and 12). They wrote their own introductions instead, seemingly as a means of more smoothly integrating the other man’s words into their texts. 19. Compare Benedict, Miracula 4.86, and William, Miracula 2.12 (2.50 by Robertson’s numbering). 20. See William, Miracula 1.49 (2.35 in Robertson’s edition) and 2.2 (Robertson, 2.40), and my discussion of these chapters in Wonderful to Relate, 149. 21. Scholars working on miracle collections more generally should be sensitive to the possibility of letter texts standing behind chapters ostensibly in the author’s own voice. A striking example of how such a letter could get absorbed into a collection is found in Eadmer of Canterbury’s early twelfth-century miracle collection for Saint Dunstan, in which Eadmer discusses a miracle that occurred at Sapperton ( probably a manor near Glastonbury). Eadmer never indicates that the news of this miracle come in by letter, but luckily, a fair copy of the letter, with its salutation removed, was bound into British Library Arundel MS 16, a text of Osbern of Canterbury’s earlier miracle collection. See Eadmer of Canterbury, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan, and Oswald, ed. and trans. Andrew J. Turner and Bernard J. Muir (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), lxxii– lxxiii and 206– 7. In the prologue to his vita of Dunstan, Eadmer notes that he had sent out requests for information about Dunstan (ibid., lxxii): it is possible that the Sapperton letter came to Canterbury as a result. 22. An example in William’s collection is the account of the miracle of a certain servant of the monks of Boxgrove, Miracula 4.24, 339. 23. See Benedict, Miracula 1.9, 40, and the discussion of Benedict’s collecting methods in Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 159– 80. 24. Benedict, Miracula 4.64, 233. 25. The letter from Richard, abbot of Welford (no. 12), looks suspiciously as if it had been requested by the Christ Church monks in the same manner as Robert Cricklade’s account was (no. 1), but the placement of this text at the very beginning of William’s collection suggests that if it was the result of a request, the request had been made by Benedict, not William. 26. This is how the collection is described in the prefatory letter (no. 11): see William, Miracula 1.1, 139: “epulas quas habet recumbentibus exhibet.” For further discussion of William’s aims as a miracle collector, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 153– 58 and 181– 84.

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 199 27. On William’s use of letters in his vita, see Anne Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History of His Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 182– 87 and table 2, 272– 73. Duggan notes that William was a careful copyist: “Wherever William inserted complete letters into his narrative, he treated the texts with great respect” (185). 28. William, Miracula 2.12 ( Robertson 2.50), 210 –11. 29. William, Miracula 6.2, 407. 30. It is possible that letters from abbesses are behind some chapters. In his account of a miracle of a nun named Lecarda, for example, Benedict includes a dialogue between Lecarda and her sisters that may have been derived from a letter (see Benedict, Miracula 4.10, 188– 89). On nuns’ letter writing in this period, see Alison I. Beach, “Voices from a Distant Land: Fragments of a Twelfth-Century Nuns’ Letter Collection,” Speculum 77 (2002): 34 – 54; and, on women’s letter writing more generally, see Joan M. Ferrante, “‘Licet longinquis regionibus corpore separati’: Letters as a link in and to the Middle Ages,” Speculum 76 (2001): 877– 95. 31. For these in-house religious letters (in bold if the bearer is named), see nos. 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 18, 23, 26, 27, 32, 36, 37, and 38. No. 6 concerns a servant of a religious house who was likely a layman, and no. 32 is principally about the miracle of a lay brother, but I believe these letters are best read in the category of letters concerning the religious. 32. William, Miracula 2.13 ( Robertson 2.51), 211–13. For two letters written very much along the same lines, see nos. 35 and 37. 33. Letters preserved in the Becket collections about less serious illnesses— such as, for example, the letter by Pons, the bishop of Clermont, about the cure of a mute woman (no. 28) — were not generally written as testimonials to be carried by bearers. Pons wrote this letter about the mute woman because “emergency business” prevented him from coming on pilgrimage and telling the Christ Church monks the story himself. 34. Anselm addressed the five letters to people he hoped would help the monks in their mission: the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Rochester, the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, and the noble couple who had requested the new foundation. For English translations of these letters, see The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, trans. Walter Frölich ( Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990), nos. 90, 91, 92, 93, and 94, pp. 232– 38. 35. For these decrees, see M. D. Knowles, Anne J. Duggan, and C. N. L. Brooke, “Henry II’s Supplement to the Constitutions of Clarendon,” English Historical Review 87 (1972): 757– 71. 36. The prefatory letter heading William’s collection that was directed to Henry II (no. 11) is very much in this vein: the letter, written by the convent, names William as the bearer of the letter and provides the king with a description of the miraculous visions that led William to write the collection.

200 /

Rachel Koopmans

37. William, Miracula 6.124, 512. See also no. 17, another letter containing an explicit request for relics for the bearers. 38. William, Miracula 6.17, 429. 39. For the English translation of this letter, see Letters from the East: Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th–13th Centuries, trans. Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate ( Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), no. 38, 72– 73. The letter is edited in R. Röhricht, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1878), 127– 28n45. 40. This collection, dated to the late 1170s, is edited as The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. Z. N. Brooke, Dom Adrian Morey, and C. N. L. Brooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). The collection has been termed “a clerk’s compilation out of diverse, ill-ordered materials,” which includes “an assortment of the content of the bishop’s files and pigeon-holes”: see Dom Adrian Morey and C. N. L. Brooke, Gilbert Foliot and his Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 28. 41. See Letters and Charters, nos. 413, 424, and 428. For more letters for bearers seeking funds for a particular cause, see also nos. 352, 386, 390, 418, and 419, and for a similar letter from a slightly earlier time period from Archbishop Theobald, see Avrom Saltman, Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury ( London: Athlone, 1956), no. 82, 305– 306. On these letters, see also Nicholas Vincent, “Some Pardoners’ Tales: The Earliest English Indulgences,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002): 23– 58. 42. In Heads of Religious Houses: England & Wales, I. 940 – 1216, ed. David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke, and Vera C. M. London, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 266, this Reginald ( presumably) is noted as “occ. 1166” as prior of Bermondsey. 43. See also the very similar rhetoric in the opening of the letter from the clerks of Exeter, no. 18. 44. Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. LeClercq and H. Rochais ( Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1979), no. 389. I am grateful to John Van Engen for this reference. 45. For three examples, see The Letters of John of Salisbury: The Early Letters (1153–1161), ed. W. J. Millor, S.J., and H. E. Butler; rev. C. N. L. Brooke ( London: Clarendon, 1955), no. 50 (a letter on behalf of the bearers — canons of Merton — seeking to regain property); no. 51 (a letter on behalf of William, the bearer, who is struggling with an unnamed adversary); no. 52 (on behalf of unnamed bearer who wished to join a stricter order), etc. 46. On Silvester, see Duggan, Correspondence, vol. 1, no. 122, 582– 85, and vol 2., 1131n15. 47. Walter Fröhlich, trans., The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, 3 vols. ( Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1994), 3:172– 73, no. 406. 48. It appears that religious men traveling from Perigueux with the hanged man asked John for the letter.

Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 201 49. William, Miracula 6.124, 512. 50. For letters written by religious men about miracles experienced by lay men or women (in bold if bearer is named), see nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 24, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 40, and 41 (nos. 30 and 41 discuss lay and religious miracles). 51. William, Miracula 6.10, 420. Hugh Puiset had earlier involved himself in the miracle of Eilward of Westoning. Letter no. 2 was written at his request, as we know from Benedict’s account of Eilward’s miracle: see Benedict, Miracula 4.2, 180 – 81. 52. William, Miracula 3.1, 256. 53. In William’s account of Roger’s miracle, it is clear Roger had come to Canterbury: see William, Miracula 6.11, 422– 23. 54. William, Miracula 6.14, 427– 28. 55. William, Miracula 2.22 ( Robertson 2.60), 221. 56. William, Miracula 4.23, 338. 57. William, Miracula 4.23, 338– 39. 58. William’s handling of Mabel’s letter can be contrasted with his more enthusiastic reception of an epileptic canon of Oseney on a return trip to Canterbury. William wrote a lengthy introductory chapter, Miracula 6.122, 508– 9, about the canon’s illness before copying a letter from his convent (no. 36), which confirmed that the canon had not been ill since he had come back from pilgrimage to Canterbury. 59. Benedict, Miracula 4.65, 236 – 37, and William, Miracula 1.49 ( Robertson 2.35), 192. Both men seem to have been silently copying from yet another letter for this account. The second half of the sentence cited above (“ne Cantuariam veniens et rem narraturus supra opinionem et fidem, citra auctoritatem, loqui putaretur”) is only found in William’s account — it is not clear whether this was in the original letter or whether William added it himself. 60. Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent ( Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 278– 334, at 306. 61. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 89. 62. William, Miracula 6.86, 480 – 81. 63. William, Miracula 6.126, 515. 64. Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, 53. See also Constable’s very interesting article “Dictators and Diplomats in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Medieval Epistolography and the Birth of Modern Bureaucracy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46, Homo Byzantinus: Papers in Honor of Alexander Kazhdan (1992): 37– 46.

Eight

Th e C o u n t e r f a c t u a l Tw e l f t h C e n t u r y d ya n e l l i o t t

In the twelfth century, Latin Christendom began to dream out loud. People started to see and converse with others long dead. Theologians attempted to approximate the perspective of God, who could search the conscience and judge lives unlived. Gods and heroes awoke from the slumber of their mythical past to be provided with a new agenda. Deities were invented with impunity. Vernacular literature arose and shook off the bondage of the credible, opting for magical scenarios driven by wish fulfillment. Autobiography provided a new medium for self-revelation, exposing the distance between the external world and internal desire. This engagement with what I am calling counterfactual reality was a hallmark of twelfth-century thought that permeated the period’s new genres at both conscious and unconscious levels. It was an altogether new way of looking at the world—one that provided a creative recasting of reality that pursued roads not taken, explored unexploited possibilities, fulfilled unrealized potential, and accessed fantastical or supernatural realms.1 The counterfactual could be engaged in both fiction and philosophical speculation, neither of which made claims on external reality. But it also could be revealed unconsciously in the kinds of alternative realities pre202

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 203 sented in dreams or visions. Although such states were commonly associated with a heightened truth quotient, they nevertheless resisted the kind of verification available to the miracle, which was apprehended by many. Not only were dreams and visions private, they were also apprehended independently from external (or what Augustine referred to as corporeal) vision. Instead, they proceeded from spiritual vision: an internalized faculty utilizing images that were captured by corporeal vision and subsequently stored in the imagination.2 This means that while a vision of purgatory was, in a certain sense, real, even ultrareal, to its recipient, it was destined to remain a personal reality that could be (and often was) dismissed as imaginary or counterfactual to others.3 Although the counterfactual cuts across discourses and assumes many forms, I propose to examine four manifestations that are closely related to genre. They were all generated in northern France, a locus of creative ferment where the counterfactual loomed especially large. In the memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, the counterfactual manifests itself as a kind of rambunctious textual unconscious that distorts or reinterprets external reality, often projecting deeply held attractions and antipathies into an alternative reality apprehended by spiritual vision. Concealed tensions and conflicts also reveal themselves in the way in which the text is constructed — whether through inclusions, exclusions, or strange coincidences. In the period’s novel applications of reason, the counterfactual can manifest itself in terms of speculation about received truths; hence Peter Abelard provides hypothetical motivations for Adam and Eve with a view to their possible exculpation in the outer world. In the lais of Marie de France, the counterfactual tends to manifest itself through magical realms buttressed by wish fulfillment. Finally, the writings of Alan of Lille demonstrate how in both orthodox and heterodox cosmological discourse, the counterfactual can wear the camouflage of allegory, which provides a resourceful disguise in which to explore potentially suspect philosophical and theological principles. This is a period, however, in which imaginative invention shades off into philosophical speculation, so these categories are by no means stable. Marie de France deploys romance to explore Eucharistic theology even as Alan of Lille uses literary devices such as myth and allegory as philosophical tools. All of these genres, however, demonstrate a propensity to imagine things differently

204 /

Dyan Elliott

than they presented themselves in mundane reality, an exercise that often leads to hidden insights and deeper truths. Because the counterfactual generally seeks an accommodation of the strange within the ambit of the familiar, it qualifies as uncanny in a psychoanalytic sense. It has the capacity to defamiliarize mundane reality.4 There has been a surge of recent scholarly interest in the many elements deemed uncanny in this period: visions of the dead; revenants stalking the living; bizarre creatures with quasi-human attributes. I hope to extend the conventional perimeters of the uncanny beyond its preter- and supernatural ambiance to accommodate the counterfactual.5 This orientation counterpoints a number of traditional historiographical emphases of twelfth-century scholarship. Thus in contrast to the autonomous individual, a focus on the counterfactual reveals divisiveness, altered states of consciousness, and revealing projections of the self and others. It emphasizes a scholasticism that quixotically attempts to Christianize Plato, and applications of reason exposing new vistas of uncertainty. The counterfactual also lends insight into intellectually or doctrinally troubled waters, pointing to the way that uncomfortable or dangerous truths can best be conveyed in fiction.

Guibert of Nogent: Subconscious Counterfactuality and the Name of the Father The memoirs of Guibert of Nogent (ca. 1115) constitute the first work of autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions. As such, they have rightly been taken as representative of the kind of self-reflection associated with the twelfth century and the discovery of the individual.6 Traditionally, Guibert’s memoirs have proved a veritable treasure trove to scholars enlisting psychoanalysis, peeling back the text to reveal the individual beneath the one on display. Guibert himself has fared rather poorly in this context, generally emerging as an unhappy neurotic with a mother fixation.7 Recently Jay Rubenstein has eschewed the psychoanalytic approach, with its dependence on the unconscious, instead representing the memoirs as structured around a deliberate psychological theory of mind

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 205 that Guibert elaborated from the work of Anselm of Bec.8 An analysis of the counterfactual straddles both approaches, highlighting instances of deliberate and innovative representations of identity as well as unconscious forces that work toward its destabilization. Guibert’s treatment of his parents follows a distinct, but telling, pattern in this respect. For while the portrait of the mother enlists counterfactual embellishments in a very deliberate manner, his grip on his portrayal of his father is unsteady and contradictory. Much of the material appears as if it were inadequately processed, arising unbidden from the unconscious. The result is a devolution into counterfactual mayhem. The first part of Guibert’s memoirs is largely a tribute to his beloved mother. His devotion is highlighted by his attempts to present her counterfactually as unsullied and virginal. Her fictive purity is helped by the fact that her marriage remained unconsummated for a number of years due to enchantment. Eventually, however, the spell was broken, as the existence of Guibert and his reluctantly acknowledged siblings attests.9 Yet Guibert, an ardent student of Augustine, was clearly prepared to credit the counterfactual world of inner intention over external actuality. Augustine had reassured ascetically-minded wives that God would credit their chaste intentions if they mentally withheld themselves from the sex act while paying the conjugal debt.10 Following this line of reasoning, Guibert did his utmost to align his mother’s apparent aversion to sex with an uninterrupted purity. Hence we read that “she cherished her widowhood as if, unable to bear them, she had always loathed a wife’s bedtime duties.”11 Guibert also emphasizes her refusal to remarry after her husband’s death, despite her youth, choosing to live an ascetic life within her home. Just in case the reader missed the point, Guibert relates how he heard “a devil-possessed dependent of hers . . . shouting out these words: ‘The priests have placed a cross in her loins.’ Nothing could have been truer,” Guibert remarks.12 The mother is represented as complicit with her doting son’s conviction of her purity. Eventually she left her home for a hermitage attached to a monastery, where she modeled her behavior on a senior and virginal nun.13 Just prior to her death, however, his mother successfully argued for the right to receive the same veiling as a consecrated virgin — a rite that religious authorities as renowned as Anselm of Bec had told her was

206 /

Dyan Elliott

forbidden to widows. This final privilege was nevertheless granted, partially as a result of a series of visionary interventions engineered by the Virgin Mary, to whom she was especially devoted.14 The superiority of the psychic virginity available to Guibert’s mother becomes especially apparent when she sees the older nun, her erstwhile mentor, in purgatory “carried off by two coal-black spirits, her form a mere shadow.”15 The mother’s exceptional purity was also an anchor for Guibert’s vocation. Destined for the church from infancy, Guibert nevertheless experienced a bout of adolescent rebellion: “As the life of this world began to stir my itching heart with fleshly longings . . . my mind repeatedly fell to remembering and dwelling on what and how great I might have been in the world, in which my imaginings often travelled beyond truth.” It is noteworthy that Guibert’s precocious commitment to chastity required that his “fleshly longings” be elaborated as lives unlived. He thus presents an interesting foil for his mother, whose parallel commitment is conveyed through her son’s efforts to erase the life that was lived. Fortunately, his mother was apprised of Guibert’s inner turbulence through dreams and called him back from the brink of counterfactual disaster. Guibert confessed to her, and the problem was resolved “since . . . my will was one with hers.”16 This image of concord, frequently ascribed to lovers in romance, underlines the fact that Guibert’s beloved mother was indeed his beloved. Since Guibert is modeling his work after Augustine’s Confessions, it is not surprising that his mother achieves a similar prominence to Augustine’s mother. Yet, as Nancy Partner has noted, Guibert’s mother remains nameless throughout the narrative, bringing her into tacit alignment with Augustine’s nameless but much beloved mistress.17 Such intense feelings for a mother who suffered the trials of a troubled marriage must naturally take their toll on Guibert’s attitude toward the father he never knew. Guibert’s alleged profession of joy at his father’s premature death has a distinctly oedipal resonance, which is hardly dispelled by the feeble rationale that, had his father lived, he would doubtless have interfered with his son’s monastic vocation.18 Nevertheless, the father is quite often evoked to offset his wife’s piety. This is especially true in the most detailed discussion of the father, which occurs in Guibert’s relation of the mother’s vision of purgatory. Of course, since Guibert never knew his father, it is to be expected that he would rely on the

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 207 testimony of others. But it can also be no coincidence that, of the many things he might have related, he chose to dwell on an incident that showed his father to such poor advantage. Throughout Guibert’s retelling of his mother’s vision, moreover, the point of view switches seamlessly back and forth between what she said she saw and what Guibert says it meant, merging their consciousness so that his will was, indeed, “one with hers.” Guibert begins by recounting how, one night as she was beginning to fall asleep, “her soul seemed to leave her body without her losing her senses.” After escaping the clutches of some predatory specters, who attempted to drag her into a pit, she “suddenly . . . saw that my father was there, appearing as he did when he was young. When she looked hard at him and piteously asked of him whether he was called Evrard (for that had been his name), he denied that he was.” The denial functions as a simultaneous rejection of the relationship with mother, and, hence, son alike. Alternatively, it could be read as the mother’s unconscious recognition that her image of the father (and hence her son’s) was distorted, perhaps beyond recognition. Whatever the case may be, Guibert himself is at pains to claim the reluctant revenant for his father, rationalizing why the spirits of the deceased no longer answered to their former names.19 One of the identifying traits of the specter, moreover, is the proximity of the figure of a wailing child, which Guibert identifies as the illegitimate child that Evrard begot during the time that he and his wife were incapable of sexual congress as the result of witchcraft.20 As the episode suggests, the period’s “birth of purgatory” provided an eerie forum in which spectral projections of the self had the opportunity to converse with spectral projections of others, usually deceased.21 Such apparitions are counterfactual on multiple levels. Their very appearance in their former bodies was, in itself, a fiction.22 Medieval authorities further recognized that there were physiological reasons that could cause one to imagine the appearance of a ghost, or, as Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge said to the ghost of Jacob Marley, “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you.”23 The subjectivity of the experience is also a factor: even if a specter appeared while an individual was awake, its apprehension was exclusive to the person to whom it appeared. From this perspective, it is worth stressing that Guibert’s father is many times removed from reality for reader and author alike: he is a ghost from a third

208 /

Dyan Elliott

party’s vision, further occluded by the medium of a dream. Because Guibert only learned of the dream many years after its occurrence, it is further obscured by the passage of time.24 The fact that the father’s apparition denied, perhaps even lied about, his identity seems to render this specter even more counterfactual than the “average” specter — which generally returns to seek prayers or issue warnings and, hence, depends upon being recognized. Whatever the reality quotient of such encounters, they invariably lead to a reordering of earthly hierarchies. The mere fact of being granted such a vision establishes the mother’s spiritual superiority over most Christians. But this advantage is multiplied through interactions with various spirits. Hence Guibert’s mother established an ascendancy over her former mentor —“a woman who clearly was always mortifying her body with crosses on the outside, but, it was said was not enough on her guard against a hunger for spiritual glory.”25 Hence her purported holiness was exposed as simulated and counterfactual. The gender hierarchy in marriage is likewise inverted insofar as her ghostly husband acknowledges the benefits of her prayers, alms, and masses.26 Not only was the adulterous husband now the spiritual client of the wife he had humiliated, but she had the further satisfaction of seeing him punished by the inescapable presence of his illegitimate child’s specter, endowed with preternatural powers of wailing and tacitly presented as an appropriate punishment for his betrayal. Nor was her visionary reach limited to the dead. In the same vision, she also saw a specter of Guibert’s brother, who Guibert is quick to inform us was still alive and would only die many years later. As a result, the brother’s appearance in purgatory is doubly counterfactual.27 The first time the reader learns the father’s name is in the course of this same vision in which he denies his name. It is also the last time he enters the narrative. Well before this incident, however, the name Evrard is a source of contestation and rivalry. The first person named Evrard that Guibert mentions is the pious count of Breteuil, who essentially gave up his name in order to pursue the vita apostolica in anonymity. One day he encountered an overdressed fop whose appearance was so outlandish that Evrard could not help but ask who he was. “The other man raised his eyebrows with a sidelong look in a bold fashion. . . . ‘I am,’ he said,

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 209 ‘though I must ask you not to mention it to anyone, Evrard of Breteuil, formerly count, who, as you know, was once a rich man in France, but, going into exile, I am now voluntarily doing penance for my sins.’” The authentic Evrard “star[ed] in disbelief at the impudence of so incredible a rascal, and scorn[ed] all further talk with his own shadow.” Ultimately, the count accepted responsibility for his impersonator, recognizing that he himself had “furnished the occasion for deception.” Evrard joined a stable religious order expressly to “‘deprive anyone of the temptation to impersonate us.’”28 One wonders if the pious count was being overscrupulous. Were there really others waiting in the wings to steal his identity? But the very fact that Guibert includes this anecdote suggests the degree to which counterfactual identities, whether by error or theft, were a locus of concern. Evrard of Breteuil was a genuine holy person who was being cynically impersonated by an impious rogue. Nor is this concern with fraud restricted to Guibert’s autobiography. His treatise On the Relics of Saints expresses a similar dismay over the various scams being perpetrated with the bodies and identities of the dead. There were two different sites claiming the head of John the Baptist; two different communities that translated the relics of Saint Fermin of Amiens. Far from being a martyr, Saint Pyro is alleged to have died from a drunken fall into a well. Guibert regarded the situation as dire, reasoning, “Whoever venerates something he does not know is never free from grave danger, even if that something is actually holy; on the contrary it normally leads to sacrilege.”29 What’s in a name? With respect to Guibert and his attitude to his father, the answer may well be “everything.” If the episode concerning Evrard of Breteuil and his double is construed as an extension of Guibert’s own doubts over his father’s identity — a reading implicit in the purgatorial specter’s denial — two other Evrards appear who are equally suggestive. Each betrays his respective lord, even as Guibert’s father betrayed his mother. The penultimate Evrard was not only implicated in the scandalous communal revolt against the bishop of Laon, but was additionally a two-faced traitor, guilty of betraying his master. The final Evrard was the leader of a heretical sect at Soissons, thereby committing the ultimate act of treachery by betraying God.30 Both were executed, thus receiving, like Guibert’s father in purgatory, the punishment they

210 /

Dyan Elliott

deserved. Whether by voluntary decision or involuntary lapse, Guibert constructs a chain out of the different evocations of Evrard’s name, forging its links from uncertainty, subterfuge, and treachery. The father may be long since dead, but the son contrives a verbal monument that keeps the infamy of his name alive.

Peter Abelard: The Intentional Counterfactuality of a Master It is hard to imagine personalities more diametrically opposed than Guibert, the self-effacing and insecure monk, and his slightly younger contemporary, Peter Abelard, the bombastic and self-assured scholar. And yet there was considerable common ground. Not only did they produce the only autobiographies of the period, both also became preoccupied with questions of interiority and conscience.31 Although Guibert was a transitional figure and Abelard on the vanguard of the new learning, both engaged in what John Van Engen has identified as new reading practices, directing their attention to the minor prophets.32 I would add to this list of parallels a mutual indebtedness to counterfactual constructions.33 But while Guibert’s explorations into the realm of the counterfactual were often oblique and sometimes unconscious, Abelard wielded the counterfactual with the precision of a master. Abelard first burst upon the intellectual scene with a formula for dismissing the existential claims of Universals, a problem inherited from the ancients.34 Rooted in Plato’s realm of Ideas or Forms, the term itself refers to the elements or qualities that characterize and unite a distinct genus or species. The Realists believed that Universals preexisted the objects they informed in a separate realm. Nominalists denied their existence, arguing that Universals were simply words or names (nomina) that society has agreed to apply to a given group of individuals or objects. William of Champeaux, one of Abelard’s teachers and an extreme Realist, staked his reputation on the claim that Universals were things and that a particular concurrence of the same things is the material essence present in all individuals or objects of a given species or genus. This implied that humanity had a material essence that somehow ex-

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 211 isted independently of any given human. Abelard countered by denying that Universals had any ontological reality independent of the things in which they inhered — a view which ultimately prevailed. Less dismissive than his ultra-Nominalist teacher Roscelinus, however, Abelard did acknowledge that these words were invested with meaning — a position akin to our understanding of concepts and, hence, frequently referred to as conceptualism.35 In essence it was a struggle over the nature of reality. The Realists’ claim for a privileged, independent, and formative realm of Universals posited different levels of authenticity to the detriment of the temporal world, imparting a counterfactual aspect to the quotidian. As such, the belief in Universals had a distinctly uncanny resonance. Abelard fought back by demoting Universals to a counterfactual status, thereby upholding the reality quotient of the everyday. But there were other counterfactual realities that Abelard actively fostered, such as the possibility of Christians before Christ. In Abelard’s first ambitious theological opus, Theologia ‘Summi boni’ (ca. 1119–1120) he argues that Plato’s World Soul anticipated the doctrine of the Trinity.36 This insight was not unique to Abelard but shared by a number of other scholars — particularly those aligned with the Platonic school of Chartres.37 Theologia Christiana— a work that was begun after the condemnation of his Theologia ‘Summi boni’ at Soissons (1121) — goes considerably further.38 Here Abelard argues that certain pagan philosophers not only knew about the Trinity, but were even possessed of a saving faith. Such individuals were “Gentiles perhaps by nation, but not by faith. . . . For how is it that we would relegate them all to infidelity and damnation — to whom . . . God himself revealed the mysteries of the faith and the profound mystery of the Trinity.”39 Such thinking was supremely counterfactual. And yet Abelard was ultimately forced to acknowledge the fallacy at the heart of his vision: his theological optimism was checked by his own conviction that there was no salvation without direct knowledge of Christ.40 Abelard’s propensity to think counterfactually was especially in evidence in the groundbreaking method of his work Sic et Non (ca. 1120), the basic structure of which was to argue both sides of any given position. Some of these questions on the nature of God were quite abstruse

212 /

Dyan Elliott

and would have had little or no impact on human history if answered either way. Question 25, however, returns to the question of whether “philosophers also might have believed in the Trinity or the word.” Unfortunately, Abelard cannot garner the kind of support from Christian authorities that would assure salvation to his beloved philosophers. Though leading with Paul’s potentially ecumenical remarks that the invisible things of God were clearly revealed and understood from the beginning of the world, this is immediately followed by patristic authors condemning Gentile philosophers.41 And yet a different position emerges if the predicament of pagan philosophers is read through the lens of related problems. In particular, when the question of whether someone can be saved without baptism is engaged, the chorus of denials is interrupted by the example of Trajan. According to legend, the emperor, known for his justice, was freed from the pains of hell by the prayers of Gregory the Great.42 It is true that Abelard goes on to cite the careful equivocation of Gregory’s biographer that this did not mean that Trajan was actually admitted into heaven, just that he was spared the pains of the flame. Even so, such efforts on behalf of the virtuous pagan would gain in momentum until Dante was emboldened to put Trajan in paradise.43 Perhaps the most daring of Abelard’s counterfactual moves arose in the course of the inward-looking speculation initiated in his later work Ethics (1139). We have already seen how an emphasis on intention helped Guibert’s mother cultivate a counterfactual virginity that even received ecclesiastical ratification. Abelard made a parallel strategy available to all of Latin Christendom through his redefinition of sin. According to Abelard’s formulation, sin was assessed in terms of contempt for God— a measure that only God “who searches our hearts and loins and sees in our darkness” (Psalm 7:10) could wield with any precision.44 Such a definition furthered his case for his philosophers since “ignorance of God or unbelief in him . . . can happen to many people without fault.”45 Abelard also notes that Christ chose to preach in certain cities, but withheld himself from others, asking, “Who will impute this to their fault?” 46 The deeply personal nature of sin as defined by Ethics allows Abelard to place the counterfactual in the foreground of Christian life and sustain this position by casuistic demonstrations of the depth of divine

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 213 judgment. “For if a monk and a layman alike come to consent to fornication, and if the mind of the layman is also so incited that if he were a monk he would not hold back in reverence for God from that baseness, he earns the same punishment as the monk. . . . God considers only the mind in rewarding good or evil, not the results of deeds.”47 In other words, their relation to external reality is entirely eclipsed by the truth revealed in the counterfactual recesses of conscience, only apparent to God. “Works in fact . . . are all indifferent in themselves and should be called good or bad only on account of the intention of the agent.”48 This line of argument is pursued still further in a recently discovered series of quaestiones (ca. 1140) attributed to Abelard in which he explores the respective degrees of sin of Adam and Eve. He begins by recapping the traditional cases against each: on the one hand, Adam was more culpable, as he knew more and was supposed to look after Eve; on the other hand, Eve was more guilty because Adam only ate the apple out of sympathy, at least according to Augustine. Moreover, Paul says explicitly that Eve, not Adam, was seduced (1 Timothy 2:14). But Abelard rejects these judgments, claiming it is impossible to know who manifested more contempt for God. He proceeds to demonstrate this point through a provocative exploration of the hypothetical doings of straw men and counterfactual readings of biblical figures.49 The example of the monk and the layman is resurrected, only to be supplemented with the hypothetical instance of a man who fornicates with a single woman, but might have slept with her anyway had she been married. But he follows this by evoking Augustine’s comment that although John the Baptist was not tortured, he was nevertheless prepared for such torments and hence deserved the same reward as Peter. Likewise, Abraham, the fruitfully multiplying patriarch par excellence, was as deserving of merit for his counterfactual virginity as was John the Baptist. The example of Lucretia is further adduced from the pagan past as evidence that no one can be forcibly deprived of her virginity, which is a state of mind.50 Although reiterating that only God can know whether Adam or Eve was the worse sinner, Abelard maintains that their sin is no worse for its deleterious effects on humanity because the extent of their contempt for God remains static. The situation is parallel to someone who lands a sucker punch that results in a disastrous outbreak of violence. Yet,

214 /

Dyan Elliott

however many may have been killed, the instigator is still less culpable than would be an adulterer, whose sin was more deliberate. Alternatively, if a deed results in a greater good, this is no guarantee that the deed itself was good. Still, as Boethius says, to wish evil is evil; to do evil is worse. And Abelard acknowledges the necessity of punishing certain deeds as deterrent. Thus a priest is compelled to assign penance to a loving mother who rolls over in her sleep and inadvertently smothers her baby, as a caution to others.51 The respective culpability of Adam or Eve is unknowable. Even so, Abelard does what he can to lift the presumption of guilt from Eve, hence leveling the playing field. Abelard admits that he cannot understand why Augustine would assign more blame to Eve. But he reflects on how Augustine once invited a certain correspondent to correct his writings, as he did theirs, and, as far as Abelard is concerned, the offer still pertains. Paul’s claim that only Eve was deceived is recast as a reference to her gullibility over the devil’s promise of immortality, which Adam recognized as a lie. He ate the fruit in solidarity with his wife, confident that he could easily propitiate God over so trifling an offense.52 Abelard’s simulation of Adam’s reasoning that his offense was nugatory casts doubt on his judgment, edging his degree of fallibility closer to Eve’s. It is a subtle move. Eventually Abelard will progress from an Eve who is not necessarily more culpable to one who may not have sinned at all, asking: would it be disobedience if Eve had forgotten the lord’s sanction against eating the apple?53 If, in fact, she did suffer a lapse in memory, her sin would be comparable to that of a man who bedded the wife of another, mistaking her for his own. If the husband really was hoping to sleep with the maid, however, he would still be an adulterer in God’s eyes, even if the wife surreptitiously took her place. By the same token, if Eve was forgetful of God’s injunction and simply desired some fruit, her culpability would decline precipitously. Furthermore, if she was generally inclined to put the divine will before her own, “not only did she not sin, but it could be turned to merit and she would be rewarded more than if she had not desired [the apple].”54 In short, in the counterfactual realm of God’s justice, where intention and action were frequently at odds, Abelard imagines a world in which

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 215 Adam and Eve’s degree of personal responsibility was not only greatly diminished, but where Eve may even have earned a degree of masticatory merit. It is a world in which practically anything could happen — where even the veil of female shame could be lifted altogether.

Marie de France and the Counterfactual Eucharist The appearance of vernacular romance gives rise to two different types of fictional fabrications: those that might have existed but did not, and those that not only did not exist but could never have existed. This latter group would require an entirely different order for its viability—the realm of magic. The genius of Marie de France is exemplified by her ability to unite effortlessly social realism with the realm of fantasy, allowing a given protagonist to enter a counterfactual reality by the mechanism of a wish. Thus the impoverished but worthy knight Lanval, undervalued in Arthur’s court and close to despair, receives timely financial and romantic relief from a fairy lover visible only to him.55 The selfless grief of Eliduc’s long-suffering wife over the death of her husband’s lover is rewarded by a magic powerful enough to restore her rival to life.56 In the lai Yonec this pattern receives, if not its most elaborate treatment, at least its most quirky. A beautiful malmariée, locked in her room by an elderly husband, muses, “I have often heard tell that in this country one used to encounter adventures which relieved those afflicted by care: knights discovered maidens to their liking, noble and fair, and ladies found handsome and courtly lovers, worthy and valiant men. There was no fear of reproach and they alone could see them. If this can be and ever was, if it ever did happen to anyone, may almighty God grant my wish.”57 Immediately a large hawk flies into her chamber and is transformed into a handsome knight. The hawk-knight claims to have been deeply in love with the lady for years, but had to await her summons. In other words, her wish-cum-prayer, like a spell, must be expressed before it could be fulfilled. The lady is prepared to grant the knight her love, provided that he can prove that he is a Christian. By way of response, the knight not only

216 /

Dyan Elliott

professes his faith, but offers an extremely unusual surety in support of his word: “If you do not believe this of me, send for your chaplain. Tell him that an illness has come upon you and that you want to hear the service that God has established in this world for the redemption of sinners, I shall assume your appearance, receive the body of Christ, and recite all my credo for you.” Approving the idea, she sends for her attendant (the elderly sister of her ancient husband) who, after some resistance, summons the priest. “[He] came as quickly as possible, bringing the corpus domini. The knight received it and drank the wine from the chalice.”58 Yonec should be assessed in the context of the tales of metamorphosis that were rife in this period. Werewolves were particularly in vogue— so much so that Caroline Bynum has suggested that a “werewolf Renaissance of the twelfth century” might be added to the period’s accolades.59 Marie herself wrote a werewolf story in which a disloyal wife hides the clothing necessary for her were-husband to resume his human form. Despite a prolonged sojourn in a wolf ’s body, however, the man’s inner self remained unaltered. Thus, when pursued as prey by hunters, he was preserved through a very human form of supplication: “He ran up to him [the king] and begged for mercy. He took hold of his stirrup and kissed his foot and his leg.”60 Gerald of Wales likewise depicts a remarkably humane werewolf seeking last rites for his lupine companion. The wolf moved the reluctant priest to compliance by pulling the animal skin away from the body of the ailing animal to reveal a woman underneath.61 As Bynum has suggested, such tales provide a reassuring continuity of identity, “stressing the werewolf as a rational soul trapped in an animal body,” while at the same time testing the boundaries between species.62 Such metamorphoses are unsolicited and undesired. The werewolves described by Gerald were victims of a strange curse, imposed by a (saintly?) abbot, which compelled the natives of Ossory to take turns becoming wolves for seven-year stints.63 Yonec stands in stark contrast to this pattern. The hawk-knight is not trapped in an alien form but apparently able to assume any shape at will. While transformation into his beloved is certainly idiosyncratic, it nevertheless resonates on a number of levels. From a romance perspective, it could be construed as the apex of the ten-

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 217 dency for the hero and heroine to resemble one another, while reversing the general representation of woman as reflection of man.64 The ease with which the knight can assume and abandon bodies is also reminiscent of the shape-shifting capacity of demons— an aspect of the uncanny that was beginning to exert considerable fascination among contemporary writers.65 The parallel with demons is both evoked and allayed by his offer to take communion, since any demon would be routed definitively by a consecrated host.66 On the most obvious, but perhaps most subtle, level, it is a tacit reminder that the tale began with the lady alone in her room fantasizing about a lover—as might any woman in Marie’s audience. It is possible that there never was anyone else in the room and that the knight was a fantasy who morphed into a delusion because of illness. However this transformation is understood, it is a strange coincidence that both Marie and Gerald place metamorphosis and the Eucharist, specifically in conjunction with the last rites, within the same frame. Each metamorphosis—human to werewolf; hawk-knight to lady—is juxtaposed with the still more baffling change from bread to bleeding body at the heart of the Eucharistic mystery. Gerald is certainly sensitive to possible parallels. He begins by deploying what Bynum has with justice referred to as the “rather dubious analogy” between Christ as divinity becoming human and man becoming wolf, as prequel to a series of bizarre metamorphoses. Some of these are culled from Augustine’s City of God; others— such as the magical red pigs that revert to normal if they cross water—Gerald claims to have witnessed firsthand. But significantly, he concludes with the change of bread into the body of Christ— a subject which he “judges is more safely passed over.”67 Gerald was showing uncharacteristic restraint in not pursuing the analogy between a human in a wolf ’s body and the true presence of Christ in the consecrated host. Although the last major Eucharistic controversy had occurred in late eleventh century, the theology of the Eucharist remained an intellectual minefield.68 Guibert of Nogent’s speculation on the three bodies of Christ in the sacrament only won him humiliation and heartache.69 Among Abelard’s condemned doctrines was the view that the accidents of bread and wine somehow persist in the substance of the air after the consecration and the alleged change of substance.70

218 /

Dyan Elliott

Marie may have been discreetly engaging these same issues. She had the advantage over Guibert and Abelard, however, since she was neither constrained by the literal nor writing theology. Indeed, the magical world of the lais, where the natural was indistinguishable from the supernatural, was arguably the perfect medium for a treatment of the Eucharist. The discussion was fast moving beyond the grasp of reason in theological circles. Over the latter half of the twelfth century, any symbolist understanding was rejected in favor of an increased emphasis on the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, despite the continued appearance of bread and wine. This was the epitome of what could be described as the counterfactuality of the sacred. Indeed, the trajectory of Eucharistic theology was a steady progression toward the complete separation of external and internal reality — a separation that finds a parallel emphasis in the ethical musings of Abelard. The knight’s transformation into the lady, in which the essence of his identity is obscured by his lover’s outer form, mirrors the mystery at the heart of the mass. Nor is this entirely out of keeping with the knight’s overall persona, which is fraught with Christological parallels. Within the context of Marie’s magical world, he represents the lady’s personal savior. Not only does he ultimately die for her sake, but he is also cruelly put to death by a husband characterized as implacably evil. Thus his miserable wife laments, “He will never die. When he should have been baptized, he was plunged into the river of Hell.”71 Of course, the fact that the knight’s salvific activity is performed in the service of adultery would render this a very strange theology indeed. But Marie was not writing theology. She was, however, attempting a statement about the holiness of unconstrained human love. As such, she would have been in sympathy with her older contemporary Heloise and her defiant proclamation to Abelard that “the name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.”72 Of course, it is possible to read Marie’s Eucharistic experimentation cynically, perhaps as an expression of doubt in the nascent doctrine of transubstantiation, or even satire.73 This strikes me as misguided, however. If Gerald could find Christ in a werewolf, Marie could even more plausibly find Christ in a self-sacrificing knight.74

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 219 Alan of Lille, Platonic Allegory, and Denuded Heresy The twelfth century’s interest in counterfactuality was especially manifest in its deep investment in narratio fabulosa or fabula—the imaginative deployment of allegory, myth, and quasi-fictional narrative as vessels for moral and philosophical principals.75 Such fictive constructions were frequently strategic, allowing for the kind of speculation that would have been otherwise condemned.76 Very often these narratives were displayed against a Platonic backdrop— an indebtedness that could cut both ways. In the symbolist school of Chartres we find what M.-D. Chenu characterizes as “the optimistic Platonism of the Timaeus,” which was, in itself, a fabula detailing the creation of the world through the triune creative forces that theologians associated with the Trinity.77 There was, however, a darker side to a Platonic framework that sometimes presented problems for Christian appropriation. The fact that creation tended to be seen as a series of emanations effected through intermediaries rather than the direct work of a supreme being was a definite challenge. Worse still was the exaltation of the spiritual over the material in a manner far exceeding the comparatively restrained dualism of orthodoxy.78 Rather than regarding the material world as the creation of a beneficent deity, this strand of Platonism perceived the world as a byproduct of the inevitable devolution of spirit into matter. The stimulus of the fifth-century Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and his Carolingian disciple, John Scotus Eriugena, attest to the continued appeal of this philosophy in the twelfth century, sometimes inspiring or at least underwriting distinctly unorthodox positions.79 Honorius Augustodunensis, who came under the influence of Eriugena late in life, is a case in point. His Clavis physicae, written sometime in the 1120s, describes prelapsarian humanity as a spiritual body infused with reason in the image of God.80 The material body and its division into the sexes were ramifications of the fall.81 Spiritual elements would eventually triumph over the material, however, returning to God. In contrast to Honorius, Alan of Lille, a Platonizer to the bone, was generally careful to enlist the appropriate integumentum, or allegorical covering, for speculation, frequently invoking the persona of Nature in

220 /

Dyan Elliott

this context.82 In The Plaint of Nature, the protagonist “acting by an established covenant as the deputy of God” was responsible for bringing the “material body into real existence from the mixed substance of primordial matter.”83 Things went awry, however, when Nature voluntarily turned away from her task in order to sojourn in the “delightful palace of the ethereal region,” much to humanity’s detriment.84 She delegated the job to Venus, who proved still more dilatory. “Desiring to live the soft life of barren ease rather than be harassed by fruitful labour . . . she began to wanton with childish indiscretion.”85 Stimulated by their delinquent forewoman, humans quickly degenerated into deviant same-sex relations and a whole host of other vices. Anticlaudianus opens with a chastened Nature, very much aware of her limitations: “I find no living thing that is perfect in every way and could not bring many complaints against us.” 86 She wishes to atone for these past lapses by making a perfect man and calls a heavenly council of the Virtues with that purpose in mind. The members of the council are cognizant of their inability to animate their creation, however. Thus Prudence, equipped with a chariot fashioned by the Seven Liberal Arts and drawn by the equine team of the Five Senses, is sent to heaven for a soul. From an interpretative standpoint, these are flexible narratives. Alan acknowledges as much in the prose prologue of Anticlaudianus, claiming that the poem can be read literally (as a kind of adventure), morally, or allegorically.87 If not for this wide counterfactual margin, there would have been a number of junctures at which aspects of Alan’s Platonism might have rankled. For instance, both works ascribe the creation of the human body to Nature—not God himself. In Anticlaudianus, moreover, a preexisting soul is infused into the body — a supposition that parallels the beliefs of contemporary dualists. The Plaint further depicts Nature (a kind of personified emanation) as a flawed delegate who is ultimately responsible for the human race’s decline. Yet the potential volatility of this material is dispelled by the genre of vision poetry, steeped in allegory. Alan was certainly apprised of how essential allegory could be to stay on the right side of orthodoxy. Nor was he prepared to share this exploratory vehicle with any group he deemed heretical. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his polemical work On the Catholic Faith against the Heretics

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 221 of His Time, in which he stripped a competing ideology of its Platonic integumentum.88 The prologue of this work constitutes an extended critique on heretical methodology and the intellectual confusion that ensues. Contemporary heretics present a particular challenge to the faith because, unlike the heretics of old, with their cogent arguments, their modern counterparts are “given to new philosophical speculations” eclectically borrowed from the past, acting as “mirrors of the modes of thinking [of others].” Hence, “bound by no reason human or divine, they fashion monstrous things according to their will and desire.” The result is a theological hodgepodge. “The new heretics . . . depict ancient dogma drawn from different heresies as one general heresy— as if creating one idol from different idols; one monster from many; a common poison from many different noxious herbs.” As a result, Alan is “forced, with clear reasons, to render an account of a reasonable faith [disertis rationibus de fide rationabili reddere rationem].” Moreover, because he is basically confronting borrowed (and hence ancient) doctrines, the situation does not call for innovation, “but rather [to be] opposed by authentic reasons [rationibus obviandum authenticis]” derived from the church fathers.89 The “new philosophical speculations,” “mirrors of modes of thinking,” and the “fashion[ing] of monstrous things,” almost certainly pertain to the sectarians’ appropriation of classical thought and the development of their own allegories and mythologies. This is further implied by the constant reiteration of ratio and its derivatives as antidote. Yet Alan seems content temporarily to withhold this remedy, instead developing precisely the kind of classical medley he seems to despise. He begins by commending the famed heroes of yore for their expeditious elimination of monsters, comparing them with the church fathers countering the ‘monstrous things’ of heretical fashioning: “Hercules slew Antaeus, Theseus the Minotaur, Jason the fire-breathing bull, Meleager the enormous boar, Coroebus the Stygian monster, Perseus the sea-monster, even so we read that the noble princes of Holy Church with spiritual weapons overcame the monsters of various heresies.” So far so good: the puissance of the church fathers had prevailed over heretical monstrosity. Unfortunately, this good luck did not hold. For while pagan Antaeus was prepared to

222 /

Dyan Elliott

stand by while the Hydra unfurled its other heads, “among moderns there are not those who are able to resist new heresies.” As a result Alan is forced to step into the breach, “least among the sons of Jesse . . . to kill Goliath with his own sword.”90 This brief counterfactual reverie — itself a hybrid of pagan, Christian, and Jewish lore — was just a preamble: the body of the treatise is eminently reasonable, consisting of a scholastic description and refutation of the competing faith. It begins by detailing how certain heretics posited the existence of two warring principles of light and dark, associated with good and evil respectively. The principle of light, which is God, was the creator of all things spiritual such as souls and angels. The dark principle, Lucifer, created all temporal and material things, including the earth. It is therefore Lucifer, not Christ, who is the prince of the world. This philosophy is corroborated by Paul’s description of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit.91 Initially, Alan presents the two deities as equals, ventriloquizing heretical arguments against a single and omnipotent creator as follows: “If God made visible things, either He could make them incorruptible or not. If He could not, He was weak; if He could do so and refused, He was malevolent.”92 In this reckoning, matter is physically and morally invested with such gravity that good and evil are represented as equal, obscuring the Platonic roots of this doctrine in which the spiritual ultimately prevails over the material.93 At a later juncture, however, Alan introduces the contentions of “certain of the aforesaid heretics” who claim that human souls are really apostate angels “infused into human bodies by God’s permission, to the end that they may be able to do penance therein.” In fact, they argue, there were no angels left in heaven, but all fell with Lucifer.94 It is in these claims that the Platonic inevitability of the fall of spirit into matter, as well as its ultimate return, can be best discerned. The lengths to which Alan goes to refute these claims are proportionate with his concern. Thus he proceeds to prove “that there is a soul in the human body, not demons”;95 “that demons will not be saved”;96 “that some angelic spirits remained in heaven”;97 and “that not all angels fell from heaven.”98 In short, Alan is determined to refute what he perceived as the baleful pattern of descent of spirit into matter and its return. His in-

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 223 sistence on the eternal materiality of humankind is in keeping with this program: he not only adamantly contradicts the view that Christ was simply a disincarnate shadow of human nature, but also underlines his natural birth,99 the reality of his flesh,100 and that he was sustained by food and drink.101 Our glorified but material bodies were destined to rise again, as had Christ’s.102 The treatise will eventually develop a spirited apology for the sacraments, including a comprehensive defense of penance and transubstantiation, that anticipates Lateran IV.103 I have focused on the section treating the cosmological assumptions of the sect and its implications because this is precisely the area in which the need for allegory, and the softening effect that its counterfactual narration provides, is most acutely felt. Alan’s disquisition on the heresy is, however, relentlessly literal and hence very much at odds with the mythologizing character of his opening chapter. Yet the sources indicate that twelfth-century dualists shared the inclination for allegory and counterfactual mythologies evident among Alan and his peers. Dualism had traditionally eschewed the literal in favor of mythical expression. This was certainly true of the Platonizing gnostics of the early church. The Vision of Isaiah, an ancient work depicting the prophet’s ascension into heaven with an angelic mentor, which continued to circulate in the twelfth century, bears witness to this shared predilection. Likewise, The Secret Supper, a Bogomil work circulating in the West by the last decade of the twelfth century, details a counterfactual conversation between John the Evangelist and Christ at the Last Supper and provides a grand recasting of Genesis.104 In fact, the dualist investment in mythical structures was sufficiently deep that some scholars have observed that the heretics’ chief strategy was “to substitute myth for history.”105 Alan was clearly not prepared to share myth and allegory, the preferred medium of twelfth-century intellectuals, with thinkers he deemed dangerous. From this perspective, the mythology he enlists in the opening chapter could be construed as a cryptic statement of orthodoxy’s prerogative. The competing belief system that Alan presents is, by contrast, trapped in the literal: stripped of all metaphor, allegory, or hypothesizing. Indeed, elsewhere, Alan is prepared to experiment with the appropriation and realignment of heretical myth. Hence, his sermon for Palm Sunday

224 /

Dyan Elliott

describes a heavenly city in which an army of angels was expelled for rising up against their lord: “The demons moreover seeing themselves excluded from the celestial castle in the lower world contrived a horrible castle through which they could insult the superior castle. . . . The Devil therefore through depraved suggestion secured his castle in the first woman, through which the entire human race was compelled to be members of his family.”106 In short, Alan was not turning “Goliath’s sword” against the heretical giant, as he alleged in the prologue, so much as forging a different sword of their beliefs—in crude metal with no ornamentation. Without any imagery to hide behind, the dualists were denuded so as to be barely recognizable as Platonic, even as their doctrine emerged as painfully simplistic and unmistakably heretical. Eventually the mythological content would be restored to them by their orthodox foes. It is probably no coincidence, however, that this only occurred after orthodoxy’s fascination with Plato had receded, as had competition for counterfactual forms or the possibility of confusion between orthodox and heterodox Platonisms. Aristotelianism was now the favored method of the day. Heterodox mythology was not readmitted under the sophisticated counterfactual auspices that Alan and his cohort had enjoyed, however, but presented in a much more literal fashion, as absurd as it was baffling. An anonymous anti-heretical manifesto, probably from the early thirteenth century, avers, “In their secret meetings their elders recount that the wicked god first fashioned his creatures and at the beginning of his act of creation, made four beings, two male and two female, a lion and a bee-eater, an eagle and a spirit. The good God took from him the spirit and the eagle and with them He produced the things which he made.” Bee-eater may refer to a Provençal bird that eats bees. But what it or any of the other animals may signify is a mystery.107 There were other methods for making dualist doctrine seem risible. Moneta of Cremona’s Summa against the Cathars (ca. 1241) tends to separate the doctrine from the mythologizing, sometimes with ludicrous results. “They say that the sun, the moon, and the stars are demons, adding that the sun and moon commit adultery once each month because one reads in astronomical works of the conjunction of sun and moon. They also say that the moisture from that conjunction

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 225 is sprinkled through the air and on earth, because they lose clarity.”108And this strategy has, of course, sustained the orthodox representation of the heretics as simplistic, even crude, thinkers. ——— The twelfth-century deployment of the counterfactual was in every way a match for the spirit of exuberant creativity that both characterized the age and gestured toward things to come. Although autobiography never caught on as a genre, Guibert’s quasi-hagiographic depiction of his mother and her visions were the wave of the future, anticipating the rise of female mystics and their ministry in purgatory. Romance and the world of magic would continue to flourish. Abelard’s emphasis on intentionality would revolutionize the penitential system, while his casuistic methodology would become standard fare in the universities. Alan’s heirs would abandon allegory, but would continue to pummel their heretical opponents with the latest theological methodologies. Yet something important was lost. Abelard’s method, read in conjunction with his opposition to Universals, augured a shift in which reason would win out over poetry, even as Aristotle came to replace Plato. This substitution resonated far beyond the nascent universities. For an Aristotelian perspective had little room for pagan Christians, whimsical explorations of the Eucharist, or mythical approaches to theology. It also had little tolerance for phenomena that were impervious to explanation or classification. The solution was to consign such anomalies to the realm of the demonic — the new and ever-expanding repository for the uncanny. And in no time at all demons managed to colonize magic, romance, theology, visionary culture, and heresy — creating some of the most powerful, and frightening, counterfactual realities Latin Christendom had ever seen.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Barbara Newman and Ruth Karras for their helpful comments. I am also indebted to Mary Favret for alerting me to a special issue dedicated to the question of counterfactual realities. See Catherine Gallagher’s introductory forum, Representations 98 (2007): 51– 52.

226 /

Dyan Elliott

2. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim 12.25, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 28/1, ed. Joseph Zycha ( Leipzig: G. Freytag, 1894), 417–18. 3. For a nuanced discussion of this question, see Barbara Newman’s “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1– 43. 4. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey ( London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 17:217– 56. 5. There has already been considerable work on aspects of the uncanny in this period. See, for example, Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); JeanClaude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture,” Past and Present 152 (1996): 3– 45; C. S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity ( New York: Zone Books, 2001); and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 6. See Colin Morris’s classic statement of this premise in the Discovery of the Individual, 1050 – 1200 ( New York: Harper and Row, 1972). See also John F. Benton, “Consciousness of Self, and Perceptions of Individuality,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 263– 95, esp. 284 – 86 on the difficulty of applying twentieth-century terms signifying individuation of persons to this period. For an alternative emphasis away from individuality and on self-definition through allegiance to groups, see Caroline Walker Bynum’s “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82–109. 7. See, for example, John F. Benton’s introduction to his translation of Guibert’s life in Self and Society in Medieval France ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); Nancy Partner, “The Family Romance of Guibert of Nogent: His Story/Her Story,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler ( New York: Garland, 1996), 359– 79; cf. Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the North to the Thirteenth Century,” in History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd DeMause ( New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 105–12, 122– 29. 8. Jay Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind ( New York: Routledge, 2002), 63 ff. See Nancy Partner’s very eloquent defense of the use of psychoanalysis on medieval subjects in “The Hidden Self: Psychoanalysis

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 227 and the Textual Unconscious,” in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner ( London: Arnold, 2005), 42– 64. 9. Guibert does his best to minimize them, however, in spite of the fact that his older brother actually was in the monastery with him at Nogent: Autobiographie 2.4, ed. Edmond-René Labande ( Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), 242; Benton, trans., Self and Society, 133. Rubenstein notes the possibility of something missing in the manuscript, however: Guibert of Nogent, 62. There was also another brother — a knight who ended up in hell for falsely swearing and taking the lord’s name in vain (1.7, 1.18, p. 42; 152; trans., 50 – 51, 95). 10. See particularly Ep. 262, To Ecdicia c. 2, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 57, ed. A. Goldbacher ( Leipzig: G. Freytag, 1911), 623. On the importance of interiority, and the increased emphasis on conscience, in religious life during this period, see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 261 ff. 11. Autobiographie 1.18, p. 146; trans., 92. 12. Ibid., 1.13, 14, pp. 94 – 96, 98; trans., 71– 72, 73. 13. She is described as an old woman “in a nun’s habit” (in sanctimonali habitu) in ibid., 1.14, p. 102; trans., 75). Although this seems like a circumspect way of describing her vocation, perhaps even indicating doubt over her purity, the word sanctimonialis was reserved for virginal choir nuns. See Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200 –1500 ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 94. 14. See Guibert’s argument against the veiling of widows and her resistance: Autobiographie 2.4, pp. 244 – 46; trans., 133– 34; Elliott, Bride of Christ, 121– 25. Guibert was also devoted to Mary. His first work was Liber de laude Sanctae Mariae, Patrologia Latina 156:537– 77. See Rubenstein’s analysis in Guibert of Nogent, 21– 26. Rubenstein further argues that as Guibert was preparing to leave home, he gradually drew closer to Mary, who became something of a mother surrogate (69– 70). 15. Autobiographie 1.18, pp. 152– 54; trans., 95. On the overweening pride of virgins, see Augustine, De sancta virginitate 38.39, Patrologia Latina 40: 418. The two women had agreed that whoever died first would report back to the other. This was a common trope in pious exempla. Guibert of Nogent describes a parallel agreement between two holy virgins in his De pignoribus sanctorum, which has a happier outcome: 1.2, Patrologia Latina 156: 620; Joseph McAlhany and Jay Rubenstein, trans., On the Relics of Saints, in “Monodies” and “On the Relics of Saints ( New York: Penguin, 2011), 204. 16. Autobiographie 1.16, p. 122; trans., 83. 17. Cf. Partner, “Guibert and his Mother,” 360. 18. Autobiographie 1.24, p. 24; trans., 44. 19. Ibid., 1.18, pp. 148– 50; trans., 93– 94. See Jean-Claude Schmitt’s analysis of this dream in Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 47– 51.

228 /

Dyan Elliott

20. Autobiographie 1.18, p. 150; trans., 94. As penance for her husband’s sins, she adopted an orphan who kept her awake with its wailing— a vicarious suffering that she believed benefited her husband: ibid., 1.18, pp. 154 – 58; trans., 96– 97. 21. See Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, part 2. There is also the rise of many different kinds of interaction between the living and the dead — a number of which have popular nontheological roots: Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual”; Schmitt, Ghosts, 59– 62. 22. Twelfth-century theologians attempted to come to terms with the mechanics of such appearances. Honorius Augustodensis (ca. 1100), for example, argued that the dead inhabited bodies made out of air that imitated the ones they had inhabited in life; see Dyan Elliott, “Rubber Soul: Theology, Hagiography, and the Spirit World in the High Middle Ages,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 96. Thomas Aquinas would have the final word on this, denying the existence of spiritual matter: Summa Theologica 1a q. 75 art. 5. 23. According to Macrobius, an insomnium was caused by a bodily disturbance: Commentarii in Ciceronis Somnium Scipionis 1.3 (Quelingburg: G. Bassius, 1848), 24 – 25. 24. Guibert is very clear that his mother’s visions were contained by the dream state. Moreover, Rubenstein notes that even in Guibert’s waking visions, when he allegedly saw demons or even the devil, the words used were frequently imagines or species, implying a lesser degree of reality: Guibert of Nogent, 68– 69. 25. Autobiographie 1.18, pp. 152– 54; trans., 95. 26. Ibid., 1.18, p. 152; trans., 95. 27. Ibid., 1.18, p. 154; trans., 95. 28. Ibid., 1.9, p. 56; trans., 55. There is also a supernatural instance of impersonation when the devil masquerades as Saint James, prompting a penitent fornicator to castrate himself and take his own life: ibid., 3.19, pp. 142– 46; trans., 219– 20. Cf. the instance in the contemporaneous work of Goscelin in which the devil masquerades as a priest and talks a hermit into murdering his ward, whom he had impregnated: Liber confortatorius, bk. 4, ed. H. C. Talbot, Studia Anselmiana, fasc. 37, Analecta Monastica, 3d ser. ( Rome: Herder, 1955), 104 – 5; W. R. Barnes and Rebecca Hayword, trans., in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 190 – 92. 29. Guibert of Nogent, De pignoribus sanctorum 1.3,1, PL 156: 624, 625, 614; trans., 210 –11; 211– 212; 196. 30. Autobiographie 3. 11, 17, pp. 370, 328– 34; trans., 188, 212–14. Evrard did not act alone, but shared the responsibility with his brother, Clement. The names of the two fraternal heretics, Evrard and Clement, are uncomfortably close to the name of Guibert’s father, Evrard of Clermont.

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 229 31. For possible parallels, see Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 75, 77– 78, 80 – 82. On Abelard’s life, see Michael Clanchy, Peter Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997). 32. John Van Engen, “The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom,” in European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 33. Also see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950 – 1200 ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 226 – 29; and Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 74. 33. Jaeger, Envy of Angels, 226 – 29; Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 74. 34. For background into this controversy and Abelard’s intervention, see Martin M. Tweedale, Abailard on Universals (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1976), 89–132. For Abelard’s position, see John Marebon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 174 – 201. See also Yukio Iwakuma, “Influence,” in A Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 306 –12; and John Marebon, “Life, Milieu, and Intellectual Contexts,” in ibid., 27– 34. 35. His position could also be construed as undermining the commonality of humankind in favor of a theory that insisted on the uniqueness of the individual. At one point he argues the inadequacy of the Universal since “There do not seem to be any things to which universal nouns are applied, since all things subsist distinctly in themselves and do not agree.” Logica Ingredientibus, as cited by Tweedale, Abailard on Universals, 162. 36. Theologia ‘Summi boni’ 1.36 – 38, ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 13 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1987), 98– 99; cf. Theologia Christiana 1.98, ed. E. M. Buytaert, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 12 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), 112–13; Theologia ‘Scholarium’ 1.158, ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 13 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1987), 383. 37. M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 69– 70; Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 55– 63. For the historiography of the school, see John Marenbon, “Philosophy and Theology,” in European Transformations, ed. Noble and Van Engen, 412–14. 38. Abelard’s final Theologia ‘Scholarium’ also builds on the previous two works. See the concordance in the editions of Theologia ‘Summi boni’; Theologia ‘Scholarium,’ ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 13 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1987), 75– 81.

230 /

Dyan Elliott

39. Theologia Christiana 2.15, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 12, 139; cf. Sic et Non q. 25, ed. Blanche B. Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 167– 69. 40. John Marebon, “Peter Abelard’s Theory of the Virtues and Its Context,” in Knowledge, Discipline, and Power in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of David Luscombe, ed. Joseph Canning et al. ( Leiden: Brill, 2011), 237– 38. According to an anonymous student’s record, the question of whether individuals could be saved before Christ was also addressed by Alan of Lille, who resolves it in the negative. Although the question is allegedly “Whether those who were before or under the law would be able to be saved without faith in Jesus Christ,” it is limited to a treatment of Old Testament figures, in “Deux questions sur la foi inspirées d’Alain de Lille,” ed. Raynaud de Lage, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 14 (1943– 45): 323– 26. 41. Sic et Non, q. 25, pp. 167– 69. 42. Ibid., q. 106, pp. 348– 49. Abelard goes on to cite the careful equivocation of the biographer that this did not mean that Trajan was actually admitted into heaven. Cf. the quaestio that addresses whether a person who loved God perfectly could be saved without baptism: q. 10, in Charles Burnett and David Luscombe, eds., “A New Student for Peter Abelard: The Marginalia in British Library MS Cotton Faustina A. X.,” in Itinéraires de la raison: Etudes de philosophie médiévale offertes à Maria Cândida Pacheco, ed. J. F. Meirinhos (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2005), 178. 43. God allowed Trajan to return to the flesh briefly so he could be converted: Paradiso 20, 106 –17, in The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum ( New York: Knopf, 1995), 475. As Barbara Newman pointed out to me, Langland goes still further claiming that Trajan was saved not by prayers from Gregory but for his own goodness. 44. See Jaeger’s discussion of Abelard’s privileging of the inner over the outer man and how this philosophy could help to exculpate an individual, such as himself, who had inspired so much scandal, in Envy of Angels, 244 – 45. 45. Ethics, ed. and trans. David Luscombe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 64 – 65. 46. Ibid., 66 – 67. 47. Ibid., 44 – 45. 48. Ibid., 45. 49. Burnett and Luscombe, “New Student for Peter Abelard,” 169. 50. Ibid., 169– 70. 51. Ibid., 170 – 71. 52. Ibid., 172. 53. This is on a continuum with other arguments he made on behalf of the first mother. See Mary McLaughlin, “Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women: Twelfth Century ‘Feminism’ in Theory and Practice,” in Pierre Abélard; Pierre le

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 231 Vénérable: Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu du XIIe siècle, Abbaye de Cluny 2 au 9 juillet 1972 ( Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1975), 287– 333. 54. Burnett and Luscombe, “New Student for Peter Abelard,” q. 6, pp. 173– 74. It seems to me that something more is needed to turn Eve’s snack into a meritorious act. Our account of this quaestio is, after all, based on the notes a student took during one of Abelard’s lectures. It seems likely that the student could not write fast enough and missed a turn in the argument. 55. Marie de France, Lanval, ll. 5–152, in Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert ( London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995), 58– 61; Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, trans., in The Lais of Marie de France, 2d ed. ( London: Penguin, 1999), 73– 75. 56. Eliduc, ll. 1006 – 66, in Lais, 152– 54; trans., 124 – 25. 57. Yonec, ll. 91–104, in Lais, 84; trans., 87. 58. Yonec, ll. 145– 90, in Lais, 85– 86; trans., 88. 59. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 94. 60. Bisclavret ll. 145– 48, in Lais, 52; trans., 70. 61. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica dist. 2, c. 19, ed. James F. Dimock, in Giraldi Cambrensis opera (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), 5:102. 62. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 95. For a reading of werewolves as indicators of ethnicity, see Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity, 86 – 87. As David Shyovitz has argued, Talmudic scholars in the Rhineland were struggling with the same issue, again using the werewolf to think with. 63. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica dist. 2, c. 19, p. 102. 64. See Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature: From the Twelfth Century to Dante ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 73– 74. 65. See particularly Walter Map’s De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles dist. 2.12–15, 29; 4.6, 11, ed. M. R. James, rev. ed. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 156 – 64, 204 – 6, 315– 40, 351– 64; and book 3 of Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), especially 61– 62, 64, 66, 85– 86, and 93; 674 – 78, 680 – 83, 684 – 88, 717– 30, and 743– 46. 66. Also note that the lady made her initial appeal to God, not that this is necessarily a warrant against demonic trickery, however. Even so, Michelle Sweeney argues that the magic in question is “sanctified by God,” despite its adulterous tenor: Magic in Medieval Romance from Chrétien de Troyes to Geoffrey Chaucer ( Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 92. 67. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica dist. 2, c. 19, pp. 106 – 7. See Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 16 –17. 68. The last great Eucharistic controversy was between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc. See Gary Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament according to the Theologians,

232 /

Dyan Elliott

c. 1080 –c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 35– 43; and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17– 20. 69. Guibert’s main treatment of the Eucharist occurs in the course of the second book of his De pignoribus sanctorum, Patrologia Latina 156:629– 50; trans., 219– 48. See Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 132– 72; Macy, Theologies, 80 – 82. 70. Macy, Theologies, 114 –15. This is according to William of St. Thierry. The claim is not present in any of Abelard’s works, however, and may have been circulated in the course of his teaching. 71. Yonec, ll. 86 – 90, in Lais, 84; trans., 87. 72. Heloise, ep. 2, in Héloïse–Abélard: Correspondance, Lettres I–VI, ed. François d’Amboise ( Paris: Editions Hermann, 2007), 104; Betty Radice, trans., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, rev. ed. M. T. Clanchy ( Middlesex: Penguin Books, 2003), 51. Barbara Newman also compares Marie de France with Heloise with respect to the speculation that she, too, was an abbess and that both women may have had much in common with the first wife’s retreat to the cloister in Eliduc: “Liminalities: Literate Women in the Long Twelfth Century,” in European Transformations, ed. Van Engen and Noble, 371– 72. 73. Steven Justice argues that the many exempla concerning Eucharistic miracles were to risk provoking doubt in order to spark a more reflective faith: “Eucharistic Miracle and Eucharistic Doubt,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012): 307– 32. See also Sabine Flanagan, Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 71– 73. The fact that both Gerald and Marie were writing in a Plantagenet ambiance begs the question of whether their two idiosyncratic approaches to the Eucharist were in some way related. Although it may well be that Marie wrote as early as the 1160s, unfortunately, the terminus ante quem for both works is the death of Henry II in 1189. So it is impossible to say with any certainty if and how one may have influenced the other. But given that Marie is, after all, from France, the site of heated Eucharistic discussions, it is not difficult to construct an imaginative ( possibly counterfactual) narrative in which Gerald heard or read some of Marie’s lais, perhaps Bisclavret and Yonec, and this started him thinking about Eucharistic werewolves. 74. According to Burgess and Busby, although the lais must have been written by the 1180s, they could have been written as early as the 1160s since they show no influence of Chrétien de Troyes: Burgess and Busby, introduction, in Lais, 14. For the chronology of the different recensions of Gerald’s Topograhia Hibernica, see Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146– 1223 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), app. 1, 213. 75. These are the terms used by Brian Stock, in Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester ( Princeton: Princeton University

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 233 Press, 1972), and Peter Dronke, in Fabula, respectively. For an overview of twelfth-century approaches to myth, see Stock, Myth and Science, 31– 62. 76. Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000 –1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 185. This tendency is illuminated in Barbara Newman’s God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), which delineates how authors use personae such as Sapientia or the Goddess Natura in order to explore the female aspect of God. 77. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 36. 78. See ibid., 52– 56. 79. Ibid., 80 – 88. 80. Clavis physicae, c. 103, ed. Paolo Lucentini ( Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1974), 75. Cf. ibid., cc. 106, 272, pp. 76 – 77, 219– 20. 81. Ibid., c. 70, p. 49. Guibert makes a similar formulation symbolically versus literally: Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 44. 82. The persona is first introduced into medieval literature by Bernard Silverstris. See Newman, God and the Goddesses, 51– 66; George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 58– 72; and Stock, Myth and Science, 63 ff. On integumentum, see Stock, Myth and Science, 48. Despite Alan’s undoubted mastery of this medium, Chenu still notes that Alan is one of the best witnesses to the tensions between Platonism and orthodoxy: Nature, Man, and Society, 96. 83. Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae 6, ed. N. M. Häring, Studi Medievali ser. 3, 19, 2 (1978): 825; James J. Sheridan, trans., The Plaint of Nature ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 117. 84. Ibid., 8, p. 841; trans., 146. 85. Ibid., 10, p. 849; trans., 163. Venus is also very much at fault in Alan’s off-color poem on whether it is preferable to marry a virgin or matron. ( The answer is predictable.) It bears much in common with The Plaint to the extent that many manuscripts treated it as the ending of the poem. See Nikolus M. Häring’s edition, “The Poem Vix nodosum, by Alan of Lille,” Medioevo 3 (1978): 165– 85. A prose translation of the poem by J. J. Sheridan is included on 167– 70. 86. Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, ed. R. Bossut ( Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1955), 1: ll. 216 –17; James J. Sheridan, trans., Anticlaudianus or the Good and Perfect Man ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1973), 54. 87. Ibid., prose prologue, 56; trans., 40 – 41. 88. De fide catholica contra haereticos sui temporibus, praesertim Albigenses, Patrologia Latina 210: 305– 430. Book 1 of the treatise (cols. 307– 78) is devoted to contemporary dualists. Parts of this book have been translated in Heresies of the High Middle Ages, ed. and trans. Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 215–17. I have purposefully avoided

234 /

Dyan Elliott

using the terms Cathar or Albigensian because Alan does not use them. The term Cathar is first used by Eckbert of Schönau in his Sermones tredecim contra haereticos (ca. 1164), Patrologia Latina 195:11–102. See Uwe Brunn, Des Contestataires aux ‘Cathares’ ( Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2006), 218–19, 238. The use of the term Albigensian only definitively became associated with the heresy in 1209, after the so-called Albigensian Crusade. See Jean-Louis Biget, “ ‘Les Albigeois’: Remarques sur une denomination,” in Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polémique et pouvoirs avant l’Inquisition, ed. Monique Zerner ( Nice: Centre d’Études Médiévale, 1998), 219– 55. This is not to say that I am siding with Mark Pegg et al. that the dualist heresy was largely the imposition of polemical writers and later inquisitors. R. I. Moore’s War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe ( London: Profile Books, 2012) also shares this position. See, however, Peter Biller’s very penetrating discussion of the sources, the problems they present, and on the general reliability of the early inquisitors regarding the basic beliefs of the heretics: “Through a Glass Darkly: Seeing Medieval Heresy,” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson ( London: Routledge, 2001), 308– 26. It has traditionally been assumed that Alan had firsthand knowledge of these heretics because he joined the Cistercians late in life, is reputed to have taught at Montpellier, and addressed the treatise to Count William VIII of Montpellier. See Jean Longère’s introductory volume to Alan’s Liber poenitentiales ( Lille: Librairie Giard, 1965), 1:217– 21. Recently this view has come under attack: see Moore’s War on Heresy, 219– 20. 89. Prologue, De fide catholica, Patrologia Latina 210:307– 8. 90. Ibid., 1.1, col. 307; trans., 215. 91. Ibid., 1.2, col. 307; trans., 215–16. 92. Ibid., 1.3, col. 309. 93. It is this tendency that leads Fichtenau to differentiate the heretics from Platonists: Heretics and Scholars, 175, 178. 94. De fide catholica, 1.9, Patrologia Latina 210:316; trans., 217. 95. Ibid., 1.10, cols. 316–17. This also required an in-depth explanation of what led to this belief in the first place: ibid., 1.11, col. 317. 96. Ibid., 1.12, cols. 317–18. 97. Ibid.,1.13, cols. 318. 98. Ibid.,1.14, col. 318. 99. Ibid., 1.19– 20, cols. 321– 23. 100. Ibid., 1.21, col. 323. 101. Ibid., 1.22, col. 323. 102. Ibid., 1.24, cols. 324 – 25. 103. Ibid., 1.47 ff.; 1.57 ff., col. 352 ff.; 359 ff. Alan’s later manual for confessors will draw on some of these discussions. See Liber poenitentialis 4.4, 2:164 – 65 and 164n.

The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 235 104. Edina Bozóky, ed., Le livre secret des cathares: Interrogatio Iohannis ( Paris: Beauchesne, 1980). 105. Verbeke, “Philosophy and History,” as cited by Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars, 155. 106. “In Dominica Palmarum,” in Alain de Lille: Texts inédits, ed. MarieThérèse d’Alverny (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1965), 247. See Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars, 163, 167. Fichtenau also notes the puzzling omission of humanity’s fall, original sin, and redemption through Christ: ibid., 188. 107. Antoine Dondaine, ed., Manifestatio haeresis Albigensium et Lugdunensium, app. 1, in “Durand de Huesca et la polémique anti-cathare,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 29 (1959): 268; Wakefield and Evans, trans., Heresies, 231– 32; see also 718n11. 108. Moneta of Cremona, Adversus Catharos et Valdenses libri quinque 2.1, ed. T. A. Ricchini ( Rome: Palladis, 1743; repr. Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg, 1964), 110; Wakefield and Evans, trans., Heresies, 318.

Nine

Th e C r o s s i n M e d i e va l Monastic Life giles constable

Christian life in the Middle Ages was frequently compared to the cross. Jesus said that “He that taketh not up his cross and followeth me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:35) and that “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” ( Matthew 16:24). Saint Ephraim in the fourth century wrote that “He subjected all peoples to the infirmity of the cross. Extend your arms to the cross in order that the arm of the crucified Lord may be extended to you.”1 Saint John Chrysostom described solitude as a rest from the cross of life.2 Martin of Tours, while he was still a layman, told the emperor Julian that he would fight without arms “in the name of the lord Jesus, by the sign of the cross.”3 Christians should look at Christ on the cross, according to Rabanus Maurus, as if he were dying at that moment and should meditate in their hearts on the image and on the suprascription “since God is also man.”4 And Odo of Cluny, in his Occupatio, said that all faithful Christians must bind their limbs to the cross.5 The sign of the cross — both visible and invisible, physical and symbolic— was ubiquitous in medieval society, both as a blessing and as a precaution against danger. 236

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 237 These ideas and practices developed as time went on. Many examples can be cited from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Henry of Marcy stressed that not only the lowest and middle ranks of people “but also the highest should attach the cross to themselves, indeed they should glory in attaching themselves to the cross.”6 The crosses born by carnal, animal, and spiritual men, in whose hearts Christ hangs daily, were described in an anonymous text from the circle of Bernard of Clairvaux.7 And Thomas of Citeaux, in his commentary on the Song of Songs, distinguished between those who bore the sign of Christ (that is, the cross) on their bodies, in their hearts —“by remembering, understanding, and loving God,” he said — and on their foreheads —“by glorifying the passion of Christ and the victory of the cross.” The first was a sign of human infirmity, the second of divinity, and the third of preaching both the passion and the humanity of Christ.8 Precisely what Thomas meant here is uncertain, but his words emphasize the inner and outer functions of the cross. There is by implication a spiritual hierarchy of types and degrees of attachment to the cross. What was true of all Christians applied even more to those who were dedicated to the religious life, the monks, nuns, hermits, and canons. The highest rank of Christians in the three sources cited above was probably monks. The anonymous author of the treatise On the professions of monks, which was written at Bec in the first half of the twelfth century, argued that the monk was he “who is attached to the cross, has no power of his own, and cannot move according to his own will.”9 The cross was the physical sign of commitment to monastic life. Pachomius, who is considered the founder of cenobitic monasticism, wanted the cowls of his monks to be marked with a purple cross,10 and the headdress of Coptic monks is still marked with a cross. Bede said that monks should bear the cross on their foreheads, like all Christians, and the likeness of the crown of thorns in the form of their tonsure.11 In the twelfth century, Heloise wrote to Abelard that nuns should have the sign of the cross woven in white on the dark veils over their heads in order to show that they belonged particularly to Christ “by the integrity of their bodies” and that this mark “should strike fear into the hearts of any of the faithful and make it more abhorrent to them to burn with desire for these

238 /

Giles Constable

women.”12 Arnulf of Lisieux, in a letter written about 1159, said that a monk should express obedience to his superior by voice and in writing “with an oath also physically intervening [and] with the added impression of the saving cross.”13 This suggests that the cross was a mark of confirmation, like the cross put at the beginning of a document or in place of a signature. It distinguished the monk or nun as a bearer of the cross and sealed his or her obligation to renounce the world. There are countless references—many more than can be mentioned here—in the Lives of medieval holy men and women, most of whom were professed religious, to taking, following, bearing, and meditating on the cross and to crucifying themselves to the world. Their sufferings, including poverty, nudity, and solitude, as well as physical mortifications, were often compared to the cross, and their lives were called crucifixions. Peter Damiani described himself as “the uttermost servant of the cross of Christ” in the salutation to one of his letters.14 “We carry the cross on our forehead,” he said in his sermon “On the invention of the cross,” “but we hide the same cross much more salubriously in our heart.”15 For Bernard of Clairvaux, in his sixth sermon on Lent, “All the things that the world loves—the pleasure of the flesh, honors, riches, the vain praises of men— are a cross for me.”16 And Aelred of Rievaulx called his monks “not only adorers of the cross of Christ but also professors and even lovers of the same cross. . . . Our order,” he said, “is the cross of Christ.”17 Bernard and Aelred were Cistercians, but the same view was held by black monks, regular canons, and religious women. For the author of the treatise On preserving the unity of the church, which was written at Hirsau in the late eleventh century, the cross of the Lord was not only that on which He was crucified, but also that which is fitted to the virtues of all the disciplines in the course of life: “Whence not only the whole life and institution of a monk but also every Christian action is described in the sign of the cross.”18 In the Stimulus of love, which has been attributed to Anselm, Bernard, and Eckbert of Schönau, the breadth of the cross was compared to love, its length to eternity, its height to omnipotence, and its depth to wisdom: “Attach my hands to it, and my feet, and place on Your servant the entire form of Your passion.”19 And for Peter of Celle, “The whole form of the claustral discipline emanated from the cross. . . . The cloistered person who is truly cloistered should crucify himself en-

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 239 tirely with his vices and desires,” stripped, suffering, and attached to the wood, so that only his tongue can move in prayer.20 Elsewhere Peter described the soul as “co-suffering in the passions of Christ, co-crucified, and co-dying with Him.”21 Stephen of Muret, the founder of the Grandmontines, was said to have carried the cross of Christ on his mind and body.22 Canons were described by Anselm of Havelberg, who was himself a canon, as “bound to the cross of obedience.”23 And Godwin of Salisbury wrote, in his Meditations addressed to a recluse named Rainild, that to carry the cross is to offer one’s own body, which contains the form of the cross.24 Nuns likewise should embrace “the length, width, height, and depth of the charity” of the cross, according to Wolbero of Saint-Pantaleon in Cologne in his commentary on the Song of Songs,25 and the delight of the anchoresses in the Ancrene Riwle was “to be painfully and ignominiously suspended with Jesus on His cross.”26 Among the most elaborate discussions of the crucifixion of monks is found in the Dialogue of miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach, who distinguished between the long cross of the monastic order, as he called it, referring presumably to its long duration as well, perhaps, as its size, and the short or brief cross of pilgrimage. When Bernard of Clairvaux preached the crusade, Caesarius said, “He signed some [for pilgrimage] and received others into the order. He who was touched and inwardly instructed by the unction of the Holy Spirit received the cross not, however, of the overseas expedition but of the order, judging it more salutary to impress a long cross on his mind than to sew a narrow band temporarily on his clothing.” Caesarius went on to stress the superiority of the cross of the order to the cross of pilgrimage.27 Elsewhere, in the section “On the crucifixion of monks [religiosi]” he distinguished inner crucifixion by compassion to outer crucifixion by mortification of the flesh: “Those who are of Christ, who can say with the Apostle that ‘We are crucified with Christ’ (Gal. 2:20), have crucified their flesh, that is, they have attached it to the cross, fighting against the vices of works and the concupiscences of desires.” The right hand of a monk is attached to the cross by the nail of obedience, the left hand by the nail of patience, and the feet by the nail of humility.28 Caesarius gave an account of two visions of a priest who

240 /

Giles Constable

was angry with his abbot. In one he saw the congregation of his abbey as the body of Christ and the strictness of the rule as the cross. In the other he saw Christ on the cross “not in painting, not in sculpture, but in a body of flesh,” whose obedience the prior should follow.29 Monks who were tempted to become pilgrims or crusaders were sometimes prevented from leaving their monasteries by visions of the cross forbidding them to depart. James of Vitry said in one of his sermons that Christ stayed on the cross in order to show that monks should stay on the cross of religious life.30 Count William II of Nevers became a lay brother at La Chartreuse rather than a crusader, changing his belt into rope and silk into wood, according to his biographer: “Bearing the cross of the Lord every day and following Him constantly [ he was] a true pilgrim of the world and did not cease to progress from virtue to virtue before he deserved to see the God of gods in Syon.”31 Christ gave a golden cross to Christina of Markyate in a vision and instructed her to hold it firmly upright and to remember that He Himself bore the cross and that all who wished to go to Jerusalem must carry the cross.32 The abbot of Mortemer warned a knight who had taken the cross of crusading that he should crucify himself for Christ as a monk rather than bear the cross on his clothing,33 and Hildegard of Bingen told Abbess Hazzicha of Krauftal and two companions who were “marked with the sign of Christ by which you go to the heavenly Jerusalem” not to go on an earthly pilgrimage.34 Ralph Niger, in his treatise On military matters and the triple way of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, written in 1187 and 1188, said that clerics and religious (deuotati) and “those who by their profession constantly bear the cross of the Lord on their bodies” should not also carry the cross of pilgrimage or fight the Saracens.35 In some cases the monk’s experience of the cross was a physical reality. Gerard of Saint Albinus at Angers carried a lead cross.36 Gilbert of Merton secretly wore an iron chain around his loins, which was compared by his biographer to “the cross of Christ on his body,” and Raymond of Piacenza, who died in 1200, went around with a cross on his shoulder.37 Some holy men and women prayed with their arms extended, in the form of a cross, or lay on the ground with their arms and legs extended, and a few bore or imposed on their bodies the marks or stigmata of the crucifixion. Savonarola was said to have had the image of the cross

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 241 and the name Jesus imprinted on his chest during prayer.38 The Premonstratensian canon Philip of Harvengt identified the location of the abbey of Prémontré with a cross because it was in a valley of which the four branches, going east and west and north and south, stretched out “in the manner of a cross.” God made the place in the likeness of a cross, Philip said, in order that the inhabitants would conform to the crucifixion.39 Many of the references to monastic cross bearing were symbolic and metaphorical, however, and applied to particular aspects of the lives of professed religious. In the remainder of this paper I shall look at the importance of the cross in monastic profession, costume, prayer, and death. It was customary from the earliest times to place a cross in the hand of a new monk or nun and to mark him or her with the sign of the cross.40 When Saint Anthusa withdrew from the world, according to her Acts, which date probably from the end of the fifth century, the bishop of Tarsus gave her a cross which she still had when she died twenty-three years later.41 Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite said, in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, that after a new monk ratified his commitments, “The priest marks him with the sign of the cross and cuts his hair, invoking the three persons of the divine beatitude.”42 In the west Syrian rite the sign was on the shoulder, but its position may have varied from region to region or even from monastery to monastery.43 The precise significance of this cross is also uncertain. It may have been not only a blessing and a mark of the new monk’s or nun’s devotion to Christ, but also a sign of divine protection and of an orientation towards Jerusalem, with which the cross was associated in early Christian and medieval spirituality. It may also have been connected with the ancient concept of entry to monasticism as a second baptism, which opened the way to a new life. The symbolism of the cross permeated monastic life and customs. The habit was said to be modeled on the cross.44 William of Gellone put on the apostolic dress “in the form of the cross [instar crucis],” and, according to the eleventh-century Canterbury pontifical, the cowl that was placed over the head of a novice had “the form of the most holy and venerated cross.”45 The canons of Barnwell arranged their clothing “in the form of a cross” when they sat or bowed, except at meals or in the lavatory.46 The author of the treatise On preserving the unity of the church said that the monastic cowl “had the appearance of the cross through its four

242 /

Giles Constable

extended parts so that this four-part union by every part restrains and leads to heaven him who is crucified to the world.”47 He continued with the passage cited above saying that the entire life of a monk and every Christian act was described in the cross.48 The costume of the mendicants was likewise compared to the cross. Thomas of Celano said, in his First Life of Francis of Assisi, that Francis designed for himself “a tunic that bore a likeness to the cross” in order to ward off temptation and to crucify his flesh by its roughness.49 Both monks and friars could be, and often were, said literally to carry the cross. The liturgical life of monks and nuns was also filled with the image of the cross. Some ascetics, including Saint Gall and Dominic Loricatus, prayed with their arms extended in the form of a cross.50 The monks of Cluny were especially celebrated for their devotion to the cross, and their liturgical ceremonies in honor of the cross exercised a wide influence outside Cluny itself.51 Peter the Venerable’s statute that the devotional crosses presented to dying monks should be made of wood rather than metal was inspired by his desire that they resemble the true cross.52 The passionate devotion to the cross of Peter’s mother Raingard, who became a nun at Marcigny toward the end of her life, was described in his letter written to his brothers after her death.53 Abbots and priests in monasteries often wore a pectoral cross, and from the sixth century on, abbots in Gallic and Spanish monasteries carried crosses, probably as marks of jurisdiction and pastoral care.54 Many individual monks and nuns kept crosses and crucifixes in their cells and prayed before them. The seventh-century Nestorian ascetic Dādisho’ adored and embraced the cross in his cell,55 and Saint William of Vercelli, the founder of Montevergine, who died in 1142, prayed at night before a cross in his cell.56 The use of crosses in monastic churches, refectories, and chapter houses spread especially in the ninth century.57 Monks and nuns participated in and to some degree inspired the growing devotion to the crucifix that marked the spirituality of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.58 The cross figured prominently in the private visions and religious experiences of monks and nuns. Odo of Saint-Martin at Autun was seen raised up, embracing a cross halfway up a wall; Richard of SaintVanne, after praying before the cross and looking at it with tears, heard a voice saying, “You have blessed Me on earth, and I bless you”; and Ru-

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 243 pert of Deutz embraced an image of Christ on the cross above an altar in the church of Saint Laurence at Liège.59 “I adore your cross, O Lord,” Damiani said in one of his prayers, “I adore your life-giving death”; in his sermon “On the exaltation of the holy cross,” he stressed almost every aspect of the cult of the cross and urged monks to meditate on the position of the crucified body.60 “I often see with the most immediate perception of my mind,” he wrote, “Christ fixed with nails, hanging on the cross, and I eagerly receive the dripping blood in my mouth placed below.”61 Rupert of Deutz, in his dispute with the Jewish convert Herman, said that Christians who outwardly contemplated the image of Christ’s death on the cross were inwardly incited to love Him.62 And Gerhoh of Reichersberg wrote in his commentary on the Psalms that “When you see with your eyes the life-giving image of the poor and destitute Man hanging on the cross, realize inside in your heart that you see the Lord face to face.”63 Meditations of this type prepared the way for a sense of identification with Christ and of bearing His cross. Saint William Firmat, who died in about 1090, “crucifying the world to himself and himself to the world, and recalling in frequent meditation what and how greatly the Lord suffered for him on the cross, took his cross when he was about to visit the holy places of Jerusalem and began to follow in the footsteps of the Lord.”64 This shows that the two crosses of monastic life and of pilgrimage were not always incompatible. This devotion showed itself especially at the time of death.65 Abbot Attala of Bobbio, who died in 627, had a cross brought to him when he was dying and addressed it in emotional terms: “Greetings, nourishing cross, you who carry the price of the world and, bearing the eternal banners, bring medicine to our wounds; it is you who by His forbidden blood, in order to save the human race, descended from heaven into this vale of tears, you the second Adam who progressing in the path of the first Adam removed the ancient stain by a new washing.”66 The dying Saint Benedict is shown with his arms extended in the form of a cross in an illustration in MS Vat. lat. 1202, f. 80, which dates from about 1070.67 Robert of Arbrissel, when he was on his deathbed, called for the wood of the holy cross,68 and Robert of Betun, who was prior of Llanthony before he became bishop of Hereford, addressed a long soliloquy to the cross when he was dying at the Council of Rheims in 1148.69

244 /

Giles Constable

The cross played an important part in the elaborate ceremonies surrounding the death of a monk at Cluny, described in the customary by Bernard of Cluny.70 The dying monk was first marked with the sign of the cross on his eyes, ears, lips, nose, hands, feet, and inquina, meaning his groin or genitals. He then kissed and adored a cross, and a cross was put on his face, presumably to enable him to kiss it more easily. After death, his body was laid on the ground on ashes sprinkled in the form of the cross and, finally, a cross was attached to the structure holding his bier. The cross thus played a central role in the lives of medieval monks and nuns from the time of their profession until their final hours. They were surrounded by images of the cross and constantly reminded of its power and significance. They had a deep personal relationship with the cross, and there was almost no distinction between contemplating the sufferings of Christ on the cross and participating in them. The cross marked not only their outer lives, including their physical appearance and costume and their behavior in church and in the monastery, but also, and more significantly, their inner lives and sufferings, of which every aspect reflected the significance of the cross.

Notes 1. Louis Leloir, Saint Ephrem: Commentaire de l’évangile concordant. Version arménienne, Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium, 137, 145: Scriptores armeniani 1– 2 ( Louvain: E. Peeters, 1953– 54), II, 213 (xx, 23, commenting on Luke 23.39), who went on to say that he who did not extend his hand to the cross could not move his hand to Christ’s table. 2. Chrysostom, Expositio in psalmum 9.2, in Patrologia graeca, LV, 123. 3. Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, 4.5, ed. Jacques Fontaine, Sulpice Sévère. Vie de saint Martin, Sources chrétiennes 133– 35 ( Paris: Cerf, 1967– 69), I, 260. See Olivier Guillot, Saint Martin de Tours. Apôtre des pauvres (336– 397) (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 87– 88. 4. Rabanus Maurus, Opusculum de passione Domini, in Patrologia Latina [ hereafter PL] CXII, 1425B. 5. Odo of Cluny, Occupatio, VI, 163, ed. Anton Swoboda ( Leipzig: Teubner, 1900), 123. 6. Henry of Marcy, Tractatus de peregrinante civitate Dei, 13, in PL, CCIV, 357A.

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 245 7. H.-M. Rochais, Enquête sur les sermons divers et les sentences de saint Bernard, Analecta sacri ordinis Cisterciensis 18.3– 4 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1962), 90. 8. Thomas of Cîteaux, In cantica canticorum, 12, in PL, CCVI, 810BC. 9. Anonymous of Bec, Tractatus de professionibus monachorum, ed. Giles Constable, Three Treatises from Bec on the Nature of Monastic Life, Medieval Academy Books 109 ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 58. 10. Matias Augé, “L’abito monastico dalle origini alla regola di S. Benedetto,” Claretianum 16 (1976): 56 – 57; Claude Peifer, Monastic Spirituality ( New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), 184. 11. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People V, 21, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 548. 12. The Letters of Heloise and Abelard, trans. and ed. Mary McLaughlin and Bonnie Wheeler ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 181, Ep. 8. Cf. David Luscombe, ed., The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 483, Ep. 8.103. 13. Frank Barlow, ed., The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Camden Third Series 61 ( London: Royal Historical Society, 1939), 26, Ep. 19. 14. Peter Damiani, Ep. 50 (= Opusc. 15), in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, ed. Kurt Reindel, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 4 ( Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1983– 93), II, 79. Abbot Pontius of Cluny called himself “crucis Christi . . . seruus” in the heading of the letter published by Pietro Zerbi, “Ancora interno a Ponzio e allo ‘scisma’ cluniacense. La ‘svolta’ del 1124 – 25,” in Società, Istituzioni, Spiritualità. Studi in onore di Cinzio Violante, Collectanea 1 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1994), II, 1084. 15. Peter Damiani, Serm. 18, in PL, CXLIV, 610B. On Damiani and the cross, see Valentino Vailati, “La devozione all’umanità di Cristo nelle opere di San Pier Damiani,” Divus Thomas 46 (1943): 85; and Giovanni Tabacco, “Privilegium amoris. Aspetti della spiritualità romualdina,” II Saggiatore 4 (1954): 324 – 43. 16. Bernard of Clairvaux, In quadragesima sermo 6, 3, in S. Bernardi opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H.-M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957– 77), V, 379. 17. Aelred of Rievaulx, Serm. 9, in PL, CXCV, 263C-D. 18. De unitate ecclesiae conservanda, II, 42, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum 2 ( Hanover: Hahn, 1891– 1897), 278. On De unitate, see Zelina Zafarana, “Richerche sui ‘Liber de unitate ecclesiae conservanda,’ ” Studi medievali 7, no. 2 (1966): 626 – 29; and I. S. Robinson, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 94 – 95. 19. Ekbert of Schönau (attr.), Stimulus amoris, in PL, CLVIII (among the works of Anselm), 758D– 9A. See André Wilmart, “La tradition des prières de saint Anselme. Tables et notes,” Revue bénédictine 36 (1924): 59.

246 /

Giles Constable

20. Peter of Celle, De disciplina claustrali, 6, in PL, CCII, 1108D, 1110BC. See Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, Théologie 41, 42, 59 ( Paris: Aubier, 1959– 64), I, 55. 21. Peter of Celle, Mosaici tabernaculi mystica et moralis expositio, 1, in PL, CCII, 1053BC. 22. Stephen of Lecey, Vita Stephani Muretensis, 31, in Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio mediaeualis [ hereafter CC:CM] VIII, 120; Gerard Itier, Conclusio vitae Stephani Muretensis, 2, in ibid., 321– 22. 23. Anselm of Havelberg, Epistola apologetica pro ordine canonicorum regularium, in PL, CLXXXVIII, 1125C. 24. Godwin of Salisbury, Meditationes, in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 96, f. 11r. 25. Wolbero of St. Pantaleon, Commentaria super Canticum Canticorum, praef., in PL, CXCV, 1016CD. 26. James Morton, ed. and trans., Ancrene Riwle, Camden Society 57 (London: Camden Society, 1853), 355. On this work, which is now commonly called the Ancrene Wisse, see the references in Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66, n. 95. 27. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, I, 6, ed. Joseph Strange (Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), I, 12–13. On the cross of crusading, see Giles Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century ( London: Ashgate, 2008), 45– 91. 28. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, VIII, 19, ed. Strange, II, 97. 29. Ibid., IV, 18, ed. Strange, I, 189– 91. 30. Thomas F. Crane, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the “Sermones Vulgares” of Jacques de Vitry, Publications of the Folk-Lore Society 26 ( London: David Nutt, 1890), 127– 28, no. 305. In his Vita of Mary of Oignies, James said that she “crucem tollebat”: Acta Sanctorum, 23 June, IV, 641F. Saint Romuald told a self-willed hermit who recognized no superior that “If you carry the cross of Christ, it is added that you should not leave the obedience of Christ”: Peter Damiani, Vita beati Romualdi, 24, ed. Giovanni Tabacco, Fonti per la storia d’Italia 94 ( Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1957), 51. 31. Decima Douie and David Farmer, eds., Magna vita sancti Hugonis, IV, 12(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), II, 57. 32. Charles H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Christina of Markyate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 106, cap. 41. 33. J. Bouvet, “Le récit de la fondation de Mortemer,” Collectanea ordinis Cisterciensium reformatorum 22 (1960): 152. 34. Peter Dronke, Women Writers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 258.

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 247 35. Radulfus Niger, De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitanae (1187/88), III, 90, ed. Ludwig Schmugge, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters 6 ( Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977), 196; cf. IV, 10 (204) on the two crosses of pilgrimage and “the higher life.” 36. On Gerard, see Jean-Hervé Foulon, “Solitude et pauvreté volontaire chez les ermites du Val de Loire,” in Liber Largitorius. Etudes d’histoire médiévale offertes à Pierre Toubert par ses élèves, Sciences historiques et philologiques, V. Hautes études médiévales et modernes 84 (Geneva: Ecole pratique des hautes études, 2003), 399– 401, 412. According to the Miracula Girardi sancti Albini Andegavensis, in Acta Sanctorum, 4 Nov., II.l, 506D, Gerard carried the cross voluntarily (sponte), like Christ, thus outdoing Simon, who carried it as a duty. 37. Marvin L. Colker, “Latin Texts Concerning Gilbert, Founder of Merton Priory,” Studia monastica 12 (1970): 269, cap. 8; Kenneth Baxter Wolf, The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis Reconsidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 73, 76. 38. Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 86; cf. 281, where he later denied this. 39. Philip of Harvengt, De continentia clericorum, 126, in PL, CCIII, 857D– 8A. 40. See the references in Giles Constable, “The Ceremonies and Symbolism of Entering Religious Life and Taking the Monastic Habit, from the Fourth to the Twelfth Century,” in Segni e riti nella chiesa altomedievale occidentale. Spoleto, 11–17 aprile 1985, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 33 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1987), reprinted in Giles Constable, Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe, Variorum Collected Studies 541 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), Art. VII, 796n74 and 817. 41. Franz J. Dölger, “Das Kreuz bei der Mönchsweihe,” Antike und Christentum 5 (1936): 291– 92. 42. René Roques, “Eléments pour une théologie de l’état monastique selon Denys l’Aréopagite,” in Théologie de la vie monastique, Théologie 49 (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 284 – 85; Pierre Raffin, Les rituels orientaux de la profession monastique, Spiritualité orientale 4 (Bellefontaine: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1969), 22– 24. 43. Raffin, Rituels, 106 and n. 177. 44. See, in addition to the works cited in note 10, Benedictus van Haeften, S. Benedictus illustratus sive disquisitionum monasticarum libri XII (Antwerp, 1644), 480 – 83 ( V, 3,5), citing among others Honorius Augustodunensis on the cross shape of the cowl and tunic; Constable, “Ceremonies,” 817, citing Ps-Anselm, De similitudinibus, and Hamelin of St. Albans. 45. William of Gellone, Vita, II, 23, in Acta Sanctorum, 28 May, VI, 817A; Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 325. See Constable, “Ceremonies,” 813.

248 /

Giles Constable

46. John Willis Clark, ed., The Observances in Use at the Augustinian Priory of S. Giles and S. Andrew at Barnwell, Cambridgeshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), 86. 47. De unitate ecclesiae conservanda, II, 42, 277. 48. See note 18 above. 49. Thomas of Celano, First Life of Francis of Assisi, IX (22), in St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies, 3d ed., ed. Marion A. Habig (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), 247. 50. Walafrid Strabo, Vita Galli, I, 11, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum merovingicarum 4, 292– 93; Peter Damiani, Vita sancti Rodulphi et sancti Dominici Loricati, 10, in PL, CXLIV, 1018B–19B; cf. Damiani, Ep. 50 (= Opusc. 15), ed. Reindel, II, 109, where he referred to hermits with their arms extended in prayer “and other exercises of holy fervor.” See Albert Dresdner, Kultur- und Sittengeschichte der italienischen Geistlichkeit im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert ( Breslau: W. Koebner, 1890), 297; Willy Rordorf, “The Gestures during Prayer According to Tertullian, De oratione 11– 30, and Origen, Perì Euchês 31– 2,” Liturgy O.C.S.O. 29, no. 1 (1995): 87– 99. 51. See especially the sermon of Abbot Odilo, De sancta cruce, in PL, CXLII, 1031– 36, and among secondary works, Glauco Maria Cantarella, I monaci di Cluny ( Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 164 – 65; Barbara Rosenwein, “Cluny’s Immunities in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Images and Narratives,” in Die Cluniazenser in ihrem politisch-sozialen Umfeld, ed. Giles Constable, Gert Melville, and Jörg Oberste, Vita regularis 7 (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 1998), 155– 56; Dominique IognaPrat, Ordonner et exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam, 1000 –1150 (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 186– 91; Dominique Iogna-Prat, Etudes clunisiennes (Paris: A & J Picard, 2002), 84 – 87. 52. Statuta Petri Venerabilis abbatis Cluniacensis IX (1146/7), 62, in Consuetudines benedictinae variae (Saec. X I–Saec. XIV), ed. Giles Constable, Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum 6 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1975), 93– 94; cf. Stat. 75, in ibid., 104, and the relevant notes with references to the cult of the cross at Cluny. 53. Giles Constable, ed., The Letters of Peter the Venerable, Harvard Historical Studies 78 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), I, 169, Ep. 53. 54. In the Ordo Casinensis (Ordo regularis), II, 18, some of the priests, deacons, and subdeacons had gold crosses: Initia consuetudinis benedictinae. Consuetudines saeculi octavi et noni, ed. Kassius Hallinger, Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum 1 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1963), 119. This work probably dates from about 817/21 and reflects the usage of the Aniane reforms: Pius Engelbert, “Die Herkunft des ‘Ordo Regularis,’ ” Revue bénédictine 77 (1967): 264 – 97. See François Chamard, “Les abbés au Moyen Age,” Revue des questions historiques 38 (1885): 103– 8; Pierre Salmon, Etude sur les insignes du pontife dans le rit romain. Histoire et liturgie ( Rome: Officium Libri Catholici, 1955), 25.

The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 249 55. The cross on the front and back of a bishop’s pallium was a sign of his redemption, according to Rabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum libri tres, I, 23, ed. Detlev Zimpel, Freiburger Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 315. See Erik Petersen, “La croce e la pregiera verso l’Oriente,” Ephemerides liturgicae 59 (1945): 55– 56; B. Capelle, “Aux origines de la culte de la croix,” Les questions liturgiques et paroissiales 27 (1946): 162. 56. Johannes a Nusco, Vita sancti Guillelmi, II, 14, in Acta Sanctorum, 25 June, VII, 102CD. 57. See the late eighth-century Memoriale qualiter, II, 6 (chapter house), V, 11 and 14, (2) II, 10 (refectory), and (2) II, 6 (church), in Initia cons. ben., ed. Hallinger, 254, 257, 270, and 274; see 224 – 25 on authorship and date. 58. See among others Ursmer Berlière, L’ascèse bénédictine des origines à la fin du XIIe siècle, Collection Pax in-8° 1 (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1927), 238– 39; Edouard Dumoutet, Le Christ selon la chair et la vie liturgique au Moyen-Age (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne et ses fils, 1932), 18– 27; Romuald Bauerreiss, “Vom Ursprung des Benediktuskreuzes,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner-ordens und seiner Zweige 56 (1938): 275– 80; Matthäus Bernards, Speculum virginum. Geistigkeit und Seelenleben der Frau im Hochmittelalter, Forschungen zur Volkskunde 36– 38 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1958), 181– 82; Johannes Fried, “Endzeiterwartung um die Jahrtausendwende,” Deutsches Archiv 45 (1989): 449– 61; and Foulon, “Solitude,” 408–15. 59. Vita of Hugh of Anzy-le-Duc, II, 11, in Acta Sanctorum, 20 Apr., II, 764; Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, II, 2, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 8, 369 (=PL, CLIV, 200C); Rupert of Deutz, Super Matheum, 12, in CC:CM, XXIX, 382– 83. See John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 51, 350 – 51. 60. Peter Damiani, Carmina et preces, 27, in PL, CXLV, 928A, and Sermo 47, in PL, CXLIV, 763B– 5C. See André Wilmart, “Les prières de saint Pierre Damien pour l’adoration de la Croix” (1929), reprinted in André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du Moyen Age latin ( Paris: Brepols, 1932), 138– 46. 61. Peter Damiani, Ep. 72 (=Opusc. 19.5), ed. Reindel (cited note 14 above), II, 343. See Tabacco, “Privilegium,” 334. 62. Hermannus quondam Judaeus, Opusculum de conversione sua, 4, ed. Gerlinde Niemeyer, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 4 ( Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1963), 79– 80. See Rupert of Deutz, De sancta trinitate et operibus eius, XXI, 9, in CC:CM, XXII, 1163. 63. Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Commentarium in Psalmis, IV, 40.14, in PL, CXCIII, 1486BC. See, on this passage, Karl Morrison, “I am you”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 197– 98, saying that the soul participated “with the God-in-man in the picture.”

250 /

Giles Constable

64. Stephen of Redon, Vita sancti Guillelmi Firmati, 1, in E.-A. Pigeon, Vies des saints du diocèse de Coutances et Avranches (Avranches: Impr. de A. Perrin, 1898), II, 402. 65. See Louis Gougaud, “La mort du moine,” in Anciennes coutumes claustrales, Moines et monastères 8 ( Ligugé: Abbaye Saint-Martin de Ligugé, 1930), 69– 95, esp. 76 – 77 on cross. 66. Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Attalae, III, 10, in Acta Sanctorum, 10 March, II.2, 44. 67. Emile Bertaux, L’art dans Italie méridionale ( Paris: Ecole française de Rome, 1903; repr. 1968), pl. VIII (opposite I, 206). 68. Andrew of Fontevrault, Vita altera Roberti de Arbrissello, VII, 38, in PL, CLXII, 1076B. Baldric of Bourgueil, Vita Roberti, II, 11, in ibid., 1043C, said that Robert subjected himself to many crosses. 69. William of Wyecombe, Vita Roberti Betun episcopi Herefordensis, II, 25, in Anglia sacra, ed. Henry Wharton ( London, 1691), II, 316 –17. 70. Bernard of Cluny, Ordo Cluniacensis, I, 24, in Vetus disciplina monastica, ed. Marquard Herrgott (Paris: Osmont, 1726), 190 – 99; cf. Ulrich of Cluny, Consuetudines Cluniacenses, III, 28– 29, in PL, CXLIX, 770C– 5D. See Frederick Paxton, A Medieval Latin Death Ritual: The Monastic Customaries of Bernard and Ulrich of Cluny, The Chalice of Repose Project: Studies on Music-Thanatology 1 (Missoula, MT: Saint Dunstan’s Press, 1993), 71– 97; Frederick Paxton, “Death by Customary at Eleventh-Century Cluny,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, Disciplina monastica 3 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 297– 318.

Te n

A D e a t h i n Wi s d o m ’ s C o u r t Poetry and Martyrdom in Thirteenth-Century Castile

susan einbinder

In the summer of 1279, a weakened Christian army surrounded the port city of Algeciras in the last Muslim kingdom on Iberian soil. Had the Christian siege prevailed, Granada might have fallen two centuries and more before 1492. But the Christian victory so sought by King Alfonso X of Castile was not to be. Plagued by hunger, sickness, and desertion, what remained of the Castilian fleet at Algeciras was decimated that summer, and as the defeat at Algeciras reverberated throughout the royal court, there were other casualties as well. The following essay explores the fall of one of the higher-ranking figures associated with the failure of the siege, a Jewish financier and courtier known in Christian sources as Don Zag de la Maleha and to his fellow Jews as Yitzhaq (Isaac) ben Zadoq. Don Zag may have been as surprised as anyone by his sudden downfall. He was a powerful tax farmer, someone who provided the king with large sums of cash in exchange for the right to collect outstanding taxes. His final commission in this role, which authorized him to pursue royal taxes long in arrears, was specifically intended for the relief of the Christian army in the south. With an escort and the monies he had successfully collected, Don Zag left for Seville to meet with the king’s second 253

254 /

Susan Einbinder

son, Sancho, stationed at the front. Sancho, however, had his own plans for Don Zag’s delivery, which he forwarded to his mother in Aragon, where she had fled to her brother the year before. Using the siege monies to cover her journey and debts in Aragon, Queen Violante returned to Castile in July. Starved of funds, the siege collapsed. Bedridden and possibly deranged by sickness, humiliated by the flight of his wife and the defeat of his army, Alfonso X arrested the three Jewish tax farmers whom he held responsible for this disaster.1 One converted to save himself, while another was dragged to his death. In September 1280, despite Sancho’s efforts to intervene, Don Zag was hanged outside the Franciscan monastery that was Sancho’s residence in Seville. Tersely, the royal chronicles describe the financial scandal, the military embarrassment, and the Jewish courtier’s end, suggesting the family tensions that sealed Don Zag’s fate. Two poetic sources treat this incident also, a Hebrew lament and a Romance cantiga. The Hebrew lament is by Todros Abulafia, a poet associated with Alfonso X’s court and under Don Zag’s patronage.2 The cantiga, in Gallego-Portuguese, is one of the Cantigas de Santa Maria attributed to Alfonso X. Highly stylized works, both poems have been extensively mined as historical resources but rarely with attention to the ways in which they mediate history through literary tropes. Drawing on forms of dramatic narrative, social critique, and religious polemic, both of these works view contemporary events through a blend of personal and conventional motifs. This essay focuses on the ways in which polemics and politics are linked to images of familial leadership and loyalty, explicitly or implicitly contrasted with those of a rival faith. Where the Hebrew poem stresses good governance and order, by implication absent in the Christian court, the cantiga emphasizes loyalty and service, explicitly betrayed by the Jews. Todros’s poem contrasts Don Zag’s ideal family with the king’s failure to rule his household; Alfonso contrasts his loyalty to Mary with his Jewish servants’ disloyalty to him. The interest of both compositions in this theme is illuminated by reading them in the context of contemporary events. Resituating these texts in the thick of court politics permits their historical context to enrich them as poetry, even as the poems themselves enrich the historical context that has been traditionally read without them. While my primary concern is with the Hebrew

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 255 lament and its treatment of Don Zag, the cantiga offers a meaningful counterpoint to the Hebrew poem’s concerns. Let me begin with the lament before turning to the cantiga, then juxtapose the poems to conclude with some thoughts on the ways in which, read in counterpoint, these two compositions reflect similar assumptions about kinship, politics, and faith. A unique figure in many ways, Todros Abulafia recorded events and encounters throughout his tumultuous life. Born circa 1247 in Toledo, he reached Don Zag de la Maleha and the Alfonsine court around 1270, when he was in his early twenties, and his verse testifies to the zest for pleasure and privilege he indulged under his patronage.3 Although the lament discussed below depicts its speaker as an eyewitness, Todros may or may not have been present for Don Zag’s execution. The siege of Algeciras collapsed in the summer of 1279; Don Zag was hanged in September 1280. Four months later, in January 1281, Alfonso X ordered a surprise Sabbath raid on Toledo synagogues; Todros and other local Jews were incarcerated for several months while the Jewish community struggled to raise their exorbitant ransom. The poetic lament may date to the summer of the execution or to the following year. We know that Todros was strongly affected by his time in prison, which he documented in a number of poems and letters, some of the latter beseeching an important relative, the rabbi Todros ben Joseph, to intercede on his behalf. Upon their ransom, the prisoners rejoined a shaken community in the throes of public penance, renouncing luxury clothing, festivities, and liaisons with Muslim or Christian concubines who doubled as domestic servants. According to their rabbis, the community’s travails were God’s punishment for these sins.4 Domestic politics, family virtue, and loyalty preoccupied the Castilian king also. Throughout the 1270s and 1280s, these concerns were tested through a series of intrigues and crises, illnesses and deaths, all of which unfolded against the backdrop of larger political concerns. By the mid-1270s things were not going well for Alfonso X. He was badly in need of money and had resorted to new and heavy taxation. Since taxes were not always paid, that meant increasing reliance on tax farmers such as Don Zag or his father, or the rival clans of the Barcilonai or Ibn Shoshan brothers. At the same time, Alfonso X’s nobles relentlessly sued for

256 /

Susan Einbinder

privileges, battering his vision of a uniform law for the land — ultimately codified in the Siete Partidas but not promulgated until years after Alfonso X’s death. The war in the south was expensive, and the king’s armies suffered repeated humiliations in Granada. In 1275, following an exorbitant journey to Beaucaire to meet with the pope, the disappointed king laid to rest his imperial ambitions. Falling ill on his return, he stopped in Montpellier, where news reached him of a Moroccan invasion and the death of his eldest son and heir, Fernando de la Cerda. His beloved daughter Leonor died a few months later, as did a favored nephew.5 The king took these losses hard. In 1277, possibly suffering from mental deterioration, he ordered the execution of his brother Fadrique and Fadrique’s ally and perhaps lover.6 The king was not a healthy man, and throughout this period he experienced worsening bouts of illness: fevers, jaundice, edema, facial ulcerations, and a frightening episode of swelling that nearly forced his eye from its socket. Contemptuously, Sancho referred to lesions or ulcerations of his father’s face that gave him the appearance of a “leper.” 7 Whatever the diagnosis, it affected his behavior and his marriage as well.8 His queen, Violante, was the daughter of James I (the Conqueror) of Aragon and sister to his successor, Pedro III. (One of her brothers, another Sancho, was the powerful archbishop of Toledo and was killed in 1275, the year Alfonso lost two children and a nephew.)9 Married in 1246 at the age of ten or twelve, the queen gave birth to eleven children and served as a valued negotiator for her husband, who trusted her repeatedly with prickly nobles, councils, and courts. Nonetheless, in January 1278 she fled to Aragon, taking with her her widowed daughter-in-law Blanche (the daughter of King Louis IX of France) and two small grandsons in line for the throne.10 At the 1278 Cortes in Segovia, the king disregarded his grandsons’ claim by granting significant authority to his second son, Sancho, powers that some scholars have equated with co-rule. It was a newly emboldened Sancho, then, who persuaded his parents to reconcile.11 To do so, he needed to cover Violante’s debts in Aragon and finance the return journey: he found a way to do so with Don Zag’s arrival in Seville.12 Queen Violante returned to her husband in July 1279. She is missing in the sources until 1282, when she appears at an assembly in Valladolid. By then, the Castilian fleet had been destroyed at Algeciras,

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 257 Don Zag was dead, and in defiance of his father, Sancho had proclaimed himself king. Against this backdrop, we can turn to our poems. Todros’s lament for Don Zag has received no real attention since the work of Yitzhaq Baer in the early decades of the twentieth century.13 While the poem—“Time’s Impartial Decree” (‫ — )זמן בגזרה שווה‬draws on multiple genre conventions, it is primarily indebted to the Hebrew lament genre, which itself owes much to Arabic models. Traditionally, the lament, a poetic eulogy, consists of idealized encomia that occasionally embed historical details; the text moves through a sequence of thematic segments embellishing an idealized portrait of its subject with topoi of communal grief. Baer, of course, was interested in history, which he identified with the small gems of realia embedded among conventional expressions of grief. Nonetheless, Todros’s lament is more than a brace for pointillist details of fact. Indeed this final homage to his patron proves a complex blend of traditional and innovative elements. The poem’s artful weave of embellishment and fact is strikingly evident in its extended description of Don Zag’s execution. Not only does the victim politely request permission to pray before the executioner hoods and hangs him, but following a penitential confession, he addresses his mother, sisters, and wife, his children, his eldest son, and finally his supporters, all depicted as witnesses to his death. For the historian Baer, this depiction of Don Zag’s family could be read literally as the insertion of “documentary” detail into a poetic eulogy. In fact, the family tableau embedded in the lament may itself be a literary invention; as already noted, we do not know if Todros was even present at his patron’s execution. Moreover, like other elements of the poetic narrative, such as the use of idealized portraiture and biblical “backstories,” the lament’s polemical treatment of the family constitutes a social and religious polemic as much as a commemorative strategy. From this literary perspective, the intrusion of the private family into public verse is noteworthy. Carefully, Todros portrays the Jewish courtier as an impeccable family man, squelching any doubts that personal moral failings might have contributed to his end. The lament praises a patriarchal hierarchy that has publicly unraveled in the royal household and extends its social critique to the religious beliefs of the king. Whether Todros composed

258 /

Susan Einbinder

his elegy before or after his own arrest, he was a member of the royal court and would also have known of the queen’s flight and return, as well as Sancho’s hunger for the throne. His idealized portrait of Don Zag’s family contrasts sharply with the fissures in the royal family, where the king’s failure to rule his household or maintain its loyalty hums loudly beneath Todros’s text.14 The work of a mature poet, Todros’s lament for Don Zag was written when the poet was in his thirties. The composition, consisting of sixty-four verses, is notably free of the martyrological conventions that had matured among Jewish poets in nearby France and Germany.15 Instead, Todros’s lament draws on Iberian Hebrew conventions inherited from the age of Muslim rule. His Hebrew verses are a latticework of biblical citations that weaves a subtle backdrop to the surface meaning of the text. Each verse contains four subunits: the first three subunits share a rhyme, which changes from verse to verse, while the fourth is a biblical excerpt ending with the word qodesh, or “holy”: aaaQ/ bbbQ/ cccQ, and so on. Atypically for Iberian Hebrew composition, the meter is neither quantitative (Arabic) nor regular. Also atypically, the biblical citations favor cultic passages, drawing from Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Ezekiel, and Daniel to forge a net of allusions to Don Zag’s sanctity, piety, and exemplary death. The content of “Time’s Impartial Decree” is also idiosyncratic in several ways. The poem makes no mention of Alfonso X. Rather, its introductory verses rail against “Time,” or Fate, who levels righteous and wicked alike. This is a common trope in medieval Hebrew poetry from Spain and not in itself surprising. Here, the generic condemnation of Time gives way to a dramatic interlude whose main character is the victim himself. The figure of Don Zag appeals to the executioner and his henchmen, who stand waiting with the hangman’s rope: .‫ וככלות נפץ יד עם קודש‬/ “.‫ עד כי אכלה שיחי‬/ ‫ מעט תפשוני חי‬/ ‫ ”אנא אחי‬:‫אמר‬ ——— He said, “Please, my brothers! Detain me alive for a bit, so I may finish my prayer.” And when he finished, the power of the holy people was shattered [with him]. [53– 54]

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 259 After reciting his final confession, Don Zag tells the executioners to proceed: “.‫ שאו ידיכם קודש‬/ ‫ ”השלימו הפעולה‬/ ‫ פניהם חלה‬,‫ לדבר‬/ ‫ויהי כאשר כלה‬ ——— When he finished speaking, he implored them: “Finish the deed. Lift up the holy offering in your hands.” [59– 60] Reassuring the anguished onlookers, the victim offers advice and consolation to his mother, his sisters, and his wife, his daughters and sons, his eldest son David, and his supporters. Snugly interwoven into the portrait of a grief-stricken family are the threads of a larger critique, one that assumes that the moral condition of communities and that of their leaders are inextricably linked. Mother and son receive the lion’s share of the poem’s attention, and I will limit my analysis here to their treatment, which finds an echoing voice in Alfonso’s allusions to the Holy Mother and her loyal servants and Son. Don Zag first consoles his mother for his untimely death by reassuring her that his soul has gained eternal life:16 “Take comfort, take comfort, my mother! For God’s house is my abode. He commanded me to sanctify His Name, and I have provided the holy crown. “Why are you weeping for the death of a body and corpse? My soul sees the processions of my God, my King, into the Holy Sanctuary! “Even if I have found an untimely death at the hands of tormentors, the angels have brought me up as an offering to my Lord: this is holy. “I have merited eternity by virtue of plaiting the royal crown, the golden plate, the holy diadem. “My soul has become the companion of angel and cherub and fiery winged creatures, and God is there saying to me, this is a holy place. “[. . .] to [turn over] the body to the executioner, while the soul returns to the inner sanctum to serve in the holy place

260 /

Susan Einbinder

“with the pious ones, who established their righteousness within their households, [which] they leave [ behind] in the holy chambers.” [85– 99] The recipient of this outpouring, Don Zag’s mother, was an important widow as well; her husband, Don Çuleyma (Solomon ben Isaac), had been a formidable presence in the courts of Ferdinand III and the young Alfonso X.17 She most likely had an impressive pedigree of her own. Todros reminds us of Don Zag’s proud lineage, twice alluding to passages in Ezekiel that legislate privileges of the Levitical descendants of Zadoq, whose name is shared by the victim ( Isaac ben Zadoq). In fact, this passage refers repeatedly to the priests or Levites, their investiture and privileges. Thus Todros recalls the days of Don Zag’s glory, which in other poems he had invoked in descriptions of luxury cruises, wine and women, sumptuous apparel, and tokens of royal affection. Now the poet emphasizes divinely sanctioned privilege and priestly merit, underlining Don Zag’s pedigree and election as they testify to his piety. Don Zag’s words to his mother also summon two images of idealized femininity. In the second line, “tzofiah halikhot” ([my soul] sees the processions [or ways]) echoes Proverbs 31 with its praise of the good wife and mother: “A good wife who can find? She is more precious than rubies . . . / she looks out for the ways [tzofiah halikhot] of her household” (Proverbs 31:7, 27). The verse’s conclusion, from Psalm 68, describes the defeat of God’s enemies and a procession to the Temple led by singers and musicians amid women with their drums. One group of commentaries to this passage insisted that the young women—almot—represented eternal life (‘al mot). Another exegetical reading of the same verse invoked Miriam and her women at the Red Sea, whose praise of God preceded even the angels’.18 Both traditions, which would have been familiar to any Jew with Todros’s education, echo in Don Zag’s exhortation, affirming traditional images of female piety.19 Don Zag’s final words to his mother envision the (feminine) Soul, the royal Shulamith, returning to her Maker in the celestial court (94 – 95), perhaps an ironic nod to Violante’s homecoming. Todros’s representation of his patron’s household as a model of piety and virtue, perhaps especially female virtue, was relevant. Historians of Jewish life in Christian Spain refer ubiquitously to the wave of communal

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 261 repentance that followed Don Zag’s execution and the arrest and ransom of Toledo’s leading Jews.20 Two contemporary sermons document its force. The preacher was Todros’s relative, Todros ben Joseph, the elderly rabbi and courtier to whom the poet had appealed from prison.21 Rabbi Todros, who escaped arrest, was active on behalf of the prisoners and exhorted his community to turn its back on the immoral pleasures that had triggered God’s ire. His sermons criticize Jewish communal failings: the swearing and dishonest business practices; Sabbath loitering in public places and men ogling women in holiday finery, or worse, engaging in sexual liaisons with gentile servants.22 Saperstein has argued that the behaviors singled out by Rabbi Todros targeted not a decadent courtier class but an entire religious community.23 As metaphor and social barometer, however, the family pointed upward and down: decadence at the lower levels of society imperiled the purest of their leaders, but moral decay at the top also threatened those below. Women featured critically in this debate, both in terms of their own moral laxity and insofar as they were victims of the infidelities of their husbands, brothers, and sons. Echoing these concerns, Todros’s poem testifies to how much the sermon captured (rather than created) this communal debate.24 Cantiga 348 has been dated to the second half of 1281 and may have been known to Todros. Like the Hebrew lament, this cantiga has been beloved by historians. It appears near the end of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a compilation of more than four hundred lyrics in praise of the Virgin, composed by Alfonso X or under his supervision. Alfonso does not mention Don Zag or the fiasco at Algeciras; rather, the king, who has exhausted his fortune in battle, turns to Mary for help. He has two dreams in which Mary directs him to treasure. The first dream proves fruitless; the second yields riches. The double dream sequence and the cameo roles of royal officials who impede the treasure’s discovery are the king’s idealized recapitulation of a frustrating year of defeats and perceived betrayal. The ransom that freed Todros and his fellow Jews from prison is the poem’s second “treasure”: the poem tells us that it has been hidden by the Jews, “[Mary’s] enemies, whom She hates worse than the Moors” (seus emigos, a que quer peor ca mouros).25 On the surface, Cantiga 348 does not acknowledge family tensions, but rather describes the king’s costly wars of crusade in the south.26 The

262 /

Susan Einbinder

king, the song tells us, had exhausted his wealth in his efforts to conquer Andalusia, to honor the Christian faith and vanquish that of the Moors. He had raised a large army but lacked funds to support it, and his nights were plagued by worry. One night the Holy Virgin came to him in a dream and assured him that her Son had answered his prayer with a hidden treasure. However, when the king awoke and sought the treasure, “non achou y nemigalla”—“he found nothing there.” A year later, the Virgin reappeared with clues to a real treasure, belonging to her detested enemies, the Jews, and the king offers thanks to the “Mother and Daughter of God.” This cantiga is a zajal, an Andalusian Muslim genre characterized by its rhyme scheme and refrain: Ben parte Santa Maria sas graças e seus tesouros aos que serven seu Fillo ben e ela contra mouros ——— Holy Mary generously shares her blessings and her treasures with those who serve Her and Her son well against the Moors The refrain rhymes the king’s two obsessions, tesouros and mouros, one of which he needs to get rid of the other. The Iberian zajal from which the poem is derived is a strophic lyric form with roots in Andalusian song. In each four-line stanza, the first three verses rhyme independently; the fourth verse anticipates the refrain rhyme (i.e., where the refrain is AA, the arrangement is bbba + AA, ccca + AA, ddda + AA, and so on). The odd-numbered stanzas end in “mouros” and the even-numbered stanzas “tesouros,” alternating the two overt sources of royal anxiety. As these concerns threaten to destabilize the poetic narrative, the recurring refrain offers reassurance to the listeners, concluding always with a couplet in which the echoing invocations of Mary and her treasures override the stanzas’ preoccupations. Cantiga 348 refers three times to royal counselors who encouraged the king’s trust in Don Zag and thus contributed to his betrayal—“those who guard his possessions” in stanza 3, and the counselor and “certain others” of stanzas 6 and 7. All are linked to Alfonso X’s first, misleading dream, suggesting his fear of defection within the court. Likewise, two lines rhyming “mouros” (5, 9) actually refer to the Jews, who are worse

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 263 than “mouros.” Nowhere does the king explicitly mention his family, but his Beloved Mary is described in language that emphasizes her identity within the Holy Family: she grants the king’s prayers in the name of her Son and is praised with her Son in the final stanza’s “madr’ e filla.” Unlike Alfonso’s wife, Mary intercedes with her Son to Alfonso’s benefit, and she bestows wealth upon him rather than taking it. This cantiga also belongs to the Puerta de Santa Maria group, which is noted for its focus on Alfonso, his family, and events at the court.27 Whether or not Todros ever heard this cantiga, the Holy Mother’s presence was pervasive in his world. 28 Even Castilian Jews could not escape her in the court or market, communal bakeries or baths — or in exchanges with their servants, some more intimate than others, but ubiquitous in their presence at home. A polemical riposte to the Virgin’s iconographic power may even undergird Todros’s unusual focus on Don Zag’s mother: she, too, witnesses the death of an innocent son, who accepts his “sacrifice” by evoking a cult that Christianity claimed to have superseded. At the same time, Don Zag exemplifies patriarchal authority— a rebuke to feminized sanctity and a model of the family values conducive to private and public health. This emphasis is abundantly evident in Don Zag’s final words of family advice, which are addressed to David, his eldest son. The only person actually named in Todros’s poem, David’s importance as heir underlines the lament’s patriarchal concerns. In contrast, the biblical allusions that repeatedly summon images of warring and troubled kings might easily have led Todros’s contemporaries to think of Alfonso X— a failed patriarch and king in service to a false god. Don Zag says: “David, prepare yourself in fear of the One Who Dwells on High. May God be with you; may He send you aid from the Holy Sanctuary! “Hasten forth your trained men. May your pathways be set to observe your King’s Law. Then you shall sanctify them and be holy. “Worship the Awesome God, and do not stray to idolatry, my son. For you are meant to rule: holiness befits your house. “Break your appetite, and feast your thoughts on the God of your fathers, attending to the duties of the Holy Sanctuary.

264 /

Susan Einbinder

“Know that all is vanity, and that joy ends in mourning. Happy is he who leaves the world with his heart on the holy covenant. “The soul is imprisoned in mire and dirt. Death is her freedom, a jubilee and holy.” [107–18] Once again, Todros has Don Zag invoke the moral platitudes of a nonlyric genre, here the ethical will. Some of his language taps Psalms and Proverbs, such as Proverbs 4 and its speaker’s admonitions to his son. Some passages allude to politics, evoking the wars of kings or of kinsmen held hostage. Thus, “Hasten forth your trained men” comes from Genesis 14 and Abram’s summons to his kinsmen to free his captive nephew, Lot. “May he send you aid from the Holy Sanctuary” quotes Psalm 20, a plea to save the king (and patriarchy?). “Then you shall sanctify them and be holy” cites Exodus 30, in the context of a ransom or tithe imposed on the Israelites and perhaps echoing the ransom that freed Todros and his cohorts from prison. Still other phrases allude to Aaron’s priestly descendants, whose responsibilities and privileges were embodied in Don Zag. Again, behind the surface screen of ethical pieties, a parallel, shadow narrative moves in which innocent men are held hostage, communal finances are requisitioned for sacred purposes, and an heir marshals an extended family in support. In 1280, when Todros composed his commemorative lament, David was the Zadoq family heir. By designating and advising that heir before his death, Don Zag fulfilled his final responsibilities as head of household. As a historical figure, David ben Zadoq seems not to have fulfilled the poetic vision of his succession: the historical sources do not mention him or the Zadoq family for years to come, while the powerful Barcilonai and Ibn Shoshan clans dominate royal finances. Todros himself emerges as a formidable tax farmer in the reign of Sancho IV. The contrast with the royal family did not have to be explicit for Todros to underline its presentation of an ideal patriarch and ruler.29 He concludes this passage with allusions to the book of Daniel, a rich resource for messianic prophecies as well as bad news about kings. The passage draws on Daniel 11, and no wonder: that biblical chapter predicts a war between north and south in which the south is under siege; the southern kingdom’s resistance against northern advances; peripheral

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 265 threats from the north and east; and the northern king’s final advance to pitch his “palatial tents” between sea and mountain, where alone and unaided, he shall meet his end. Even beleaguered and ill, the king would probably have resisted such a prophecy of his inevitable defeat. If he regretted the loss of his tax farmer, or his family’s disaffection, Cantiga 348 does not say so; nor does it explicitly mention his wife or his son. By the fall of 1281, when it was supposedly written, Alfonso X was threatening to disinherit his son Sancho. In April, Sancho summoned the Cortes to Valladolid, where in the presence of his mother and uncle, he assumed royal power. At that point Alfonso X did disinherit him. By then, as the prophet Daniel had predicted, the king was alone and unaided; even an appeal to his old enemy, Abu Yusuf in Morocco—to whom he offered his crown in payment—failed to restore his kingdom. He died two years later with Sancho on the throne.30 Cantiga 348 reflects Alfonso X’s preoccupation with a loyal servant and son, an inverted counterpoint to Todros’s focus on fathers and rulers. In sum, Todros’s lament for his former patron is a social and religious polemic, enlisting an idealized representation of a patriarchal leader in an implicit appeal for moral correction in Jewish homes and Christian court. The lament is formally idiosyncratic, absorbing and adapting the conventions of metaphysical poetry, the ethical will, and poetic eulogy; it is surely not pure martyrology. Its core analogy between hearth and kingdom relies explicitly on images of family as barometers of social order and political health.31 The patriarchal ideal also challenges the Marianism that dominated Alfonsine Castile. Both in its idealized depiction of Don Zag’s mother and its emphasis on patriarchal privilege, Todros’s poem critiques Christian reverence for Mary as Intercessor, policy maker, and antagonist of the Jews. So, too, Cantiga 348 testifies to Alfonso X’s preoccupation with questions of governance and loyalty that are dramatized in the song’s counselors and Jews, Mother and Son. Why does Mary mislead the king and make him wait for a second dream and treasure? Well, why does Todros open his lament condemning Fate, and then conclude by asserting God’s unfailing providence? Eerily, both poems embed a lingering discordance, tracing parallel fault lines in the landscape of faith. Indeed, and fittingly, a kindred blend of faith and doubt characterizes both of these poems and perhaps the men who wrote them. One was

266 /

Susan Einbinder

a Jew and one was a Christian; one served the victim and one he served; one admired him and one ordered his death. Nonetheless, they view that death across the same chasm of incommensurability, which they resolved as a story of politics, family, and faith. In Wisdom’s court in Castile, two of the three had proved fickle—but later centuries would fare far worse. ——— Full translations of the Hebrew and Gallico-Portuguese texts follow in the appendix to this essay. Notes 1. The classic biography of Alfonso X remains Antonio Ballesteros Beretta, Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona: El Abir, 1984). Ballesteros notes the October 9, 1276, dispensation that sold access to tax records back to 1261 to three Jewish tax farmers, Don Zag, Abraham Ibn Shoshan, and Yerno the son-in-law of Don Meir, plus a Christian partner, Roy Ferrandez de Sant Ragund. However, he also notes that a second document, dated October 2, 1276, names only Don Zag (807). I have also relied on the extensive studies of Joseph O’Callaghan, in particular, “The Cortes and Royal Taxation during the Reign of Alfonso X of Castile,” Traditio 27 (1971): 379– 98; “Paths to Ruin: The Economic and Financial Policies of Alfonso the Learned,” in The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror, ed. Robert I. Burns ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 41– 67; The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); “Kings and Lords in Conflict in Late Thirteenth-Century Castile and Aragon,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages II, ed. Paul Edward Chevedden, Donald Joseph Kagay, and Paul G. Padilla (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 117– 35; Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: A Poetic Biography ( Leiden: Brill, 1998); Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). See also Robert MacDonald, “Law and Politics: Alfonso X’s Program of Political Reform,” in The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror, ed. Robert Burns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 150 – 202; and Teofilo Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth: the Reordering of Castilian Society 1150 –1350 ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 2. I rely on the two diwan editions for the text, one of which is actually a facsimile edition of the only extant copy of the poem. That copy is preserved in Moses Gaster, ed., Sefer Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot le-haSar Todros haLevi ibn Abu’l’afia, according to the transcription of Shaul Yosef of Hong Kong [ Hebrew]

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 267 (London: E. Goldston, 1926), no. 361. The “modern” critical edition of Todros’s diwan also contains the text: David Yellin, ed., Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot: Osef Shirei Todros ben Yehudah Abu-l’afia, Part I ( Jerusalem: n.p., 1932), no. 405, 134 – 39, notes in the back, 92– 96. 3. For biographical information, see Haim Schirmann, HaShirah Ha’Ivrit BiSefarad UveProvans ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik; and Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1960) 4:413–18; and Haim Schirmann and Ezra Fleischer, eds., HaShirah Ha’Ivrit BiSefarad HaNotzrit uveDrom Tzarefat ( Jerusalem: Magnes/Hebrew University, 1997), 366 – 425. 4. Todros resurfaces several years after this incident in the court of Sancho IV, where, like his former patron, he farms taxes. After Sancho’s death in 1295, Todros fled to Alfonso’s despised brother, Enrique, in whose service he remained until his death. See MacDonald, “Law and Politics,” 188. 5. O’Callaghan, Learned King, 233– 36. 6. O’Callaghan, Learned King, 241. 7. A 1948 forensic autopsy of Alfonso’s mummified corpse, which inspired a 1992 essay in Speculum, concluded that the king suffered from a brain tumor; a recent biography wavered between sinus problems, chronic granuloma, or “cancer of the maxillary sinus” with “inverted papilloma.” Juan Delgado Roig, “Examen Médico Legal de unos Restos Históricos: Los cadáveres de Alfonso X el Sabio y de Doña Beatriz de Suabia,” Archivo hispalense 9 (1948): 135– 53. See also Richard Kinkade, “Alfonso X, Cantiga 235, and the Events of 1269–1278,” Speculum 67, no. 2 (1992): 284 – 323. The newer diagnosis options appear in H. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography, trans. Odile Cisneros ( Leiden: Brill, 2010), 288. Chastened by some excellent recent articles on the dangers of retrospective diagnosis, I will leave this stuff alone. See Jon Arrizabalaga, “Problematizing Retrospective Diagnosis in the History of Disease,” Asclepio 54, no. 1 (2002): 51– 70; and Pier Mitchell, “Retrospective Diagnosis and the Use of Historical Texts for Investigating Disease in the Past,” International Journal of Paleopathology 1 (2011): 81– 88. 8. The state of medical knowledge in Castile was weak, in marked contrast to neighboring Aragon, where the importation of Galen via Arabic into Latin would soon transform the practice of medicine. Surprisingly, given both his poor health and Toledo’s role in the translation of scientific works, medicine was not high on the king’s list of interests. The Toledan school, in Garcia Ballester’s words, remained “a scientific market rather than a place of medical study.” See Luis Garcia Ballester, “Medical Science in Thirteenth-Century Castile: Problems and Prospects,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61 (1987): 183– 202, here 195n57. The author notes, “Everything seems to indicate that Toledo was the place where medical works were translated, but that the work of translation was not followed up by one of copying and elaboration. European scientists came and went. Christian Toledo was a scientific market rather than a place of medical

268 /

Susan Einbinder

study.” See also, by the same author, La Búsqueda de la salud: Sanadores y enfermos en la España medievale (Barcelona: Ediciones Peninsula, 2001). It may be that Alfonso’s faith in other kinds of healing deterred investment in medical science; the Cantigas de Santa Maria refer repeatedly to scenes of confounded physicians whose futile efforts are trumped by the Blessed Mary. The relatively low priority granted to medical research in Castile is also reflected in the king’s reliance on Jewish physicians, such as the Ibn Waqar brothers, or Abraham al-faquim, or one Zizaq, all men who would have been supplanted by university physicians if there had been universities with medical faculties from which to draw them. Todros wrote poems to all of these men, too, confirming that they held positions of privilege at the court. Some of them were also bankers who farmed taxes for the king, and it is worth asking whether Don Zag himself had any medical training. One verse does suggest some such skills: ‫ קטרת הסמים קודש‬/ ‫אבקת רוכל‬-‫ מכל‬/ ‫( וישכל‬79– 80). Nonetheless, nothing else in the sources indicates any medical role for Don Zag. 9. O’Callaghan, Learned King, 235– 36; MacDonald, “Law and Politics,” 162. James I’s son Sancho became archbishop in 1268. 10. On his deathbed, the young Fernando had entrusted them to a noble from the powerful Lara clan, angering the rival Haros, who in turn counseled Alfonso X’s second son Sancho to head for the frontier, where successes on the battlefield enthused his supporters. The king was impressed, too, subordinating the succession claim of his grandson to his second son’s. MacDonald, “Law and Politics,” 192. 11. Ballesteros, Alfonso X el Sabio, 790; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 246. 12. It is worth noting that the royal chronicles do not blame the Jewish courtier but, with circumlocution, describe how the king was troubled to learn that upon Don Zag’s arrival in Seville, the money was “taken” by Don Sancho. How reluctant or willing Don Zag was to comply with Sancho’s order we do not know: “Et el rey, que cuydaua que les enbiaría acorro del auer que recabdaua en Castilla e en León don Çag de la Malea et los que andauan con él, et sopo cómmo [este auer avía tomado] el infant don Sancho [e lo] auié dado a la reya donna Violante, pesól ende mucho ca non touo de qué enbiar pagas a los que estauan en la hueste de Algezira nin a los que estauan en la flota en la guarda de la mar . . . ” Crónica de Alfonso X: Según el MS II/2777 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real (Madrid), ed., transcr., and notes by Manuel González Jiménez (Murcia: Real Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1998), cap. LXXII, pp. 200 – 201. 13. Yitzhaq Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain ( Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1971), vol. 1, ch. 3, 111– 37; and Yitzhaq Baer, “Todros b. Judah haLevi and His Time” [in Hebrew] Tsiyyon 2, no. 1 (1937): 19– 55. Later historians relied on Baer without returning to the poem. See, e.g., B. Chapira, “Contribution á l’étude du Divan de Todros Ben Iehouda Halévi Aboulafia,” Revue des Etudes Juives n.s. 6, no. 106 (1941– 45): 1– 31; and Judit Targarona Boras, “Todros ben Yehuda ha-Leví Abulafia, un poeta hebreo en la corte de Alfonso X el Sabio,” Helmantica 36, no. 110 (1985): 195– 210. O’Callaghan, Ray,

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 269 MacDonald, etc., all cite Baer. Todros’s diwan was published for the first time only eighty years ago and owes its existence to a single manuscript hastily copied in the nineteenth century by a businessman and lover of Hebrew poetry, Shaul Abdullah Yosef of Hong Kong. After Shaul Yosef ’s death — an avid marksman, he shot himself in the arm and died of gangrene in his fifties — his sons turned over his papers to the Hebrew scholar Moses Gaster. Stunned by the contents, Gaster in 1925 published a facsimile edition of Shaul Yosef ’s copy; a decade later, David Yellin’s critical edition followed. See Gaster’s introduction to Yellin, Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot. 14. Violante’s absence did not leave the king to dine alone. Beatriz, his illegitimate daughter, who had for years been the consort of King Afonso III of Portugal, was now with him. Upon his ascension to the throne in 1279, her son Dinis had expelled her to Castile, where she became “Alfonso X’s greatest single source of consolation and moral support” in the wake of Violante’s defection. See MacDonald, “Law and Politics,” 160. 15. See Susan L. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom from Medieval France ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 16. The opening verse puns cleverly on Isaiah 50:1 (“Take comfort, take comfort, my people” [‫)]נחמי נחמי עמי‬, which the poet alters by one letter to read ‫“( נחמי נחמי אמי‬Take comfort, take comfort, my mother”). As Aviva Doron has observed, the poem offers testimony to belief among nonphilosophical Jews in the soul’s immortality: Aviva Doron, Meshorer behatzar hamelekh ( Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1989), 178– 81. For a contemporary affirmation of the same belief, see Ibn Sahula’s Meshal haQadmoni, where in book 1 the Hart responds to the Lion’s query about the nature of the soul with a long disquisition based on Aristotelian philosophy. Unlike the vegetative or animal forms of the soul, the Hart explains, “when death takes her form,” the intellectual or reasoning soul “to her dwelling-place . . . turns again / Aloft, to Him who gave her, to remain / For ever there . . .” Translation by Raphael Loewe, in Isaac Ibn Sahula, Meshal haQadmoni: Fables from the Distant Past, ed. and trans. Raphael Loewe (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 1:98–100. The interlacing series of fables that constitutes book 1 of Ibn Sahula’s remarkable work, which were also produced in an Alfonsine milieu, are widely believed to represent conditions in Alfonso X’s court in the early 1270s; Loewe suggests that the Hart may be intended to represent Don Zag or his father and the Fox and the rebellious animals various nobles in the court (lxxxviii– xc). 17. Roth argues that the father, who died in 1273, outlived the son, and that the Isaac ben Zadoq mourned in the poem is not Don Zag de la Maleha. One of his arguments is that the king’s decision to impound Don Culeyma’s property in Seville after his death made no sense if the son were still living. The arguments do not strike me as convincing, and they are not cited by any study to appear since the publication of Roth’s essay. Todros’s lament, which lists every category of kinship relevant to Don Zag’s household, makes no mention of the father

270 /

Susan Einbinder

(to whom, in a variety of other poems, he paid homage). I consider this additional evidence that the father was not alive. Ballesteros is more persuasive on this point and the chronology: see Ballesteros, Alfonso X el Sabio, 810. See also Joseph O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 173. For invocations of the biblical family of Zadoq, see also, e.g., lines 35– 36, 51– 52, 61– 62, 105–106, which cite Ezekiel 44 and 48. 18. ’‫ ילקות שמעוני תורה פר‬,‫ ויקרא רבה פר’ יא ד”ה ט רבי ברכיה‬,‫שמות רבה פר’ כד ד”ה אז‬ .and many more —‫בשלח רמז רמא ד”ה תניא ר’ מאיר‬ 19. As students of this poetry know, the expected literacy level for the (male) audience to this poem would have been reasonably high. Raphael Loewe remarks, in his introduction to his recent translation of the Meshal haQadmoni, by Todros’s contemporary Isaac Ibn Sahula, that an “adequate” Jewish education would have included “at its base, familiarity with substantial portions of the Hebrew Bible and with the legendary embellishment of biblical history in midrashic exegesis,” while “at least some” of his reading audience would have familiarity with rabbinic law and “Western patterns of thought . . . in Arabic or Hebrew translation . . . [of ] such works as Sa’adyah’s Beliefs and Opinions and Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed.” Isaac Ibn Sahula, Meshal haQadmoni, lxvi. See also Ephraim Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages ( Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). 20. See, e.g., Baer, or any other credible history of medieval Jewish experience in Christian Spain. 21. For more on Rabbi Todros, see Baer, “Todros b. Judah haLevi,” 29– 30, 36; and Marc Saperstein, “The Preaching of Repentance and the Reforms of Toledo of 1281,” in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons: Proceedings of the International Symposium, Kalamazoo, 4– 7 May 1995, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Louvain la Neuve: Fédération internationale des Instituts d’études médiévales, 1996), 157– 74. 22. Saperstein, “The Preaching of Repentance,” 166 ( his translation). 23. Ibid., 173. 24. The widespread distribution of this social critique suggests it was not the elderly rabbi who discovered it. Moreover, had the sermon “created” the debate, the lament would have to postdate it, which, while possible, seems unlikely. The particular critiques found in Rabbi Todros’s sermon were already featuring in other didactic and homiletic diatribes. 25. English translation in Kathleen Kulp-Hill, trans., Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria ( Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 423– 24. The GallicoPortuguese text may be found online at http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Cantigas_ de_Santa_Maria/CCCXLVIII. The literature on the Cantigas de Santa Maria is abundant. This study has made use of the following: Albert Bagby Jr., “The Figure of the Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music and Poetry, ed. Israel J. Katz and Jon E. Keller ( Madison, WI:

A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 271 Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987), 235– 46; Dwayne Carpenter, “The Portrayal of the Jew in Alfonso the Learned’s Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman ( Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 15– 42; and Angus MacKay, with Vikki Hatton, “Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 60 (1983): 189– 98, reprinted in Angus MacKay, Society, Economy and Religion in Late Medieval Castile ( London: Variorum, 1987). 26. Gallico-Portuguese text from http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria/CCCXLVIII. 27. Joseph Snow, “A Chapter in Alfonso X’s Personal Narrative: The Puerto de Santa Maria Poems in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” La Corónica 8, no. 1 (1979): 10 – 21; Manuel Gonzales Jimenez, “La frontera de Granada en las Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in IV Estudios de Frontera: Historia, Tradiciones y leyendas en la frontera: Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda ( Jaén, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Jaén, 2002), 229– 45, esp. 242– 43; Anthony John Lappin, “The Thaumaturgy of Regal Piety: Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Journal of Hispanic Research 4 (1995– 96): 39– 59. 28. John Keller, “The Threefold Impact of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Visual, Verbal, and Musical,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music, and Poetry, ed. Israel Katz and John Keller (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987), 7– 35. 29. Nor is it explicit or isomorphic in Ibn Sahula’s tale of the Lion, the Hart, and the Fox, cited above. For all of these authors —Todros Abulafia, Alfonso X, Isaac Ibn Sahula, and presumably their contemporaries—it was both acceptable and aesthetically, politically, and didactically meaningful to embed real historical figures and their conflicts in dramatic narratives that did not necessarily unfold as they did in “real life.” Nonetheless, the allegorical or imaginative representation is not distinct from its historical counterpart so much as it attempts to distill its moral essence and capture it in hyperbolic form. 30. O’Callaghan, Gibraltar Crusade, 81– 83. 31. Whether this was a peculiarly Castilian concern I doubt, but a later Castilian continuation of this theme has been very much on my mind, and that is the Hebrew translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics produced by the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Jewish courtier-physician, Meir Alguades. A rare fifteenth-century copy of this work at the Jewish Theological Seminary includes a fragment of the Economics (Politics). The Hebrew text begins, not with the words of Aristotle, but with a discourse on the place of highborn women, whose domain should be restricted to the domestic and who should never leave home without their husbands’ permission, fearing always the inherent sinfulness of women: NY MS JTS 2315, fol. 127a (Arabic numbering 130a): ‫האשה החשובה ראוי להשתרר בכל הדברים שהם פנימה ולעיין בכל הדברים כפי הדתות הכתובים לא‬ .‫תעזוב לה חנם שום אדם בלי מרשות]?[ בעלה מפחדת תמיד ביותר מהדברים הנאמרים מחטאת הנשים‬

272 /

Susan Einbinder

Appendix Cantiga 348 Alfonso X el sabio Translation by Kathleen Kulp-Hill in Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise ( Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 423– 24. How Holy Mary revealed a great treasure of gold and silver to a king who wrote songs for Her. Holy Mary generously shares Her blessings and Her treasures with those who serve Her and Her Son well against Moors. Concerning this, I shall tell a miracle which happened in Spain which Holy Mary, the gentle and compassionate One, performed for a king who led a great army to honor the faith of Christ and destroy that of the Moors. That king had expended great treasures that he possessed in order to conquer the land called Andalusia, but he trusted so firmly in the Holy Virgin Mary that he never gave thought to diminishing his wealth. Whereby it happened once that he had raised a large army, and those who guarded his possessions were not prompt in coming to his aid, nor could they find much money in his coffers with which he could long sustain the war against the Moors. While he was worrying about this, in his sleep one night he saw the Glorious Virgin and went up to Her, weeping and asking Her to please have mercy on him so that he might have wealth. She told him: “Your prayer is already granted by my Son. Therefore, have no concern for your lack of funds, but be of good heart, for I shall give you a very great treasure which lies hidden under the earth which people much worse than Moors put there.” When She had told him this, She went away. The king was very pleased by that dream and called in one of his advisors and told him what he had dreamed. After he had told him, he went to where he thought to find those treasures. Although trustworthy men had previously told him that that treasure lay there without doubt, he found nothing there and said with great

Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 273 disappointment: “May Holy Mary preserve me, because I have not enough left to do great harm to the Moors.” So God willed that on that occasion the king should find nothing. However, after a whole year had passed, he led an attack on Granada, and on his way to join his army he passed by that way again, and the Virgin showed him in another place great treasures Of silver, gold, rich and precious stones, much cloth of silk, beautifully worked tapestries, and other very noble objects of gilded silver which belonged to the Jews, Her enemies, whom She hates worse than the Moors. When the king found all this, he was exceedingly happy and fervently blessed the Virgin who is Mother and Daughter of God. At once he sent this wealth as a gift to Seville to serve Her and God with this and other treasures. ———

‫ ( זמן בגזרה שווה‬Time’s Impartial Decree) Todros Abulafia Text in David Yellin, ed., Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot: Osef Shirei Todros ben Yehudah Abu-l’afia, Part I ( Jerusalem: n.p., 1932), no. 405, 134 – 39; notes, pp. 92– 96. 1– 2 Time’s impartial decree has closed the door of hope. It has waved away all that is good and twisted sacred and profane. 3– 4 Time, like a foe, stood and uprooted a cypress of immeasurable splendor. Time destroyed the precious one. Time’s enmity has wrought havoc with everything in the Holy Sanctuary. 5– 6 Time scattered the high princes, leaving one alive, one a sin-offering, and one a whole sacrifice to the Lord of holiness. 7– 8 The world was filled with violence. Privilege became a burden, and Time passed through, trampling the golden bud, the crown of holiness.

274 /

Susan Einbinder

9–10 Arrogantly, the destroyer arose and brought the heavenly pillars down to earth; he overthrew the holy foundations. 11–12 One was roasted on the fire, another was dragged in the open, and one who was guiltless was hanged — he was scented with holy salt [ like the sanctuary incense]. 13–14 Time! Aren’t you ashamed — how you arose to destroy the world, leaving the holy seed like a heap of stones, a stump! 15–16 You have made an end and destruction to the holy one who repaired the breach. You will never make another one so holy as long as the world exists. 17–18 This is your way with sin and transgression, to dim the eyes of the sighted, and annihilate the righteous with the wicked, to make desolate the sinner and saint. 19– 20 You listen to lies and return evil for good. How can you account this holy one a guilt offering? 21– 22 You exterminate root and branch; you race to exchange evil for good. Such is your law, to order a sin offering in the holy sanctuary! 23– 24 Do you love wickedness? Or have you not learned to distinguish between night and day, and what is holy? 25– 26 You established no ransom for the elite hostage. How could the apostate be released instead of atoning for the holy one? 27– 28 You blind yourself to any light and designate the holy ones for destruction. You entrap every holy thing that is dedicated to God! 29– 30 Daily you sweep everything away in wrath, unfired and fired clay alike. Does fearing God bring no advantage over those who leave God’s covenant?

Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 275 31– 32 You have made low what was mighty, and brought down what was exalted. The exile of Jerusalem, the holy city, has been renewed. 33– 34 For the evil that was decreed, let pearl-like tears fall in weeping from the eyes of the kind and the cruel. 35– 36 Honor amplified its mourning, and Poetry broke his lyre when the light of the world vanished, and when he came to the holy place. 37– 38 Privilege wept in bitterness of spirit, and came to offer eulogy in the holy tent of meeting. 39– 40 When the foundation that ascended to the holy sanctuary fell, Torah and Greatness heard a sickly voice [?]. 41– 42 The heart of the Virtues was broken, their grace crushed; fire blazed in them on the day of the Holy Sanctuary’s destruction. 43– 44 Mourning for the death of their noble one, who came from their dear land, who appeared from the mount of their Glory, who went forth from the ten thousands of holy ones. 45– 46 He did not merit death because of any corruption of soul. It was God’s decision to make a holy offering. 47– 48 He earned eternity. He merited the Kingdom instantly. Happy is he who so dedicates his house to holiness. 49– 50 Sanctifying God’s Name and his law, he took the hangman’s rope as his inheritance. The day of his death is a day of atonement before God, a holy convocation. 51– 52 The attackers conspired. They came prepared for the binding with ropes, exalting the holy portion.

276 /

Susan Einbinder

53– 54 He said, “Please, my brothers! Detain me alive for a bit, so I may finish my prayer.” And with his conclusion came the shattering of the holy people’s strength. 55– 56 Broken-spirited, he cried out loudly and bitterly: “May my death atone in place of the offering, in place of the holy [offering]. 57– 58 To You, God, I pour out my prayer. I commit my soul to Your hand. Is it too much to ask that it live on holy land?” 59– 60 When he finished speaking, he implored them: “Finish the deed. Lift up the holy offering in your hands.” 61– 62 He who sees the pious man’s end puts mud and clay on his head, and thus he said to the victim: 63– 64 “If the body dies, will we still exist?” “I shall not die but shall live. See, my soul will endure and be holy.” 65– 66 “Woe is me, for I am doomed to death, I have lingered to my [own] evil by living to see the holy one uncovered !” 1 67– 68 He rebuked him2 : “Fool! Do not weep for my death, for this is my day of rest, a Sabbath of Sabbaths, a holy convocation.” 69– 70 The inner sanctuary and hall have been destroyed, along with this righteous man, the foundation of the world, who vanquished all with the weight of his holiness. 71– 72 “I have abandoned the world’s vanity, and gained the heavenly kingdom. I have been anointed on high with the holy anointing oil.” 73– 74 In life and death, he was surely righteous. On heaven and earth, he was sanctified among the priestly descendants of Tzadok, in the place of righteousness, on the holy mountain.

Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 277 75– 76 He did not return from it defeated or crushed, and his light did not vanish. The work of the Holy Sanctuary was perfected in him. 77– 78 All pleasant deeds and all pious attributes that belong to the Holy Sanctuary were gathered together in him. 79– 80 In righteousness and justice, he sustained patronage and nobility. He was more knowledgeable than anyone else in making medicines and scented drugs for the Holy Sanctuary.3 81– 82 He inherited many graces, and added several good attributes to the ancestors’ legacy. Their seed and his were intermingled. 83– 84 As he grew, his beauty increased, and his life4 was bounded by God’s house [of study and worship]. His voice was heard when he came to the Holy Sanctuary. 85– 86 “Take comfort, take comfort, my mother! For God’s house is my abode. He commanded me to sanctify His name, and I have provided the holy crown.” 87– 88 “Why are you weeping for the death of a body and corpse? My soul sees the processions of my God, my King, into the Holy Sanctuary! 89– 90 “Even if I have found an untimely death in the hands of tormentors, the angels have brought me up as an offering to my Lord: this is holy. 91– 92 “I have merited eternity by virtue of plaiting the royal crown, the golden plate, the holy diadem. 93– 94 “My soul has become the companion of angel and cherub and fiery winged creatures, and God is there saying to me: this is a holy place. 95– 96 “. . . to [turn over] the body to the executioner, while the soul5 returns to the inner sanctum to serve in the holy place

278 /

Susan Einbinder

97– 98 “With the pious ones, who established their righteousness within their households, [which] they leave [ behind] in the holy chambers. 99–100 “My sisters, I have not died. Say this to my wife: my life was profane, but this very day it has returned to a state of holiness.6 101– 2 “I have been sanctified in a state of purity, without contact with the women of my family. My glorious house [ body?] was established on the holy mount. 103– 4 “Return, my sons and daughters! Give thanks to Him who dwells in heaven for the day my sins were forgiven. Bow down to God in holy array. 105– 6 “Seek out the Father of orphans, who will always have mercy on you [ by virtue of ] the holy land’s offering. 107– 8 “David, prepare yourself in fear of the One Who Dwells on High. May God be with you; may He send you aid from the Holy Sanctuary! 109–10 “Hasten forth your trained men. May your pathways be set to observe your King’s Law. Then you shall sanctify them and be holy. 111–12 “Worship the Awesome God, and do not stray to idolatry, my son. For you are meant to rule:7 Holiness befits your house. 113–14 “Break your appetite, and feast your thoughts on the God of your fathers, attending to the duties of the Holy Sanctuary. 115–16 “Know that all is vanity, and that joy ends in mourning. Happy is he who leaves the world with his heart on the holy covenant. 117–18 “The soul is imprisoned in mire and dirt. Death is her freedom for her, a jubilee and holy. 119– 20 “And you, O band of brothers, who are set in my heart where their names are engraved, like the engraving of a holy signet,

Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 279 121– 22 “Be informed and know that God’s divine messengers have pitched the palatial tent of your dear one who has been struck down by the glorious Mountain.”8 123– 24 Let God say “enough” to sorrows, and let there be light for all the children of Israel. Let a redeemer come for Zion and let Jerusalem be holy. 125– 26 Let Him bring in your rejected ones from the east and north and south. Let the dead rise for the End of Days when he is released in the holy jubilee.

Notes 1. Lit., “when they removed his covering” ( perhaps hood). The outburst belongs to the speaker or witness who is overwrought at the sight of Don Zag’s unhooding prior to being hanged. 2. I.e., “He” (Don Zag) rebuked “him” (the speaker of the preceding lines). 3. In the context of the Sanctuary, the reference must be to the compounded incense that accompanied the sacrifices. The medieval sense of the words is, however, medical, and may suggest that Don Zag was also a physician. There is no record of his having practiced medicine, but it would not be uncommon for a Jew of his rank and closeness to the court to have medical training. 4. Literally, “his way was bounded,” i.e., his life was guided by the principles of Jewish faith and practice. 5. Literally, “Shulamith.” 6. Following Yellin’s reading. 7. Brody emends to read: you are intended for purity. 8. Yellin’s punctuation yields different phrasing: the one who has been struck down by divine messengers, [they] have pitched, etc.

Eleven

A n t i - Ju d a i s m i n the Christina Psalter

william chester jordan

This paper is offered as a speculative inquiry into the nature of a codex, a psalter associated with the French royal family in the thirteenth century, and its association with the development of anti-Jewish representations in the same period. A few points about the general characteristics of the medieval Catholic psalter are worth mentioning at the outset.1 Many such codices provided far more than the texts of the one hundred fifty poems and songs of the Book of Psalms. Visually, many also included variable calendar-lists of universal and local saints as well as ornate illustrations. The variations in the calendars help scholars to localize the codices in either or both of two ways. The feast days of the particular local saints included in the earliest hand(s) may tell researchers where a manuscript was produced or at least the region for whose use it was intended. Subsequent additions to the lists can also suggest how the manuscripts traveled, as scribes over decades or centuries incorporated different and locally popular saints’ days into the calendars. The illuminations directly accompanying the psalms, which were placed in the margins of the text or in enlarged initials at the opening of all or some psalms, served to illustrate and comment on the poems themselves. But there were often prefatory se280

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 281 quences of pictures that were unrelated to the psalms per se. Some of these prefatory sequences were extremely elaborate full-page scenes, such as the seventy-eight-picture sequence in the famous mid-thirteenthcentury Psalter of Saint Louis, of Parisian origin and royal patronage, on which several scholars, including myself, have worked.2 The most sumptuous of the psalters, those using gold in the illustrations, were extraordinarily expensive and, because of the use of so much precious metal, exceptionally heavy. The Psalter of Saint Louis, a small codex now covered in velvet and measuring only six by eight inches and three inches thick, weighs about three pounds (1.36 kilograms).3 An ordinary book of similar size and with a similar covering, judging from a few comparisons I have made, would weigh about half a pound (0.23 kilograms) less. Put another way, enough gold went into the manuscript to mint at least fifty gold écus, the prestige coins Louis IX began to strike in the 1260s.4 Before the Hundred Years War, an écu was worth twenty shillings tournois.5 Fifty écus were the equivalent of one thousand shillings or fifty pounds (livres) tournois, quite a tidy sum. Some viscounts commanded this amount or thereabouts as their yearly income.6 Much more could be said about psalters. Scholars who work on ceremonial and sacramental books differentiate between biblical and liturgical psalters and their different manners of organization. They distinguish between the format and content of the books in western and eastern Christianity. They note exceptional examples, such as glossed psalters, and epitomes with only a selection of psalms. They have constructed elaborate taxonomies that both make distinctions among various kinds of ceremonial, liturgical, and study books and show how these kinds of texts overlap. And so on. Most of this sort of analysis is not germane to my project. Issues of patronage are relevant, however. Personages in the royal court circle in Paris in the thirteenth century commissioned a great many illustrated books, including psalters but not restricted to this genre.7 One need only think of the wonderful examples of the moralized Bibles studied in 2000 by John Lowden.8 The Christina Psalter, the artifact at the heart of the present study, is one such book, commissioned from within the royal circle; unlike the Psalter of Saint Louis and the moralized Bibles, however, it has received scant attention. The best work on the

282 /

William Chester Jordan

book is that published in 2006 by Marina Vidas, adjunct professor of art history at the University of Copenhagen. The subject was suggested to her by the wide-ranging art historian Jonathan Alexander of the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.9 But Vidas’s book is a largely formal study of genre, production, ownership, and the like. It hardly extends beyond such matters. In particular, there is a surprisingly short section on the psalter’s anti-Judaism which I think begs for greater elaboration.10 This is what I will attempt to do—go beyond formal considerations to the substantive matter of the psalter’s anti-Jewish motif — after summarizing the main findings of Vidas’s study. In its present condition the Christina Psalter has three folios that serve as flyleaves and were added during a modern rebinding. The first two of these are empty, but folio 3 verso contains informative tables in a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century hand—indications of scriptural readings, dominical letters to aid in dating, and other dating aids.11 The calendar begins on folio 4 and extends to folio 9 verso. Three hands are identifiable, one—the earliest—French, and two others, Norwegian, according to Vidas, although she does not indicate the criteria by which she made these identifications. A relative few feast days, which are graded by color coding, appear in the calendar along with further dating aids useful for calculating movable feasts. Vidas suggests that the small number of feasts implies private ownership. A religious community would need to know the dates of far more feast days. She also notes that many of the feasts are typical of psalters of French and particularly Parisian provenance, although several that one might expect to be included are not to be found. The redaction of the calendar, based on the entries from the earliest (French) hand, points to the late 1220s or early 1230s, with additions made in subsequent years by Scandinavian hands. The calendar is illustrated with scenes of hawking, heraldry, and the zodiac.12 Folio 10, which follows the calendar, is an elaborate table that provides the means to help, in Vidas’s words, “determine the position of the moon within the zodiac on each day” of a particular year. This in turn would permit the calculator to assess the day as one fortunate, unfortunate, or indifferent for particular activities, such as bloodletting.13 The prefatory cycle of pictures comes next, folios 10 verso to 21. I will return to this after describing the remainder of the manuscript.

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 283 The psalms themselves commence after the prefatory cycle at folio 22 verso and continue until folio 154 in the order found in the Bible, although there is one run that is now lost, Psalms 58 to 63. A second French hand, contemporary with the French hand of the calendar, is responsible for writing the text of the psalms.14 Historiated initials allow the reader to disengage clusters of psalms appropriate to particular weeks and Sundays of reading. One should note in particular the abundance of gold in these and, as I will show later, in other parts of the psalter. As Vidas writes, “A considerable amount of gold was expended in the illumination of the Psalter. Besides using this precious material in hundreds of the manuscript’s initials and in the backgrounds of the twenty-four medallions of the Calendar as well as in the thirty-two miniatures of the prefatory cycle, nearly every page has one or more gold anthropomorphic or zoomorphic line fillers, close to 280 in total.”15 The psalm pages considered here are: Psalm 26, The Lord is my light / Dominus illuminatio mea (figure 11.1; see gallery for ch. 11 figures) Psalm 52, The fool said in his heart: There is no God / Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est deus (figure 11.2) Psalm 68, Save me, O God / Salvum me fac deus (figure 11.3) Psalm 80, Sing out your joy to God our helper / Exultate deo adiutori nostro (figure 11.4) Psalm 87, O Lord, the God of my salvation / Domine, Deus salutis (figure 11.5) Psalm 109, The Lord said to my Lord / Dixit dominus domino meo (figure 11.6) After the more than two hundred fifty pages of the psalms and their historiated initials, one finds texts of ten canticles, seven drawn from the Old Testament and three from the New, all appropriate for liturgical practice. Next come the hymn known as the Te Deum and the Athanasian Creed. All together — canticles, hymn, and creed — occupy folios 154 verso to folio 166.16 Many psalters commissioned for lay folk, Vidas notes, have similar song-hymn-creed sections.17 The same can be said of the section of litanies (folios 169 to 172): Kyrie eleyson, Christe eleyson, Christe

284 /

William Chester Jordan

audi nos, and further invocations of God (the Trinity), the Virgin Mary, and the celestial hierarchy for mercy. The saints then invoked, however, point to some connection between the original patron of the manuscript and the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés of Paris, but what this connection signifies is at present uncertain. Saints added to the litany in the thirteenth century but after 1255 included the new crop of mendicant saints ( Francis, Anthony, Dominic, Clare) and a few others, the most important among them, in terms of where the manuscript migrated, being Olaf.18 The manuscript comes to an end with two sections. The first (folio 172 to 172 verso) consists of two fairly conventional collects, Deus cui proprium and Omnipotens sempiterne, conventional in the sense of showing up in numerous psalters written for lay patrons.19 The second consists of the Mass of the Blessed Virgin for Pregnant Women and Those in Labor. It occurs on folios 172 verso and continues through folio 174 verso. This is an addition of the fourteenth or fifteenth century and is uncommon in psalters, though not in missals.20 So much for the description of the Christina Psalter. But why does one call the manuscript the Christina Psalter? Or, put another way, who was Christina? The scholarly consensus is that the psalter came to be associated with a particular Christina, namely, the princess of Norway who was the daughter of King Haakon IV. Haakon, born in 1204, ruled Norway from 1217 to 1263. His daughter Christina lived from 1234 to 1262 and according to scholarly consensus was the recipient of the psalter, which explains its presence today in Scandinavia. If so, the book was a gift directly from the French royal court or from an initial French recipient who regifted it to Christina. Christina’s connection to the French royal family was strong: at about age twenty-four she wed Philip of Castile and León, Blanche of Castile’s nephew. At the time the psalter was commissioned, this Blanche was the wife or the recent widow of Louis the Lion, who was king of France from 1223 until his death from disease in 1226 in the concluding phase of the Albigensian Crusade. Queen Blanche was also regent for her young son Louis IX, the future Saint Louis, in the first decade or so of his reign. This thorny question of whether or not the Christina Psalter, originally bestowed on someone else, was regifted as a wedding present for Christina need not detain us.

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 285 It is enough to know that the weight of the evidence points to a Parisian, indeed French royal origin of the manuscript before its subsequent migration directly or in stages to Scandinavia.21 At this point we need to return to the prefatory cycle of full-page pictures, from folio 10 verso to folio 21, twenty-four scenes in all. I have already noted that such prefatory cycles exist in many psalters and often have nothing obvious to do with the psalms. The pictures usually represent, in chronological order, sequences from the Old Testament or New Testament, the latter in the case of the Christina Psalter, where the pictures illustrate the life of Christ from infancy to resurrection.22 Figure 11.7, for example, reproduces the opening picture, the upper scene being the Annunciation to the Virgin, the lower the Visitation. One should again note the abundance of gold that is characteristic of all these pictures. The sequence of pictures, however, is incomplete, with folios probably lost in rebinding.23 This is important to remark because the four missing scenes, I will argue, would almost certainly have further developed an iconographically distinct and culturally aggressive antiJewish subtheme already hinted at in the sequence. This subtheme is represented by a scene of Jews plotting ( Vidas’s term) Jesus’s arrest and execution (figure 11.8). The scene, perhaps more properly, alludes to the debate that culminated in the plotting and occurs in the upper station of folio 18 verso; the lower station is devoted to the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. The textual inspirations from the Gospels for these two scenes are multiple: Matthew 26:3– 5 and 47– 56; Mark 14:1– 2 and 43– 49; and Luke 22:2 and 47– 53. True, John’s Gospel is more lavish and informative than any of these, but he narrates the scenes in such a way that the events occur in chapter 11 at verses 47– 54, while the arrest takes place in chapter 18 at verses 1–12. So, the artist’s inspiration, given the textual juxtaposition of the scenes in the three synoptic Gospels (references to which were melded together in a number of Gospel harmonies), is probably one or more of the passages from them, in particular Mark, as I shall argue later.24 Nonetheless, I do not deny that he may also have had John’s more extensive descriptions in the back of his mind, as did other authors who otherwise explicitly quoted or invoked a synoptic gospel when they wrote of Jews, although I shall not pursue that possibility here.25

286 /

William Chester Jordan

As to the upper scene, on the left are two men, one in front of the other, the more foregrounded wearing a conical hat (a marker for a Jew), the other with a round-top hat.26 They look at the central figure while gesturing in a way that bespeaks an energetic discussion. On the right two other men appear, again one foregrounded but apparently with a roundtop hat and largely obscuring the other, who wears a conical hat. The figure behind also gestures, making him part of the agitated discussion. But the other, who is dressed rather sumptuously, strokes his beard in thought. The central figure, depicted with a conical hat, looks somewhat to his right (the viewer’s left), as if listening to the discussants on that side. At the same time he holds a body-length empty scroll with one hand and points at it with the other (his right hand). This may be an indicator of his dominant role among the speakers, a point suggested by his centrality or, at least, his highly significant participation in the conversation.27 It is not unreasonable to suppose that in a setting of Jews hostile to Jesus, the emptiness of the scroll signifies the vanity of this seditious speech. This scene may be rather simple, but it was assuredly not common at the time it was painted. In fact, there are very few such scenes in the entire corpus of medieval Christian art before the production of the Christina Psalter, making this picture peculiar, as Vidas noted, if not unique in its time, in its anti-Jewish imagery.28 One similar scene in the so-called Toledo–New York Bible, a moralized Bible, has the scroll inscribed with the single word Caiphas,29 alluding to the scriptural narrative, “Then were gathered together the chief priests and ancients of the people into the court of the high priest who was called Caiphas” ( Matthew 26:3). Other Gospels call the ancients or elders scribes ( Mark 14:1 and Luke 22:2) or Pharisees ( John 11:47), but the only plotter mentioned by name in any is Caiaphas (using the conventional spelling). One other psalter that has the scroll also has a discussant holding a book, probably symbolizing the presence of the scribes.30 All these manuscripts originated in and around the French royal court and under its patronage. In the lower scene of folio 18 verso of the Christina Psalter Judas kisses Jesus in betrayal. Peter in the foreground and on the viewer’s left cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Behind this scene stands a slightly obscured soldier with a poleax. Another soldier with a poleax

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 287 takes Jesus, the central figure, by the hands in arresting him. And on the viewer’s far right, one of those in the crowd who has come to watch the drama and seems to have a cudgel and a hand on the soldier’s pole bears a stereotypical sign of the hated Jew, a distorted face.31 All of this more or less conforms (saving only the stereotypical pictorial traits) to the various scriptural narratives. I quote Mark 14:43– 48, And while he was yet speaking, cometh Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve: and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the ancients. And he that betrayed him, had given them a sign, saying: Whomsoever I shall kiss, that is he; lay hold on him, and lead him away carefully. And when he was come, immediately going up to him, he saith: Hail, Rabbi; and he kissed him. But they laid hands on him, and held him. And one of them that stood by, drawing a sword, struck a servant of the chief priest, and cut off his ear. And Jesus answering, said to them: Are you come out as to a robber, with swords and staves to apprehend me? The next folio in the present constitution of the Christina Psalter has two scenes as well (figure 11.9). The first, in the upper station, is that of the three women at the open tomb on Easter morning, which is precisely appropriate only to Mark’s Gospel, chapter 16, verse 1, which mentions the women by name—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. The other Gospels refer to two women by name (Matthew 28:1), or to an indefinite number (Luke 23:55 and 24:1), or solely to Mary Magdalene ( John 20:1). (I shall return to the possible relevance of the artist’s or exegete’s choice of the Gospel of Mark as his source momentarily.) The second scene on the page, in the lower station, is the Noli me tangere, where Mary Magdalene sees the risen Christ, who forbids her to touch him ( John 20:17). Originally, however, there were several other scenes intervening between those of the plotters and the arrest, on the one hand, and those of the Easter events on the other. Vidas has surmised on tenuous evidence that the present psalter lacks the Roman soldiers’ flagellation of Jesus, the crucifixion, the deposition from the cross, and the anointing of the dead body which might have been present originally.32

288 /

William Chester Jordan

If these scenes were depicted, then the psalter would revert to a rather conventional sequencing. My question is whether Vidas’s conjecture coheres with a mentality that introduced such an unusual scene as that of the Jews debating Jesus’s fate into the sequence. Indeed, the other manuscripts in which similar scenes appear and to which Vidas compares the depiction in the Christina Psalter have their origin in the contemporary French royal court, whose obsession with the place of the Jews in society I have spent my entire academic life exploring. (My first graduate seminar paper was on the tribulations of the Jews of Normandy in 1247, that is to say, on the eve of Louis IX’s first crusade.) If we assume that the evangelist Mark’s narrative line was dominant in the conception of the sequence that starts with the scene of the Jews debating Jesus’s fate, which I intimated above (even though the other gospels are more common picture sources), then there are a number of encounters between the arrest and the Easter story which could have been the subject of illustration and, more to the point, would have continued to emphasize the guilty centrality of Jews to the drama. Besides the crucifixion, which Vidas herself suggests and to which I shall return, Mark tells the story of Jesus’s appearance before the High Priest, who rends his garments at the Nazarene’s declaration of his messiahship, a scene that includes Jews spitting on him and beating him, following the High Priest’s action (Mark 14:55– 65). The evangelist also describes the Jewish leaders taking counsel together the next morning, a kind of reenactment of their original debate, and deciding to send Jesus to Pilate (Mark 15:1). The appearance before Pilate prompts Mark to describe the Jewish crowd’s cries to release the seditious Barabbas and repeatedly to crucify Jesus (Mark 15:6–15). This, too, would have provided a splendid opportunity to render the Jews’ guilt. Mark also describes the mocking of Jesus and his crowning with thorns while in Pilate’s custody (15:17–19). Modern interpreters read this text literally, namely, as evidence of the responsibility of Roman soldiers. But by the thirteenth century the crowning with thorns, as I have recently shown, had been thoroughly Judaized in Christian exegesis.33 Mark’s narration of the crucifixion (15:22– 37), with the Jewish bystanders’ scorning of Jesus, the offer of vinegar by the sponge bearer, also

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 289 imagined as a Jew in medieval Christian exegesis, and of course the titulus, THE KING OF THE JEWS, were all susceptible to the most negative visual treatment of Jews, as the late Ruth Mellinkoff showed comprehensively.34 One example (figure 11.10) is the scene of Jesus being brought before Caiaphas from the late thirteenth-century Salvin Hours.35 In other words, I am suggesting that the four missing leaves included the crucifixion as well as three other scenes that were susceptible to strong anti-Jewish interpretations. The peculiar thing is that there are remarkably few examples of these various scenes in the corpus of medieval Christian art before the time of the Christina Psalter, but not after. Indeed, by 1270, the approximate date of the production of the Salvin Hours, they had already begun to proliferate, and the scene of Jesus before Caiaphas in particular even shares the motif of the empty scroll. More research would have to be done on this, and I have largely depended on the work of Vidas for confirmation. But my own survey of scenes, such as those collected by Ruth Mellinkoff, makes me think that Vidas is right: such scenes were very uncommon before the Christina Psalter but common not long afterward. Of course, to argue from this one scene and imagine that other scenes from the Christina Psalter, now lost, stimulated a trend among later artists is a real leap. And yet, we have been repeatedly told that the influence of the French royal court and its artistic productions — manuscript illuminations, and architecture, too, for that matter — was profound in the thirteenth century.36 It would not be entirely surprising if the Christina Psalter, especially its putative anti-Jewish scenes, had a similar influence before the book migrated to Scandinavia. To repeat, this is speculation. It is not proof that I am right and that the now missing scenes even had a peculiarly anti-Jewish slant. But neither is there any evidence or reason to believe that the exegete and/or artist who planned and executed the lost scenes retreated from their very creative interjection of the debate scene — retreated immediately from this to a much more conventional iconography thereafter. If so, why did he or they introduce the scene in the first place? The Christina Psalter deserves more study, and it deserves to be considered not merely in formal terms, but in depth as an artifact of the culture — political, social,

290 /

William Chester Jordan

and religious — of the French royal court. The anti-Judaism of that court was one of its principal features. The reign of Louis VIII (1223–1226) opened with its only major piece of legislation, an établissement or statute directed at the Jews of France, in which the king commanded that existing debts owed them could no longer generate interest charges. Even the contractual obligations of borrowers to pay interest were annulled. He also abolished the long-standing practice of letting Jews register their debts in offices maintained by the crown. So draconian was the legislation that Jews tried to flee the royal domain and take shelter under other lords whose policies they regarded as more tolerable. But the king forbade flight and put enormous pressure on neighboring lords to return Jews who dared to flee. On top of everything else, the king ordered a captio or seizure of Jewish wealth, which is to say, the repayment of the principal of debts owed to the Jewish lenders not to the lenders themselves, but to the royal treasury.37 The brief reign of Louis VIII was stern. In the early years of his son’s reign, 1226 down to, say, 1234, which constitute the temporal upper limit for the production of the Christina Psalter, policies toward the Jews culminated. The years 1227 and 1228 saw another captio carried out against those Jews who had managed to generate some new wealth since 1223. Thousands of debts were paid over to the royal treasury as a systematic campaign was launched to suppress usurious moneylending. What was usury? In the famous Ordinance of Melun of 1230 all interest charges— any interest charges whatsoever— were declared to be usury. Jews who lent money were thenceforth reduced to being pawnbrokers who could draw income only from the sale of pledges that remained unredeemed. This measure, if effectively enforced— and ultimately it was effectively enforced— would have impoverished the Jews of royal France, who drew their livelihood almost exclusively from moneylending. The Ordinance of Melun also stigmatized as traitors to the crown— as rebels, to use its word — all those who refused to enforce or who violated its provisions.38 The Christina Psalter, in other words, was conceived and executed at a time when the monarchy established its identity as irrevocably hostile to what it regarded as the excesses of Jews and when it articulated and began to enforce policies designed to bring them, as future directives

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 291 would demonstrate, to the ultimate goal of conversion. Taking these facts into consideration, scholars would be wise to search for the Christina Psalter’s single loose leaves with the missing illustrations, perhaps in some Scandinavian repository or repositories.39 They may very well represent one of the initial iconographic consequences of this heightened religious, ideological, and social antipathy to the Jews, much as the exactly contemporary moralized Bibles, in Sara Lipton’s words, “constitute an unprecedented visual polemic against the Jews.”40 If my suspicion is correct, we would only have to emend her choice of words from “unprecedented” to “almost unprecedented” in acknowledgment of the contribution of the lost images of the Christina Psalter to this visual polemic.

Notes 1. For a brief introduction to the nature of the medieval psalter, from which my general remarks are drawn, see Eric Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books from the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, trans. Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Order of St. Benedict, 1998), 129– 34. 2. Harvey Stahl’s Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), is the most comprehensive study and guide to the literature (to about the year 2000). See also Gerald Guest, “The People Demand a King: Visualizing Monarchy in the Psalter of Louis IX,” Studies in Iconography 23 (2002): 1– 27; Gerald Guest, “Structuring Old Testament History in the Psalter of Louis IX, in Tributes to Lucy Freeman Sandler: Studies in Manuscript Illumination, ed. Kathryn Smith and Carol Krinsky ( London: Harvey Miller, 2007), 51– 61; and William Chester Jordan, “The ‘People’ in the Psalter of Saint Louis and the Leadership of Moses,” in Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy Duquesnay Adams, ed. Stephanie HayesHealy, 2 vols. ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1:13– 28. 3. Stahl, Picturing Kingship, 3. 4. On the weight of the écu, 4 grams, see Per Enghag, Encyclopedia of the Elements: Technical Data, History Processing, Applications ( Weinheim, Germany: Wiley, 2004), 107. D. J. Henstra, “The Evolution of the Money Standard in Medieval Frisia: A Treatise on the History of Systems of Money of Account in the Former Frisia c. 1500 – c.1500,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Gronigen, 2000, 114, opts for 4.5 grams, and I have used this so as not to exaggerate. On Louis’s introduction of the écu, see William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 210 –13.

292 /

William Chester Jordan

5. Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange ( London: Royal Historical Society / Boydell and Brewer, 1986), 189. 6. Joseph Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 56. 7. Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 8. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles moralisees, 2 vols. ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 9. Marina Vidas, The Christina Psalter: A Study of the Images and Texts in a French Early Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscript ( Njalsgade, DK: Museum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen, 2006). For the inspiration of Jonathan Alexander, see 7. 10. Ibid., 89– 90. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Ibid., 16 –19. 13. Ibid., 19– 20. 14. Ibid., 21– 22. 15. Ibid., 99. 16. Ibid., 22– 23. 17. Ibid., 22. 18. Ibid., 23– 24. 19. Ibid., 25. 20. Ibid., 25. 21. Ibid., 49– 53. 22. Ibid., 20 – 21. 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Influenced by the case of the moralized Bibles, Vidas implies that Matthew’s Gospel is the likeliest inspiration: Christina Psalter, 73. Her citations to English-language biblical passages derive from the Authorized Version. I have preferred to quote the Vulgate in the American version of the Douay-Rheims translation. On the use of Gospel harmonies in learned circles, see Beryl Smalley, The Gospels in the Schools c. 1100 –c. 1280 (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 30 – 33. 25. For an example of this sort of double usage, in this case of the Gospel of Matthew directly and the Gospel of John more allusively, see Barbara Newman, “The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody,” Church History 81, no. 1 (2012): 12. 26. On headgear, including the conical hat as a Jewish marker, see Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1:59– 94. 27. Cf. Michael Curschmann, “Levels of Meaning and Degrees of Viewer Participation: Inscribed Imagery in Twelfth-Century Manuscripts,” in Qu’est-ce que nommer? L’image légendée entre monde monastique et pensée scolastique, ed.

Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 293 Christian Heck ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 89– 99. Curschmann draws on William Noel’s work in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David, ed. K. V. D. Horst et al. (’t Goy, Netherlands: HES, 1996), 159– 64. 28. Vidas, Christina Psalter, 74. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. On physical distortions and deformities, including facial, see Mellinkoff, Outcasts, 1:122– 35. 32. Vidas, Christina Psalter, 28. 33. William Chester Jordan, “Judaizing the Passion: The Case of the Crown of Thorns in the Middle Ages,” in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. Elisheva Carlebach and Jacob Schacter (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 51– 63. 34. See the illustrations in Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2. Mellinkoff (Outcasts, 1:328) drew on my work on Stephaton, the sponge bearer at the crucifixion, in discussing the Judaization of the tormentors of Christ. 35. Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2, plate VI.6. 36. Claudine Billot, “Les Saintes-Chapelles ( XIIe – XVIe siècles): Approche comparée de fondations dynastiques,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 73 (1987): 229– 48; Robert Branner, St. Louis and the Court Style in Gothic Architecture ( London: A. Zwemmer, 1965); Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 37. William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 93–104. 38. Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 129– 35. 39. I have launched a modest effort to search for the missing leaves of the Christina Psalter. My strategy is to try to identify already cataloged single leaves in library collections in Scandinavia, leaves whose provenance has hitherto been unknown — an obvious method; see, for example, the Finnish database from the National Library in Helsinki, brought to my attention by Tommi Lankila, a graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University, http:// fragmenta.kansalliskirjasto.fi/community-list. See also the Norwegian database Bergen University Library [ Norway]–Medieval Parchment Fragments http:// gandalf.aksis.uib.no/mpf/. I also intend to look systematically through Scandinavian sale and auction catalogs of the last century or so. There is no certainty, of course, that these leaves can be identified. Such single leaves may very well have become (transient) devotional objects, as John Van Engen suggested to me in conversation. 40. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1.

Tw e l v e

E m p e r o r C h a r l e s I V, J e w s , and Urban Space d av i d c . m e n g e l

The 1346 election of Charles IV as King of the Romans accelerated Prague’s rise to late medieval prominence. Already in 1344 it had become an archbishopric, a lofty status progressively embodied by the new Gothic cathedral rising, stone by stone, within the walls of Prague Castle. That castle, and the city that had grown up in its shadow, was the center of Charles’s power as King of Bohemia. His royal and imperial ambitions can be traced in Prague’s transformation during his reign (1346 –1378). In 1348 Charles IV established there a university, Central Europe’s first. In the same year, he ordered the first of two new circuits of walls to greatly extend the city’s urban area and embarked on an extended building program. Despite what might have seemed unfortunate timing—1348 is a year remembered especially for the devastating effects of the Black Death in many European cities—Prague grew and prospered throughout Charles IV’s reign.1 We might even call it a golden age, one all the more impressive for its defiance of the crisis often associated with the same century elsewhere in Europe.2 During these years Prague’s sparsely populated suburbs developed into the booming New Town, and the imperial style of its art and architecture helped to inspire the Beautiful Style.3 To294

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 295 gether the city’s diverse population of Czechs and Germans, of Christians and Jews, flourished under Charles IV as at no other time. Of the stories told about medieval Prague, this attractive tale of an all-too-brief golden age disrupted by the political tumult and urban destruction of the Hussite era has enjoyed a recent resurgence. This is a tourist-friendly story, explaining as much as a guide needs to remember about the major landmarks of the built (and rebuilt) medieval environment of a lovely and walkable city: Charles Bridge, Charles University, New Town with its expansive Charles and Wenceslas squares, and the Gothic (and partly neo-Gothic) cathedral of Saint Vitus. Golden-age Prague furthermore offers an appealing contribution to a refashioned, post-1989 Czech identity, as does the gilded memory of the emperor who orchestrated it. In a recent Czech Television poll to identify the greatestever Czech, Charles IV topped not only the principled but tragic Jan Hus, but also all other historical Czechs—even hockey players.4 Among scholars, art historians in particular have turned enthusiastically to the same sites that attract tourists. Their interest and research have inspired a number of treasure-rich exhibitions in Prague and even New York City. The resulting volumes and additional research by growing ranks of international scholars have given welcome attention to the significance of physical space in Prague: the design and orientation of its cathedral and other sacred buildings, the location and composition of decorative arts, and the political and religious meaning of the art and architecture.5 This work reminds us that the physical space of a built environment is well worth scholarly attention, both to describe its significance for those who lived within it and also — as some authors have further argued — because at least some medieval patrons themselves paid careful attention to the organization of urban and architectural space. Paul Crossley and others, for example, have attributed to Charles IV himself a direct, intentional role in shaping the politically significant space of Prague’s new cathedral and that of the expanding city itself.6 The locations of saints’ tombs within the cathedral of Saint Vitus participate in a “sacred topography” that reflect Charles IV’s “politics of presentation.”7 Similarly, the sites selected by the emperor for the many new churches within New Town point to carefully designed “axes of meaning” converging on the square that now bears Charles’s own name.8 Such arguments are open to

296 /

David C. Mengel

criticism, especially for overestimating the medieval monarch’s personal and sustained engagement with the fine details of art and architecture that so fascinate academic art historians. They have also contributed to what Milena Bartlová rightly characterizes as “a cult of personality of Charles IV,” traceable to the exhibitions and publications that marked the six hundredth anniversary of the emperor’s 1378 death.9 Yet, whereas the scholarship of 1978 addressed nearly every possible facet of Charles IV’s life and reign,10 the art historians in the vanguard of twenty-first-century international scholarship have focused especially on the emperor’s roles in transforming Prague’s shape and appearance. The result can be a glowing, if at times still hazy, image of an idealized, highly educated medieval monarch and connoisseur of the arts whose careful stewardship ushered in Prague’s golden age. A parallel strain of scholarship, one also nurtured by the publications of 1978, paints Charles IV much differently. Rather than looking admiringly at the cultural achievements of Charles IV’s reign, especially in Prague, this research looks critically at the suffering of Jews in areas under Charles IV’s authority, especially in German cities. Numerous Czech and German historians have addressed the question of Charles IV’s relationship with Jews, as have historical surveys of Jews or anti-Judaism in Europe.11 A commonplace of the literature compares the experience of Jews within the kingdom of Bohemia, where Charles ruled as king, with that of Jews elsewhere within the empire. (Charles had been elected the empire’s ruler in 1346, but his reign remained contested until 1349.) Bohemian Jews in general faced less violence than those in the rest of the empire during the middle years of the fourteenth century. Historians have sought to explain this difference by emphasizing the limitations of Charles IV’s financial resources and his political power outside Bohemia, particularly in the early years of his reign. Not a few have gone beyond explanation to venture into uncomfortable territory for the medieval historian: namely, the moral evaluation of past actions. Implicit are often hypothetical or counterfactual questions: How would Charles IV have treated Jews throughout the empire, had his power been equal to that he enjoyed in the Bohemian crown lands? Would the peace and privilege of the Bohemian Jews have been shared uniformly by Jewish communities across the entire empire?

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 297 In these accounts, Prague’s flourishing Jewish community serves primarily as a foil to the Jewish communities in other cities of the empire, notable primarily for what they did not experience. Historians similarly contrast the community’s situation during these decades with that of later Jews massacred in Prague in 1389, during the reign of Charles’s successor, Wenceslas IV. In that year accusations of host desecration led to mob violence on Easter day— also the last day of Passover in 1389—that left hundreds of Jews dead.12 Prague Jews experienced no such violence during Charles IV’s reign. Yet, despite this relative peace and prosperity, historians of art, literature, and material culture have uncovered remarkably little material to study from Prague Jews during this period. The signature thinkers, texts, manuscripts, and synagogues of Prague’s medieval Jewish community date primarily to the thirteenth or fifteenth centuries. The third quarter of the fourteenth is particularly blank. The devastation of 1389 must be at least partly to blame for this lack of sources, but it has left a noticeable gap in the recent exhibitions and catalogs dedicated to Charles IV’s Prague.13 In this essay, I intend to contribute to both scholarly conversations through a close look at two of Charles IV’s most favored cities: Prague and Nuremberg. A better understanding of their different circumstances, especially in the first years of Charles’s imperial rule, can inform a more robust answer to questions about the character of Charles IV’s relationship with Jews. To achieve this, I will focus—as Crossley and others have done so powerfully in Prague — on physical space: namely, on Charles IV’s active role in reshaping urban space. At the end of Charles IV’s life, both Prague and Nuremberg could thank the emperor for expansive new marketplaces: today’s Charles Square and Wenceslas Square in Prague, and the Hauptmarkt with its Frauenkirche in Nuremberg. Creation of these spaces brought suffering to the Jews of one city and new privileges to those of the other.

Jews in Prague and Nuremberg A comparison of Prague and Nuremberg is particularly apt for this period. The medieval empire never had a single capital city, and even Charles IV’s

298 /

David C. Mengel

impressive plans to remake Prague were not intended to alter that. Instead, as Peter Moraw argued, Charles IV cultivated an axis of powerful cities from Frankfurt to Wrocław (Breslau), with Nuremberg and Prague as its two most important points.14 Charles’s own itinerary confirms this powerfully.15 The charters he issued from Nuremberg document more than fifty separate visits in twenty-six distinct years. Only Prague hosted the ruler more frequently.16 As in Prague, the emperor worked to boost Nuremberg into the ranks of the empire’s greatest cities. For example, Charles made sure that his son and heir, Wenceslas, was born and christened in Nuremberg in 1361. By then his Golden Bull of 1356 had already stipulated that each future emperor should hold his first Reichstag at Nuremberg, after being elected at Frankfurt and crowned at Aachen.17 No two cities benefited more from Charles IV’s long reign than Nuremberg and Prague. Yet while the Jews of Prague flourished during these years, Jews in Nuremberg were massacred. At first glance, the disparity seems inexplicable — particularly because Charles IV took direct interest in the fates of both communities. For Jews in fourteenth-century Prague, Charles IV’s actions seem to have been almost entirely beneficial. To start, they enjoyed the legal protection guaranteed by King Přemysl Ottokar II a century earlier to all the Jews of Bohemia. In 1356 Charles IV confirmed Ottokar’s Statuta Judaeorum, which identified Jews in Prague and the Bohemian crown lands as servi camere nostre, indicating at once Jews’ protected and subservient status, in the same words used by German rulers since Frederick II in 1236 to express Judenregal, the royal rights over Jews.18 In the fourteenth century, two Prague synagogues served a population of perhaps 750 Jews, according to the most recent estimate; they lived predominately in the northwestern part of the city’s Old Town, the most densely settled of three legally distinct Prague cities (Old Town, Lesser Town [ Malá Strana], and Hradčany).19 Careful study indicates a modest expansion during Charles IV’s reign of this Jewish quarter (vicus Judaeorum) — which was neither a legally distinct town nor a closed-off ghetto at the time.20 Evidently this Old Town Jewish community flourished. Furthermore, in 1348 Charles specifically invited Jews to participate in his ambitious plans to expand Prague by establishing a fourth dis-

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 299 tinct Prague city, New Town: he extended to Jews the same tax incentives on offer to any Christian who would move into the lightly populated area and build a stone house. He further promised his special protection to Jews who answered the appeal, in recognition of their “vulnerability.” All Jews except those already living in Old Town were eligible — for Charles IV did not want to damage Old Town to benefit New Town.21 Under Charles IV, Jews living in their traditional community within Prague’s Old Town enjoyed privileged protection, while other Jews were offered financial incentives to help populate New Town. Prague’s Jews could have hardly asked more from their ruler and protector. Three hundred kilometers away, the experience of Jews in Nuremberg was entirely different. Although they too should have enjoyed the emperor’s protection as servi camere regie, they instead seem to have been treated as expendable tools for Charles IV’s political ambitions. The emperor’s relationship with Nuremberg was admittedly shaky— at best—in the first years of his contested reign as King of the Romans. As supporters of his Wittelsbach rival, Ludwig of Bavaria, the Nurembergers did not even admit the elected Charles into their gates until October 1347, after Ludwig’s death. Seven months later, the so-called Artisans’ Revolt brought to power a new Nuremberg town council that supported the Wittelsbachs’ next champion, Günther von Schwarzburg.22 Charles only reentered the city in September 1349, after Günther’s death and Charles’s own belated coronation at Aachen the previous summer. The emperor’s entry marked the end of the urban revolt as Charles reinstated the previous town council. Nuremberg’s Jews suffered financially during the revolt, but matters quickly worsened afterward. Included among a flurry of privileges Charles granted to Nuremberg during that visit was an October 2 charter absolving the council from any responsibility for violence against the town’s Jews, “unser camerknecht,”23 that the “common folk” might perpetrate.24 Given this advance permission, it should come as no surprise that Nuremberg’s Jews did indeed become the targets of mass violence two months later, only days after a series of still more chilling imperial charters instructed the Nuremberg town council and citizens precisely how to dispose of the town’s Jewish houses after their inhabitants were gone.25

300 /

David C. Mengel

A brief entry in the family chronicle of a Nuremberger named Ulman Stromer — likely an eyewitness to the massacre — recorded simply that the town’s Jews had been “burned” on December 5, the eve of Saint Nicholas Day in 1349.26 The Nuremberg Memorbuch records the names of 562 Jews who died then. Most of their houses were destroyed, their synagogue burned.27 The Jewish cemetery was also pillaged and some of its gravestones repurposed as building materials — including, most poignantly, as steps in a staircase of the renovated church of Saint Lorenz.28 No members of Nuremberg’s Jewish community remained in the city, a situation that the emperor seemed to envision as permanent. The next October, he fully legitimized the plundering of all Jews’ property and other wealth in the city.29 Evidently this was the plan from the start: in advance of the massacre, his so-called Market Charter (Markturkunde) had ordered that a new church dedicated to the Virgin Mary be built on the site of the synagogue.30 And so it was: construction began within three years, the choir was consecrated in 1355, and in 1358, less than a decade after the Saint Nicholas Eve massacre of Jews, the completed Gothic Frauenkirche permanently replaced Nuremberg’s synagogue.31 Presumably the few Jews who by then had returned to Nuremberg lamented the old synagogue’s demise,32 even as they recited the names of those who survived the fiery violence only in the spare language of the community’s Memorbuch: May God remember the souls of those killed and burned in Nuremberg: Joseph, son of Jechiel haKohen, his wife Chandlin and his daughter; Yechiel haKohen, his wife Jutta and his three children; Isaac, son of Baruch haKohen, his wife Jachnet, his son the young Baruch, his mother-in-law the elderly Hanna, his daughter Minna, her young son Koplin, and her [other] six children; Jacob, son of Baruch haKohen, his wife Tube, his young son Michel, his unmarried daughter Dolce and his [other] four children; Yechiel, son of Yekutiel haKohen, his wife Miriam and his eight children; Dolce, daughter of Yekutiel haKohen, and her six children. . . .33

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 301 Historians, Charles IV, and Jews The well-documented, premeditated massacre of Nuremberg Jews in 1349 is breathtaking, even to modern readers with general knowledge of the range of persecutions, discriminations, and libels to which medieval European Jews were at times subjected. So the fate of Nuremberg’s Jews under Charles IV seems to call not only for explanation, but also for moral condemnation; some historians in recent decades have indeed offered the latter. Before turning to their judgments, however, we need some further context for the experience of Jews in these two cities. Midfourteenth-century Prague and Nuremberg make an instructive comparison, but they belonged to a larger environment that should inform our evaluation. First, we should note that persecution of and violence against urban Jews was neither unusual nor isolated in fourteenth-century central Europe.34 Nor were such acts limited to the waves of anti-Jewish violence in the years 1348 through 1350—despite a common tendency in the scholarship to overestimate the Black Death’s causal force, even in the face of the awkward chronology of plague and persecution in many cities.35 ( Nuremberg itself seems to have escaped the epidemic in these years, for instance.)36 Instead, the experience of Nuremberg’s Jews in 1349 fits into a wider and longer pattern of medieval persecutions and expulsions of Jews in central Europe.37 Violent attacks on Jews occurred in dozens of cities not only between 1348 and 1350, but also especially in the previous several decades. During the so-called Good Werner (1287/1288), Rintfleisch (1298), and Armleder (1336 –1338) persecutions, and in other local and regional outbreaks of violence, mobs killed and burned Jews in numerous cities in this region.38 A contemporary Toledo rabbi characterized the regnum Teutonicum as the “land of persecution,” a judgment supported by maps that plot the incidences of violence in the region.39 Nuremberg’s Jews had suffered especially in the 1298 persecutions, during which its Memorbuch was begun by Isaac of Meiningen.40 Isaac died in the violence along with more than six hundred other Jews; they had fled to Nuremberg Castle, but the imperial officials there proved unable to hold off the mob.41 In the kingdom of Bohemia, too, there were episodes of anti-Jewish violence during the same decades, if not as

302 /

David C. Mengel

many as in the more western parts of the empire.42 So although the tacit, advance permission that Charles IV gave Nuremberg’s citizens in 1349 to expel or kill its Jews remains shocking, the anti-Jewish violence itself fits into a larger pattern that predated Charles’s reign and extended far beyond Nuremberg. Secondly, Charles IV’s offer of amnesty to Nuremberg citizens also belongs to a larger pattern. As violence against Jews erupted in town after town at the beginning of his reign, Charles IV quickly issued pardons for the perpetrators. Repeatedly Charles assigned the possessions of the murdered or exiled Jews to city authorities or even to individual supporters— as had some of his imperial predecessors in similar situations before.43 The emperor regularly abdicated, in other words, his duty as ruler to protect the Jews of the empire. Even worse, Nuremberg was not the only city that received advance permission from Charles IV to confiscate the property of Jews, should they be killed or exiled. Similar letters went to the city of Frankfurt and to Archbishop Baldwin of Trier, assigning Jewish property in Frankfurt and Alsace, respectively, to their recipients — in the event that Jews in those places might happen to be killed.44 So although the situation of Nuremberg’s Jews in 1349 is particularly well documented, it was not unique or perhaps even exceptional.45 Where does this leave the broader question of Charles IV and Jews— and specifically the question as informed by a comparison of Nuremberg and Prague? Most historians have been inclined to attribute the Nuremberg massacre to the emperor’s relative powerlessness. Some earlier commentators even portrayed Charles as a praiseworthy protector of Jews unable to hold back the crush of anti-Jewish mobs of common folk, perhaps panicked by the arrival of plague and wandering flagellants.46 Others further characterized the violence as a medieval manifestation of social or class conflict,47 an explanation that seems more plausible for the Rintfleisch and Armleder persecutions than for this one. Closer study of the midcentury events now allows us to rule out this explanation for the persecutions of 1348 to 1350. The chronology is often wrong for plaguecrazed mobs—plague followed violence in some places rather than preceding it— and official instigation and complicity are too clearly recorded in surviving documents: the emperor and leading city officials in Nuremberg and elsewhere both anticipated and excused the violence.48 At the

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 303 same time, scholars have continued to argue that Charles IV’s political power in the empire was extremely limited, especially but not only while his imperial rule remained contested. Charles, according to this perspective, only gave what he had no power to withhold; in other words, he could not have protected the empire’s Jews in any case. Exacerbating this weakness was the financial precariousness of Charles IV’s situation in the early years of his imperial reign, which serves to explain why the emperor resorted to the dispersal of Jewish property. Paying soldiers and buying allies left Charles IV seriously in debt as he struggled after his 1346 election to consolidate his power in the empire. He owed great sums, for example, to Archbishop Baldwin of Trier, his great-uncle, who had supported Charles’s claims in imperial politics and over the family’s Luxemburg lands. Transferring to Baldwin his rights over Jews in Alsace offered a way to reduce that debt.49 An even more tempting resource was the emperor’s expectation of annual payments from Jews, not to mention the right to levy additional taxes; this was the most lucrative aspect of the Judenregal. Future income from such taxes could be exchanged for much-needed cash or political support. Unfortunately, previous emperors had progressively allocated elements of the Judenregal to city governments and regional lords.50 That left the relative responsibilities and privileges of various authorities in relation to a city’s Jews “anything but clear” in cities such as Nuremberg, especially during times of conflict and transition; nevertheless, the emperor did retain the strongest claim on the right to tax Jews.51 Historians’ efforts to disentangle the evidence for the financial motives and effects of Charles IV’s acts have also suffered a lack of clarity. It is tempting to jump right to the conclusion that the emperor pawned or gave away Jewish property in Nuremberg that was not yet vacant. But to understand the steps that led to this inflammatory end, a more detailed summary of the financial aspects of Charles IV’s orders is necessary. The emperor’s continuing claim to the right to tax the empire’s Jews led him to declare invalid the revolutionary city council’s reported levy of 13,000 gold gulden on Nuremberg’s Jews during the Artisans’ Revolt. Charles then rewarded the Burgraves of Nuremberg52— his loyal supporters and likely already his creditors—by granting them whatever the revolutionary council had extorted from the city’s Jews.53 It was up to them to

304 /

David C. Mengel

reclaim the money from the town councilors who, for the moment, remained in firm control of Nuremberg. For the same reason, Charles IV’s own future receipt of annual Jewish payments from Nuremberg remained in doubt, even as his need for ready money had not abated. Mortgaging that future income—evidently expected to be 2,200 pounds per year from Nuremberg’s Jews at this time54—required finding a lender willing to accept significant risk. The same Burgraves of Nuremberg, together with the bishop of Bamberg, did precisely that in June by providing the emperor money he desperately needed to put down the rebellion. In exchange, the bishop of Bamberg was to receive 1,100 pounds of the Jewish tax each year for the next six years;55 the Burgraves of Nuremberg were likewise to receive 1,100 pounds annually until the debt to them had been entirely paid.56 Given the reports of anti-Jewish persecutions and expulsions emanating from dozens of other towns over the previous seven months,57 these creditors may have insisted upon additional guarantees that the promised payments would indeed be forthcoming from the Jews. We know that Charles IV offered them precisely such a pledge— a pledge that explains his reassignment of occupied Jewish property: should the Jews be expelled from Nuremberg before repayment of this debt, he stipulated, the bishop of Bamberg and the Burgraves of Nuremberg were to divide equally the houses and moveable goods belonging to the town’s Jews.58 Strapped for money, Charles IV borrowed against whatever elements of the Judenregal he could monetize. He mortgaged the annual taxes owed him by Nuremberg’s Jews — payments he had never before received— and further secured the loan with the promise of Jewish property — located in a city that did not yet recognize his authority. Charles proceeded to promise some of the same Jewish property to others, including the three best Jewish houses of his choice to the Wittelsbach heir, Ludwig of Brandenburg, in exchange for his acknowledgment of Charles IV’s imperial rule. This grant would obtain only if the Jews living there happened to be killed.59 Such detailed scrutiny of the context of Charles IV’s actions has helped historians to explain them. Like previous emperors, including his rival Ludwig of Bavaria, he granted to others the rights over Jews associated with the Judenregal in part because he was not currently profiting from them. Such rights were more theoretical than real; his true finan-

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 305 cial stake in the Jews in much of the empire was minimal. He mortgaged tax income that was theoretically owed to him by Jews, but which he had not actually been receiving; he transferred to favored supporters Jewish houses — including ones that had not yet been vacated — but in a city where a hostile revolutionary council denied his authority. These measures promised to benefit those to whom Charles owed money, those whom he wanted to reward, or those with whom he hoped to curry favor — all without costing him much, or anything.60 Those promises issued while his imperial title remained contested were furthermore of dubious value to their recipients, coming from a ruler with limited power to enforce them. The emperor’s financial exigency and his limited power in imperial cities such as Nuremberg also provide a simple and appealing explanation for the better situation of Jews within the crown lands of Bohemia: where Charles IV had the power to protect Jews, he tended to do so. His royal authority in Prague allowed him to treat Jews as he chose, whereas his weak and contested imperial authority in Nuremberg in 1349, together with his dire financial situation, compelled him to abandon the Jews to their own fates. As medieval rulers went, some historians have argued, Charles IV was therefore no worse an enemy to Jews than most others.61 One article — a small contribution to a mountain of literature appearing in 1978— aggressively challenged this tendency to exonerate Charles IV. It was a study of the Artisans’ Revolt in Nuremberg of 1348 to 1349 by Wolfgang von Stromer, descended from the same Stromer whose fourteenth-century family chronicle recorded the burning of Nuremberg Jews. Stromer’s careful account added still further explanation of the political and financial situation that limited the scope of Charles IV’s power, but nevertheless offered scathing moral judgment against the emperor, expressed in distinctively twentieth-century terms: “As Protector [of Jews], his failure to uphold his duty would already render him guilty. But through the phrases cited above [that is, the language granting amnesty in advance for violence against Jews], Charles IV demonstrated himself to have been the desk worker with ultimate responsibility for the Final Solution [die Endlösung] in Alsace, Frankfurt and Nuremberg.”62 To Stromer, Charles IV’s meager efforts to protect Jews in his crown lands and his isolated punishment of a few egregious instances of

306 /

David C. Mengel

anti-Jewish violence by no means mitigate his guilt. It seems “grotesque,” he concluded, to exonerate Charles IV from complicity (Mitschuld ) in the Nuremberg pogrom.63 Subsequent historians have echoed the moral condemnation of Stromer, if not usually so directly in the language of Holocaust.64 The measured judgment of František Graus admitted that, from the perspective of realpolitik, one might acknowledge Charles IV’s limited power to protect Jews within the empire. Nevertheless, in the Nuremberg case in particular, Graus too considered undeniable Charles IV’s complicity as well as his abject failure to fulfill the role that he and other medieval rulers claimed for themselves: protector of Jews.65 Other historians have expressed a combination of moral condemnation and bewilderment at Charles’s “inexplicable” acts.66

Urban Space Already we have seen that the larger context of late medieval anti-Jewish violence in the region, Charles IV’s political weakness in the empire at the contested start of his reign, and his related financial need can together help us to explain—if certainly not to excuse— why Charles IV provided advance, tacit permission for the Nurembergers to expel or even murder the Jews in their city. But those factors seem to me insufficient to explain the relative peace enjoyed by the Jews of Prague. Their experience is more difficult to explain than that of the Nurembergers— at least until we pay closer attention to the different physical environments of the two Jewish communities. As with all city dwellers, the lives of Jews in these medieval towns cannot be separated from the characteristics of the space they occupied. Urban space, as art historians and others continue to remind us, at once reflected and shaped both the experience and meaning of medieval urban life. That insight provides the foundation of my argument here: namely, that independent developments in the early fourteenth century affected the physical place of the Jews in each town in ways that contributed significantly to their fates. To understand how this happened, we must next look more closely at the urban space of both cities. The town of Nuremberg grew from two eleventh-century settlements on either side of the Pegnitz River. The older developed around

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 307

Map 12.1. Nuremberg during the reign of Charles IV

Nuremberg Castle; the second, on the other side of the river, spread out from a royal palace and the church of Saint Jakob.67 (See map 12.1.)68 By the middle of the thirteenth century, Nuremberg consisted of two walled areas: north of the Pegnitz lay St. Sebald Town, so called after the church of the same name; south was St. Lorenz ( New) Town, a planned, ovalshaped town established around the middle of the twelfth century.69 At about the same time, a significant number of Jews fleeing violence during the Second Crusade were resettled in Nuremberg, where they may have joined Jews already living there.70 Where exactly they settled remains in question. Historians have generally assumed that in the twelfth century Jews occupied the same space they did in the fourteenth century — namely, the swampy land between St. Sebald Town and the Pegnitz River. Convenient as this area was to both towns, its waterlogged ground would have required houses there to be built on expensive wooden pilings.71 This assumption fits well with the broader claim that medieval

308 /

David C. Mengel

Jews tended to occupy the least desirable, most marginal parts of cities, reflecting a social gradient of center to periphery embodied in medieval urban space. But that general point has been challenged, not least because so many urban Jewish settlements in medieval central Europe were centrally located. Jewish settlements grew in tandem with the highmedieval cities themselves, and the space each community occupied within a city reflected the moment of Jews’ arrival as much as any other factor.72 For Nuremberg, furthermore, recent archaeology has failed to discover any settlement at all in the high-medieval area just north of the Pegnitz; instead, boardwalks seem to have led people over uninhabited swampland between St. Sebald Town and the bridge over the Pegnitz. If Jews lived nearby in the twelfth century, it was likely just to the northeast on the site of the later fruit market. Another area of Jewish settlement south of the river in St. Lorenz Town seems to be indicated by a mikwe, a Jewish ritual bath, which archaeologists judge to date from the twelfth or thirteenth century.73 The location of later medieval Jewish settlement in Nuremberg is much clearer: archaeological and textual evidence concurs that a concentration of Nuremberg’s Jews did inhabit the southern edge of St. Sebald Town after the building of a new wall around it in the middle of the thirteenth century and continued to occupy the same area until 1349. The ground level seems to have been raised during this wall-building process, making it far more habitable than before—if still possibly more floodprone than other parts of the city.74 Jews and at least some Christians both lived in this area, where in 1296 a synagogue was built not far from the chapel of Saint Maurice.75 The synagogue was damaged in the 1298 Rintfleisch persecution but repaired again afterward.76 This urban space occupied by Nuremberg’s Jewish community was at once central and marginal. Just inside the new walls, it was distant from the city’s two original centers of gravity, the castle and the church of Saint Jakob. Yet its proximity to the bridge that linked the two towns made it ideally located for conducting trade. Indeed, the stalls and arcades built along the Jewish houses evidently threatened to choke urban traffic in the early fourteenth century, for which reason at least some of them were likely demolished.77 Prague’s late medieval Jews occupied a remarkably similar urban space. (See map 12.2.)78 Like Nuremberg, Prague had grown up on both

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 309

Map 12.2. Prague during the reign of Charles IV

sides of a river. Hilltop castles on either bank of the Vltava loomed over the early medieval settlements: Prague Castle with its suburban population on the western side and Vyšehrad on the eastern side. A single bridge linked the two sides of the river. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, settlement clustered especially in the bend of the river around a marketplace that has become today’s Old Town Square.79 By the time of Charles IV’s coronation as King of Bohemia in 1347, Prague comprised three legally distinct towns: Hradčany and Lesser Town on the western side of the river and Old Town (or Greater Town) on the eastern. A phrase from the early twelfth-century chronicle of Cosmas of Prague suggests that Jews were then living on both sides of the river, although

310 /

David C. Mengel

their earliest settlement locations in Prague remain— as in Nuremberg— a matter of some speculation. Some probably lived within Lesser Town and others on land that later became part of New Town. Archaeological research has further uncovered evidence of a Jewish cemetery in the latter place.80 By the later thirteenth century, however, Jews were concentrated especially in the area north of Old Town Square. Two synagogues existed there by the early fourteenth century. But this Jewish quarter was by no means a distinct ghetto. Jewish and Christian houses were legally distinct — residents of houses that were legally Jewish owed no parish tithes — but one could find both on the same street and in some cases the same block. The status of an individual house could and sometimes did change from Christian to Jewish, or Jewish to Christian, but only with the king’s permission. Notice also the interspersed churches and synagogues: the Church of the Holy Spirit, belonging to the hospital order of the Crosiers with the Red Heart, occupied space between the Old Synagogue and the Old-New Synagogue. The entire area, moreover, was divided among three Old Town parishes; in 1380 the parish priests of Saint Nicholas, Saint Valentine, and Holy Cross the Greater (which the Crosiers administered) all grumbled that the Jewish houses within their parishes represented lost tithes.81 Although gates were added before 1389 in several places to protect some of the predominantly Jewish blocks, they seem not to have been installed before Charles IV’s death in 1378.82 As in Nuremberg, the Jews in Prague occupied an urban area near the river that was also home to Christian residents; on the edge of Old Town, it was still convenient both to Prague’s main marketplace and to its only bridge. Its low elevation did make the area especially prone to flooding; in fact, the first incontrovertible documentary evidence for a Jewish population there comes from an account of a 1273 flood that inundated the entire Jewish quarter (“per totum vicum Judaeorum”).83 The presence in the same area of Hampays, an officially sanctioned brothel, underscored the location’s marginality and limited desirability.84 From around the middle of the thirteenth century, Jews in Nuremberg and Prague lived in areas with remarkably similar characteristics. But that changed profoundly in the fourteenth century as both cities flourished and grew. In Prague, Charles IV’s ambitious plans shifted the

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 311 urban center to the south and east. His vision for New Town included numerous new religious houses as well as two new, carefully laid out public marketplaces that dwarfed those of both Old Town and Lesser Town: the horse market (now Wenceslas Square) and the cattle market (now Charles Square).85 The cattle market became the ceremonial center of a new annual feast day arranged by the emperor as a public display of the great collection of relics he had collected from across Europe.86 In reshaping the urban space of Prague, Charles IV proved determined, even ruthless. Wherever existing buildings or property owners stood in the way of his vision, they had to give way. He had the Romanesque basilica of Saint Vitus demolished to make way for its Gothic successor. Since New Town needed new parish churches, Charles arranged for two new ones to be built on property that had belonged to a local monastic community.87 The emperor required the Old Town artisans practicing the noisiest, hottest, and smelliest crafts to move to the less densely populated New Town.88 Later he ordered that the walls between the two towns be torn down, so that Old Town and New Town would combine as a single Greater Town of Prague. That command had further spatial implications to which Charles IV responded decisively. For example, he confiscated Prague’s most notorious brothel, called Venice, which the urban unification had shifted from Old Town’s southern margin to the center of Prague’s Greater Town. The emperor reassigned the vacated brothel to a charismatic priest for an experimental religious community of priests and reformed prostitutes. When that priest attracted controversy and then died, Charles IV quickly expelled the community and reassigned the property to the Cistercians for a college— an uncontestably respectable purpose for its newly central location.89 By then the emperor had already established another college, Charles College, for twelve arts masters at the university he had founded in 1348. He generously provided the college a large Old Town house — namely, the house of Lazarus the Jew. Charles IV seems to have confiscated the house from Lazarus or his heirs despite the fact that Lazarus had previously enjoyed his particular favor, itself presumably the result of the emperor’s financial relationship with Lazarus’s family.90 The house of Lazarus, the first home of Charles College, was located near the edge of the Jewish quarter closest to Old

312 /

David C. Mengel

Town Square. Fortunately for the Jewish community, this house was the exception in Prague. The emperor’s plans for the city included an expanded and remade urban area, but for the most part they left the Jewish quarter alone. The city’s physical topography and built environment together dictated the direction in which the city should expand: Prague’s new walls on both sides of the river followed the terrain to bring the ancient hilltop castle of Vyšehrad into the urban fortification system. To the good fortune of the city’s Jews, most of their houses happened not to stand in the way. The fourteenth-century expansion of Nuremberg, on the other hand, left the Jewish quarter on some of the most desirable, most central property in the city. A new city wall built in the 1320s crossed the river to surround both St. Sebald Town and St. Lorenz Town. By this time, multiple bridges spanned the narrow Pegnitz to connect the northern and southern parts of Nuremberg, now unified physically as well as legally. What the new urban conglomeration lacked was a centrally located marketplace of adequate size, as would have been painfully clear to the city’s powerful merchant families. One such family included the brothers Ulrich and Conrad Stromer, both uncles of Ulman Stromer, whose family chronicle briefly mentioned the 1349 massacre of Nuremberg Jews. The Stromers enjoyed considerable wealth and power within Nuremberg, despite its political vicissitudes: Ulrich served on the revolutionary town council of 1348 to 1349 that had supported Charles IV’s Wittelsbach opponent; his brother Conrad was a member of the pro-Charles IV council that the emperor reinstated in 1349.91 Their connections extended far beyond the city itself. Like some of Nuremberg’s other leading merchant families, the Stromers had intermarried with Prague’s leading families and even included members who served at Charles IV’s own court. Together they have been described as a “lobby” at the court for Nuremberg’s trade and financial interests.92 Despite his association with the revolutionary council, Ulrich in particular cultivated the favor of Charles IV. Ulrich delivered to Rome Nuremberg’s gifts for Charles IV’s imperial coronation in 1355, for example.93 It was also Ulrich who traveled to Prague to obtain from Charles IV the notorious Market Charter of November 1349—the document that expressed Charles IV’s grand plans for the urban space occupied by Nuremberg’s Jews.94

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 313 The words of the Market Charter, rarely quoted at length, express clearly the emperor’s ambition for his second city in language grounded in Ulrich’s intimate (and self-interested) knowledge of its urban topography. We Charles, by God’s grace King of the Romans, for all time improver of the empire, and King of Bohemia, profess and proclaim publicly in this letter to all who see it or hear it read, that we have considered such a defect, which is communal and has existed in the city of Nuremberg: namely, that in this city there is no large square [grozzer platz] on which people can gather together to buy and sell things and otherwise profit. For this reason, when we considered that it is for the profit and good of us, the empire, the city and the citizens themselves, we have allowed and also with this letter do allow the council members and the citizens of Nuremberg themselves to tear down all the Jewish houses in Nuremberg that lie between the houses of Franz Haller and Fritz Behaim, plus the synagogue and the four Jewish houses that are in the middle between the two streets and across from the house of Ulrich Stromer; from them they shall make two squares that shall endure permanently and belong to the city in common. And furthermore, no house shall ever again be built upon that space, with the exception that in place of the synagogue, one should build a church in honor of Saint Mary, our Lady, which will lie on the larger square in the place where the citizens think best.95 In a further pair of charters issued three days later, Charles IV rewarded Ulrich “for his loyalty to us and for the sake of the service he has done for us and for the empire and may still do in the future.” The reward? The house of the Jew Isaac of Scheßlitz, located in the same block as his own house, one that was not slated for demolition by the Market Charter. Within the year, Ulrich received another neighboring Jewish house as well; a few other leading merchants of Nuremberg benefited similarly.96 Unlike earlier charters, the Market Charter was not conditional on the death or exile of the Jews who inhabited the houses it targeted for destruction. And rather than transfer Jewish property to other individuals to enjoy as they pleased — like the separate charters that benefited Ulrich and others—the Market Charter ordered the destruction of

314 /

David C. Mengel

Map 12.3. Nuremberg, detail of Jewish quarter

Jewish houses and the conversion of the underlying land into public space. (See map 12.3.)97 This grant also explicitly superseded earlier gifts, which led to some legal complications; remember that the bishop of Bamberg and the Burgraves of Nuremberg had shortly before been promised all the town’s Jewish houses as surety for receipt of the next several years’ worth of Jewish taxes to the emperor. Nevertheless, a deal was soon reached.98 We cannot know, of course, whether the idea for a new pair of adjacent market squares in the middle of Nuremberg originated with Ulrich Stromer and his fellow citizens or the emperor himself. But Charles IV’s support for the creation of a great public space in Nuremberg certainly parallels his contemporary plans for the great horse and cattle markets in Prague’s New Town. Furthermore, his strong and continued interest in the building of a church in honor of the Virgin suggests that this stipulation at least originated with him. He was present at the dedication of the choir and the church itself in 1355 and 1358, and he endowed the church with a considerable treasure of holy relics.99 Commercial, political, and

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 315 religious interests motivated Charles IV to order the creation of public marketplaces in the centers of both Prague and Nuremberg. In Nuremberg, the most central site for such a market, the site favored by Charles and the leading Nuremberg citizens whom the new emperor was eager to please, happened to be occupied by the city’s Jewish community. Writing about the violence against Jews in Strasbourg in 1349, a chronicler in that city attributed the murder of Jews not to religious animosity or concerns about the Black Death, but instead to their Christian neighbors’ greed for their property and money: their wealth, he said, was the “poison that killed the Jews.”100 In Nuremberg, Ulrich and others did indeed covet the houses of their Jewish neighbors. That contributed to Jews’ insecure situation in the city. Historians have emphasized an additional factor leading to the Nuremberg massacre: namely, the inherent legal vulnerability of medieval Jews, which Charles IV, himself still feeling vulnerable in his imperial and financial situation, exploited. But I suggest that the Nuremberg Jews suffered, while those of Prague did not, because of the location of their houses and synagogue within Nuremberg’s late medieval walls. The space that they occupied itself proved poisonous.101 Prague’s new walls, on the other hand, extended in the opposite direction and simply reinforced the marginal and relatively undesirable location of Prague’s Jewish neighborhood— a low-lying, flood-prone urban area also notorious for prostitution and gambling.102 Perhaps the emperor’s solicitude for Jews in Prague was not, after all, demonstrably greater than elsewhere. Remember that Charles IV confiscated the house of Lazarus the Jew for his new college. More damning still, a formulary from Charles’s chancery includes an undated document granting an unnamed person one thousand gold florins—to be taken from the property, goods, and furniture of Prague Jews “in the event they should be killed or flee the city of Prague,” an ominous echo of the charters the emperor issued to several German cities.103 But in Prague the emperor’s urban plans faced a very different problem than in Nuremberg. His challenge there was too much open space within the new walls, not too little. So the priority was attracting Jews (and everyone else) to New Town, not expelling them from Old Town. It was geography that saved Prague’s Jews from the fate of those in Nuremberg.

316 /

David C. Mengel

Judging the Emperor A close reading of the Market Charter and greater attention to the built environments of Prague and Nuremberg allow us better to explain the differing fates of the Jews in the two cities. But it seems that the burden of proof has shifted: now the point is less to explain why Nuremberg Jews suffered than to explain why Prague Jews did not. Perhaps the broader question of Charles IV’s general relationship with and policies toward Jews — the subject of numerous articles and book chapters — was never the most useful one, or at least not the one most likely to lead to a compelling explanation. Political, financial, and other factors — especially factors related to urban planning — prove to be more salient. Yet by attempting to explain the past more richly, to me more convincingly, I seem to have invited an even harsher moral judgment on Emperor Charles IV than that of Wolfgang von Stromer. The names recorded in Nuremberg’s Memorbuch bring back to mind what modern maps of medieval cities can easily obscure. Gutlin, daughter of Nehemiah haKohen, and her young son; Simson, son of Baruch haKohen, his wife Deiha, his son-in-law David and his wife Lilia, daughter of Simson haKohen, his son Yechiel haKohen and his wife Jutta. Joel, son of Kalonymos haKohen, his wife Gutlin, his daughters Juttlin, Merlin, Leah and his three grandsons, as well as his grandsons Suslin and Joel, sons of Chakim, and his servant Bona, daughter of Jacob of Wöhrd, his daughter the young Dolce with her daughters Hannah, Miriam, and Hizlin, and her sons Lasan and Michel. . . .104 Remaking the urban space of Nuremberg contributed to the violent massacre of at least 562 individual Jews — people whose names we still know, husbands and wives, daughters and sons, grandchildren. Some historians have felt compelled to defend Charles as a well-intentioned ruler, albeit one of limited power — a ruler whose idealized image fits nicely into a glossy exhibition catalog of golden-age Prague. Others have instead condemned him, after more or less careful historical analysis, for actions that contravene the moral standards of his age or our own, the

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 317 latter rightly shaped by the modern experience of Holocaust. My own goal here has been neither to defend nor condemn, but to understand and explain.105 Patron of arts, builder of Prague’s tourist-friendly cathedral and numerous other churches, founder of a university, Charles IV was also at times ruthless, even inhumane, in his commitment to redesigning his cities. Nuremberg’s proud Frauenkirche looks out not only over the city’s expansive main marketplace, but also over the ghosts of massacred Jews. That the Jews of Prague did not suffer the same fate owes little or nothing to the scruples of an enlightened medieval monarch. Giving closer attention to urban space has shown that. Still, I hold back from offering judgment, hoping instead to have painted richer and more compelling—but also more complicated—pictures of Charles IV, of the Jews of his two most favored cities, and of an undeniably remarkable age for the city of Prague — if not an age of unalloyed gold. But what real era of any living city ever was?

Notes 1. On the considerable confusion surrounding Bohemia’s experience of the Black Death and later plague outbreaks, see my article, “A Plague on Bohemia? Mapping the Black Death,” Past & Present 211, no. 1 (May 1, 2011): 3– 34. 2. Prague in the later fourteenth century meets the general criteria that Peter Hall lays out for the golden age of a great city, although Hall himself does not include in his massive survey any examples between the years 100 ( Rome) and 1400 ( Florence). Peter Geoffrey Hall, Cities in Civilization ( New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). 3. Jiří Fajt, “Charles IV: Toward a New Imperial Style,” in Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347– 1437, ed. Barbara Drake Boehm and Jiří Fajt ( New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 16. 4. Česká televize conducted this poll in 2005, in which Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Václav Havel gained the second and third most votes. Hus appeared in seventh place: “Největší Čech všech dob? Karel IV.!,” Česká televise, March 19, 2005, http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/specialy/nejvetsicech/oprojektu_ napsalidetail?id=133. It would be unwise to take this poll too seriously, as Czech voters evidently did not. Before fictional characters were disallowed, it seems that the leading vote recipient was the fictitious Jára Cimrman — a genius of art and science who somehow never got credit for his astonishing works: Ladka M. Bauerova, “Czechs’ Hero? The People’s Choice Is a Joke,” New York Times,

318 /

David C. Mengel

March 26, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/world/europe/25iht-hero .html?_r=1&. 5. Boehm and Fajt, eds., Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347– 1437; Jiří Fajt and Barbara Drake Boehm, eds., Karel IV., císař z boží milosti: kultura a umění za vlády posledních Lucemburků 1347– 1437 ( Prague: Správa Pražského hradu, 2006); Klára Benešovská, ed., The Story of Prague Castle ( Prague: Prague Castle Administration, 2003); Jiří Fajt, ed., Magister Theodoricus: Court Painter to Emperor Charles IV ( Prague: National Gallery Prague, 1998); Jiří Fajt, ed., Court Chapels of the High and Late Middle Ages and Their Artistic Decoration ( Praze: Národní galerie v Praze, 2003). 6. Paul Crossley, “The Politics of Presentation: The Architecture of Charles IV of Bohemia,” in Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, Richard Marks, and A. J. Minnis ( York: York Medieval Press, 2000), 99–172; Paul Crossley and Zoë Opačić, “Prague as a New Capital,” in Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, ed. Boehm and Fajt, 59– 73. 7. Crossley, “The Politics of Presentation,” 164. 8. Crossley and Opačić, “Prague as a New Capital,” 64, building on the foundational work of Vilém Lorenc, Nové Město pražské ( Prague: SNTLNakladatelství Technické Literatury, 1973). 9. Milena Bartlová, “Karel IV a výtvarné umění,” in Ve znamení zemí Koruny české: sborník k šedesátým narozeninám Prof. PhDr. Lenky Bobkové, CSc, ed. Luděk Březina, Jana Konvičná, and Jan Zdichynec ( Prague: Casablanca, 2006), 349; see also Eva Schlotheuber, “Der Ausbau Prags zur Residenzstadt und die Herrschaftskonzeption Karls IV.,” in Prag und die grossen Kulturzentren Europas in der Zeit der Luxemburger (1310 –1437), ed. Markéta Jarosová, Jiří Kuthan, and Stefan Scholz, Opera facultatis Theologiae catholicae Universitatis Carolinae Pragensis, Historia et historia artium 8 ( Prague: Togga, 2008), 601–17. Among the most significant works on the subject to appear in 1978 was the volume that accompanied exhibitions in Nuremberg and Cologne: Ferdinand Seibt, ed., Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen ( Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1978). 10. On the literature of 1978, see Peter Moraw, “Kaiser Karl IV. 1378–1978: Ertrag und Konsequenzen eines Gedenkjahres,” in Politik, Gesellschaft, Geschichtsschreibung: Giessener Festgabe für František Graus zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Ludat and Rainer Christoph Schwinges (Cologne: Böhlau, 1982), 224 – 318. 11. Among the most recent is a passing, firmly critical reference in David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition ( New York: Norton, 2013), 201. 12. Barbara Newman, “The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody,” Church History 81 (2012): 1– 26. 13. One partial exception proves the point by including very little material from Charles IV’s own reign, despite the focus of the pair of New York and Prague exhibitions that the English and Czech versions of the article accompanied: Vivian B. Mann, “The Artistic Culture of Prague Jewry,” in Prague: The

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 319 Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, ed. Boehm and Fajt, 83– 89; Mann, “Židé a panovnický dvůr,” in Karel IV., císař z boží milosti, ed. Fajt and Boehm, 276 – 89. See also Otto Muneles, “Die hebräische literatur auf dem Boden der ČSSR,” Judaica Bohemiae 5 (1969): 110 –14. 14. Peter Moraw, “Zur Mittelpunktsfunktion Prags in Zeitalter Karls IV.,” in Europa Slavica–Europa Orientalis: Festschrift für Herbert Ludat zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus-Detlev Grothusen and Klaus Zernack ( Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1980), 448– 60; František Graus, “Prag als Mitte Böhmens 1346 –1421,” in Zentralität als Problem der mittelalterlichen Stadtgeschichtsforschung, ed. Emil Meynen (Cologne: Bohlau, 1979), 22– 35; Karl Bosl, “Nürnberg– Böhmen–Prag,” Böhmen und seine Nachbarn: Gesellschaft, Politik und Kultur in Mitteleuropa ( Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976), 176 – 87; Günther Bräutigam, “Nürnberg als Kaiserstadt,” in Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 339– 43. 15. The maps of Charles IV’s itinerary in Heinz Stoob’s study of Charles IV graphically illustrate the importance of this axis: Kaiser Karl IV. und seine Zeit (Graz: Verlag Styria, 1990), maps 1– 4. This is especially true for the years 1355–1368, depicted in map 1. 16. Werner Schultheiß, “Kaiser Karl IV. und die Reichsstadt Nürnberg: Streiflichter und funde zur Territorialpolitik in Ostfranken,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 52 (1963): 43. 17. Wolfgang D. Fritz, ed., Die goldene Bulle Kaiser Karls IV. vom Jahre 1356, Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis separatim editi ( Weimar: Böhlau, 1972), 87, chap. 29. 18. Jaromír Čelakovský, ed., Privilegia civitatum Pragensium, Codex juris municipalis regni Bohemiae 1 ( Prague: Grégr, 1886), 5– 9, no. 3; 99, no. 63. Peter Hilsch, “Die Juden in Böhmen und Mähren im Mittelalter,” in Die Juden in den Böhmischen Ländern, ed. Ferdinand Seibt ( Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), 22– 26. On the significance of the oft-discussed “camerae nostre servi,” see David Abulafia, “The King and the Jews — the Jews in the Ruler’s Service,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. Christoph Cluse, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 4 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 45– 46; cf. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 191– 93, 201, who translates servi as “slaves.” 19. Alexandr Putík’s estimate of 750 Jews significantly revises the conventional estimate of 4,000, which seems to have been based solely on the contemporary report that 3,000 Jews died in the 1389 pogrom: “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town,” Judaica Bohemiae 30 – 31 ( May 1996): 44 – 45. Cf. Wilfried Brosche, “Das Ghetto von Prag,” in Die Juden in den Böhmischen Ländern, ed. Seibt, 106, 117; Tomáš Pěkný, Historie Židů v Čechách a na Moravě, 2d ed. ( Prague: Sefer, 2001), 387n2; 637. 20. Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town,” 7– 46, esp. maps 6 and 7.

320 /

David C. Mengel

21. Čelakovský, ed., Privilegia civitatum Pragensium, 79– 85, nos. 49– 50; Lorenc, Nové Město pražské, 97–104. This part of Prague was already home to a large Jewish cemetery and at least a small number of Jewish inhabitants, but their numbers seem not to have increased significantly after the foundation of New Town. See Pěkný, Historie židů, 393, for a summary of more recent archaeological investigations of this area. 22. For this revolt, see especially Wolfgang von Stromer, “Die Metropole im Aufstand gegen König Karl IV. Nürnberg zwischen Wittelsbach und Luxemburg, Juni 1348–September 1349,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 55– 90. 23. On the problem of translating Kammerknecht, a medieval German form of “servi camere regie,” into modern English in the traditional way as “serfs of the royal chamber,” see Abulafia, “The King and the Jews,” 43– 46. 24. Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 1173, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www .regesta-imperii.de/regesten /8-0-0-karl-iv/nr/1349-10-02_4_0_8_0_0_1350_ 1173.html; Arndt Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg 1146–1945, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Kultur der Stadt Nürnberg 12 ( Nürnberg: Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, 1968), 32; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 64 – 65; Werner Schultheiss, “Der Handwerkeraufstand von 1348/49,” in Nürnberg, ed. Pfeiffer, 74. 25. Margarete Kühn, ed., Dokumente zur Geschichte des Deutschen Reiches und seiner Verfassung: 1349, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum 9 (Hannover: Hahn, 1983), 481– 82, nos. 616–18. 26. “Anno domini 1349 di juden hi waren gesessen zu mittelst auf dem platz, gingen hewser auf und ab, und do unser frawen kapellen stet gin auch ain gass auf und ab und hinter unser frawen kirchen; und hetten auch hewser am Zotenperg. di juden vurden verprant an sant Niclos abent anno alz vor geschriben stet.” Karl Hege, ed., “Ulman Stromer’s ‘Püchel von meim geslechet und von abentewr,’” in Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1862), 1:25. 27. Isaac ben Samuel of Meiningen, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches: Im Auftrage der Historischen Commission für Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, ed. Siegmund Salfeld (Berlin: L. Simion, 1898), 61– 65, 219– 30; Rainer Barzen, “Das Nürnberger Memorbuch. Eine Einführung,” in Corpus der Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden im spätmittelalterlichen Reich, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Jörg R. Müller ( Trier: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, 2011), http://www.medieval-ashkenaz.org/NM01/einleitung.html. This web-based project’s edition of the Memorbuch currently includes the entries up to 1347. 28. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 35; Günter Heinz Seidl, “Die Denkmäler des mittelalterlichen Jüdischen Friedhofs in Nürnberg,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 70 (1983): 43– 51; Karl Kohn, “Die Lage des Nürnberger Judenfriedhofs om Mittelalter,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 321 Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 70 (1983): 13– 27. A photograph of the repurposed gravestones appears in Herbert Lehnert et al., Juden in Nürnberg: Geschichte der Jüdischen Mitbürger vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart ( Nurnberg: Tümmels, 1993), 7. 29. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 34; Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 1335, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1350-10-12_ 1_0_8_0_0_1524_1335. 30. Kühn, Dokumente zur Geschichte, 481, no. 616. 31. Klaus Winands and Hasso Breuer, “Aachen–Nürnberg–Prag. Eine Miszelle zur Architekturrezeption unter Karl IV.,” in Architektur und Kunst im Abendland: Festschrift zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres von Günter Urban, ed. Michael Jansen and Klaus Winands (Rome: Herder, 1992), 168– 70; Paul Crossley, “Our Lady in Nuremberg, All Saints Chapel in Prague, and the High Choir of Prague Cathedral,” in Prague and Bohemia: Medieval Art, Architecture, and Cultural Exchange in Central Europe, ed. Zoë Opači (Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009), 64 – 80. 32. One Jew was admitted to the city as early as February 1350— in exchange for an exorbitant fee. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 38. 33. Isaac ben Samuel of Meiningen, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches, ed. Salfeld, 219– 20. I am grateful to Katja Vehlow, who corrected my translation of the edition’s German translation by comparing it to the Hebrew. I have omitted the honorific titles —“Rabbi” or “R.” for the adult males and “Lady” for adult females — to avoid misperceptions. Barzen, “Nürnberger Memorbuch.” 34. Nor, of course, was it a daily experience, as Robert Chazan points out: “These episodes of significant anti-Jewish violence should not, however, give rise to a pervasive sense of medieval European Jews living their lives under the threat of daily danger to life and limb. These periods of wide-ranging anti-Jewish violence represent the exception rather than the rule for medieval Jews. In between these explosions of violence, Jews could and did live normal lives. Only in this way can we understand the ongoing Jewish decisions to remain in western Christendom and the capacity to foster a burgeoning Jewish population and a rich Jewish culture in medieval Europe.” Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 182. 35. Alfred Haverkamp, “Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes im Gesellschaftsgefüge deutscher Städte,” 1981, reprinted in Verfassung, Kultur, Lebensform: Beiträge Zur Italienischen, Deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte im europäischen Mittelalter, dem Autor zur Vollendung des 60. Lebensjahres, ed. Friedhelm Burgard, Alfred Heit, and Michael Matheus (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1997), 232– 36; Christoph Cluse, “Zur Chronologie der Verfolugungen zur Zeit des ‘Schwarzen Todes’,” in Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter von der Nordsee bis zu den Südalpen: Kommentiertes Kartenwerk, vol. 1, Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden, ed. Alfred Haverkamp, Abteilung A, Abhandlungen 14 (Hannover: Hahnsche

322 /

David C. Mengel

Buchhandlung, 2002), 223– 42. Cf. Karl Heinz Burmeister, Der Schwarze Tod: Die Judenverfolgungen anlässlich der Pest von 1348/49 (Göppingen: Jüdisches Museum, 1999). 36. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 31; Mengel, “A Plague on Bohemia?,” 32. 37. Jörg R. Müller divides the high- and late-medieval persecutions and expulsions of Jews in this region ( between the North Sea and the southern Alps) into six periods: 1000 –1200; 1201–1250; 1251–1300; 1301–1350; 1351–1450; and 1451–1520: “Judenverfolgungen und -vertreibungen zwischen Nordsee und Südalpen im hohen und späten Mittelalter,” in Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter von der Nordsee bis zu den Südalpen, ed. Haverkamp, 1:189– 222. 38. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 224 – 26; Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 201. 39. R. Judah b. Asher (d. 1349), cited in Jörg R. Müller, “Ereẓ gezerah — ‘Land of Persecution’: Pogroms against the Jews in the Regnum Teutonicum from c. 1280 to 1350,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Cluse, 246. Müller’s map (252– 53) of anti-Jewish violence in central Europe is based on maps C.4.3 and C.4.4 in Alfred Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter von der Nordsee bis zu den Südalpen, 3 vols. ( Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2002). 40. Barzen, “Nürnberger Memorbuch.” 41. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 22– 24; Ernst Daniel Goldschmidt, “Nürnberg,” in Germania Judaica, vol. 2, Von 1238 bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, ed. Zvi Avneri, Veröffentlichung des Leo Baeck Instituts ( Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1968), 598– 99. 42. Pěkný, Historie Židů v Čechách a Na Moravě, 30 – 36. The distinction in fact seems as much geographic as political: of twenty-four towns in which significant Jewish populations lived in the later Middle Ages, Alfred Haverkamp notes that Jews in only five were spared the 1349 persecutions: Regensburg, Prague, Vienna, Wiener-Neustadt, and Graz. All were in the eastern parts of the empire, but only Prague was ruled by the king of Bohemia. Haverkamp, “The Jewish Quarters in German Towns during the Late Middle Ages,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish–Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann ( Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1995), 17, 19. 43. Burmeister, Schwarze Tod, 16 –17; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 82; František Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 234 – 36. 44. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 274 – 75; Alfred Haverkamp, “Studien zu den Beziehungen zwischen Erzbishof Balduin von Trier und König Karl IV,” 1978, reprinted in Verfassung, Kultur, Lebensform, ed. Burgard et al., 97; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 82– 83.

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 323 45. Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 234. 46. “And, in the times of which we are writing, the Pope Clement VI and the Emperor Charles IV were both favourable to the Jews, and endeavoured, but in vain, to prevent their persecution: for when once the bloodhounds of persecution — Avarice, Ignorance, and Hatred — are let loose, nothing short of the power of Heaven itself can restrain them.” William Henry Lowe, The Memorbook of Nurnberg Containing the Names of the Jews Martyred in That City in the Year 5109, 1349 A.D.: From the Unique Manuscript Preserved in the University Library, Cambridge, and Marked “Add. 1506” ( London: Jewish Chronicle Office, 1881), 29. Lowe’s generous portrayal of the medieval emperor’s intentions may, however, have been shaped somewhat by his contemporary and even wishful concerns; in a note on the same page, he thanks “the Emperor and Crown Prince of Germany” for “doing their best to put a stop to the disgraceful outrages, which are being perpetrated against the Jews in Germany.” 47. See, e.g., Georg Caro, Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden im Mittelalter und der Neuzeit, vol. 2, Spätere Mittelalter (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1920), 217. 48. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 223– 31, 259– 68. 49. Haverkamp, “Studien zu den Beziehungen,” 81– 85, 92– 97. 50. J. Friedrich Battenberg, “Des Kaisers Kammerknechte. Gedanken zur Rechtlich-sozialen Situation der Juden in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit,” Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 563– 74. 51. For example, in 1313 Emperor Henry VII had given the city’s imperial mayor (Schultheiß) responsibility to protect the city’s Jews and the right to admit new Jewish residents, for a fee, but had not abdicated his own right to tax Jews. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 25– 26. 52. At the time, the Hohenzollern brothers Johan II (d. 1357) and Albrecht (d. 1361) exercised this noble office jointly. Günther Schuhmann, “Johann II.,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 10 (1974): 504, http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd134291077.html. 53. Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 967, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www .regesta-imperii.de/id/1349-05-28_2_0_8_0_0_1133_967; Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 31. 54. Goldschmidt, “Nürnberg,” 601. 55. Of this, he was obliged to remit 100 pounds yearly to Ulrich of Hanau, presumably another (smaller) creditor. Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 6604, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1349-06-23_1_0_8_0_0_ 8076_6604. 56. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 32. 57. For a dated list, see Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 232– 36. 58. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 32. This account by Müller, based on archival sources, has not been fully integrated into the scholarship. In part for that reason, accounts of the roles of the bishop of Bamberg and the

324 /

David C. Mengel

Burgraves of Nuremberg in subsequent disputes over the ownership of Jewish property in Nuremberg have not always been clear: e.g., Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 80 – 81n84. 59. “Wann die Juden daselbst um nehst werden geslagen.” Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 1045, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1349 -06-27_2_0_8_0_0_1216_1045; Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 32. 60. Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 210; Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 280; Hana Karasová, “Židé v době Karla IV.,” in Otec Vlasti 1316–1378, ed. Jaroslav V. Polc ( Rome: Velehrad – Křes anská Akademie, 1980), 176 – 77; Eva Doležalová, “Pražská Židovská obec ve středověku a její mezinárodní kontakty,” in Od knížat ke králům: sborník u příležitosti 60. narozenin Josefa Žemličky, ed. Eva Doležalová and Robert Šimůnek ( Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2007), 352; Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 31. 61. Willehad Paul Eckert, “Die Juden im Zeitalter Karls IV,” in Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 130, echoing with approval the judgment of Caro, Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2. 62. “Als ihr berufener Schutzherr wäre er schon vor anderen schuldig durch pflichtwidriges Unterlassen. Durch die zitierten Formulierungen aber erweist er sich für die Endlösung im Elsaß, in Frankfurt und Nürnberg als der hauptverantwortliche Schreibtischtäter.” Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 83. 63. Ibid.; Michael Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, Enzyklopädie Deutscher Geschichte 44 ( München: Oldenbourg, 1998), 118. 64. See, e.g., Burmeister, Schwarze Tod, 22– 24; Ruth Bork, “Zur Politik der Zentralgewalt gegenüber den Juden im Kampf Ludwigs des Bayern um das Reichsrecht und Karls IV um die Durchsetzung des Königtums,” in Karl IV: Politik und Ideologie, ed. Evamaria Engel ( Weimar: Böhlau, 1982), 70 – 73, at 73: “Karl IV. gab die Juden preis. Er verzichtete auf seine Schutzfunktion um des erhofften Gewinnes willen und nutzte darüber hinaus die Situation während der Anfänge seiner Herrschaft aus, um Anhänger zu werben. So spekulierte er auf Pogrome, begünstigte und förderte sie.” 65. Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 240; see similar comments by Wilhelm Hanisch, “Die Luxemburger und die Juden,” in Die Juden in den Böhmischen Ländern, ed. Seibt, 27– 28. 66. Müller, “Ereẓ gezerah —‘Land of Persecution’,” 257; see also Burmeister, Schwarze Tod, 17; Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, 63; and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, introduction to “Nürnberg —Ein Zentrum Karolinischer Macht und Kunstpolitik im Reich,” in Kunst als Herrschaftsinstrument. Böhmen und das Heilige Römische Reich unter den Luxemburgern im Europäischen Kontext, ed. Jiří Fajt and Andrea Langer ( Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 194 – 95. 67. Karl Bosl, “Die Anfänge der Stadt unter den Saliern,” in Nürnberg, ed. Pfeiffer, 15–16; Fritz Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwicklung Nürnbergs,” in Nürnberg, ed. Pfeiffer, 54 – 55; Birgit Friedel, “Spuren Der Frühesten Stadten-

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 325 twicklung,” in . . . Nicht eine einzige Stadt, sondern eine ganze Welt . . . Nürnberg: Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte: 1050 – 2000, 950 Jahre Nürnberg, ed. Birgit Friedel and Claudia Frieser ( Büchenbach: Verlag Dr. Faustus, 1999), 48– 51. 68. Based on maps in David Nicholas, The Later Medieval City 1300 –1500 ( London: Longman, 1997), 420 – 21; Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwicklung Nürnbergs,” 56 – 57; Claudia Frieser and Birgit Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi waren gesessen zu Mittelst auf dem Platz . . . Die ersten Nürnberger Juden und ihre Siedlung bis 1296,” in . . . Nicht eine einzige Stadt, sondern eine ganze Welt . . . Nürnberg, ed. Friedel and Frieser, 57; Seidl, “Denkmäler des mittelalterlichen Jüdischen Friedhofs in Nürnberg,” abb. 1. 69. Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwicklung Nürnbergs,” 55– 60; Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 14; Frieser and Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi waren gesessen zu Mittelst auf dem Platz . . . ,” 52– 53. 70. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 14 –15. 71. Ibid., 15–16. 72. Haverkamp, “Jewish Quarters in German Towns,” 26 – 27. 73. Frieser and Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi waren gesessen zu Mittelst auf dem Platz . . . ,” 57– 70. 74. Ibid., 56 – 59. 75. The chapel was moved in 1313 to a location north of St. Sebald: ibid., 53, 56 – 57; Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwicklung Nürnbergs,” 58. 76. Frieser and Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi waren gesessen zu Mittelst auf dem Platz . . . ,” 54. 77. Ibid., 52. 78. Detail of Jewish quarter, ca. 1380s, after Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town,” maps 4 – 7. 79. Dobroslav Líbal, “Staré Město v raném středověku,” in Staré Město Pražské: Architektonický a Urbanistický Vývoj, ed. Dobroslav Líbal and Jan Muk ( Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 1996), 17– 63; Dobroslav Líbal, “Raně Gotické Staré Město a doba Václava II.,” in Staré Město Pražské, ed. Líbal and Muk, 65–119. 80. Cosmas, The Chronicle of the Czechs, trans. Lisa Wolverton ( Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 174; Hana Volavková, Židovské Město Prazské ( Prague: Sportovní a Turistiché Nakladatelství, 1959), 8– 9; Hana Volavková and Pavel Bělina, The Lost Jewish Town of Prague, trans. Gita Zbavitelová ( Prague: Litomysl Paseka, 2004), 8; Pěkný, Historie Židů v Čechách a na Moravě, 15–16; Milada Vilímková et al., Die Prager Judenstadt ( Prague: Aventinum, 1990); Brosche, “Ghetto von Prag,” 87– 88. 81. Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town,” 12–16. 82. Ibid., 18– 20. Putík’s map 7 indicates the likely locations of the several gates.

326 /

David C. Mengel

83. Ibid., 7–11. 84. David C. Mengel, “From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond: Milíč of Kroměříž and the Topography of Prostitution in Fourteenth-Century Prague,” Speculum 79 (2004): 414, 424 – 27. 85. For Charles IV’s plans for New Town, see Lorenc, Nové Město Pražské, esp. 41– 57. 86. Franz Machilek, “Privatfrömmigkeit und Staatsfrömmigkeit,” in Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 93. 87. In exchange for their land, the Crosiers with the Red Star were granted patronage over the two new parishes of Saint Henry and Saint Stephen. Anna Petitova-Bénoliel, L’Eglise à Prague sous la dynastie des Luxembourg (1310 – 1419). Middeleeuwse Studies en Bronnen 52 ( Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), 118–19. 88. The emperor seems also to have envisioned New Town as Prague’s new artisanal center, or at least a center for some of the noisiest, hottest, and smelliest crafts — not to mention those most at risk of fire. Prague’s malters, dryers (of malt), brewers, wagon makers, tinsmiths, and other smiths were ordered to move their operations to New Town within a year of the city’s foundation. At least some of these occupations were resented or perhaps even prohibited in Old Town, so this decision allowed artisans such as those “die mit dem hamer smiden vnd kloppen” to practice their crafts freely in New Town. Čelakovský, ed., Privilegia civitatum Pragensium, 75, no. 48. 89. Mengel, “From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond,” 440. 90. Michal Svatoš, ed., Dějiny univerzity Karlovy 1: 1347/48–1622 ( Prague: Karolinum, 1995), 42– 43; Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town,” 33– 35; Doležalová, “Pražská Židovská obec,” 352. 91. Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 57– 58. 92. Wolfgang von Stromer, “Der kaiserliche Kaufmann —Wirtschaftspolitik unter Karl IV.,” in Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 64 – 66; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 67. On the Nuremberg merchant families, see Wolfgang von Stromer, Die Nürnberger Handelsgesellschaft Gruber, Podmer, Stromer im 15. Jahrhundert, Nürnberger Forschungen 7 ( Nürnberg: Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1963). 93. Stromer, “Kaiserliche Kaufmann,” 65. 94. Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 76 – 77. 95. Kühn, ed., Dokumente zur Geschichte, 481, no. 616: “Wir Karl von gots gnaden Romischer kung ze allen zeiten merer des Reichs und kung ze Beheim voriehen und tun kunt offenlich an disem brief allen den, di in sehent oder horent lesen, daz wir angesehen haben solchen gebrechen, der gemeinlich ist untz her gewesen in der stat ze Nürnberg, bei namen dar an, daz in der selben stat kein grozzer platz nicht enist, dar an di leut gemeinlichen an gedienge kaufen und vorkaufen mügen und andirr iren nutz schaffen. Dar umb wann wir bedacht haben, daz es uns, dem Reich, der stat und den burg(er)en da selbest nutz und gut

Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 327 ist, haben wir den ratleuten und den burg(er)en da selbest ze Nuremberg irlaubet und erlauben auch mit disem brief, daz si alle die Judenhauser zu Nuremberg, di gelegen sint zwischen Frantzen des Hallers und Fritzzen des Beheims heuser, und dar zu di Judenschul und di vier Judenheuser, di zu mittelst zwischen den zwein strazzen un(d) gegen Ulriches des Stromayrs haus gelegen sint, brechen mügen und sullen und darauz zwene pletzze machen, dy ewiclichen also bleiben und zu der stat gemeintlich gehoren, und also daz furbaz nymmermer dar uf kein haus sol gemachet werden, auzgenumen daz man aus der Judenschul sol machen eine kirchen in sant Marien ere unser frawen und di legen uf den grozzern platz an ain sulch stat, da ez die burger aller peste dunket.” 96. The language of the first grant suggests that Isaac was no longer alive, or at least no longer in possession in the house, at the time of the grant: ibid., no. 617–18, pp. 481– 82; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 81, esp. note 85; Andreas Würfel, Historische Nachrichten von der Juden-Gemeinde welche ehehin in der Reichsstadt Nürnberg angericht gewesen aber Ao. 1499 ausgeschaffet worden ( Nürnberg: Georg Peter Monath, 1755), 130 – 36. According to Kohn’s reconstruction, Ulrich Stromer received the Jewish houses Kohn lists as C and B; if he also obtained A ( later joined with B), his newly acquired houses would have connected with his own corner property on the fruit market. “Das Hochmittelalterliche Judenviertel Nürnbergs. Eine Topographische Rekonstruktion,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 89; Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 32– 35. 97. Based on map in Seidl, “Denkmäler des mittelalterlichen Jüdischen Friedhofs in Nürnberg,” abb. 1. 98. The city agreed to pay 1,600 gulden, half to the bishop and half to the Burgraves, a very small sum in relation to what they had been promised Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 33– 34. 99. Günther Bräutigam, “Die bildende Kunst zur Zeit der Luxemberger,” in Nürnberg, ed. Pfeiffer, 107; Machilek, “Privatfrömmigkeit und Staatsfrömmigkeit,” 99–100; Gerd Zimmerman, “Die Verehrung der böhmischen Heiligen im mittelalterlichen Bistum Bamberg,” Bericht des historischen Vereins für die Pflege der Geschichte des ehemaligen Fürstbistums Bamberg 100 (1964): 226 – 29. 100. “Was man den Juden schuldig was daz wart alles wette unde wurdent alle pfant un briefe die sie hettent uber schulde wider geben. Daz bar gut daz su hettent, daz nam der rot, un teiletes under die antwerg noch mar[g]tzal. Daz was ouch die vergift, die die Juden dote.” Fritsche Closener and Adam Walther Strobel, Strassburgische Chronik (Strasbourg: Literarischer Verein, 1842), 107; see also Ferdinand Seibt, Karl IV: Ein Kaiser in Europa, 1346–1378 (1978; repr. Munich: DTV, 1994), 198. 101. In a partial parallel, Ruprecht II of the Palatinate expelled Jews from his territory in 1390 and assigned the property of Heidelberg Jews to the town’s young, struggling university; the synagogue became a university chapel dedicated

328 /

David C. Mengel

to the Virgin Mary. Jürgen Miethke, “The University of Heidelberg and the Jews: Founding and Financing the Needs of a New University,” in Crossing Boundaries at Medieval Universities, ed. Spencer E Young (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 317– 39. 102. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did that change, when Prague’s Jewish town was destroyed in a process that was welcomed by many of its Jewish inhabitants and owed as much to nineteenth-century liberalism and to the model of Baron Haussmann as to the legacy of medieval anti-Jewish violence. Cathleen M. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-class Ethnic Politics around 1900 ( Boulder, CO: East Europe Monographs, 2003). Floodwaters continued to threaten this area more than others of Prague and reached the Old-New Synagogue again as recently as 2002. Pavla Státníková, Historie povodní v Praze v grafice, malbě a fotografii ze sbírek Muzea hlavního města Prahy ( Prague: Muzeum hlavního města Prahy, 2001); Peter S. Green, “As Prague Dries, Flood Wall Stands Tall as a Hero,” New York Times, August 18, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com /2002/08/18/world/as-prague-dries-flood-wallstands-tall-as-a-hero.html. 103. “condicione tali, quod quam primum judei dicte civitatis quocunque casu seu eventu contrario perempti fuerint, aut de ipsa Pragensi civitate fugerint.” Ferdinand Tadra, ed., Cancellaria Caroli IV = Summa Cancellariae (Prague, 1895), 73– 74, no. 103, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002044159; see also Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 235– 36. 104. See note 34 above. 105. On empathy toward and condemnation of historical subjects, see Richard Kieckhefer, “Empathy for the Oppressor,” in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell, Disputatio 25 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 317– 36.

Thirteen

I n P r a i s e o f Fa i t h f u l Wo m e n Count Robert of Flanders’s Defense of Beguines against the Clementine Decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus (ca. 1318–1320)

wa l t e r s i m o n s

The Council of Vienne’s legislation condemning beghards and beguines in 1312 marked a turning point in the history of the lay religious movement, after which ecclesiastical authority often regarded these men and women with deep suspicion. Following the promulgation of the council’s decrees in 1317, bishops in many parts of northern Europe launched extensive inquiries against beghards and beguines, leading to stricter regulation of their way of life and sometimes to suppression of their communities. Indeed, as John Van Engen has shown in his magisterial Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, the Modern Devout who emerged from Geert Groote’s teachings in the second half of the fourteenth century initially endured hostile scrutiny and canonical challenges because of the enduring legacy of the Vienne decrees against lay religious without an approved rule.1 The genesis of the Vienne legislation and its reception among contemporaries is actually a more complex, multilayered story than this brief introduction suggests. I shall return to the ongoing historical debate2 at greater length in another contribution. Here, I should like to introduce a 331

332 /

Walter Simons

new piece of evidence taken from the archives of the beguinage of Our Lady of Ter Hooie in Ghent. The beguine community at Ter Hooie survived those troubled times in no small part because of this document and preserved it in its archives until the closure of the beguinage seven centuries later, after the death of the last beguines, Hermina Hoogewijs (2005) and Marcella Van Hoecke (2008).3 It is a petition directed by Robert of Béthune, count of Flanders from 1305 until 1322, to Pope John XXII (1316–1334), defending the beguines of Flanders against the council’s accusations and requesting that they be allowed to continue their way of life. At that time, the county of Flanders was home to more than fifty beguinages housing, most probably, several thousand women. Beguine way of life may well have been the single most popular form of religious life for women in these lands.4 Speaking eloquently of the count’s strong belief in the women’s piety and social value, the document is the only known record of a secular ruler praising beguines in this time of crisis. The Council of Vienne (October 16, 1311 – May 6, 1312) As the proceedings of the council are largely lost, we are poorly informed of the ways in which it reached its conclusions and do not even know with certainty its exact decisions, since Pope Clement V chose to rework the decrees into a decretal collection but died before he could do so, on April 20, 1314. They were revised again by his successor, Pope John XXII, who published them only in 1317 as the Clementinae.5 The council’s main concerns lay with the Templars, the recovery of the Holy Land, and reform of the Church. Fragmentary evidence further suggests that within the context of the latter goal, the central committee charged with the redaction of the decrees held “long discussions on the beghards,”6 resulting in the decree Ad nostrum (number 28 of the council’s constitutions, later known as Clementinae 5.3.3). In the final version promulgated by John XXII, this decree condemns “an abominable sect of wicked men, called beghards, and of faithless women, commonly called beguines, [that] sprung up in the realm of Germany” and then goes on to list eight errors on the concept of spiritual perfection allegedly spread by the sect and expressed in terms partially inspired by the errors

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 333 theologians had found two years earlier in the work of Marguerite Porete, condemned as a heretic in Paris on May 31, 1310.7 It ends with an order for “bishops and inquisitors” of the “dioceses where beghards and such beguines are living” to investigate “their life, behavior, and opinions on the articles of faith and the sacraments of the Church, and to impose due punishment on those found guilty.”8 Jacqueline Brown, writing as Jacqueline Tarrant, has convincingly argued that the original decree approved at Vienne, forming the basis of Ad nostrum, referred to beghards only, and that beguines were added as members of this putative sect during the later revision of the decree.9 In a similar change made after the council, a brief resolution at Vienne to prohibit beguines from living together in convents, while allowing a beguine to provide for and lodge a daughter or niece in her private house,10 was expanded into the papal decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus (number 16 of the council’s constitutions, known as Clementinae 3.11.1). It states: Certain women, commonly called beguines, who . . . promise obedience to no one, nor renounce property, nor live in accordance with an approved rule, can in no way be considered religious although they wear a certain habit that is called that of beguines. . . . We have heard from a reliable source that there are some beguines who seem to be led by a particular insanity, arguing and preaching on the Holy Trinity and the divine essence, and express opinions contrary to the Catholic faith on the articles of faith and the sacraments; deceiving simple people, they lead them to various errors while creating and producing many other causes for danger to the soul under the cover of holiness. After receiving many ominous reports from these and other sources about their reputation and justly regarding them suspicious, we with the approval of the sacred council declare their way of life [statum] perpetually prohibited and forever abolished from the Church of God. However, at the end of the decree the pope then affirms that, Of course by what precedes we in no way intend to prohibit that, if there are any faithful women living virtuously in their dwellings [ hospitiis], whether they promise chastity or not, who wish to do

334 /

Walter Simons

penance and serve the Lord of hosts in a spirit of humility, they be allowed to do so in the manner inspired by the Lord.11 Both decrees obviously spelled trouble for beguines, but the measures thereby put in place against them diverged in severity and contained some ambiguity, no doubt because they were proposed by different subcommittees. Ad nostrum was part of a series of conciliar canons (numbers 24 – 28) regarding inquisitorial and missionary work among nonChristians. Having identified beghards (and eventually also beguines) in Germany as the main proponents of the so-called heresy of the Free Spirit, the canon prescribed immediate and concerted action to fight their doctrine. Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, on the other hand, emerged from discussions about “religious” (monastic) life that found expression in canons dealing with such diverse subjects as the usus pauper controversy within the Franciscan order, conflicts between secular clergy and Mendicants regarding their apostolate, and the visitation of nunneries (canons 2– 4, 10 –11, 13– 20). It decided that beguines did not qualify as religious and should not make claims to religious status. Clarifying the original, somewhat cryptic, conciliar decree that forbade beguines from living in “convents,” it now declared their “way of life” prohibited, thus in essence reiterating canon 13 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and canon 23 of the Second Council of Lyons (1274), which had banned all religious orders not following a rule previously approved.12 Ad nostrum pronounced on a matter of orthodoxy; Cum de quibusdam mulieribus evoked the large body of canon law on religious persons and institutions. Still, while the two decrees pertained to different issues and appealed to different sets of rules, they evidently overlapped, if only because beguines were targeted as potential heretics in the first and as pseudoreligious in the second. In addition, Cum de quibusdam mulieribus spoke of certain beguines who, seemingly led by madness, ventured to preach on the mysteries of the Trinity and divine essence, committing doctrinal errors. This broadside at beguine spirituality did not refer to the heresy of the Free Spirit or the statements condemned as heretical in Ad nostrum and treated the women with disdain rather than anger or horror. Nonetheless, it raised the issue of doctrinal deviance quite directly. Ambiguity arose from the qualification that only some beguines were guilty of such folly,

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 335 and especially from the final clause granting faithful women permission to lead a humble life of service to God “in the manner inspired by the Lord.” As mentioned above, the official promulgation of the council decrees did not occur until November 1, 1317, when Pope John XXII sent the final text of the Clementinae to the universities. However, in the intervening five-year period, news of the decrees unquestionably filtered through to various echelons of the Church and perhaps even to the wider community. After all, bishops and theologians attending the council must have left with some knowledge of the decisions made and with summary notes of those that directly concerned them, including policies on lay religious. Canon lawyers and secretaries involved in the revisions under Pope Clement V and in the first year of John XXI’s pontificate were other potential sources of information. And, finally, there had in fact been an oral promulgation: Pope Clement had his version of the decrees read in consistory at Monteux (near Carpentras) on March 21, 1314, anticipating the written dissemination aborted by the pope’s death a month later. If complete and accurate information about the imminent decrees might be wanting, rumors evidently swirled throughout the Low Countries, home of a great many beguine communities. In a will written on June 11, 1316, seventeen months before the official promulgation, Giles of Repen, chaplain of Saint Maternus in Tongeren (in the imperial diocese of Liège), sympathized with the fears of the local beguines but also made provisions in case of their suppression. Donating a piece of land to the beguinage of Saint Catherine’s in Tongeren for the celebration of anniversary services for himself and members of his family, he added that, “should, God forbid, the said beguinage be destroyed by the Roman Curia, it shall cede the land to the hospital of the Eleven Thousand Virgins that is being built in the beguinage, for use of the poor in that hospital.”13 Meanwhile beguines of Aalst and Dendermonde complained to Pope John XXII that unnamed leaseholders on their land, lay and clerical, were appropriating possessions of the beguinages. The pope ordered inquiries into the affair on September 7, 1316, and January 13, 1317.14 It is probably not a coincidence that both cities were located in Rijksvlaanderen, or “Imperial Flanders,” subject to the empire: Ad nostrum had mentioned German beguines in particular, and suspicion of heresy fell more fully on those beguines living in “German” lands.

336 /

Walter Simons

Once Pope John XXII had officially promulgated the Clementinae, diocesan authorities in Flanders proceeded with their implementation. On February 25, 1318, the bishop’s standing judge-delegate for the diocese of Tournai ordered the dean of Christianity (decanus Christianitatis, the bishop’s local representative) of Ghent to publish Cum de quibusdam mulieribus in his district. He asked the dean to warn beguines against violating the decree, to seize all property of the beguine communities suppressed in the district, and to hold it for “pious use” by the bishop. All those who contested the seizures should be excommunicated or forced to pay a fine of 100 marks of silver.15 We may assume that deans in the other districts of the diocese received similar notices. No mention, however, was made of the decree Ad nostrum against the heretical “sect” of beghards and beguines in Germany. The suppression of beguinages and the confiscation of their collective property logically followed from Cum de quibusdam mulieribus. The decree did not prohibit individual women from leading a life of penance, as the final clause had pointed out, nor did it endanger their individual property rights. The judge-delegate’s letter clearly states that only the immovable goods, “intended for collective use of the [beguine] community” should be seized. Yet in practice the measure made it impossible for the women to pursue beguine life in common in the manner to which they were accustomed. Larger “court” beguinages in Flanders had their own chapels or churches, hospitals for elderly or sickly women, breweries and other service buildings, “convents” for the training of novices or for communal housing — most of which were collectively endowed and had now lost their sources of revenue. Smaller, independent “convents” outside a court structure had far less property, but the little they did possess (their communal house and land, with or without a chapel; possibly also a small hospital) was usually held in common and could thus be confiscated as well. Furthermore, the confiscations undermined an important principle of beguine life, that of mutual support. Most court beguinages housed a diverse population of women of varied social status and wealth; in larger communities, such as the two “beguine courts” of Ghent dedicated to Saint Elizabeth and Our Lady of Ter Hooie, several hundred women pooled their resources to support the neediest among them, effectively forming miniature social-security systems, with the

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 337 wealthy and able-bodied women paying into common funds that provided an income to the elderly, the sick, and poor. The funds were invested in land or other real estate. Loss of such properties thus threatened the survival of the internal dole system, forcing the expulsion of the poorer members of the community.16 As a matter of fact, since destitute, semi-itinerant beguines were also those more often suspected of heresy, one wonders if the confiscations did not tear down these support structures intentionally. Everybody knew, of course, that the Templars’ assets had just been seized and were being transferred to the Hospitallers and others. The smaller mendicant orders, such as the Brothers of the Sack, suppressed by the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, had been allowed to reside in their convents until the death of their last friars; their property, too, now passed into other hands. In Tournai, for instance, the bishop transferred the local convent of the Brothers of the Sack to the Augustinian Hermits in 1317 through 1319, at the very moment the beguine assets were being seized.17 Who could doubt that beguines faced a similar fate? Rather touchingly, around this time a beguine at Saint Elizabeth’s in Ghent made a list of all “property donated to the beguinage since the Second Council of Lyons” in the apparent hope that real estate acquired before that time would be spared.18 While beguinages lacked a central command or even institutional ties with one another, which might have facilitated a concerted response to the Clementine decrees, they were not entirely powerless. Several communities naturally sought the support of the count of Flanders, whose ancestors had founded court beguinages in Ghent (Saint Elizabeth; perhaps also those of Our Lady of Ter Hooie and the much smaller beguinage at Saint Aubertus or “Poortakker”), Bruges (Saint Elizabeth or “Vineyard”), Lille, Douai (Saint Elizabeth or “Champfleury”), Courtrai, and Ypres (Saint Christine Ten Brielen). They had also extended their protection beyond those favorite institutions to the wider movement in their county at a crucial moment, during the formative years of the 1230s and 1240s.19 Since then, the counts had granted the women tax privileges, supervised the administration of “their” beguine courts, and issued internal regulations. Beguines of Ghent, the largest city of Flanders and a major political player, frequently called on the count for special

338 /

Walter Simons

aid, even sometimes against the bishop. In 1284 beguines of Saint Elizabeth of Ghent complained to Count Guy that during a recent audit of their financial records, the count’s bailiff had brought a priest along, which went against their tradition: “We doubt,” they declared, “that we have ever opened our books before a priest, which the bishop may now demand from us”; the count agreed that such was not the custom, and that the annual audit would henceforth be done solely before his representative.20 And in June 1311, four months before the Council of Vienne, Guy’s son and successor, Count Robert, even appealed to Pope Clement in a conflict with the bishop of Tournai. The latter had contested the count’s authority over the beguines and the affairs of the beguinage, but Count Robert invoked his rights as heir of the beguinage’s founder and “more than sixty years” of custom. To underscore his full secular jurisdiction over the beguines, Count Robert further reminded the pope that the women “were lay people, not clergy [persone sint seculares non ecclesiastice].”21 Given what the council was about to decide, that last statement may not have been the most fortunate. The Document The text of Count Robert’s petition to Pope John XXII on behalf of beguines of Flanders, asking the pope to exempt them from Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, is published below (see apppendix). It was written on a simple piece of parchment, slightly irregular in form, with a space left blank for a decorated initial and the dating formula left unfinished. The scribe, obviously an experienced professional (albeit occasionally distracted), wrote in an early fourteenth-century cursive hand commonly found in the comital, urban, or ecclesiastical administrations of contemporary Flanders. Several interlinear and marginal corrections that cannot always be interpreted as misreadings or simple slips of the pen suggest that it is a draft. Probably the final version was to be copied on higher quality material, properly dated, and authenticated by the count’s chancery. That would also explain why at some point the present document was discarded and passed on to the beguines of Ter Hooie as a token of the count’s efforts. No copy of it or indeed any reference to this petition was found in the archives of the Flemish counts or in the

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 339 Vatican archives.22 Still, that is not unusual, nor must we assume that the letter was never sent: its content is entirely consistent with the count’s policies in the matter and with later sources. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why the draft document would have been handed over to the beguines if the petition had not in fact been sent. ( Notes on the reverse date from a much later era and do not tell us anything about its genesis.) Internal evidence provides few clues for dating. The letter obviously responds to the recent proclamation of Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, lamenting its effects on beguine communities in Flanders, which places it after February 25, 1318. As will be explained below, it must precede Pope John’s letter Cum de mulieribus, which clarified the Clementine decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus and was sent to bishops of the Low Countries on December 31, 1320. To narrow down that window of time a little further, we need to examine more closely the political context, namely the ongoing conflict between the Flemish count and the French crown, as well as Pope John XXII’s role in that struggle. After the great clash between France and Flanders around 1300, leading to the famous Flemish victory over the French knights at Courtrai in July 1302, peace did not return to the county for any extended period of time.23 Both sides were dissatisfied by the Treaty of Pontoise of 1312; hostilities resumed in 1314 and again in 1315 through 1316. In November 1317, delegates of both parties traveled to Avignon to seek the help of Pope John XXII, who rendered a nonbinding “advice” on March 8, 1318. The main issue of discussion at this point consisted of the securities to be exchanged for observing a future peace treaty. Since 1226, any breach by the Flemish count of a treaty with the French crown could trigger retaliation by the French bishops who governed the dioceses of Flanders ( Thérouanne, Tournai, Arras, and Cambrai, all in the ecclesiastical province of Rheims) and might issue an interdict over Flanders. The count now demanded a similar guarantee from the French king: if he broke his oath, Pope John XXII should excommunicate him and French barons should be released from their oaths of fealty to the king. This was a bridge too far for Pope John, fearful to offend King Philip V, who in turn argued that the conflict with Flanders kept him from acting upon his desire to launch a new crusade, as the pope wished. A papal mission led by the Dominican Pierre de la Palud and two Franciscans, Étienne de Nérac and

340 /

Walter Simons

William of Ghent, to persuade the Flemish that the king’s oath should suffice by itself, failed in a climate of mutual distrust and disputes among the papal envoys during their trip to Flanders (April–May 1318). French bishops and archbishops placed the usual interdict on Flanders in September 1318. After a second papal mission—led by none other than the Dominican Bernard Gui—in October 1318 did not succeed, Pope John XXII finally demanded that Count Robert accept his terms on pain of excommunication and a major papal interdict over Flanders. A third papal envoy traveled to the Flemish borders to inform the count and his subjects of the pope’s sentence, proclaimed at Tournai on June 25, 1319; Count Robert had sixty days to comply. When the city of Ghent refused to march against France the following month, most probably because of the new spiritual threat of the papal interdict, Count Robert relented on August 20. Pope John wrote to Robert on September 11, 1319, to congratulate him on that decision and express relief that excommunication proved unnecessary. Weakened by his advanced age—he was now seventy-three—and by dissent within his own family, Count Robert concluded a new peace treaty with the king on May 6, 1320. The count died on September 17, 1322. The tone of confidence, perhaps even defiance, pervading Count Robert’s petition suggests a date prior to Pope John’s formal threat of excommunication on June 25, 1319. One doubts that Robert would risk lecturing the pope on the finer points of conciliar doctrine while being under such a threat. Put differently, his chances of successfully petitioning the pope under these circumstances were slim. Although it is not impossible that the count wrote after the apparent reconciliation with the pope in September 1319 (but before December 31, 1320), the earlier period seems more likely: that was the time when Count Robert was fighting French episcopal action in the county on multiple fronts, while still hoping for Pope John’s “neutral” arbitration in the Franco-Flemish conflict. If this hypothesis is correct and the letter was written between February 25, 1318, and June 25, 1319, it may be linked to another measure taken by the count. On June 12, 1319, he appointed Henry ( Hendrik) Braem, legum professor, as his special representative to protect the beguinage of Saint Elizabeth of Ghent. Recalling that “religious women who used to be called beguines” had been living at the beguinage under his protection and that of his ancestors “since the oldest days” (ab an-

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 341 tiquo), but that the Church had recently prohibited the “way of life” (status) of said women and abolished it, he declared that he would not allow the institution, founded by his predecessors, to be “abandoned under the pretext of this novelty.” In phrases that replicate the last clauses of Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, the count extended his protection over all “faithful women” living at Saint Elizabeth “virtuously in their dwellings, whether they promised chastity or not, who wish to do penance and serve the Lord of hosts in a spirit of humility, in the manner inspired by the Lord.” Henry Braem should make sure no other women live in the beguinage, and that, “since the outward decency of dress demonstrates internal moral virtue,” the women wear “clothes that fit their virtuous and humble way of life.”24 While observing the injunction against beguine dress imposed by Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, the count’s instructions to Henry conformed not only with the “escape clause” contained in the decree, but also with his petition to Pope John. If the petition and the charge to Henry were part of the same series of measures taken in defense of beguines, the former might plausibly be dated in the spring of 1319. That would be consistent with the reference in the petition to the decree’s adverse effect on Flemish beguine communities, whose internal discipline, the count asserts, it had fatally undermined, indicating that some time has lapsed since the decree was implemented. Henry Braem had served on Count Robert’s council since 1309. As a wealthy member of a prominent Ghent family, he frequently acted as the count’s liaison with the city. His clerical status and legal training made him the ideal person to mediate between count, city, and Church. In addition to his work for the count, he served as legal counsel to the city and held benefices as a canon of the cathedral of Tournai and collegiate churches of Saint Omer and Saint Pharailde of Ghent. He knew the beguinage of Saint Elizabeth well: his stone dwelling on the Vismarkt in Ghent was located not far away, and he was probably related to Elizabeth ser Braems, the superior of Saint Elizabeth’s from 1269 to 1277; the ser Braems were among the oldest donors of the beguinage.25 We do not know if Henry was also involved in writing Robert’s petition. Nothing in the letter suggests expertise in canon or civil law; quite the opposite, for the petition generally disengages from legal matters and lacks the legal jargon we would expect from someone with Henry’s

342 /

Walter Simons

profile. While it reflects thorough familiarity with the proper forms of address and rhetoric in correspondence with the pope, that technical knowledge was of course widely shared within the count’s chancery and does not help to identify its author. We may consider Henry Braem, rather, one of several possible intellectual authors, along with, for instance, Count Robert’s confessor, the Franciscan Giles of Klemskerke, or the former custos of the Franciscan order in Flanders, Fulco Borluut, a member of another wealthy Ghent clan with close ties to the count’s family and active in the care of nuns and beguines from 1291 to 1320.26 Both Henry Braem and Friar Giles of Klemskerke feature as witnesses in a charter of November 24, 1321, by which Count Robert confirmed the authority of the main mistress at Ter Hooie to discipline the women living at the beguinage according to its “ancient customs, save in all things the statutes of our holy father the Pope.”27 Authorship by a beguine seems unlikely. The language of the document, a somewhat ornamental, affected Latin, could have been used by any well-educated individual in the fourteenth century, including some beguines. But its paternalistic, aristocratic, and entirely external perspective on the beguine movement, a perspective that bespeaks quite accurately the attitudes of the Flemish comital family and their circle in this period, is not what one would expect from a beguine author. The petition, then, directly challenges recent episcopal measures implementing Cum de quibusdam mulieribus by arguing that they reflect a “bad” or “superficial understanding” of the decree. The canon condemned the way of life of “dangerous beguines” rashly debating subtle theological problems, with grave consequences for the simple people who thought them to be holy. But “in my land,” the count affirms, women who have “since the oldest days” pursued a simple life of holiness are also commonly called beguines; these never engaged in “the aforesaid sillinesses” and have never been “infamous or suspect of the errors of the aforesaid constitution.” Would the pope not like to bring these “laudable women” back to that honest, faithful way of life? And, the petition asks, is the pope quite aware of the disastrous effects of those incorrect interpretations? By dissolving beguine communities, the bishop’s implementation of Cum de quibusdam mulieribus has ruptured the disciplinary fabric that undergirded their observances and

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 343 “maternal admonitions . . . redolent of virtue.” As a result, the women have now “releas[ed] the reins of modesty” and are destined for vice, “to the loss of many girls.” Count Robert dwells at length on the beguine world, once pious and disciplined, destroyed by the recent actions. He describes the typical format of beguine communal life in Flemish cities, where “enclosed courtyards” are “assigned” to them, a reference to the so-called court beguinages, walled spaces sometimes comprising entire neighborhoods which could and still can be found in various cities of the Low Countries, and which the count — possibly correctly — assumes to be little known at the highest echelons of the Church in Avignon. His petition emphasizes the point that the women sustain themselves materially, either through family endowments or by the hard labor of their own hands, engaging in such “licit feminine crafts” as washing textiles; the contrast with the “dangerous beguines” known to beg for alms is left implicit. It then turns to their demonstrably orthodox religious practices: these women hear mass daily, pay their parochial dues, respect the priesthood, and on feast days participate in the divine office—indeed a regular component of liturgical practice among most beguines of Flanders since the earliest days.28 In a rare passage skirting perilous terrain, the count highlights beguine engagement with sermons on those feast days, when they “expound” on the sermons—tracing a fine line between proper application of the spoken Word through mutual exhortation (admissible and admirable) and expounding Scripture itself (an appropriation of clerical privilege and therefore inadmissible). The count concludes his apologia beguinarum with a remarkable exploration of social factors for their success. In an age in which the upper classes find it increasingly difficult to place their daughters in convents or marry them within their station, beguinages form an acceptable alternative, the count argues. Not only do they provide young girls with a suitable education that serves them well, should they eventually marry or find an opening in a convent, but they also receive within their ranks candidates from all classes and fortunes who opt not to marry or take up monastic vows. This is a broad analysis of a complex situation — the count’s allusion to an excess of women in his county simplifies more complex demographic changes — but not far from the truth: beguine communities indeed provided shelter to a wide range of single women who

344 /

Walter Simons

could not or did not wish to marry.29 The count’s rationale for beguine life became a topos of beguine lore. A description of life in beguinages of Ghent presented to agents of the bishop in 1328 borrowed substantial parts from Count Robert’s text to explain why his ancestors, Countesses Joan and Margaret, had founded beguinages almost a century earlier, invoking the same social pressures and thus laying the basis for much received wisdom on beguine history since then.30 The count ends the letter with a request: since the last clauses of Cum de quibusdam mulieribus appear to leave the door open for women to pursue these ideals, could the pope provide the women of Flanders with a special license to do so? In as much as we admire the clarity and force of Count Robert’s defense, we must also note some glaring omissions. There is no reference whatsoever to the decree Ad nostrum and the “sect” of beghards and beguines it condemned. The absence is understandable: by 1320, no bishop had attempted to implement Ad nostrum in the Flemish dioceses, and no investigations against the heresy described therein had been launched. Obviously Count Robert saw no reason to raise that dangerous subject here. There are other silences, however. The count sketched a picture of beguine life crafted upon a particular model for beguine organization: the enclosed court beguinage, with its rather stable population and large endowment, its chapel or church served by a priest and multiple chaplains and visited regularly by mendicant confessors. This type of beguinage formed a large, diverse female microcosm that was well known to the count and his staff, and, we may assume, relatively easily monitored for orthodoxy. This was not the case for the numerous small beguine houses and convents that sprang up in every city and town of the county, largely without comital support or clerical supervision. These more ephemeral and loosely organized houses, quite comparable to the German situation, could only arouse further suspicion; the count silently omitted them. Similarly, Count Robert did not volunteer the information that his own father, Count Guy, had ordered his bailiff in 1295 to act against “wanton young girls” (lassivas juvenculas) who “wear the habit of beguines” but should be removed from their ranks because of their “suspect talk” (suspecta colloquia), sexual activity (lapsu carnis), or “other crimes.”31 Finally, the count surely failed to describe beguine education accurately: it could offer a

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 345 great deal more than the moral training and the usual crafts deemed essential for a young girl’s preparation for marriage or the convent. It usually included training in music and languages, some Latin, and in a few cases, quite serious study of Scripture and of course mystical theology.32 Evidently the count did not wish to allude to anything that might raise further suspicion. Even as the petition thus spoke to real and essential features of Flemish beguine experience, it also quite deliberately misrepresented it. For Count Robert, more was at stake than the preservation of his own good name and that of his family’s religious heritage. The decision of the bishop of Tournai to dissolve beguinages in his diocese was clearly understood as an assault on a quintessentially Flemish institution. In the context of the ongoing struggle with France, the religious quickly became the political or the national. As mentioned above, French royal policy vis-à-vis Flanders routinely made use of French episcopal jurisdiction over Flemish territory. But shortly after victory at Courtrai, in 1303, the Flemish demanded the erection of separate Flemish dioceses. There were sound pastoral reasons for them, they argued: “The largest part of the county is populated by people who speak the Flemish language, and they cannot possibly be spiritually guided by bishops who are ignorant of that language.” But to put matters more bluntly, as Count Robert’s younger brother Philip did, the episcopal sees of Thérouanne, Tournai, Arras, and Cambrai were all “occupied by enemies of the Flemish.”33 Religion, language, and national politics were symbolically addressed by ritual action in that same year: when the count and the Flemish urban militia successfully besieged the bishops’ city of Thérouane, bands of their men ran into the church to remove a statue of Saint Louis, which they publically beheaded on the market square — this, barely six years after the French king’s canonization.34 For his part, King Philip IV of France accused the Flemings of being Joachimites, and French clergy preached against Flemish “idolatry.”35 The Grandes Chroniques de France relate that in 1304 “there lived in Flanders a false female prophet with the habit of a beguine: she feigned to be pious, living among beguines, but made certain fictional revelations full of lies that deceived the king, the queen, and even nobles of France, particularly at the time when the king was fighting the Flemish,” until Charles of Valois, the king’s brother, made her confess her lies under torture.36 In the middle of the Franco-Flemish negotiations of

346 /

Walter Simons

1318, sermons in Paris suggested that, if the pope excommunicated the Flemish, the latter could be killed like Saracens. Papal envoy Pierre de la Palud, who preached a similar sermon in Paris, naturally lost all credibility before even arriving in Flanders because news of his participation in such royal propaganda quickly reached the Flemish. The episcopal interdict that followed later in the year incited still more Flemish anger: when, in compliance with the interdict, the guardian of the Franciscan convent in Ghent refused to say mass, the count’s bailiff attacked him with his sword and expelled him from Flanders “as a robber, [who] has no right to be in the land of the count.”37 One understands therefore Count Robert’s quick dismissal of the episcopal decisions and his determination to defend beguine orthodoxy in his county, his land (terra mea), and his fatherland (mea patria). Having argued that the women in Flanders had only a name in common with those other, “dangerous” women and that the bishop’s decree had instead wreaked havoc on a perfectly Catholic institution, his proposal to Pope John XXII was both modest and reasonable: why not apply the last clause in Cum de quibusdam to these women? Why not indeed, some at Avignon must have thought. Count Robert’s letter was not the only one to ask the question. Around the same time, in the first months of 1319,38 Bishop John of Strassburg apparently also sought clarification from Pope John on the very same issue, and others may well have done so, though Count Robert’s letter is the only one to survive. Pope John XXII responded with a new bull, Cum de mulieribus, sent to the bishops of Tournai, Cambrai, and Paris on December 31, 1320, and distributed to other bishops in the following weeks. In this letter, John agreed that, while certain beguines, particularly in Germany, were reputed to be guilty of the errors enumerated in the Clementinae, he received news of women, also called beguines, who lived piously. He therefore ordered the bishops to carefully investigate such women and, if they were deemed innocent, to protect their persons and their property against mistreatment.39 These inquiries took another three to eight years to complete, depending on the city and diocese. Throughout this period, beguines in Flanders — and in many other parts of northwestern Europe — shunned the name “beguine,” as did those who wished them well. In a letter for

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 347 the beguines of Ghent, of 1321, Count Robert called them “good women who serve God and whom one used to call beguines”: the beguine way of life was still not permissible, their habit prohibited. Indeed, it was only after the bishops’ agents had made the rounds to sanction beguine orthodoxy in the various beguinages, in 1328,40 that the women could dress again in their original, gray habits. The deep attachment of monks and nuns to their monastic garb as the outward symbol of their propositum is well known. As a profound marker of their identity, the gray (griise) habit served a role no less important for beguines, as Cum de quibusdam mulieribus had observed. Shortly after the resumption of beguine life in Ghent, a member of the community made a dorsal note on Count Robert’s letter charging Henry Braem with their protection. It said, “This is [the letter in which] Count Robert asked master Henry Braem to help maintain us in law, and to help us regain our ‘gray.’ ”41 Notes I should like to thank the editors of this volume, David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton, as well as an anonymous reviewer for the Press, for their criticism and wise counsel in writing this essay. 1. John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), especially 84 –118. 2. Jacqueline Tarrant, “The Clementine Decrees on the Beguines: Conciliar and Papal Versions,” Archivum Historiae Pontificae 12 (1974): 300 – 8; Elizabeth Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages ( Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 3– 50; Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 24 – 26, 38– 42; Sean L. Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard de Cressonessart ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 196 – 204; Jörg Voigt, “Das Beginenwesen nach dem Konzil von Vienne: Die Auswirkungen der Konzilsdekretale Cum de quibusdam (1317) auf die Beginen in den Diözesen Cambrai, Tournai, Lüttich und Utrecht und die Umsetzung der Bulle Cum de mulieribus (1320),” in Friedensnobelpreis und historische Grundlagenforschung. Ludwig Quidde und die Erschließung der kurialen Registerüberlieferung, ed. Michael Matheus ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 441– 75, incorporated with a few changes in Jörg Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter: Frauenfrömmigkeit in Thüringen und im Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012), 288– 314.

348 /

Walter Simons

3. The archives of the beguinage of Ter Hooie have suffered extensively from neglect in the past. Several items in the collection attested by local historians in the late nineteenth century are now missing, and the present classification is in a state of disarray. I should like to thank canon Ludo Collin, chancellor of the bishop’s administration of Ghent, for his efforts to save the archives, and for graciously giving me access to them at the Bishop’s House in Ghent, where the collection is currently preserved. 4. For some essential data in the medieval history of these beguinages, see my Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Low Countries, 1200 – 1565 ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 5. The sources are best discussed in Ewald Müller, Das Konzil von Vienne 1311– 1312. Seine Quellen und seine Geschichte ( Münster in Westfalen: Aschendorffschen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1934). See also Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. ( London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1:333– 35, with edition of the decrees and facing English translation on 336 – 401. 6. Item de Beghardis longus processus, in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 2699, fol. 31a, edited in Müller, Konzil von Vienne, 687, no. 27. Müller dates this informal version of the council’s decrees to the last session, on May 6, 1312, or shortly afterward, probably before December 31, 1312: ibid., 679– 85. 7. At least six theologians serving in Marguerite’s trial also attended the Council of Vienne: Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, 193– 99; for the extracts from Marguerite’s work invoked in the trial, see ibid., 128, and the edition of the trial record in Paul Verdeyen, “Le procès d’inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart (1309–1310),” Revue d’Histoire ecclésiastique 81 (1986): 47– 94 (at 51). 8. “[S]ecta quaedam abominabilis quorundam hominum malignorum, qui Beguardi, et quarundam infidelium mulierum, quae Beguinae vulgariter appellantur, in regno Alemanniae procurante satore malorum operum, damnabiliter insurrexit. . . . Porro dioecesani et illarum partium inquisitores haereticae pravitatis, in quibus Beguardi et Beguinae huiusmodi commorantur, suum officium circa eos diligenter exerceant, inquirentes de vita et conversatione ipsorum, qualiterve sentiant de articulis fidei et ecclesiae sacramentis. In illos vero, quos culpabiles repererint . . . debitam exerceant ultionem.” Ed. in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:383– 84. See also Aemilius Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879–1881), vol. 2, col. 1183– 84. 9. Tarrant, “The Clementine Decrees,” 302, 308, rejecting Müller, Konzil von Vienne, 410. 10. “Item quod Begine conventum habere non debent, set quevis filiam neptam in domo sua nutriat et custodiat prout potest.” Ed. in Müller, Konzil von Vienne, 687, no. 16. 11. “Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, Beguinabus vulgariter nuncupatis (quae, cum nulli promittant oboedientiam nec propriis renuncient, neque profiteantur ali-

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 349 quam regulam approbatam, religiosae nequaquam exsistunt, quanquam habitum, qui Beguinarum dicitur, deferant . . . nobis fide digna relatione insinuatum exstiterit, quod earum aliquae, quasi perductae in mentis insaniam, de summa Trinitate ac divina essentia disputent et praedicent ac circa fidei articulos et ecclesiastica sacramenta opiniones catholicae fidei contrarias introducant et, multos super his decipientes simplices, eos in errores diversos inducant aliaque quam plura periculum animarum parientia sub quodam velamine sanctitatis faciant et committant, nos tam ex his quam ex aliis, de ipsarum opinione sinistra frequenter auditis, eas merito suspectas habentes, statum earundem sacro approbante concilio perpetuo duximus prohibendum et a Dei ecclesia penitus abolendum. . . . Sane per praedicta prohibere nequaquam intendimus quin, si fuerint fideles aliquae mulieres, quae promissa continentia vel etiam non promissa, honeste in suis conversantes hospitiis, poenitentiam agere voluerint et virtutum Domino in humilitatis spiritu deservire, hoc eisdem liceat, prout Dominus ipsis inspirabit.” Ed. in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:374. See also Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 2, col. 1169. 12. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:242 and 326 – 27. 13. “Et si quod absit beghinagium predictum destrueretur per curiam Romanam, tunc volo quod predicta terra simpliciter cedat dicte infirmarie sue hospitali quod in honore Undecim Milium Virginum in dicto conventu [= the beguinage] est constructum ad usus pauperum dicti hospitalis.” Tongeren, Stadsarchief, Archief van het Begijnhof, Oorkonden, no. 47 (original, unpublished). Saint Maternus was a chapel on the grounds of the collegiate chapter of Our Lady in Tongeren. 14. E. Soens, Cartularium en renteboek van het Begijnhof Ste Katharina op den Zavel te Aalst (Aalst: Spitaels-Schuermans, 1912), 35– 36; Jan Broeckaert, Cartularium van het begijnhof van Dendermonde voorafgegaan van eene historische schets dezes gestichts ( Dendermonde: Aug. De Schepper-Philips, 1902), 19, no. XIV. See also Arnold Fayen, Lettres de Jean XXII (1316–1334), 2 vols. ( Rome: Institut historique belge de Rome, 1908–1909), 1:71, no. 226. 15. “Mandamus vobis quatenus ipsam constitutionem in omnibus locis vestri decanatus ubi necesse fuerit publicetis seu publicari faciatis et penas sententiarum ac pericula quas incurrent non observantes eandem eisdem mulieribus exponatis; preterea cum destructo collegio bona ad comitatem eiusdem collegii deputata, saltim mobilia, applicari debeant de iure communi reverendo in Christo patri domino Tornacensi episcopo in usus pios et debitos per ipsum convertenda, mandamus vobis quatenus ipsa bona ubicumque poterunt inveniri saysiatis ac arrestetis, saysitaque et arrestata detineatis, et faciatis detineri ad opus predictum, inhibentes omnibus illis penes quos bona ipsa contigerit inveniri sub pena excommunicationis et sub pena centum marcarum argenti ne dicta bona distrahant vel alienent vel distrahi aut alienari faciant aut procurent vel hoc facientibus seu facere volentibus auxilium prebeant consilium vel favorem. . . . Bona tamen que ad privatas personas pertinent nolumus nec intendimus saisiri vel arrestari.” Ghent,

350 /

Walter Simons

Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 41, contemporary copy certified by the dean (unpublished). 16. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 48– 60, 91–104. 17. Tournai, Archives du Chapitre Cathédrale, Cartulaire D, fol. 189r –190r; see Walter Simons, Bedelordekloosters in het graafschap Vlaanderen: Topografie en chronologie van de bedelordenverspreiding voor 1350 (Bruges: Stichting Jan Cobbaut and Sint-Pietersabdij Steenbrugge, 1987), 110 –11. 18. “Dit [es] tgoet dat die van sente Liisbetten ghecreghen hebben sider dat de conselie te Lyons was,” from an informal note in an early fourteenth-century hand on a piece of parchment containing copies of deeds from 1273, 1277, and 1287. Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, Charters Béthune, no. 56. The list is edited in Jean Béthune, Cartulaire du Béguinage de Sainte-Élisabeth à Gand (Bruges: Aimé de Zuttere, 1883), 42– 43, no. 56. 19. See Simons, Cities of Ladies, 104 – 9, 267– 68 (nos. 25A– B), 273– 74 (no. 35A), 276– 78 (nos. 40A– C), 282 (no. 58), 285– 86 (no. 63), and 300 (no. 108A), as well as Walter Simons and Paul Trio, “Begijnen, begarden en tertiarissen in het middeleeuwse Ieper,” Jaarboek voor middeleeuwse geschiedenis 4 (2001): 118– 67 (at 126 – 29 and 150 – 52). For the important place of beguines in the context of Countess Joan’s (d. 1244) and Countess Margaret’s (d. 1280) religious policies, see Theo Luykx, Johanna van Constantinopel, gravin van Vlaanderen en Henegouwen (Antwerp: Standaard-Boekhandel, 1946), 310 –18, 348– 59, and 412– 20; Erin L. Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Bernard Delmaire, “Béguines et béguinages en Flandre et Hainaut au XIIIe siècle,” in Jeanne de Constantinople comtesse de Flandre et de Hainaut, ed. Nicolas Dessaux (Paris: Somogy, 2009), 107–15. 20. “[Q]uant il [=the bailiff ] i fu ore pour conte oir, il amena prestre avoec lui et nous nous doutons, sire, se nous aviemes une fois conte fait par devant prestres, ke li evesques ne nous enpeuist calengier de lors enavant.” Petition attached to the count’s letter of October 10, 1284, in Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, Charters Béthune, no. 50 (informal contemporary copy), ed. with a few small errors in Béthune, Cartulaire, 39– 40, no. 50. 21. Ghent, Rijksarchief, Oorkonden van de graven van Vlaanderen, Reeks de Saint-Genois, no. 1228 ( June 11, 1311), ed. Béthune, Cartulaire, 60 – 62, no. 88 (with an incorrect date). 22. In a most rewarding and agreeable week reviewing the papal registers and assorted materials for the era in the Vatican archives, I found no trace of the count’s petition or of any response to it by Pope John. As is well known, many papal letters, some quite significant, were not registered. 23. For the events set out in the following paragraph, the best guides are Paul Lehugeur, Histoire de Philippe le Long Roi de France (1316–1322) ( Paris: Hachette, 1897), 1:120 – 65; Herman Vander Linden, “Les relations politiques de la Flandre avec la France au XIVe siècle,” Compte rendu des Séances de la Commission

In Praise of Faithful Women \ 351 Royale d’Histoire 62 (1893): 469 – 542; Giovanni Tabacco, La casa di Francia nell’azione politica di papa Giovanni XXII ( Rome: Istituto storico Italiano per il medio evo, 1953), 108– 28; and Jean Dunbabin, A Hound of God: Pierre de la Palud and the Fourteenth-Century Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 24. “Cum in loco sancte Elizabeth iuxta Gandavum religiose mulieres que beghine nuncupate fuerant sub nostro ac predecessorum nostrorum regimine degere consueverint ab antiquo, statusque predictarum beghinarum de novo sit prohibitus et a Dei ecclesia penitus abolendus, nolentes locum predictum quem novimus a nostris predecessoribus fuisse fundatum, dimittere desolatum et pretextu novitatus huiusmodi . . . , mulieres fideles que promissa continentia vel non promissa, honeste in suis conversantur hospitiis, penitentiam agere voluerint et virtutum Domino in humilitatis spiritu deservire prout ipsis Dominus inspirabit . . . in cura, protexione et gardia nostris suscepimus speciali. . . . Et quia per decentiam habitus extrinseci morum honestas intrinseca demonstratur, volumus quod predicte mulieres honestati et conversationi humili earumdem congruentia deferant vestimenta.” Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, charters Béthune, no. 94, ed. Béthune, Cartulaire, 67, no. 94. 25. For Henry Braem’s public functions and family background, see Maurice Vandermaesen, De besluitvorming in het graafschap Vlaanderen tijdens de veertiende eeuw. Bijdrage tot de politieke sociologie van de Raad en van de raadsheren achter de figuur van Lodewijk II van Nevers (1322–1346), 3 vols. (Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 1999), 1:458– 59, and Frans Blockmans, Het Gentsche stadspatriciaat tot omstreeks 1302 (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1938), 224n4. For the ser Braems’ involvement with the beguinage: Ghent, Rijksarchief, Sint-Elisabethsbegijnhof Gent, charters at dates May 1269 and October 1, 1273; Béthune, Cartulaire, 25, no. 28; 28, no. 33; and 30 – 32, nos. 37 and 38. 26. See Walter Simons, Stad en apostolaat: De vestiging van de bedelorden in het graafschap Vlaanderen (ca. 1225– ca. 1350) ( Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1987), 234n11; Walter Simons, “Borluut, Fulco,” in Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek ( Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1987), vol. 12, cols. 95– 97. In a short work of popular history, L. Joos, a priest of the beguinage of Ter Hooie, claimed that the petition was written by “Count Robert, Friar Fulco Borluut, the prior of the Dominicans [of Ghent?] and others, with the support of the bishops of Tournai and Cambrai” (my translation), and dated it to January 10, 1320: L. Joos, Begijnhof O.L. Vrouw ter Hooie. Geschiedenis en gids ( Wetteren: Bracke-Van Geert, 1934), 20 – 21. Joos appears to have confused the petition with an unrelated vidimus by Fulco, of January 8, 1320, now lost but edited in Napoleon De Pauw, “Note sur le vrai nom du ‘Minorite’ de Gand,” Bulletin de la Commission royale d’Histoire 81 (1912): 361– 73 (at 372, no. I). 27. “les boines anchienes coustumes du dit lieu sauve en toutes choses les estatus de no saint pere le pape.” Ghent, Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 48, unpublished.

352 /

Walter Simons

28. See Walter Simons, “Beguines, Liturgy, and Music in the Middle Ages: An Exploration,” in Beghinae in cantu instructae: Musical Patrimony from Flemish Beguinages (Middle Ages–Late 18th C.), ed. Pieter Mannaerts ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 15– 25. 29. I discuss these factors in Cities of Ladies, 7– 34 and 109–17. 30. Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, Charters Béthune, no. 106, ed. Béthune, Cartulaire, 73– 76, no. 106 (for Saint Elizabeth Ghent); Ghent, Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 52C (for Ter Hooie, unpublished). 31. Ghent, Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 24 (August 11, 1295, unpublished). 32. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 80 – 85. Count Robert’s characterization of beguine teaching also found its way into the 1328 report cited above; see note 30 above. 33. J. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Études sur l’histoire du XIIIe siècle. Recherches sur la part que l’Ordre de Cîteaux et le comte de Flandre prirent à la lutte de Boniface VIII et de Philippe le Bel (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1853), 91– 93 (at 93). For the context: Walter Simons, “‘Dieu, li premierz, plus anchiiens et souverains bourgois de tous’. Sur la place de la religion dans les villes flamandes (XIIIe– XVe siècle),” in Villes de Flandre et d’Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle). Les enseignements d’une comparaison, ed. Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 77–103 (at 78– 80). 34. Chronique artésienne (1295–1304) et Chronique tournaisienne (1296–1314), ed. Franz Funck-Brentano (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1899), 68. 35. Jean Leclercq, “Un sermon prononcé pendant la guerre de Flandre sous Philippe le Bel,” Revue du Moyen Age latin 1 (1945): 165– 72. 36. Les Grandes Chroniques de France, ed. Jules Viard, vol. 8 ( Paris: Champion, 1920), 235– 36. 37. Vander Linden, “Les relations,” 485. 38. I am following here the data in Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter, 238– 46, who revised the traditional interpretation of the Strassburg dossier generally accepted since Alexander Patschovsky, “Straßburger Beginenverfolgungen im 14. Jahrhundert,” Deutsches Archiv 30 (1974): 56 –198 (at 103– 5). 39. Béthune, Cartulaire, 69– 70, no. 98; Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter, 202– 4. 40. See, for instance, the final report on the beguinages of Ghent, Bruges, Aardenburg, and Damme: Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, Charters Béthune, no. 107, edited in Béthune, Cartulaire, 76 – 78, no. 107 ( May 14, 1328). 41. “Dit es dat de grave Robberecht begherende an meester Heinric Braem helpen ons in rechte houden ende helpen omme griisse weder te ghecrijghen.” Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, charters Béthune, no. 94, reverse.

Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII \ 353 Appendix Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII Edition [ February 25, 1318–December 31, 1320; most probably in the spring of 1319] Count Robert of Flanders petitions Pope John XXII to defend beguines of Flanders against the implementation of the Clementine decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus. A. Draft: Ghent, Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-LieveVrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 43. Parchment, 28 x 19 cm (20 cm at the bottom). In dorso: Noch een protectie van Den grave van Vlaendere Robert (18th c.). Copié 20 – 21 Août 1901 N. de Pauw= (1901). [S]1anctissimo in Christo patri ac domino meo, carissimo domino Jhoanni digna Dei providencia sacrosancte Romane ac universalis ecclesie summo pontifici, suus2 devotus filius Robertus, comes Flandrie, cum humili recommendacione devotissima pedum oscula3 beatorum. Pater sanctissime, quum constitutio sacri consilii Viennensis ultimo selebrati statum periculosarum beghinarum temere de4 theologicis subtilitatibus predicare ac disputare presumentium, in simplicium subvertionem Catolice fidei contraria sub sanctitatis pallio seminando, consulto perpetuo condempnavit, ex cuius constitucionis malo ut creditur intellectu quedam mulieres ab antiquo honeste et quasi sancte conversacionis, indigene5 terre mee, communiter apud nos beghine hactenus nuncupate, suum simplicem seu humilem habitum solitum religiosasque observancias ac maternas correctiones nullius mali suspicionem sed virtutem ac dissiplinam coram Deo et hominibus redolentes, totaliter fere cohacte sunt6 relinquere in plurimarum puellarum dispendium et7 post illius statuti promulgacionem oportuna castigacione omissa, soluto pudicicie freno abierunt in devia vitiorum8. Cum numquam huiusmodi mee9 patrie mulieres consueverant

354 /

Walter Simons

per diversas regiones ociose discurrere, premissis se erroneis fatuitatibus ammiscendo, sed per diversas Flandrie villas in propriis domibus aut locatis, vel eisden concessis infra curiarum ad hoc deputatarum clausuras10 pro operis sui11 exigencia et competenti numero simul degentes, de patrimonialibus bonis aut pro maxima parte pio labore manuum suarum in lanarum vel pannorum purgatione sive aliis licitis femineis artificiis, audita prima cotidie missa, sibi tenuem victum querunt, persolventesque fideliter iura parocialia prelatosque seu ecclesiarum rectores cum debita obediencia reverentur festivos dies in sermone ac divinorum officiorum celebracione audienciisque precipue exponendo, in tantum quod omnis iuvencula in ipsarum consortio educata ad quemquam statum religionis seu matrimonii postea accedens, semper devotior reperitur. Nec in terris meis sexu habundantibus muliebri probi ac honorati viri filias12 suas quas iuxta proprias13 facultates nequeunt tradere monasteriis aut matrimoniis honorifice copulare, starent alicubi aptius collocare14 quam in istarum mulierum securrissima comitiva, ubi cujuslibet fortune mulier nobilis ac ignobilis, dives, mediocris ac pauper, honeste decenterque vivendo, in castitate ac humilitate virtutum Domino felicius famulatur.15 Unde vix opinari possum si sanctitate vestra animadverteret detrimenta virtutum ac incitamenta viciorum que pullulant ex prefate constitutionis superficiali intellectu ac cotidie magis et magis incipiunt pullulare, quin16 a debita sincera declaratione sepedictas laudabiles17 mulieres de erroribus prefate constitucionis numquam infamatas vel suspectas, ad statum suum pristinum humilem et honestum vestra sanctitas benigne dignum duceret revocare. Verum licet ut innuit ejusdem statuti ultima clausula statum fidelium mulierum sancte observancie nullatenus prohibitum videatur18, nihilhominus teneritudine consciencie ad papale vestrum preceptum pavide, sine ipsius speciali licentia statum dimissum resumere non auderent. Quocirca19 sanctitati vestre supplico humiliter quatenus20 hujusmodi nonobstante statuto super premissis, declarare seu ordinare ipsa sanctitas vestra21 dignetur quod mee Flandrie patrie mulieres superius declarate tam preterite, presentes, quam future in statu pristino libere possint in humilitatis spiritu Domino famulari. Sanctitatem vestram illesam conservet Altissimus ecclesie sue sancte per tempora longiora. Datum et cetera.

Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII \ 355 Notes = Baron Napoleon de Pauw (1835–1922), the well-known jurist and local historian, who lived close to the beguinage. His copy is preserved and kept with the original document. I was somewhat comforted to note that this erudite scholar had just as much trouble as I had in reading the document: having left open several passages on the first day of his visit, August 20, 1901, he returned the next day to complete them but was not always successful. I have not indicated his readings in this edition. 1. Ample space was left open for a decorated or larger initial, not filled in A. 2. suuus A. 3. occula A. 4. Added above the line A. 5. indigere A. 6. Added in the margin for se int, expunctuated A. 7. Added above the line A. 8. vicorum crossed out A. 9. me A. 10. Corrected above the line, from claustras A. 11. Added above the line A. 12. filas A. 13. Originally propreas, with e expunctuated and i added above the line A. 14. collocate A. 15. famulantur A. 16. Added above the line A. 17. laudabliles A. 18. prohibite videantur A. 19. Quapropter, not expunctuated but marked with a symbol referring to a marginal correction, lower right A. 20. Incorrectly expunctuated A. 21. Added above the line A.

Translation To the most holy father in Christ and my lord, dearest Lord John, supreme pontiff of the holy Roman and universal church by God’s worthy providence, his devoted son, Robert, count of Flanders, with humble dedication the most pious kissing of your saintly feet. Most holy father, a constitution of the sacred council recently celebrated in Vienne condemned

356 /

Walter Simons

by a perpetual decision the way of life of dangerous beguines who rashly presume to preach and dispute about theological subtleties, sowing things that are contrary to the Catholic faith under the cover of holiness, to the destruction of simple people. Because of a bad (so it appears) understanding of that constitution, certain women of an honorable and quasi holy way of life since the oldest days, natives of my land, around here commonly called beguines up to this point, have been forced to abandon almost completely the simple and humble habit they used to wear, as well as their religious observances and maternal admonitions, redolent of virtue and discipline before God and humankind rather than suspicion of any evil, to the loss of many girls. And after the promulgation of that statute, releasing the reins of modesty and letting go of proper chastity, they vanished on the wayward paths of vice. Such women of my fatherland never used to run around idly in several regions, engaging in the aforesaid erroneous sillinesses. Instead, in several cities of Flanders, in houses or sites owned by them or granted to them within enclosed courtyards assigned for that purpose, living together because of their work and in a fitting number, they seek a tenuous living for themselves either from their patrimonial goods or, for the most part, from the pious labor of their hands in the washing of woolens or linens or from other licit feminine crafts, having daily heard the first mass. Faithfully paying parochial dues, they honor the prelates or clerics of their churches with due obedience, on feast days through a sermon and the celebration of the divine office, particularly by expounding to those in the audience— so much so that every young girl educated in their company is always said to be more devout when later she moves on to some form of religious life or marriage. In my lands, abounding in the female sex, upright and reputable men would not agree that their daughters, whom they cannot give over to monasteries or join in honorable marriages from their own resources, be placed anywhere more fittingly than in these women’s most steadfast company, where a woman of whatever fortune, noble or non-noble, rich, middling or poor, living honorably and decently, serves the Lord more happily in chastity and humility of virtues.

Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII \ 357 Whence I can scarcely believe that, if your holiness were to consider the damages to virtue and inducements toward vice that emerge from a superficial understanding of this aforesaid constitution and daily begin to emerge more and more, your holiness might not kindly see fit to recall those laudable women, mentioned many times above, never infamous or suspect of the errors of the aforesaid constitution, to their original, humble, and honorable way of life, by a due and truthful declaration. Indeed, although the way of life of faithful women of holy observance by no means appears to be forbidden, as the last clause of that statute indicates, nonetheless they are fearful, with tenderness of conscience toward your papal precept, and do not dare to resume the way of life they abandoned without its special license. Therefore, I humbly beg your holiness that, regardless of that statute on the aforesaid matters, your holiness yourself sees fit to declare or command that the women of my fatherland Flanders, described above, whether past, present, or future, may freely serve the Lord in humility of spirit in their original way of life. May the Most High preserve your holiness unharmed for his holy church for a very long time. Dated, etc.

Fo u r t e e n

Th e E f f e c t o f Pa p a l P r o v i s i o n s t o O x f o r d a n d Pa r i s S c h o l a r s o n t h e Pa s t o r a t e a n d C a r e o f S o u l s w i l l i a m j . c o u rt e n ay

The theme of reform has been an important dimension of the research contribution of John Van Engen, stimulated in part, no doubt, by his training with Gerhart Ladner.1 The chapter of the long history of reform within the life of the church that I want to examine here concerns the attempts to improve the educational level and theological training of the clergy, particularly the parish clergy, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I should state at the outset that I will not be able to answer a question frequently raised by those interested in this topic: how many clerics with university training, particularly at the level of Master of Arts and higher, actually served out their careers as parish clergy. The evidence we have is insufficient, despite the considerable amount of attention that has been given to this issue, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century.2 What I can provide is a more detailed picture of the relation of university education and appointments to parish churches in fourteenth-century England and France.3 358

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 359 Thirteenth-Century Initiatives From well before the Fourth Lateran Council through the pontificate of Boniface VIII, church leaders, primarily popes, put forward three initiatives to improve the educational level of the clergy. At the highest level this meant increasing the appointment of university graduates to the episcopate, an area in which the papacy exercised influence through confirmation. This was even more the case by the middle of the fourteenth century, when appointment to a bishopric required papal action or provision, often after negotiations with monarchs or princes. The second initiative in the thirteenth century was to encourage bishops, acting directly or through other church officials with rights of appointment or advowson, to provide scholars from their diocese with appointment to benefices, especially parish churches, which in turn would presumably lead to a better-educated parish clergy. Ultimately more important for the parish clergy was a third initiative, namely the papal constitutions that permitted and encouraged bishops to grant a leave of absence to a rector of a parish church for purposes of study in the schools or at a studium generale, an effort that culminated in Boniface VIII’s Cum ex eo constitution in 1298.4 The success rate on the first of these initiatives, namely the appointment of university-trained men as bishops, was considerable in England but, to the degree biographical evidence permits, seems to have been lower in France.5 From the perspective of the papacy, the mendicant orders proved to be an excellent source of university-educated talent for appointment as bishops, since their members were required to have theological training. The second initiative, namely encouraging bishops to appoint university-trained scholars from their diocese to a parish church, was largely unsuccessful in the thirteenth century. Appointment to a parish was controlled by many different patrons, some lay, many ecclesiastical, all of whom were under pressure from vested interests in medieval society, from kings down to local noble families, to appoint faithful servants or those connected to their familia. This is not to say that those with university education were not appointed. Some bishops, such as Robert Grosseteste at Lincoln, considered educational training an important

360 /

William J. Courtenay

consideration, perhaps even more important than spirituality. But without a system that could level the playing field over against competing local interests, the results of papal pressure were slim. The third initiative, namely allowing dispensations from parish residency for purposes of study, was the most successful but also the most controversial. Already in the twelfth century bishops had been allowed to grant permissions of nonresidency to rectors of parish churches for purposes of study, presumably at a cathedral school.6 The perceived need for such permissions probably increased in response to the legislative emphasis at the Third Lateran Council in 1179 on improving diocesan educational resources for the training of clergy, especially if beneficed clergy in towns and villages throughout a diocese were to be included within the target group.7 Such permissions, however, simultaneously ran up against an opposing reform goal, namely to limit or eradicate parish absenteeism by requiring those holding benefices with the care of souls to be in residence, a policy also mandated at the Third Lateran Council.8 In response to a question from the archbishop of York as to whether this last canon was to be applied without exception, Alexander III allowed the continuation of licenses of nonresidence for study and other reasonable causes.9 The parish was not left without the administration of the sacraments and the care of souls. Whether the license for study was granted by a bishop or a pope, the rector was obliged to appoint a curate, who temporarily served in his stead, while the majority of the income was retained by the rector for his expenses in the schools or at a university. From a legislative standpoint, the rector was obliged to appoint a qualified curate to handle the care of souls, or he would be guilty of fraud and could lose his benefice.10 We should not assume that such curates were uneducated, since scholars holding a position as rector of a parish church would know students, ordained or able to be ordained as priests, without the means to remain at the university and for whom the portion of income for a curate would be attractive. The episcopal registers for dioceses in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries show that ordinations to the priesthood outnumbered institutions to parish churches, creating a large pool of available curates. The many clerics seeking parish churches had a strong interest in drawing attention to negligent benefice holders, including those who failed to be ordained within the required time after ap-

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 361 pointment, who held more than one church with cure, or who had been absent without license. Therefore appointing a curate who lacked the proper qualifications, which could lead to a charge of fraud and the loss of the benefice, represented a significant risk for a rector. Following upon the mandate of the Third Lateran Council to appoint a grammar master in every cathedral, and in the face of the growing threat of heresy, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 insisted on a similar appointment of a theologian in every metropolitan cathedral.11 In 1219 Honorius III mandated the implementation of that decree, and in order to offset the excuse that an insufficiency of trained teachers prevented this, bishops and chapters were instructed to do more to improve the supply of teachers of theology, allowing those capable of such studies to use the income from their benefices for up to five years of study.12 But to whom were such licenses granted, and, whatever the legislative intent, was the implementation of Honorius’s decree concerned with the preparation of teachers for cathedral schools? Cathedral and parish clergy resident in a cathedral city would not need such licenses because they could remain in residence and fulfill their pastoral duties while engaged in study, unless they were asking to study elsewhere. Similarly, unbeneficed clerics would not need such a license because they were not yet involved in the care of souls. Licenses for study must therefore have been aimed at beneficed clerics in other towns and villages in a diocese, and the small amount of evidence available suggests that licenses were not for the improvement of the teaching staff at cathedrals, but rather for the improvement of the level of learning among the clergy involved with the care of souls. The brief length of study permitted by most licenses, usually one year, as well as the junior academic status of the recipients, does not correspond well with a goal of preparing teachers. Looking at the seven rectors in the diocese of Lincoln receiving licenses for study between 1219 and circa 1232, only one is identified as studying theology and that for only one year, insufficient to prepare a teacher.13 Most of the other licenses were also for one year, and the most generous license, for seven years, was granted in 1223 to a cleric so young that he needed a tutor in the schools.14 It must be acknowledged, however, that not all licenses granted for study may have been recorded in episcopal registers, at least not with

362 /

William J. Courtenay

the same degree of thoroughness in every diocese and across time. As shall be seen in a moment when discussing licenses for study between 1274 and 1298, the number of licenses recorded varies dramatically among dioceses, and even earlier in the thirteenth century there are periods in which no licenses for study were recorded. For example, while Walter Giffard was bishop of Bath and Wells, from 1264 to 1266, no licenses for study were recorded in his surviving register, despite the fact that Giffard had studied at Cambridge, became a Master of Arts at Oxford in 1251, and may have remained there for a time for further studies.15 During his time as archbishop of York (1266 –1279), his register records six licenses for study in 1268, three in 1269, and one in 1270, before and after which no licenses were recorded.16 If these figures accurately reflect the number of licenses granted, they present an erratic picture for a large diocese with a scholarly prelate. A similar erratic pattern shows up in the register of Giffard’s successor, William Wickwane, archbishop of York from 1279 to 1285. His register records two licenses for study in 1280, seven licenses in 1281, another seven licenses in 1282, and no licenses during the remainder of his pontificate.17 With the growth of universities in the thirteenth century, opportunities for study by secular clerics expanded far beyond what was previously available at cathedrals and town schools. Thus, while licenses for study in the twelfth century were for attendance in the schools, such licenses by the middle of the thirteenth century were almost entirely for study at a studium generale, a university.18 Specific universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, or Paris, were sometimes mentioned in a license as recorded in English episcopal registers. And the growth of the faculties of theology at Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge was as important for the training of secular clerics as it was for the defense of orthodoxy against heresy.

From Licet canon (1274) to Cum ex eo (1298) Licet canon, a constitution that Gregory X attached to the decrees of the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, seemingly restricted the ability of bishops to grant licenses of absence to those holding benefices that en-

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 363 tailed the care of souls. Of the many requirements for holding a parish church, such as having attained the age of twenty-five,19 having sufficient learning and good character, ordination as priest, and personal residency in the parish, only two mitigations were allowed. Ordination to the priesthood could be delayed for up to a year from appointment to a parish church.20 Secondly, a bishop could dispense someone from the residency requirement for a period of time for reasonable cause.21 A delay in ordination was only for a year, and no mention was made of episcopal dispensation for any further delay. As regards residency, however, no definition of “reasonable cause” was given, nor of the length of time for which a dispensation might be granted. The reiteration in Licet canon of the age and ordination requirements for a rector of a parish church was aimed in part at patrons who wished to endow at an early stage a young family member destined for a church career.22 Rather than present a qualified candidate for institution to a parish church in the gift of a noble family that had a son, nephew, or protégé already tonsured, who was only a few years away from being able to be ordained a priest, they often preferred their own underage candidate and sought to obtain a dispensation from the bishop to postpone ordination for five or more years.23 In the meantime, the spiritual needs of the parishioners could be served through a temporary curate. Episcopal registers from the late thirteenth century suggest that Licet canon was to a large extent successful in addressing the abuse of underage rectors, although not eliminating it entirely.24 Licet canon’s ruling on absenteeism, however, which allowed bishops to grant leaves for reasonable cause, posed a different set of issues. While many leaves were for study, often to masters in arts for advanced theological training at Oxford or Paris,25 many others were for administrative duties or other forms of service in royal, noble, or episcopal households. The income derived from possession of a parish church had long been an attractive source of revenue from which to reward clerics who served those in positions of political, social, or ecclesiastical power. While Licet canon sought to end the appointment to parish churches of those who did not qualify by reason of age and lack of ordination, permitting leaves of absence for reasonable cause left open the possibility of leaves for service as much as for study.

364 /

William J. Courtenay

Early in his pontificate Boniface VIII moved to eliminate or reduce sharply that form of absenteeism. On March 19, 1296, a month after Clericis laicos, Boniface issued a bull that required the personal residence of parish clergy, specifically as it applied to those engaged in administrative, diplomatic, or personal service away from the parish.26 To the extent that such service qualified as reasonable cause under Licet canon, it had to be approved and licensed by the pope. Although the bull would have been sent to church officials throughout Europe, it has left very little trace in ecclesiastical records. If conscientiously observed, it would have had a devastating effect on royal and ecclesiastical bureaucracies. It appears, instead, to have been ignored. In Cum ex eo, promulgated in 1298, Pope Boniface addressed the other reason for parish absenteeism, namely licenses for study, and outlined a different course of action. He made the argument that the insistence on promotion to the priesthood within a year of installation as rector and the requirement of personal residence in the parish as stipulated in Licet canon discouraged those interested in pursuing studies from accepting appointment to a parish church. The church was losing talent for the parish ministry by too stringent an insistence on residency and ordination to the priesthood. Boniface was not alone in viewing Licet canon in that light.27 Despite the fact that both Licet canon and Cum ex eo mentioned the requirements for ordination to the priesthood within a year and residency in the parish, in that order, it was the residency requirement that attracted the most attention in the late thirteenth century and among twentieth-century historians. As Leonard Boyle expressed it in his foundational article on Cum ex eo, “in legislating ruthlessly against absenteeism, Licet canon had in fact placed the common good in jeopardy.”28 Under the terms of Licet canon no one could be appointed as a rector unless he was within a year of meeting the canonical requirement of age twenty-five, and once installed as rector, he had to remain in residence and provide the care of souls. According to Boyle, the reformist attempt to safeguard pastoral care had threatened the long-term goal of raising the clergy’s educational level. Benedict VIII’s Cum ex eo had sought to correct this unintended consequence. And because Cum ex eo assumed the recipient of the dispensation was not yet ordained a subdeacon, the legislation was aimed at those in their late teens or early twen-

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 365 ties, who would be attracted into to the parish ministry by the promise of using parish revenues for education. Although some prelates and canonists in the last quarter of the thirteenth century feared that Licet canon would greatly reduce the level of education among parish priests, a point of view Boyle adopted, Boyle also argued that Cum ex eo was aimed not at those who were already parish priests, but rather at those who desired but could not afford university education and might in this way be brought into the ranks of parish priests. Despite contemporary perceptions, Licet canon did not choke off licenses for study, nor did it limit them to one year.29 Some bishops in England took a cautious approach to granting licenses of absence in the wake of Licet canon. For example, Oliver Sutton at Lincoln (1280 –1299) apparently granted only five licenses for study to rectors in his diocese between 1290 and 1296, and only one of them was for a period longer than one year; however, six months after the constitution Cum ex eo was promulgated, Sutton granted six licenses for study in the autumn of 1298.30 Other bishops in England took a more liberal view of “causa rationabilis” in Licet canon. For example, Thomas de Cantelupe at Hereford (1275–1282) granted thirty licenses for study in less than five years, between September 1275 and January 1280.31 His successor at Hereford, Richard de Swinfield (1283–1317) continued to grant licenses for study, albeit at a more controlled pace: thirteen licenses across five years, 1283 to 1287.32 Archbishop of York William Wickwane granted twenty-eight licenses for study in less than three years (1280 –1282), at least eight of which were given to those who were already masters.33 Bishop Peter Quivil at Exeter (1280 –1291) granted thirty-eight licenses across an eightyear period.34 Whatever Pope Gregory may have intended by “reasonable cause” in 1274, a substantial number of English bishops interpreted it to cover university study. Boyle noted that “some bishops would, no doubt, stretch ‘causa rationabilis’ to cover licenses of absence for study,” specifically citing the registers of Wickwane at York and Swinfeld at Hereford.35 But adding the evidence from the registers of Cantelupe at Hereford and Quivil at Exeter suggests that the problem with Licet canon was not the suppression of licenses for study, but that only those rectors who were ordained priests, or within a year of being eligible for ordination, could be canonically

366 /

William J. Courtenay

granted a license for study. What Cum ex eo changed, as Boyle emphasized, was to allow clerics too young to be ordained priests to be installed as rectors of a parish church, use the income for up to seven years of study at a studium generale, and delay ordination to the priesthood until the eighth year. This opened the possession of parish churches and licenses for study to those in the age range of seventeen to twenty-four, precisely the age group appropriate for the final stages of a degree in arts and the beginning of studies in theology. It could also be of use to those who needed remedial work in Latin grammar, but to the extent that Cum ex eo released rectors for study at a studium generale, it assumed candidates already possessed proficiency in Latin and was aimed at those who were already studying in or wished to study in the faculty of arts at a university. It could also be used for higher studies in the faculties of theology and canon law. It has often been assumed, on the basis of Boyle’s analysis, that Cum ex eo was aimed at those in need of remedial work in Latin and those beginning their studies in arts. Thus, it comes as a surprise that among those receiving licenses for study according to the terms of Cum ex eo we find a number of scholars who were already masters in arts and thus well beyond the beginning level, both in age and educational achievement. Cum ex eo licenses to masters in arts were not, however, an occasional anomaly. For example, Archbishop Greenfield at York granted licenses for study to masters under the provisions of Cum ex eo in every year of his pontificate. In some years, such as in 1306 and 1315, they made up the majority of licensees.36 Similarly, during the short pontificate of Simon de Montacute at Worcester, masters received Cum ex eo licenses for study in every year, comprising five of the eight licenses granted in 1334, two of the six granted in 1335, four of the thirteen granted in 1336, and two of the six granted in 1337.37 This pattern might well have occurred in other dioceses, but many registers as edited do not provide academic titles to those receiving licenses for study. Whatever the intent of Boniface’s legislation, as applied in the dioceses of England in the early fourteenth century the controlling factor was not the age of the rector or his being at the beginning of studies in grammar or arts, but whether or not he was a priest. If he was a priest, the license could be granted under the authority of Licet canon, whether explicitly mentioned as such in the reg-

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 367 ister entry or not. If he was too young to be ordained a priest— as would be the case for any recent master in arts who was continuing studies in theology or canon law—the license would be granted under the authority of Cum ex eo, again whether that canon was explicitly mentioned or not.38 Many permissions to delay ordination to the priesthood, usually granted as part of a Cum ex eo dispensation for study, were probably not a result of reluctance to become a priest, although there are examples of that,39 but of the individual’s young age, that is, below the canonical age of twenty-four for ordination, that is, being in one’s twenty-fifth year. Viewed from this perspective, Cum ex eo was not primarily intended to counter an unfortunate outcome of the reforming constitution, Licet canon, which purportedly limited the education of priests. Its main purpose, again as Boyle noted, was to allow the use of parish revenues for study to those who, by reason of age, were not yet eligible to be ordained as priests. By requiring ordination to the subdiaconate within a year of institution to a parish church, the recipient of a church and a license to study was obliged to celibacy and a career as a parish priest or office within the church. Allowing the use of parish income in absentia for university study by priests already serving in a parish was practiced in the thirteenth century and did not end with Licet canon, at least as implemented at the diocesan level in England. A limited number of parish priests could be given the opportunity to study in the arts faculty to improve their Latin grammar, their skills in argumentation and rhetoric useful in preaching, or more especially in theology to better understand the Bible and doctrine — rather like a continuing education program that improves the skills of those already serving in a profession. Boyle correctly interpreted Cum ex eo to be targeted at those who were not yet priests, younger men interested in higher education who, because of the restrictions of Licet canon, might avoid the parish ministry. We might view this as equivalent to the Reserve Officer Training Corp program at American universities by which one’s university education is financed by the government in return for future military service at the officer level. Since Cum ex eo required ordination to the subdiaconate within a year of receiving the license and ordination to the priesthood after the period of study, it was not targeted at those who had been serving in a parish, since they would already have

368 /

William J. Courtenay

taken holy orders. The principal aim of Cum ex eo was to attract talented young men to the priesthood and the parish ministry, some or many of whom might already be studying at a university, by offering the use of parish income to support their education with the expectation that they would, after a number of years of study, return to that parish and serve as rector in residence. So long as those with positions involving the cura animarum could not be absent or appoint a replacement (except in rare cases), clerics interested in education would view appointment to a parish church as a barrier to study. The problem with assessing the effectiveness of Boniface’s initiative is the limited quantity of information on the educational and clerical career pattern of those who received dispensations. Boyle studied dispensations granted by specific bishops in England across the fourteenth century and presented a number of specific cases, but for the most part we have no idea whether they had previous university study or in what faculty they presumably used their dispensation to study. If we turn, as Boyle did not, to the biographical registers for Oxford and Cambridge compiled by A. B. Emden, we are in fact able to gain some impression of where episcopal licenses for study, whether Cum ex eo dispensations or ones granted on the basis of earlier canonical legislation, fitted into the academic and ecclesiastical careers of scholars. Outside England—in France, for example— a similar analysis has not been possible because episcopal registers are all but nonexistent and because we lack a comparable biographical register for the medieval University of Paris.40 An additional problem is that, in most cases, we do not know the initial financial resources of students and therefore are unable to gauge the role that parish revenues played in allowing their studies— whether it made study possible or simply enhanced the quality of life at Paris, Oxford, or elsewhere. While there is nothing in the Cum ex eo constitution that excludes licenses for study to priests already holding a benefice with care of souls, the evidence that Donald Logan has assembled for the diocese of Lincoln in the first half of the fourteenth century supports Boyle’s interpretation that Cum ex eo was targeted at clerics who were not yet priests.41 The Lincoln registers distinguish between licenses for study granted to priests already holding a parish church and dispensations Cum ex eo to non-priests, which, in addition to permission to use parish revenues

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 369 in absentia for a period of university study, allowed a delay in ordination. Most telling perhaps is the fact that institution to a parish church and the dispensation based upon Cum ex eo usually occurred within a matter of months, sometimes on the same day. While a significant number of these dispensations were granted to clerics to continue at or return to the university, the vast majority of recipients are not known to have had any previous university study. The numbers that have been assembled for the diocese of Lincoln reveal a remarkable growth in the use of parish income for university study in England in the early fourteenth century, an increase paralleled by evidence from the registers of other dioceses. If judged by the use made of this opportunity, this third initiative was highly successful. It is probably safe to assume that most of those receiving dispensations or licenses for study in fact used them for that purpose, although the number known to have attained the degree of Master of Arts is relatively small. And since all recipients of these permissions held or had been recently appointed to a parochial benefice, there would seem to be a close connection between these educational grants and the eventual care of souls. Logan has looked at the question from the standpoint of diocesan evidence, combining it with evidence provided by Emden’s Biographical Register for Oxford. What does the picture look like from the standpoint of university and papal evidence? What role, if any, did student rectors play in the academic life of a university? To answer those questions I now turn to a different body of evidence associated with yet another papal initiative.

The Rotuli : A Fourteenth-Century Papal Initiative Beyond the three papal initiatives outlined above for the thirteenth century, there was a new initiative in the fourteenth century, namely papal provisions to university scholars.42 This initiative was an innovation by John XXII that allowed a university, the first one being Paris in 1316, to petition the pope directly as a collective supplicant on behalf of a list of teaching masters without benefice income or benefice income sufficient to meet their perceived needs. In almost all cases, what was being granted by the pope was an expectation of a parish church or, in a few cases, a

370 /

William J. Courtenay

canonical prebend from a designated collator who held the right of appointment, such as a bishop, a cathedral or collegiate chapter, or a monastery. When a benefice in their gift became vacant, the papal letter of provision presumably gave the university candidate an advantage over other petitioners. This fourth initiative resembled the second inasmuch as it sought to place university-trained scholars into church positions within a diocese. But instead of trying to persuade bishops to do this on their own, it went directly to collators with a papal mandate that connected an individual scholar to an individual collator and sometimes a specific church. Moreover, this new initiative was not promulgated as a bull or constitution that might have brought opposition from kings, prelates, or lay patrons, but rather was implemented letter by letter without any policy statement. Just as kings, princes, bishops, and others had long submitted to the pope lists of persons for whom they sought a benefice, John XXII was allowing an institution, a university, to do likewise. Thus, while licenses for study under Licet canon allowed some literate priests to use their parish revenues for a year or more of university training, and dispensations for study under Cum ex eo allowed that same opportunity to rectors who were not yet priests, university petitions, submitted on rolls (rotuli), provided unbeneficed university masters with a means of obtaining a parish church or a position in a cathedral and collegiate church that might also entail care of souls. Cum ex eo put more rectors into universities; papal provisions facilitated the process of placing university masters in parish churches and other positions within the church. Together they contributed to the same, more general goal of increasing the number of beneficed clergy with university educations. By the 1330s submitting a rotulus of petitions for benefices had become standard practice through which a university, every two or three years, submitted a list of masters in all faculties and bachelors in the higher faculties (and, toward the end of the fourteenth century even students in arts) seeking a special papal grace that granted an expectation of appointment to a parish church or a canonical prebend or dignity in a cathedral or collegiate church. The results of these petitions have now been edited for the University of Paris for the fourteenth century, and although they give us no direct information on licenses for study, they do provide abun-

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 371 dant information about when in an academic career a scholar received an expectation or appointment to a parish church, how long it took to transform an expectation into collation or acquisition, and in what discipline or faculty a recipient of a parish church was studying.43 Moreover, since many university scholars continued to petition for benefices throughout their time at the university, we can see approximately when a scholar obtained his first parish appointment and when he exchanged it for one with a higher income or one located in a region more suitable to his present and future needs. This new evidence allows us to test some aspects of the relation of dispensations and licenses to study in the careers of university scholars and thus the impact that Cum ex eo had upon universities, or at least their more academically successful members. Two features of this type of documentation need to be noted. First, those whose petitions were recorded in the papal Registers of Supplication were only those whose petitions were granted, either as requested or as revised in chancery. The recorded results, therefore, do not reflect the total number of those who petitioned the pope by means of the university supplication. Only in one instance, the rotulus of 1335 for the faculty of arts at Paris, do we have evidence that allows us to know the ratio between the total number of petitioners and those who were successful, although that ratio may be atypical of a normal rate of return. It was the first rotulus in the pontificate of Benedict XII, whose attitude toward the University of Paris was, at best, ambivalent. Since the faculties and nations at the University of Paris listed the petitions in ranked order based mostly on seniority, we may assume that, except for a few cases in which the pope and his advisers may have made a distinction in persons, those receiving a favorable response were probably those at the top of the list. As we shall see, it was not based on whether or not the petitioner already held a parish church or other benefice. Secondly, the papal chancery required that supplicants list all benefices and expectations of benefices already held, including parish churches, and the corresponding letters of provision repeated that information in a non obstantibus clause. Failure to list benefices and expectations was considered fraud and could result in their loss, as well as endangering the possibility of papal graces in the future. Thus, the results of university rotuli of supplication provide a reliable picture of parish church possession

372 /

William J. Courtenay

within the career of a university scholar and allow us to compare that information against the date and terms of a license for study, at least for the British Isles, where we have episcopal registers that list dispensations and licenses for study. Let me begin with one example from Oxford in the first year of John XXII’s innovation, namely the results of Oxford’s first collective supplication to the pope in 1317.44 Although all but one of the twentyseven regent masters in the faculty of arts whose petitions were approved received an expectation of a benefice with care of souls,45 none of them already held a parish church, although they had been studying and teaching at a university for seven years or more. Their expenses at Oxford were being paid from personal family sources, a college fellowship, or a patron, supplemented by student fees from their teaching in arts. Those in the rotulus who already possessed a parish church were doctors in a higher faculty, namely theology. Of the twenty-seven regent masters in arts who received an expectation of a benefice, fifteen are known to have been successful in turning their expectation into possession of a benefice, and of those all but one obtained a parish church from the collator named in their letter of provision.46 The time span between obtaining the letter of expectation47 and possession of a church was relatively short, on average within four years, several within a year or two. Some of these petitioners might have fared well on their own initiative, but a success rate of more than 50 percent nonetheless shows the effectiveness of papal provisions for Oxford scholars at this time. Moreover, of the fifteen, only six are known to have obtained a degree in a higher faculty or a license for study after 1317. That suggests that many of them, after obtaining a parish church, moved from the university into an ecclesiastical career, either as a parish priest or in some other capacity. As mentioned, the five regent masters in theology all held parish churches, with the exception of John of Elham, who held a canonical prebend in the cathedral chapter at Hereford.48 John Lutterell was a priest when he was appointed to the parish church of Holme in 1304, but his only recorded license for study was for one year in 1320, during his time as chancellor of the university.49 There must have been a series of earlier and subsequent licenses— all based on Licet canon, since he was a

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 373 priest—to cover the fourteen years of study needed to obtain the doctorate in theology and his continuing residence at Oxford and then at Avignon. Another of the regent masters in theology was Simon de Mepham, later archbishop of Canterbury, who was appointed to the parish church of Turnstall in 1297, but whose only recorded license for study was in 1314 for a year. As with Lutterell, there must have been many unrecorded licenses for study before 1314, since he remained rector of Turnstall until he was appointed archbishop.50 Thomas de Corbridge, a clerk and possible kin of the archbishop of York of the same name, received his first parish church as an acolyte in 1300 and exchanged it for another parish church in the diocese of York in 1302, soon after which, now ordained subdeacon, he received a seven-year license to study (a Cum ex eo dispensation).51 The date of his doctorate in theology, by or before 1317, means that he must have been Master of Arts in 1302, with many years of privately funded university study already accomplished and many years of theological study ahead, for which he would have needed numerous licenses of absence, although none are mentioned in the surviving registers. Similarly, Thomas de Hotot was already a master in arts when he received appointment to the parish church of Allington together with a license to study for two years in 1303.52 Admittedly, these scholars had had successful university careers, but in no case was their arrival at Oxford a result of a permission to study, under Cum ex eo or otherwise. A similar picture emerges from the results of an Oxford rotulus in 1343, in the second year of the pontificate of Clement VI.53 Since two of the recipients mentioned what they had received from an earlier supplication to Clement, there may well have been a university rotulus submitted in Clement’s first year that, like the Paris rotulus of 1342, was not recorded in the Registers of Supplication.54 Everyone on the 1343 list receiving a papal grace was at least a master in arts and had thus been at Oxford for almost a decade or more. Moreover, only the doctors of theology and civil law (no doctors of canon law appear on the list) held parish churches, all of which had been obtained after many years of university study and the attainment of the degree of Master of Arts. Turning next to the University of Paris, a slightly different picture emerges. In the first Parisian rotulus of supplication to the pope in 1316, regent masters in theology already held parish churches and/or canonical

374 /

William J. Courtenay

prebends in a cathedral or collegiate church at the time of the supplication.55 Of the twenty regent masters in the faculty of arts who were rewarded with a papal grace, three already had parish churches, and they seem to have been teaching for many years and simultaneously involved in study in a higher faculty. Those three presumably would have had a license to be absent for reasons of study from the bishop of the diocese in which their church was located, but because we lack diocesan records on licenses or dispensations in France, we do not know how their possession of a parish church is related to study at Paris. The same is true in the university rotulus of 1335, where only one regent master in arts out of thirty-five successful supplicants held a parish church.56 Since the university rotulus of 1335 was submitted at the beginning of Benedict XII’s pontificate and he awarded graces to less than a quarter of the Parisian supplicants, the question arises whether Benedict, and perhaps other popes, may have discriminated against scholars who already possessed a church or some other benefice. Whatever Benedict’s grounds for selecting some and rejecting others, previous possession of a benefice does not seem to have been a factor. This becomes evident thanks to the survival of a record of a subsequent meeting of the Picard nation in the faculty of arts.57 The fifty-five masters who petitioned the pope in 1335 and received nothing forced their ten successful colleagues, none of whom held a parish church when they petitioned, to reimburse them the fee they paid to have their petition included in the rotulus. As a result we know the names of those masters who were not rewarded. Only one of the supplicants in the Picard nation not rewarded by Benedict is known to have held a parish church at that time, namely Jean Buridan.58 Nineteen others who were similarly passed over, and for whom we have additional biographical information (since such information was required to be included in the petition and was repeated in the letter), are known not to have held a parish church.59 It is possible that one or more of the thirty-five non-rewarded scholars for whom we do not have biographical information did hold a parish church, but since only one out of twenty for whom we do have such information was a rector, excluding benefice holders does not appear to have been a factor in papal decision making in response to the university rotulus. It is more likely that Benedict simply chose the first ten on the list and that because nations some-

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 375 times listed those without benefices before those with benefices, Buridan’s name was not among the first ten.60 In contrast to Benedict XII, his successor, Clement VI, was far more generous to university scholars. As a result of the rotulus submitted on the occasion of Clement’s coronation in 1342, 236 regent masters in arts at Paris received an expectation of a benefice, of whom only 28 already held churches.61 Papal generosity continued, especially under Urban V and Gregory XI, and there was a gradual easing of the requirements for eligibility. By the beginning of the pontificate of Clement VII in 1378, the first pope in the Avignon line during the papal schism, even students in the faculty of arts were petitioning the pope for benefices.62 In the last quarter of the fourteenth century a theologian was usually rector of a parish church by the time he reached the level of bachelor of theology, and the number of regent masters in arts at Paris who held a parish church exceeded 25 percent. By the late fourteenth century it also became common for those masters pursuing a teaching career to obtain a permanent papal leave of absence from their parish responsibilities, with income, as long as they continued teaching at a university and employed a qualified substitute for the care of souls.

The Results of Papal Initiatives Papal support of universities and university study began in the thirteenth century as a response to the problem of heresy by seeking to ensure a sufficient number of trained theologians who could combat heresy. By the end of the thirteenth century it had become a means of improving the level of learning of the parish clergy, provided that the scholar or graduate would return to his parish after his studies to care for the souls of those who, in a sense, had funded his education, and that he would remain in the parish ministry. Licenses and dispensations for study, whether based on Licet canon or Cum ex eo, were but one tool for meeting that goal. To the extent the evidence allows conclusions, they seem primarily to have brought numerous students into university faculties of arts, a few of whom attained the level of master and went on to study theology or canon law.63 Most

376 /

William J. Courtenay

recipients of Cum ex eo dispensations were not deficient in Latin, since all university study required Latin. However, most probably left before obtaining a degree, having at least acquired a few years of learning at a level above that of a grammar school. Licenses for study, on the other hand, which were usually given out in one- to three-year permissions to a parish priest, allowed him to continue at or return to the university to complete his studies in a higher faculty. While licenses for study pulled rectors of parish churches into universities, papal provisions to scholars placed university-trained individuals in parish churches. How many stayed in their parishes is impossible to determine, but these two papal initiatives nonetheless worked together to increase the level of learning within the church at large. Throughout most of the fourteenth century, the securing of a parish church by a university scholar came, for those who were successful, within a few years of the papal letter of expectation. Certainly, by the time a scholar became a bachelor of theology, law, or medicine, he would have a benefice, usually in the form of a parish church. University supplications for benefice support by way of papal provisions allowed university scholars who otherwise lacked an important patron to obtain benefices, most of which were parish churches. If, as Guy Lytle and others have argued, university scholars were losing out at the opening of the fourteenth century to nonuniversity clients of those who held the power of collation to parish churches, papal provisions gave university scholars a better chance of success and in some cases an advantage. And since, until the last quarter of the fourteenth century, scholars rarely obtained a parish church until they were engaged in studies in a higher faculty, many of those who eventually served out their careers as parish priests would have had training in scripture, doctrine, and the sacrament of penance obtained through the study of theology or canon law. On the other hand, many remained longer in teaching and went on to careers in law or medicine, or as canons in collegiate and cathedral chapters. If this latter group did not directly serve the parish ministry, they did maintain a higher level of learning within the officialdom of the church at large. Perhaps even more than Cum ex eo, the system of papal provision ensured that a higher percentage of rectors were university trained.

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 377 As the process of papal provisions to scholars (and to other petitioners) became common in the fourteenth century, those receiving such graces viewed the benefice, particularly the parish church, essentially as income. Just as parish churches in England in the nineteenth century were referred to as “church livings,” parish churches in the fourteenth century were described in terms of fructus (fruits, yield), redditus (revenue owed), and proventus ( provision, living) — that is, income. And the continual quest for appointment to a new parish appears to be based as much on the tithe income or value of the church as on proximity to region of origin or eventual residence.64 Most likely, seeking appointment to a parish church as a source of income was not new in the fourteenth century, merely better documented. The success rate in turning an expectation obtained through papal provision into actual possession of a parish church varied considerably. Petitioners often sought collation from the abbot and community of a monastery, since they held the right of appointment to churches that had been given into their care. Collation from a bishop or dean of a cathedral chapter, however, usually required the cooperation of a lay patron who held the advowson on a vacant parish church. For those scholars better connected with patrons who controlled the presentation or nomination to a specific church, or who knew those who could influence the process, the time frame between presenting a letter of expectation to a collator and being appointed to a church was around two years. For others it might take five or ten years, and in some cases it might never be successful. What is difficult if not impossible to know is how many university graduates in arts, theology, or canon law eventually served a parish as rector and, having obtained a dispensation, episcopal or papal, to have a curate serve his parish church, went on to a different church career. During his years of study, if the parish was within or near Oxford or Paris, a rector could teach and fulfill his parish duties without the need for a substitute. With parishes more distant, which was usually the case, a curate would need to be appointed, and the scholar-rector might return to his parish duties only during vacation periods. Perhaps many scholars eventually served as a rector in residence after their years at a university, but in what numbers we do not know.

378 /

William J. Courtenay

Unfortunately, sufficient documentation does not exist to gain a detailed view of what licenses for study did for the educational level of curates at the parish level. Visitation records give us only a partial view, and not a very positive one. But those records are biased inasmuch as they identify problems and have no reason to inform us about parishes in which there was a conscientious and learned rector or vicar. What we can say is that without the use of parish income for study and teaching, and without papal letters that helped place scholars in parish churches, there would have been fewer university graduates in the ranks of parochial priests and a less learned clergy in the late Middle Ages.

Notes 1. Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); John H. Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); John Van Engen, Religion in the History of the Medieval West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 2. One thinks especially of William A. Pantin’s The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955; repr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), and the many articles of Leonard E. Boyle collected in his Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200 –1400 ( London: Variorum Reprints, 1981). 3. For England, see Guy Fitch Lytle, “Patronage Patterns and Oxford Colleges, c. 1300 – c.1510,” in The University and Society, ed. Lawrence Stone, 2 vols. ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 1:111– 49; Guy Fitch Lytle, “Oxford Students and English Society: c. 1300 –1510,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1976; Trevor H. Aston, “Oxford Graduates and the So-Called Patronage Crisis of the Late Middle Ages,” Past and Present 74 (1977): 3– 40, esp. 31– 32; R. Barrie Dobson, “Oxford Graduates and the So-Called Patronage Crisis of the Late Middle Ages,” in The Church in a Changing Society, Proceedings of the Commission Internationale d’Histoire Ecclésiastique Comparée ( Uppsala: CIHEC, 1978), 211–16; Robert N. Swanson, “Universities, Graduates, and Benefices in Later Medieval England,” in Past and Present 106 (1985): 28– 61; William J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 138– 40; and especially a study by F. Donald Logan of dispensations and licenses for study in the diocese of Lincoln in the first half of the fourteenth century, University Education of the Parochial Clergy in Medieval England: The Lincoln Diocese, c.1300 to c.1350 ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2014).

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 379 4. Liber Sextus 1.6, 34, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, vol. II, Decretalium collectiones (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879; repr. Graz: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt, 1959), 964 – 65, subsequently cited as CIC II; Leonard E. Boyle, “The Constitution ‘Cum ex eo’ of Boniface VIII,” Mediaeval Studies 24 (1962): 263– 302, reprinted in Boyle, Pastoral Care, essay VIII. Boyle gives the Latin text on 271– 72. For other discussions of the meaning and impact of Cum ex eo, see C. J. Godfrey, “Non-residence of the Parochial Clergy in the 14th Century,” Church Quarterly Review 162 (1961): 433– 46; Roy M. Haines, “The Education of the English Clergy during the Later Middle Ages: Some Observations on the Operation of Boniface VIII’s Constitution Cum ex eo (1298),” Canadian Journal of History 4 (1969): 1– 22; Haines, Ecclesia anglicana. Studies in the English Church of the Later Middle Ages ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 138– 55, 309– 20; and Roy M. Haines, Calendar of the Register of Simon de Montacute, Bishop of Worcester, 1334–1337 (Kendal, UK: Worcestershire Historical Society, 1996), 324 – 28. 5. On England, see Pantin, English Church, 54 – 58, 111–17. For France, see Dale R. Streeter, “ ‘In servitio Dei’: The Bishops of France from 1305 to 1352. A Prosopographical Study,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2002. Unlike England, where we have biographical registers for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, we do not yet have comparable information for the University of Paris. 6. The existence of such licenses in the twelfth century is confirmed by Alexander III’s allowing their continuation, ca. 1180; see X 3.4.4, CIC II, 460 – 61, Relatum est nobis. Nothing is known about those receiving licenses for study before the thirteenth century, but we do know about the settings in which instruction might have been given to secular clerics. In addition to whatever teaching was available at cathedrals, other resources might be town grammar schools, private masters who taught arts and theology in the towns of northcentral France, or tutorial instruction. 7. The Third Lateran urged the appointment of a grammar master in every cathedral; see X 5.5.1, CIC II, 768– 69, Quoniam ecclesia Dei: “ne pauperibus, qui parentum opibus iuvari non possunt, legendi et proficiendi oportunitas subtrahatur, per unamquamque cathedralem ecclesiam magistro, qui clericos eiusdem ecclesiae et scholares pauperes gratis doceat, competens aliquod beneficium praebeatur.” The phrase “clericos eiusdem ecclesiae et scholares pauperes” suggests that those benefiting from the appointment of a teaching master would primarily be cathedral clergy and unbeneficed clerics, neither of whom would need permission to be absent from parish responsibilities. 8. X 3.4.3, CIC II, 460, Quia nonnulli: “Quum igitur ecclesia vel ecclesiaticum ministerium committi debuerit, talis ad hoc persona quaeratur, quae residere in loco et curam eius per se ipsam valeat exercere. Quod si aliter actum fuerit, et qui receperit quod contra sacros canones acceptit amittat, et qui dederit largiendi potestate privetur.”

380 /

William J. Courtenay

9. X 3.4.4, CIC II, 460 – 61, Relatum est nobis: those not in residence should be removed, “nisi forte de licentia suorum praelatorum, vel studio literarum vel pro aliis honestis causis, contigerit eos absesse.” 10. By the early thirteenth century we find the mandate to provide a qualified curate to be part of the standard language of a license for study. For example, in a license for study to a rector in the diocese of Lincoln, dated 1220, the official of the archdeacon is mandated “quod provideat ut ipsa ecclesia interim per cappellanum idoneum officietur.” Rotuli Hugonius de Welles, episcopi Lincolniensis, A.D. MCCIX–MCCXXXV, ed. W. P. W. Philimore et al., 3 vols. (Lincoln: Lincoln Record Society, 1907–1908), 2:57. Slightly different wording is used in a license for study in the diocese of York in 1268, The Register of Walter Giffard, Lord Archbishop of York, 1266–1279, Surtees Society 109 (Durham: Andrews, 1904), 44: “in theologia et jure canonico studere valeas per triennium, proviso quod in memorata ecclesia cura animarum interim nullatenus negligatur.” Although no mention of a substitute for a rector was made in Licet canon (1274) when allowing bishops, ad tempus, to grant a dispensation on residency, Cum ex eo repeated the requirement to appoint a qualified curate; Liber Sextus 1.6, 34, CIC II, 965: “per bonos et sufficientes vicarios, ab eis in huiusmodi ecclesiis deputandos, animarum cura diligenter exerceatur, et deserviatur laudabiliter in divinis, quibus de ipsarum ecclesarum proventibus necessaria congrue ministrentur.” That language was repeated in fourteenth-century papal letters “de recipiendis fructibus in absentia,” e.g., Acta Pataviensia I, ed. Josef Lenzenweger ( Wien: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1974), 289: “proviso, quod huiusmodi beneficia debitis interim obsequiis non fraudentur et animarum cura in eis, quibus illa imminet, nullatenus negligatur, sed per bonos et sufficientes vicarios, quibus de beneficiorum ipsorum proventibus necessaria congrue ministrentur, diligenter exerceatur et deserviatur inibi laudabiliter in divinis.” 11. Repeating the language of the 1179 statute (see note 7 above), Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran urged cathedral chapters to appoint grammar masters in other churches in the diocese, and that metropolitan churches should allocate a prebend for a theologian able to teach scripture and pastoral care to priests and others. X 5.5.4, CIC II, 770, Quia nonnullis: “adiicimus, ut non solum in qualibet cathedrali ecclesia, sed etiam in aliis, quarum sufficere poterunt facultates, constituatur magister idoneus, a praelato cum capitulo, seu maiori et saniori parte capituli eligendus, qui clericos ecclesiarum ipsarum [et aliarum] gratis in grammatica facultate ac aliis instruat iuxta posse. Sane metropolis ecclesia theologum nihilominus habeat, qui sacerdotes et alios in sacra pagina doceat, et in his praesertim informet, quae ad curam animarum spectare noscuntur. . . . Quodsi forte de duobus ecclesia metropolis gravetur, theologo iuxta modum praedictum ipsa provideat, grammatico vero in alia ecclesia suae civitatis sive dioecesis, quae sufficere valeat, faciat provideri.”

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 381 12. X 5.5.5, CIC II, 770 – 71, Super specula: “Volumus et mandamus, ut statutum in concilio generali de magistris theologis per singulis metropoles statuendis, inviolabiliter observetur . . . ut, quia super hoc propter raritatem magistrorum se possent forsitan aliqui excusare, ab ecclesiarum praelatis et capitulis ad theologicae professionis studium aliqui docibiles destinentur. . . . Docentes vero in theologica facultate, dum in scholis docuerint, et studentes in ipsa integre per annos quinque, percipiant de licentia sedis apostolicae proventus praebendarum et beneficiorum suorum.” The assumption has often been made that such licenses for study were aimed primarily if not exclusively at preparing teachers, interpreting the word docibile to mean “able to teach” rather than “able to be taught.” 13. The individual was William de Wirmele, vicar of Wrangle; see Rotuli Hugonius de Welles 3:105. 14. Ibid., 2:287: “ita quod dictus Walterus [de Clintone] per septennium proximo sequens habeat magistrum continue in scolis.” Seven-year licenses for study were rare before 1298, but they did exist. 15. The Registers of Walter Giffard, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1265– 1266, and Henry Bowett, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1401–1407, ed. T. S. Holmes ( Taunton: Somerset Record Society, 1899). On Giffard’s career, see A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (subsequently cited as BRUO), 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 2:762– 63. 16. Registers of Walter Giffard, 1– 3, 31, 44. 17. The Register of William Wickwane, Lord Archbishop of York, 1279– 1285, Surtees Society 114 ( Durham: Andrews, 1907), 84 – 85. Wickwane was referred to as “magister,” but there is no evidence that ties him to any particular university. On Wickwane’s career, see BRUO 3:2228. 18. The other phrase that occurs is “literarum studio insistentes.” One does occasionally encounter a license for study at a cathedral in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For example, John de Birerwic, rector of Molesworth in the diocese of Lincoln, received a license of nonresidency in 1222 to study for two years in Lincoln: Rotuli Hugonis de Welles 3:35. And as late as 1310, master John de Fonte, rector of Kirkeby Oreblouer in the diocese of York, received a license of nonresidency to study for three years at Rouen or elsewhere: The Register of William Greenfield, Lord Archbishop of York, 1306–1315, ed. William Brown and A. Hamilton Thompson, part 4, Surtees Society 152 (London: Andrews, 1937), 93, no. 1874. 19. The stipulation of being in one’s twenty-fifth year in order to be rector of a parish church was based on the assumption that the latter required the care of souls, which in turn required ordination to the priesthood. Licet canon attributed that legislation to Alexander III ( X. I.6.7, CIC II, 52: “nec parochialis ecclesiae regimen, nisi qui iam vigesimum quintum annum aetatis attigerit”). The practice of appointing rectors below the age of twenty-five by separating the office of rector from the care of souls nevertheless continued.

382 /

William J. Courtenay

20. X 1.6.14, CIC II, 954, Licet canon: “et infra annum, a sibi commissi regiminis tempore numerandum, se faciat ad sacerdotium promoveri.” 21. Ibid.: “Super residentia vero, ut praemittitur facienda, possit ordinarius gratiam dispensationis ad tempus facere, prout causa rationabilis id exposcit.” 22. Lists of institutions usually mention the person who held the right of presentation, which often reveals a family connection. 23. In fact, canon law allowed, by way of dispensation, the appointment of someone as young as fourteen as rector of a minor church (“parvulis ecclesiae regimen,” X. I.14.3 CIC II, 126), while X. I.14.5, CIC II, 127, required ordination as subdeacon “ad regimen parochialis ecclesiae,” although, “dispensative,” someone only in minor orders could be appointed. Being rector meant control of the church and its revenue, even if one could not be ordained a priest by reason of age and therefore could not undertake the care of souls. Being a priest, on the other hand, required ordination as priest in or after one’s twenty-fifth year and did not in itself entail appointment to a parish church as rector or vicar, or indeed to any benefice. 24. Licet canon was not received in England without objections from Edward I, lay patrons, and bishops. Haines, Ecclesia anglicana, 139– 40 summarizes these objections. 25. For example, although the register of Peter Quivil, Bishop of Exeter, 1280 –1291, as edited, does not give the ordination status of those receiving licenses, almost all of those granted were for study in the higher faculties of theology and canon law, which means that the licensees were beyond, at, or close to the age for ordination to the priesthood. See The Registers of Walter Bronescombe (A.D. 1257– 1280), and Peter Quivil (A.D. 1280 – 1291), Bishops of Exeter, ed. F. C. Hingeston-Randolph ( London: George Bell & Sons, 1889). 26. The Register of John de Halton, Bishop of Carlisle, A.D. 1292–1324, ed. W. N. Thompson, 2 vols. (London: Canterbury and York Society, 1913), 1:94 – 95: “Traxit hactenus sancta mater ecclesia in pluribus partibus orbis terrarum profunda suspiria, cujus presunt nonnulli regimini qui pastoris nomen solum optinent et commissum sibi gregem dominicum deserentes, per loca dispersi varia pervagando, tanquam mercenarii, proh dolor! lupis oves exponunt; imperatorum, regum, principum, baronum, et aliorum potencium obsequiis insistentes ac aliis exquisitis coloribus, quos ex causa tacemus ad presens, se frequenter absentant ac spirituali corporale. . . . de fratrum nostrorum consilio irrefragabili constitucione statuimus, tam pastorum quam gregum animabus salubriter providere cupientes, et omnes patriarche, primates, archiepiscopi, episcopi, abbates, priores, decani, archidiaconi, plebani, et quivis alii quibus cura iminet animarum, cujus jus, status, et preeminencie dignitatis seu condicionis existant, ecclesiis quibus presunt personaliter et continue resideant ad fideliter animo in eisdem deserviant, prout onera beneficiorum suorum exigant, infra mensem continue numerandum a die quo presens salubre statutum ad noticiam pervenerit eorun-

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 383 dem. . . . Nec volumus quod a quocunque super residencia in ipsis beneficiis minime facienda sine licencia sedis apostolice speciali plenam et expressam faciente de constitucione hujus mencionem valeat cum aliquo dispensari.” 27. Boyle, “Constitution ‘Cum ex eo’,” 268– 71, pointed to the arguments of Durandus the Elder on the negative effect of Licet canon on the educational level of the clergy. 28. Ibid., 273. 29. Haines, Calendar of the Register of Simon de Montacute, 324, expressed surprise that many of the licenses granted by Montacute were granted under the authority of Licet canon. This is surprising only because historians have misunderstood how Licet canon was applied, as will be shown. 30. The Rolls and Register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280 – 1299, ed. Rosalind M. T. Hill, 8 vols. ( Woodridge, Suffolk: Lincoln Record Society by Boydell Press, 1948–1975), 3:43, 48, 184; 5:162; 6:113, 114, 115, 116, 124. The number of licenses granted by Sutton before and after Cum ex eo assumes that all licenses were recorded, which may not be the case. Sutton held a Master of Arts degree from Oxford and had intended further study in law and theology before administrative duties interrupted his academic career. On Sutton’s career, see BRUO 3:1822– 23. 31. Registrum Thome de Cantilupo, Episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. 1275–1282, ed. R. G. Griffiths, Canterbury and York Society 2 ( London: Canterbury and York Society, 1907), 8, 29, 41, 45, 101, 120, 125, 134, 135, 136, 151, 156, 157, 176, 188, 189, 190, 194, 209, 212, 235. Cantelupe had a long academic career. He was Master of Arts at Paris by 1245, studied canon law at Orléans, was licensed in canon law at Paris and incepted as a Doctor of Decrees (canon law) at Oxford circa 1255 before returning to Paris to study theology and later incept as a Doctor of Theology at Oxford in 1273. On Cantelupe’s career, see BRUO 1:347– 49. 32. Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield, Episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. MCCLXXXIII–MCCCXVII, ed. W. W. Capes ( London: Canterbury and York Society, 1909), 545– 46. While no licenses for study were recorded for the 1290s, which may be a result of failure to include them in the surviving register, Swinfield granted fifty-four licenses for study between 1300 and 1317. Those numbers are less than the total, as is probably true for licenses for study in the Hereford diocese before 1298. For example, the list of licenses granted on page 545 lists only one license for 1300, to Thomas de Wenlock, but on page 377 for 1300 there is an entry on dispensations granted to rectors, “secundum formam constitucionis domini Bonifacii, pape octavi,” that mentions four rectors by name, among them Thomas de Wenlock. Two of the others have the title of master, almost certainly for this period revealing university study and a degree in arts. Swinfield was himself a Master of Arts and Doctor of Theology, presumably from Oxford; see BRUO 3:1833– 34. 33. The Register of William Wickwane, Lord Archbishop of York, 1279–1285, Surtees Society 114 ( Durham: Andrews, 1907), 84 – 85. Wickwane was sometimes

384 /

William J. Courtenay

referred to as “magister,” but nothing is known of his academic career; see BRUO 3:2228. 34. Registers of Walter Bronescombe (A.D. 1257–1280), and Peter Quivil (A.D. 1280 –1291), 275, 313, 315, 317, 321, 323, 327, 334, 340, 363, 364, 366, 369, 370, 371, 372, 374, 375, 376, 388, 389, 390. Quivil held the title of “magister” by 1262 and published a manual for parochial clergy known as Summula; see BRUO 3:2208. 35. Boyle, “Constitution ‘Cum ex eo’,” 268. 36. Register of William Greenfield, 3, 7, 70, 214; part III (1936), 47– 48, 71, 161; part IV (1938), 5, 6, 8, 16, 45, 56, 64, 93, 116, 136, 202, 227; part V (1938), 266, 278. Many of those receiving licenses for study under Greenfield were noble, but that may not have been unique to him. Other episcopal registers, as edited, do not usually mention noble status. 37. Haines, Calendar of the Register of Simon de Montacute, 325– 28. 38. The evidence from the register of Simon de Montacute in most cases identifies whether a license was granted under the terms of Licet canon or Cum ex eo. The registers from the bishopric of Lincoln in the fourteenth century, as analyzed by Logan in University Education of the Parochial Clergy, differentiate between licenses for study granted to those who were already priests (Licet canon licenses, even if that constitution was not mentioned) and dispensations for study granted to those who were not yet priests, for which Cum ex eo was frequently cited. 39. Haines, Ecclesia anglicana, 139 and 146, suggested that ordination to the priesthood was undesirable for those interested in an administrative career, especially royal administration. 40. It would be useful to examine papal licenses for study, which could be culled from the papal registers, but since the vast majority of licenses for study were issued by bishops and papal licenses usually addressed cases in which episcopal licenses had been exhausted or for some reason were not available, they would not provide information comparable to English episcopal registers. 41. I am grateful to Donald Logan for sharing the fruits of his research with me before the publication of his study. 42. On university petitions for benefices in England, see E. F. Jacob, “English University Clerks in the Later Middle Ages: The Problem of Maintenance,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 29 (1946): 304 – 25, and “Petitions for Benefices during the Great Schism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 27 (1945): 41– 59, both reprinted in E. F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953; repr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 207– 39; and D. E. R. Watt, “University Clerks and Rolls of Petitions for Benefices,” Speculum 34 (1959): 213– 29. On the origin of this initiative and petitions from the University of Paris, see Rotuli Parisienses: Supplications to the Pope from the University of Paris, ed. William J. Courtenay, vol. 1, 1316–1349 ( Leiden: Brill, 2002), 1– 25.

The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 385 43. William J. Courtenay and Eric D. Goddard, eds., Rotuli Parisienses: Supplications to the Pope from the University of Paris, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2002, 2004, 2013). There is a section in the papal registers of common letters that does concern dispensations for study (“de recipiendis fructibus in absentia”), but such dispensations were not a result of supplications included in a university rotulus and therefore were not edited in the volumes of the Rotuli Parisienses. 44. William J. Courtenay, “The Earliest Oxford Supplication List for Papal Provisions,” History of Universities 16 (2000): 1–15. 45. The exception was Peter de Scolaschis (Scolacley), who held a burse in Merton College by 1313 and received an expectation of a canonical prebend in the collegiate church at Auckland in the diocese of Durham; see BRUO 3:1656. 46. The exception was Peter of Scolacley; see previous note. In the case of Ivo of Eglesheyl from Cornwall, who sought a benefice from the bishop of Exeter, he was granted the church of Saint Erme in Corwall by the bishop in June 1319. His appointment was opposed by the patron of that church, however, so Bishop Stapleton of Exeter appointed him to another church in Cornwall in 1320; see BRUO 1:489. 47. The date of the Oxford rotulus was the date on which John XXII granted the individual petitions. It usually took several months for letters of provision to be prepared and to be sent to the recipient and the three executors named in the provision. John of Lugwardyn, one of the recipients, presented his letter to the collator, Bishop Orleton of Hereford, in May 1318 and received a portion of the church of Bromyard in Herefordshire in July 1322, a four-year waiting period. 48. BRUO 1:633. Although not mentioned by Emden, Elham was already a priest in September 1316, when he was instituted to the prebend of Moreton and Whaddon; see Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield, 544, where the name is given as John de Olham, priest. 49. BRUO 2:1181– 82. 50. BRUO 2:1261. 51. BRUO 1:485. 52. BRUO 2:972. According to Donald Logan, Hotot later received a three-year license for study in theology or canon law in England in 1320. Since he was already a regent master of theology in 1317, this license granted him the right to use his parish income to continue to teach theology or to study in a different faculty at Oxford for three more years. It may have been preceded by a similar license to cover the period 1317 to 1320. 53. Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Reg. Suppl. 4, f.74r– 75v; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Petitions to the Pope, vol. 1, A.D. 1342–1419, ed. William H. Bliss (London: Public Records Office, 1896; repr. Nendeln: Kraus Reprints, 1971), 60 – 62.

386 /

William J. Courtenay

54. The two were John of Swineshead (Swynesheved), MA, and William de Blebury, MA, who stated, “non obstante quod sit expectans in gratia generali per vos [i.e., Clement VI] anno consecrationis vestre primo facta.” 55. Rotuli Parisienses 1:31– 37. 56. Rotuli Parisienses 1:65– 78. The individual who possessed a church was Hugo de Montibus Vinosis in the French nation (Rotuli Parisienses 1:73), a secular clerk from the diocese of Toul who was rector of the parish church of Xammes in the diocese of Metz and had been teaching as regent master in the faculty of arts for over seven years. He had been provided with the church by the abbot of Gorze in response to a provision from Pope John XXII in 1328 (Rotuli Parisienses 1:44), which means he obtained the church at some point between 1328 and 1335 as a result of papal provision and would have begun his studies at Paris by or before 1320. He was still teaching at Paris in arts in 1349 and still rector of Xammes (Rotuli Parisienses 1:338). 57. Charles Vulliez, “Autour d’un rotulus adressé par l’Université de Paris à Benoît XII (1335),” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Age 114 (2002/1): 359– 69. 58. Buridan, who was regent master in the faculty of arts by 1327, was appointed to the church of Illies in the diocese of Arras in early 1330 and exchanged it between 1342 and 1349 for a nearby church of roughly the same value in the diocese of Tournai. Rotuli Parisienses 1:52, 54, 89, 128, 424. It appears that during that entire time he continued his teaching career in arts at Paris. 59. There are three who later held a parish church, but there is no evidence that they already held them in 1335. 60. In the rotulus of the Picard nation in 1349, those without benefice (“Isti sunt nichil actu habentes”) were listed first, followed by those who had a benefice but sought another (“Isti sunt secundum statum eorum et sufficientiam modicum habentes”). Buridan’s name was listed first in this second category. Rotuli Parisienses 1:424. 61. Rotuli Parisienses 1:93–160. 62. Rotuli Parisienses 3:304 – 417, mixed in with more advanced students. 63. Cum ex eo was aimed at educational improvement, not degree attainment or long-term study. Although the faculty of study was not specified in Cum ex eo, which allowed Boyle to suggest it could be used for study in any faculty, seven years barely covered the time needed to become a master of arts. The degree in theology was an additional ten to fourteen years of study, depending on whether one sought only the baccalaureate or the doctorate. 64. The tithe value of churches in fourteenth-century France can be obtained from the volumes of the Pouillés series in Recueil des Historiens de France ( Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1903 sq.).

Fifteen

G i o va n n i D o m i n i c i ’ s F i r e fl y Reconsidered james d. mixson

Around 1392 John of Sanminiato turned away from his life as a soldier in the service of Florence to profess religious life as a Camaldolese monk. From the cloister he wrote to his friend Coluccio Salutati, warning the famed chancellor of the danger that pagan poetry posed to the soul. Salutati responded that since all truth was from God, the study of the ancient poets posed no threat. Brother John wrote again, but when he received no reply he sought to draw out Salutati once more — this time, cleverly, by turning on Salutati’s protégé, Angelo Corbinelli. The stratagem worked. Salutati eventually entered the fray again, this time with a masterful response that addressed both John of Sanminiato’s earlier unanswered letter and the more recent one to Corbinelli. The range of arguments was impressive: that secular letters were essential for rulers of states; that their truths corroborated Christian doctrine; that they were natural, useful, and important for cultivating a sound moral life, and much more. The endgame approached checkmate, but John of Sanminiato had one last move. Around 1405 he sent Salutati’s letter to the Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici. A native of Florence and a lector at Santa Maria Novella, Friar Giovanni was a veteran preacher and reformer, and 387

388 /

James D. Mixson

well positioned to take up the challenge. His response was a treatise he called the Firefly (Locula Noctis), a work of forty-seven chapters, over four hundred pages in modern print, in which he first carefully rehearsed each of Salutati’s arguments and then offered a systematic refutation. Within months, Salutati had crafted the beginnings of a response. He piously conceded almost every point Dominici had made. But he could not resist correcting the friar’s sloppy grammar, and he refuted Dominici’s claim for the primacy of the intellect in moral matters. He also tried again to defend the virtues of pagan poetry. Salutati died before completing the response, however, and another lively moment in a centuries-old controversy died with him.1 From that day to our own, the towering humanist has often overshadowed the cantankerous friar, and the Renaissance has cast its long shadows over our readings of the Firefly. Only recently has modern scholarship begun to appreciate more fully both Dominici and his treatise as worthy of study in their own right. But our work remains incomplete. The purpose of this essay is to examine the Firefly more closely, especially for the ways in which it speaks to so much recent work on the fifteenth-century world that produced it. Dominici’s career and work are well enough known to historians of Renaissance Italy.2 A native of Florence, he joined the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella as a teenager in the 1370s. He soon came into contact with Catherine of Siena and her circle, rising to prominence under the leadership of Raymond of Capua. In 1393 he was appointed vicar-general over a small network of Observant houses across northeastern and central Italy, anchored at the Dominican convent of San Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. There he served as a lector in theology and enjoyed great popularity as a preacher and pastor. He famously turned the daughters of influential patricians to reformed religious life and founded a new community for them at Corpus Domini in 1394. His fall from grace came in 1399, however, after the Council of Ten banned from the city the peaceful processions of the white-clad penitents known as the Bianchi.3 Dominici, who had embraced the movement, staged his own procession. For his defiance of the council, he was arrested and exiled. His opponents then convinced Boniface IX to revoke Dominici’s powers as Observant vicar-general and slowly dismantled his efforts at reform across the region. By 1400, years of

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 389

his patient work were in shambles. Dominici soon found his way to Florence, however, where he began to thrive once again. He befriended Salutati and many in his circle. He found a promising protégé in Antonio Pierozzi, who professed as a Dominican in 1405 and who would later become archbishop of the city. Dominici composed most of his significant surviving works in Florence as well: a collection of letters, his best sermons, and a series of treatises on spiritual and moral matters, including his famous Regola del governo di cura familiare.4 Florence was also the catalyst for a dramatic later career. By the end of his life in 1419 he had risen to the rank of cardinal, served as papal confessor, and, as a papal ambassador, had been a central figure in the drama of the Council of Constance.5 In the midst of so much preaching and writing in Florence, Dominici paused to compose the Firefly. The treatise has received modest attention, at least from specialists. Edmund Hundt’s critical edition of 1940 remains foundational, along with B. L. Ulmann’s work on the manuscripts.6 More recently, Concetta Greenfield and Claudio Mésoniat have both authored studies (a book chapter and an extended essay, respectively) that place Dominici’s work within a longer history of humanist and scholastic poetics.7 In the same context, Anne Reltgen-Tallon has also sought a better understanding of the conservative nature of the treatise in the context of the Dominican tradition.8 Most, however, have read Dominici’s ponderous work only in passing. Erica Rummel notes it near the beginning of her study of the struggle between scholastics and humanists, for example; Ronald Witt turns to it toward the end of his account of the origins of humanism.9 In these studies, and others, references to the Firefly and summaries of its arguments appear, dutifully but briefly, only to be set aside in the pursuit of other concerns. Unfortunately these treatments have been scattered and unfocused. Worse, they have tended to force Dominici and his treatise into now-tired interpretive dichotomies, leaving behind a series of curiously competing, even contradictory claims. While an older biography celebrates Dominici as a humanist, for example, a more recent essay reflects on the Firefly’s opposition to humanism.10 Worse still, even careful scholars have on occasion retreated into thinly veiled insults. One presents Dominici as a Thomist and scholastic “extremist.” Another describes the Firefly’s “ham-fisted” argument as the

390 /

James D. Mixson

last installment in “an old and well-worn literary controversy” to which Dominici “had ultimately very little to add.”11 These appraisals have allowed the Firefly too often to escape our grasp, and they leave us with an impoverished appreciation of Dominici’s challenging work. This essay therefore seeks, if the metaphor be allowed, to catch our enigmatic insect once again and to have a closer look at it, for a time, in a pleasant scholarly jar. It seeks to understand Dominici as something other than a crabby, conservative cleric and to read his treatise as something other than an odd and undistinguished failure. To that end it first reconsiders the treatise as a product of its original literary and cultural habitat. Freed from artificial binaries between scholastics and humanists, the Firefly emerges here as a literary and pastoral work addressed to an issue of explosive public and moral concern. As a treatise, the Firefly is then allowed to shine its fleeting light on our modern scholarly darkness in two ways. First, it appears as a work distinctly populist in tone, its inspiration the language of simplicity and purity of heart so well known in other fifteenth-century devotional settings. In the name of simplicity, Dominici defends the rugged basics of the Christian faith as all the learning that ordinary folk might need. The treatise also openly attacks the very scholastic tradition Dominici is said to represent— an element that generalizations about the work’s “pastoral” stance have missed. Second, the Firefly reveals that its author’s embrace of simplicity, and his catechetical concerns, were inseparable from his thinking about demons. Driving Dominici’s attacks on the humanists’ love of pagan poetry and their elitist docta pietas, his assault on the uselessness of natural philosophy and all the chattering, arrogant disputations of the university masters was more than a vague sense of traditionalism. In ways modern scholars have all but ignored, for Dominici the reading of pagan texts was a profound moral threat not only to the learned, but to the public as a whole, because it unleashed on the world the counterfeit spiritual power of the devil. These considerations will serve — if the metaphor again be allowed — as holes in a very old scholarly lid. They allow the Firefly to breathe the fresh historiographical air of the fifteenth century as we have come to understand it of late — an era of “multiple options,” as John Van Engen has called it, options that our approaches to the Firefly have long been unable to capture.

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 391

The Firefly as Treatise Scholars who have characterized the Firefly as a scholastic broadside against humanism have done so with good enough reason. Dominici frames his subject as a disputed question: “Whether it is permissible for faithful Christians to make use of secular learning.” He surveys his opponent Salutati’s position, defines his terms carefully, and proceeds to his refutation. Dominici also structures that refutation in the manner of the schools: as a series of major and minor propositions, numbered arguments and counterarguments. Throughout the text we encounter the full array of standard authorities: Augustine ( his favorite by far); scripture and other patristic authors, including Jerome; Aquinas, too, along with Hugh of St. Victor, accented with occasional citations of canon and civil law. And at the heart of the entire treatise, as many have noted, is a strong defense of theology as a speculative science (scientia) superior to the study of secular letters and to the study of poetry in particular. Yet recent scholarship has opened the way for a reappraisal of these interpretations. Schoolmen of Dominici’s generation, we now recognize, thought and wrote in a world very different from that of their more familiar predecessors. The most fundamental changes centered on outlook and literary expression. As Daniel Hobbins’s work has shown, schoolmen raised in the generation of the Great Schism sought to engage the world beyond the classroom.12 To that end they shaped the learning of the traditional schools into new occasional pieces called tracts (tractatus). Lawyers turned from abstract reflection and strings of citations to offer consilia, legal briefs that brought the law to bear on particular cases. Physicians offered practical advice on the treatment of plague and other diseases. Theologians abandoned the traditional commentary on Lombard’s Sentences in favor of treatises that engaged a full range of issues of morality, of social conscience, of theology in practice. In all of these works, the old scholastic forms of question and case broke free of the classroom. They were now a literary device that allowed an author to engage in public controversy, to wrestle with all of the arguments overheard in the streets. The new work of the treatises, moreover, came to circulate in unprecedented ways — on a grand scale at Constance and Basel, and more modestly within local networks of authors and readers

392 /

James D. Mixson

( Wyclif ’s Oxford, the London of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, Henry of Langenstein’s Vienna, Salutati’s Florence).13 For many, and theologians especially, the concern for outreach and the search for new modes of expression were in turn expressions of a deeper spiritual concern. As Dominici wrote, a generation of theologians had begun to lament how all of the disputation and the jargon of the schools trumped matters of the heart; how pride in disputation and the embrace of learning for its own sake strangled charity, devotion, and common sense. In response— and the parallels in humanist circles and among vernacular authors have been noted—theologians began to develop a canon of “classics,” of great authors and great works. They searched their libraries for firm foundations, a return to the safety and security of what Jean Gerson called the “common school of theological truth.”14 The books and texts they embraced— Augustine and Gregory, Bernard, Hugh, and Richard, Thomas and Bonaventure — were celebrated for their pastoral utility and for their clarity and simplicity of style.15 In a sense, none of this was new. Medieval friars, after all, had always moved easily between studium and the world beyond, their preaching now described as one of the earliest forms of mass communication in the Western tradition.16 In Dominici’s own Florence, several of his Dominican predecessors had become local celebrities as both preachers and authors — Remigio dei Girolami and Aldobrandino Cavalcanti, for example, and the stern Jacopo Passavanti, whose Specchio di vera penitenzia represented an early example of a vernacular spiritual tract developed from public preaching.17 But from another perspective, the first decades of the fifteenth century saw a decisive shift. Observant authors and readers, and the mendicants especially, took the lead in shaping a dynamic that was different from its predecessors in scale, in method, in impulse and tone. They called for and embraced what Kaspar Elm called a vigorous Bildungsreform— a thoroughgoing reconfiguration and renewal of education and moral formation.18 It was led by friars who made themselves into compelling opinion makers on matters of morality and education. They were energetic authors and popular preachers who focused intently on practical matters for common folk and emphasized, more than most, the moral stakes of day-to-day decisions. At the heart of their

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 393

project was the same concern for simplicity and common sense that shaped the work of Gerson and others in the ranks of the secular clergy. Framed in this context, two points about Dominici and his work merit emphasis. First, Dominici, like Salutati, Gerson, and so many others of the era, was a relentlessly public figure. In Venice he was a mentor to patrician nuns and the inspiration behind a creative adaptation of the Bianchi movement; in Florence, a powerful and popular preacher; at Constance, along with Carlo Malatesta, the representative of Gregory XII, and the one who officially tendered the pope’s resignation. Second, Dominici was, in his own way, an active literary figure. He authored a series of biblical commentaries; a Latin treatise on propertied monks, one of the earliest of its kind and one of dozens of similar treatises to be composed and circulated in the coming generation;19 a collection of letters, most to the Dominican nuns of Venice, many of them adorned with poems; and a range of Italian treatises on charity and on questions of pastoral care and education.20 Scholars have caught glimpses of Dominici’s career in this light—one has offered a passing reference to Dominici as an intellectual “all-rounder,” for example.21 But we can now articulate such claims with more nuance and force. If Dominici was never a prolific author, and never a towering figure like Gerson or Denys the Carthusian, neither was he quite a traditional scholastic in the mold of Aquinas, or even of his Florentine Dominican predecessors Passavanti and Cavalcanti. Somewhere in between, like so many of his contemporaries, he was nevertheless a full participant in the vibrant culture of authors, texts, and intellectual exchange that was coming to characterize his era. Turning to the Firefly itself, we can now discern a specimen quite at home in the cultural climate outlined here. Dominici styled the work explicitly as a tractatus,22 one self-consciously addressed to a renowned educator and framed explicitly as a disputed question: “Whether it is permissible for faithful Christians to make use of secular learning.” Within that framework, as in so many similar treatises on matters of social and religious reform (including Dominici’s own De proprio and his vernacular Trattato delle dieci questioni), an author crafts a conversation that works through an issue of pressing contemporary concern — here the moral and spiritual dimensions of education in Florence around 1400. It was a

394 /

James D. Mixson

conversation, moreover, adorned with at least a modicum of literary awareness. In its opening passages, Dominici betrays before the towering humanist Salutati a certain authorial self-consciousness and anxiety.23 He also frames his title, Locula Noctis, as a pun on Coluccio, and Salutati himself eventually responded to the joke with a pun of his own.24 The Firefly’s structure and method, too, betray its author’s literary sensibilities. In keeping with the treatise as a genre, the work is built around the rhythms of a disputed question. But that structure, the dialectic of question, objection, response, and so on, governs the Firefly only gently. In fact, the disputed question is here framed as an extended acrostic. The first letter of the first word of the Firefly’s prologue and forty-seven chapters reconstructs John 1:5—“Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebre eam non comprehenderunt”: Prologue: Lux in tenebris . . . Chapter 1: Videlicet an fidelibus Christianis licitum sit . . . Chapter 2: Xianis preterea licet Catholicis illos libros studere . . . Chapter 3: Iterum arugo quod liceat Christianis secularibus litteris uti . . . Chapter 4: Nunc arguo quarto sic. . . . Literary style and authorial awareness, puns, acrostics, thematic invocations of light and darkness — we are far, it seems, from the measured anonymity and timeless authority of a figure such as Aquinas, and confronted with a work that is something other than a tired “scholastic” text. More distant still from inherited scholastic tradition is the language of the Firefly. Within each of his chapters, Dominici largely avoids the jargon and technicalities of formal logic, as well as the labored strings of citations characteristic of late-medieval scholastic discourse. Augustine, Jerome, and many other standard authorities appear, but most often as conversants, not as cropped citations invoked to seal an argument. Moreover, Dominici deeply embraces the fervent and eloquent authors of an older tradition: Peter Damian, Bernard, John of Salisbury, and others, all of them in extended quotation or paraphrase. For modern readers unaccustomed to Dominici’s method, the Firefly can easily seem a long-winded and unoriginal compilation, diseased by what has been described as “overelaboration, prolixity and interminable sequences of quotations.”25 But

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 395

there are alternatives to such a stern reading. That Dominici speaks with and through a patchwork of authors reflects a habit and sensibility shared with any number of his contemporaries, who embraced excerpt, paraphrase, and compilation as a sophisticated literary and scholarly technique. It is a strategy that seems to echo patterns noted among the circles of the Modern Devout, the Carthusians, and others. The Firefly is no devotional text, to be sure, but in a way that reflects the broader mood, Dominici seems to embrace the stirring eloquence of many of his “devout” texts — a word he used to describe some of them explicitly, Bernard in particular.26 Any effort to reconsider the Firefly as a treatise must also confront the matter of its reception. The text survives in three copies: one from Santa Maria Novella, where Dominici wrote; another that made its way to Salutati; and a third that is merely a tortured copy of the first.27 Is seems unsurprising, then, to find the Firefly so often dismissed as odd and ineffective, set to one side as unworthy of Dominici’s otherwise noteworthy literary output. But here, too, we are in need of more context and nuance. Scholars have noted the importance of growing international networks— most visibly the councils and the reforming religious orders—for the widespread circulation of popular works. But it is important to see that access to those networks was difficult and rare, the circulation they provided uneven.28 Most authors thus never gained or even sought it. They remained content with what has been called “coterie” readership—relatively small circles of professionals and friends who were the first and perhaps the only readers of a given work.29 In Dominici, we seem to have an author whose works and their circulation reflect that dynamic: for all of their variety, his sermons, treatises, letters, and other works, even those in the vernacular, circulated regionally and locally, and relatively briefly, in only a handful of manuscripts. That a work like the Firefly, for all of the labor put into it, survives only in a few manuscripts again suggests an author content with traditional horizons of circulation. It is a work that Dominici himself probably never envisioned reaching much beyond his immediate circles and those of Salutati in Florence. Our Firefly, so it seems, never wandered far from its home and struggled to reproduce. But a reconsideration of the text itself reveals a work that was, on its own terms, far from odd or marginal. On the contrary, as the following will show, it

396 /

James D. Mixson

was a work consistent with Dominici’s thought generally, and one that found itself at the center of a range of broader concerns.

Tilling the Earth: The Firefly ’s Thomist Populism The Firefly’s content, more even than its supposedly “scholastic” structure, has led scholars to dismiss the work as wholly traditional. Here most have allowed Salutati’s reply to set the tone. In it, the Florentine chancellor had taken up two of the Firefly’s recurring themes. One concerned the status of poetry as a teacher of truth. A second concerned whether the intellect or the will, understanding or passion, took precedence in moral matters. Dominici’s stance on both issues was quite clear. While not necessarily evil in itself, he argued, poetry was not a true scientia and was therefore dangerous to those who did not have a firm understanding of the tenets of Christianity. For a Dominican friar, the second issue was equally clear: the will was a wild animal, the intellect its trainer and pastor, its cage a sound catechetical regime.30 Scholars have rightly located these themes within a longer history of tensions—between pagan and Christian learning, between humanist and scholastic poetics, between scholastic advocates of the intellect against the voluntarism of the humanists. In light of that longer history, most have found the Firefly’s claims both unsurprising and uninspiring. Dominici’s arguments are those of Aquinas, and his pastoral stance is that of countless preachers before him, Florentine Dominicans such as Cavalcanti and Passavanti not least among them. The Firefly thus finds itself again easily stereotyped as a long-winded and tortured attempt to make rather obvious points. A more careful reading, however, reveals a work that draws its inspiration not from the traditions of the schools, but from the spiritual currents of the early fifteenth century. Specifically, Dominici grounded the Firefly’s reflections repeatedly in the ideal of simplicitas. It was a spiritual commonplace, as old as scripture itself, with a rich medieval tradition reaching from Peter Damian and Bernard to Eckhart and Marguerite.31 But in the early fifteenth century, reformist circles recovered the ideal anew, in ways that emphasized its biblical and monastic themes. Purity of heart, right intention, charity, submission to the will of God—these be-

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 397

came the leitmotifs of countless devotional works. In that spirit, the Imitation of Christ (most famously among innumerable examples) repeatedly called its readers to embrace “simplicity of intention and purity of desire.”32 Schoolmen also deployed simplicitas as a literary ideal and as a tool for social and institutional critique. Gerson attacked the “curiosity” of so many students and masters, whose style was muddled and obscure and whose subtle arguments were “contrary to penitence and simple belief.”33 Scholars have universally noted that Dominici’s concern in the Firefly was pastoral. But contentment with that level of generalization allows us to neglect the particular ways in which the ideal of simplicitas informs his major arguments. Contesting the humanist claim that all truth came from God, for example, he countered with what he called the “study of the science of charity” (scientia caritatis) which was founded on scripture alone. It taught what he called the “grammar of all simple Christians”; the eloquence of all orators; the true dialectic; the arithmetic of those who confess, counting both their sins and their blessings; the geometry by which the faithful reshaped their lives to correspond to the image of God.34 In a similar spirit, while refuting Salutati’s claim that pagan letters adorned a life of Christian grace, Dominici recounted the story of Christianity’s humble, illiterate beginnings. He cited at length Peter Damian, among others, who had celebrated “Christ’s simplicity” and the “rusticity of the wise.”35 Against the argument that pagan letters led to a life lived well, Dominici again countered with his central theme: Christ did not choose as his followers those who lived well in the world through learning—neither senators nor kings, learned grammarians nor those armed with dialectic nor puffed up with rhetoric. He chose simple commoners and fishermen, the poor, the unlearned.36 Attentiveness to Dominici’s embrace of simplicity reveals the Firefly as a work concerned with more than the dangers of pagan poetry, or even the dangers of pagan learning. At its center is a concern for the spiritual dangers of intellectual pride in the schools generally. In ways analogous to similar suspicions among figures such as Gerson and the leaders of the Devotio Moderna, to say nothing of the humanists themselves, Dominici repeatedly denounced the “artificial subtlety” of many schoolmen’s propositions. He lamented how logic, with its “clever delights,” baited the nets for so many unsuspecting minds. It was through

398 /

James D. Mixson

their “clever assertions” that the “disputations of the depraved” sought to turn perversity into truth.37 “Simplicity of life,” as Dominici put it, counted more than argument.38 The Firefly repeatedly ignites its broadsides against “exceedingly vain” and dangerous disputations, and against those who engaged in arguments that were as refined as they were endless.39 It is a work, in short, that attacks the very scholastic tradition it supposedly represents. Dominici’s embrace of simplicity informed more than his fervent attacks on the dangers of pagan learning for scholars and students. The Firefly is also charged, in a way that scholarship has too often missed, with a distinctly populist spirit. Its chapters bristle repeatedly with warnings of the dangers that refined university learning posed for ordinary folk. Dominici denounced all of the bad doctors: their remedies usually kill you, and most farmers and ordinary folk (rustici nostri) fare better without them.40 He denounced the vanities and heresy that plagued the learned study of the stars — all of it reducible to a few simple rules that could be taught even to children.41 But worst of all were the blowhard rhetoricians — the streets of Florence were stuffed with them, and most were badly trained!42 Friar Giovanni’s advocacy of simple folk emerges most clearly, however, in the proposition he advanced in chapters 32 and 33 of the Firefly: “That it is better to till the earth than to spend time with pagan books.”43 Here we see the salty populist at his best, reminding pompous philosophers and commoners alike of the holy simplicity of a life of work and the dangers of an excessive and arrogant learning that undermined solid grounding in faith and doctrine.44 In particular, Dominici argued, learned natural philosophers, unlike faithful ploughmen, undermined belief in miracles. He then illustrated the point with a vivid story: One morning in Padua, a shade in the shape of a body appeared above the grave of an entombed corpse. As a crowd gathered around, a learned natural philosopher, his students in tow, began to explain it all away. Vapors, drawn from the grave through the power of the heavens, had simply retained the body’s original shape.45 A few have noted Dominici’s call to return to “tilling the earth” in passing, only to dismiss it as a bizarre and clumsy diversion. Erika Rummel has read the story from Padua’s graveyard merely as a “shaggy dog

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 399

story,” a vivid anecdote meant to illustrate an otherwise scholastic argument.46 But to leave the matter there is to miss the broader stakes of these chapters and the precise nature of both Dominici’s concern and his response. As Dominici saw it, whatever truth the learned philosopher in Padua (and others like him) had to offer, his teaching undermined the faith of simple folk (“dum veres alliciunt simplices, falsis necant permixta”).47 He soon rushed to the defense of the simplices with a string of stern legal citations from Justinian’s Code, prohibiting the teaching of Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, and other texts inter Christicolas simplices et ignaros de Catholica fide.48 Dominici also cited, and creatively allegorized, laws that protected hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions for the sick and the poor: “For who (in terms of their faith) are the simple Christian boys—that is, those who attend schools and who, whether boys or girls, attend sermons in which mostly poems are recited (which is displeasing, and which is our current concern!) — except pilgrims, the ill, the orphans, the poor, and the imbeciles?”49 Dominici condemned the teaching of the “profane precepts” of “heretics and pagans” to those who were spiritually weak.50 Patient reading of these lines reveals more still about Dominici’s populist stance. In ways that scholars have often failed to emphasize, but that the Firefly makes unmistakably clear, Dominici engaged the issue before him as a matter of intensely public concern. The philosopher in Padua, armed with his pagan learning, had not only dismissed a wondrous event by reducing it to earthly causes. He had done so in the open, as a teacher who held a “publicly funded” chair. Dominici thus waged a “just war,” as he called it explicitly, against public preaching and teaching that was saturated with pagan poetry and prose.51 “And why am I slandered for this,” he erupted, “since I am trying to protect not private chairs but public ones, and churches consecrated to Christ?”52 This was no literary quarrel limited to Salutati’s charmed circles. At stake for Dominici was the moral life of the community as a whole. He was concerned not only for the philosophers of Padua and their students, but also for ordinary parishioners and others, women and men, young and old alike, who as they gathered round, awed by the learning of the schoolman and his ancient authors, lacked the proper intellectual grounding to separate truth from falsehood.

400 /

James D. Mixson

The public stakes of Dominici’s arguments also make sense of the legal dimensions of his response. He was the heir of a long tradition, not limited to the ranks of the Dominicans but especially robust among them, that from the thirteenth century had come to see all of Western Christendom as one community, a society of baptized Christians whose economy of salvation was now governed by the pope and by an ever more elaborate and refined body of canon law and its precedents. Within that regime canonists and priests together governed soul and body alike, in ways that blended the moral and the legal, as well as the roles of pastor and judge.53 In that spirit, and as an Observant friar himself, Dominici’s citations of Justinian were an attempt, for the sake of simple folk, to bind the public teaching and preaching of Christian scholars and students back to that regime’s orthodox foundations. And there is at least one hint that the friar put all of the citations into action: in Florence, in 1405, the grammarian Master Benedetto di Nicolello da Gubbio was accused of heresy for teaching pagan authors to impressionable students, and one scholar has raised the possibility that Dominici himself was the inspiration behind the accusations.54 One final set of considerations will help us most fully appreciate Dominici’s advocacy of simplicity and the resonance of his populism. The author and his work must be set more carefully still in their original cultural position, as, in one sense, on the margins of his intellectual and cultural scene. The story of the learned teacher of Padua, for example, was itself a grudging tribute to the vibrant teaching of so many physicians and natural philosophers in the Italian educational landscape.55 Their teaching and popularity had slowly rendered university theology ever more irrelevant by Dominici’s day. Other passages from the Firefly help us see Dominici from the same angle of vision, as a friar who moved awkwardly and uneasily in elite, intellectually refined circles. Dominici recalled his encounters with two renowned schoolmen. One had used sophisticated dialectic to disprove the claims of scripture. The other (a lapsed religious, no less!) not only denounced the Bible as fables to be read by the fire, but even sang the praises of geomancy. And both scholars had derided Dominici, to his face, as a simpleton.56 The insufferable pride of such men was only made worse by their popularity. Dominici could hardly hide his

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 401

resentment at so many young men who rushed to learn from them. The students were not only driven by pride and curiosity; they pranced to the schools with curled hair, dressed in elegant attire!57 To see so many foppish students learning from vain philosophers was bad enough. But Dominici had also to confront daily what Peter Howard has called a “public theology of magnificence” in Florence and beyond. It was a theology that appealed to high and low, one articulated through polished sermons suffused with rhetorical refinement.58 Many of its most talented advocates were churchmen who were lovers of the classics, and their popularity doubtless inspired the Firefly’s vivid attacks on modern preachers. Dominici denounced these “so-called Christians” who— when they bothered to preach at all—offered sermons laden with everything from tragedy and comedy to metaphysics. They lorded it over crowds of simple folk with citations from “poets, philosophers and other infidels.”59 The preachers’ cheeks were “puffed out” with worldly wisdom, as he put it, their reflections on the gospels interwoven with pagan texts.60 They attracted great crowds, and many eager for pagan eloquence. But none of it inspired any real devotion.61 Worst of all, as Dominici well knew, the love of classical chic had powerfully shaped life among the ranks of the religious themselves. By 1400 in Florence the results were most famous among the Augustinian Hermits under Luigi Marsigli at Santo Spirito, where Salutati himself had studied for a time. But at Santa Maria Novella, too, lectors wrote treatises adorned with references to Cicero and Seneca, Virgil and Horace, Alexander and Octavian. Dominican preachers also celebrated the “virtues of the ancient princes and philosophers.” And we know of one creative friar who, when it seemed that traditional pious legends and miracle stories no longer appealed to the crowd, recast a traditional life of Mary as a Virgilian epic.62 Here we are perhaps closer than ever to the original poignancy of the Firefly for its author, a figure who seemed so badly and so publicly betrayed by the preachers of his own order. But we are also in a position to add another layer of nuance to generalizations about Dominici’s “pastoral” concern. In defense of simple folk, and in a public cultural contest over the moral stakes of education in a Christian society, Dominici’s Firefly launched a sharp counterattack not only against learned philosophers

402 /

James D. Mixson

and their students, but also against the elite sensibility and refined tastes of the populo grasso who controlled communities such as Santa Maria Novella and against the friars who catered to them. The Firefly’s attacks on classical learning have led scholars to dismiss the work as out of touch with its times, a “bitter rearguard action,” as it has been called, in a lost cultural war.63 But Dominici’s advocacy of simplicity, his populism, and his cultural critique were from another angle consistent with both the outreach of his vernacular educational treatises and what has been called the “civic theology” of his sermons. As an advocate for ordinary folk, Dominici preached peace, charity, and the common good, as well as “social justice” for the poor. In that same spirit he denounced the polished and powerful rhetoricians in Florence, every one of them “a meddler and an embellisher with language” as he put it, who used their powers of persuasion to deceive the simple, the poor, and the weak.64 More broadly, his embrace of simplicity, of conversion, and of law was consistent with the distinct culture of lay penitence that had taken root among many confraternities and other associations across Dominici’s Italy (the Bianchi not least among them).65 It also shared something of the language and tone we have discerned in other experiments among his contemporaries, from the Lollards to the Devout to his own fellow Observant preachers.66 In fact, the connections here are explicit in the Firefly itself. One passage celebrated, for example, what he called “the pastoral fruits of certain modern people who live simply, preaching without dialectic”— a reference to any number of penitential groups, to the Observants or even the New Devout themselves. Another passage celebrated what had happened when preachers set aside their pagan texts, or even openly despised them, and instead preached the gospel purely, in humility and simplicity of faith: factions turned from feud and bloodshed to peace and reconciliation; thieves restored ill-gotten gains; the lustful embraced the chastity they had once hated; citizens submitted humbly to authority. 67 Against a range of learned masters of logic and persuasion, and against the docta pietas of so many refined elites, we have in Dominici’s Firefly a manifesto of what might be called docta simplicitas, an informed simplicity, a kind of Thomist populism. For all of the learning of the schoolmen and the humanists, as Dominici saw it, women, rustic farm-

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 403

ers, and other ordinary folk showed the way. It was they who knew true philosophy; they, along with young boys and others not fully formed in the faith, who needed only to be armed with a rugged understanding of “simple doctrine,” conditioned by obedience and discipline.68 Straightforward training in theological basics for ordinary folk was essential, both for the sake of the individual soul and as a matter of public and pastoral security.

Dominici’s Demons For all of the reconsiderations of the Firefly offered thus far, it remains difficult to explain why Dominici remained so intensely hostile to the kind of learning Salutati and so many others — monks and friars among them—had embraced. Many of his colleagues and contemporaries, after all, were advocates of more vigorous pastoral theology and yet hardly opponents of pagan philosophy and poetry. We can explore and explain the nature of the threat Dominici discerned in the classics more clearly and precisely than we have to date. For this Observant friar, as the Firefly makes clear, the study of pagan letters exposed not only the minds of the young, but also the minds of “simple” Christians of all ages, to the power of demons.69 The evidence for Dominici’s concern with demons is scattered throughout the Firefly in language that appears so often and so clearly that its import is unmistakable. Faced with Salutati’s argument that pagan letters served to corroborate the Christian faith, for example, Dominici countered by citing Paul and Augustine, who had denounced not only the “presumptuous investigation” of the ancients, but the polytheism and the “damnable worship of idols” it had fostered. In his own day, as he saw it, scholars presumed to “revive idols” and “adore demons” through their learning.70 Similarly with the study of pagan poetry: for Dominici the danger of these texts lay not merely in their paganism, still less in their challenge to scholastic scientia, but in their diabolical origins. The “wickedness of the ancient serpent” lurked in pagan literature’s lines. Reading the ancients opened the way to “diabolical fraud” and to the worship of their “demons, called gods.”71 So too with the study of

404 /

James D. Mixson

natural philosophy: its texts were rooted in deception and pride, and even to read them, let alone to defend and teach them, was to embrace a sophistry inspired by the devil.72 The Firefly’s final two chapters, however, reveal most clearly the depth of Dominici’s concern over the demonic dangers lurking in pagan texts. Confronted with Salutati’s claim that the study of pagan letters posed no threat to Christian doctrine, Dominici here crafted his refutation around a discussion of what he called “prodigies, miracles and dreams.” The thrust of the argument was to highlight the ways in which the devil and his demons sought to have for themselves the worship proper to God, and to highlight the ways in which they deployed their counterfeit spiritual power to deceive the innocent to that end. Astrology, mathematics, history, poetry—every text and tradition was filled with stories of the devil’s lies and temptations. The books of the pagans were “drunk” with the rituals that marked the “cult of demons”73 and with accounts of demonic imitation of divine miracles.74 There emerges here yet again the strong sense of the public stakes of the danger noted above. The root of so many evils in the public life of the day, as Dominici saw it, was to be found in so much celebration of the “trifles of the philosophers.”75 It was the “ancient enemy” who inspired such “vanities” of the mind, who toyed with and deceived those miserable souls who put their faith in his demons. What else had inspired the spiritual pride of so many who fancied themselves prophets and seers? With a citation of the Liber Extra he condemned all of these figures, and any who so much as spoke with them, as heretics.76 “If only Christ had so many who would profess him publicly,” Dominici lamented, “as the devil has marching shamefully under his well-known banners!”77 These passages have been noted almost nowhere, either in recent scholarship on Dominici and the Firefly, or on demonology and reform.78 But they suggest how unwise it is to continue to dismiss the treatise as odd, eccentric, or out of touch with its times. The later Middle Ages, as Dyan Elliott has shown, witnessed the emergence of the disembodied demon, who demanded and recruited bodily accomplices to do his work. Learned discourse on those “fallen bodies” and their demonic power, as Stuart Clark has shown, became central to early modern culture generally, in ways that ranged from religion and science to history and politics.

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 405

And as Franco Mormando and Michael Bailey have shown, Observant reformers were pivotal figures in crafting that emerging discourse. The power of demons was central to the sermons of Bernardino and other Observant Franciscans. In his Formicarius, the Observant Dominican John Nider, Dominici’s younger contemporary, offered extensive reflections on witchcraft and demonic power; his work laid the foundation for Heinrich Kramer’s infamous Malleus Maleficarum. In all of these texts, the power of devils and demons to deceive, to inspire all manner of magic and superstition, played a central role.79 Dominici was no demonologist in the mold of his fellow Dominicans Nider and Kramer, but the Firefly shares the same broad concern. As Dominici saw it, demons were ensnaring the young — especially impressionable boys who showed promise as preachers — by drawing them into the study of pagan philosophy. But he also warned explicitly of the special dangers for the learned, who were more likely to find themselves “tangled in the nets of Vulcan,” deceived by “miracles, auguries, oracles and dreams.”80 He then leveled his sharpest denunciation against magicians, who claimed that Moses worked his “signs and portents” by the power of spells (viribus nominum), that Solomon practiced divination, or that the apostles cast lots. Just as foolish was the magician’s belief in predicting fate through all manner of what Dominici dismissed as superstitious “observances,” including casting dice and reading cards.81 However pious their incantations might sound, for Dominici they were offered up to a crowd of demons.82 To illustrate his reflections more vividly, Dominici offered a long series of exempla from his own day, each meant to illustrate precisely how the devil and demons continued to deceive so many into joining their ranks. 83 Evil spirits often worked to recruit mature and wise men, but they were especially eager and willing to pursue women and young boys. In Pistoia, a boy was visited by the spirit of a charming young girl. She often spoke to him of future events and joked with him. The boy’s mother suggested he ask the spirit for gold, and the boy thought he had received it. But when he opened the box in which he thought he had stored it, he was met only with a foul stench. Another story came from Dominici’s Venice, where a fourteen-year-old virgin had been visited by the spirit of an adolescent boy, adorned in fine clothing. He offered her

406 /

James D. Mixson

fruits and other gifts, as well as gold. But when she went to retrieve the money, she too found her room filled with a foul stench. Other stories followed.84 In Florence, a knight and his household had been assailed by an invisible demon who had thrown stones in their house. Only the devout repetition of the name of Mary had spared the household from the “nightly terrors” of the demonic “infestation.” Another evil spirit had tormented a Florentine weaver and his wife until they had cleansed themselves with a thorough confession. And at Santa Maria Novella itself, a spirit had often playfully seized a four-year-old boy as he slept between his parents, placing the child, unharmed, on the chest next to the bed. Folksy stories about demons might easily fall into the scholarly interstices of our abiding interest in humanism and education in the later Middle Ages. But they reflect the Firefly’s engagement in a matter of long-standing, broad, and pressing concern among fifteenth-century intellectuals, inquisitors, and pastors: the power of demons to deceive. In fact, Dominici’s textual authority for each of these many stories was the famous canon Episcopi, a tenth-century text made widely available through its inclusion in Gratian’s Decretum. The canon is most often noted for its description of “wicked women” who believed that they flew through the night with Diana and who served her as their mistress. As such, it is recognized as the inspiration for what would become the infamous stereotype of the witch, flying to the devil’s Sabbath. But for Dominici, as for Nider and other contemporary demonologists, the canon was concerned primarily with deception: Christians had allowed themselves to be “seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons.”85 The antidote to so much demonic and diabolical deception was, to recall the spiritual foundations of the Firefly, a well-trained soul grounded in simplicitas. Dominici contrasted the pride and vanity of so many learned scholars of pagan poetry and philosophy with the pure hearts of those he called “true Christians.” Their purity and simplicity, nurtured by the study of “sacred letters” and guided by a learned pastor, was the only sure guard against error. He offered an extended account of miracles he had seen with his own eyes: one man healed of blindness by touch alone, another of fever; a girl’s seizure calmed; even a wounded puppy healed by the touch of a holy man. For Dominici, the piety and humility of those involved ensured that these were no illusions “crafted by the art of

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 407

demons.”86 Dominici similarly affirmed the power of divinely inspired visions. In his own day he had known a “simple” eleven-year-old girl (puellam simplicem) who told of visions that had often seized her during mass on feast days, taking her to paradise, to hell, to purgatory, to limbo.87 She had also known with certainty of secret matters both present and future, all of it confirmed by her pious works and ways. Dominici noted her eventual conversion to religious life and her miraculous abstinence from food and drink for twenty-three years thereafter.88 The same ideal governed Dominici’s discussion of divinely inspired dreams. As scripture itself taught, through the stories of Daniel, Joseph, and others, dreams often served as a source of divine revelation. Dominici’s own experience taught the same lesson. He told of his encounter with a pious man whose dreams had revealed the torments of purgatory in all of their detail, variety, and horror.89 Few readers of the Firefly seem to have ventured all the way to these concluding passages. To reach them, it is true, requires something of a forced march through an often difficult, seemingly unfocused text. The inattentive reader might thus easily dismiss it all as an Observant preacher’s pious ramblings. But careful reconsideration of these neglected final chapters allows them to take on a new life. Their seemingly odd exempla and other disjointed digressions might now be read as a deliberately and carefully crafted demonic crescendo. As such, they allow us to gauge more precisely why a friar would bother to refute Salutati at such length, and they further establish the explosive and public urgency of the pedagogical and moral battle Dominici sought to engage. Moreover, read properly, the Firefly’s reflections on demonic power put the treatise at the very center of a distinct but closely related set of early fifteenth-century cultural concerns (equally well known) about discretion and authenticity. Dominici’s era has been described as one in which truth was challenged on every side, a time of schisms and divided loyalties, of spiritual reversals, of ambivalence and ambiguity. Amid the confusion, the era’s schoolmen sought to discern true from false, authentic from counterfeit, diabolical from sacred; at the heart of their project was an abiding concern over the deceptions of the devil and his demons. 90 In a steady flood of works written after 1400 (Gerson’s De erroribus circa artem magicam of 1402, for example, and Nicholas Magni of

408 /

James D. Mixson

Jauer’s De superstitionibus of 1405, the same year that Dominici wrote in Florence) schoolmen sought, as Michael Bailey notes, to “map a topography of spiritual and natural power,” and emphasized the need for proper understanding of earthly, demonic, and divine forces at work in the world.91 They explored the relationship between God’s power and the power presumed in the rites and rituals of the church, as well as the twilight realm between those rites and the power of charms and spells. In a similar mood, and in the same years, schoolmen deployed ever more refined regimes of logic and inquest to map and to govern the contested spiritual ground between demonic and divine. 92 In 1402 (the same year that saw the publication of the De erroribus circa artem magicam), Gerson was confronted with the case of the widow Ermine of Reims, whose visions he cautiously endorsed. In all of these contexts and cases, the faith of the individual, purity of heart, and intention remained central. For theorists such as Nider, purity of heart trumped formal rites (even ordinary folk of good faith could perform effective exorcisms, for example), and the faithful disposition defeated the power of demons. For Gerson and others it was precisely the purity of heart and devout simplicity of figures such as Ermine or Joan of Arc that proved the divine merit of their visions and revelations.93 And yet, as they descended into particulars from case to case, even the most careful theoreticians of discretion confronted often intractable problems of interpretation. Nider, for example, struggled with whether the ringing of church bells or the incantation of spells to protect crops from storms were effective and licit practices.94 In a structurally similar way, the same tensions over true and false, genuine and counterfeit inform Dominici’s positions in the Firefly. It is well established that he allowed access to pagan letters, grudgingly, to those pure in heart and fully formed in the faith. But few have noted the complexity lurking behind that concession. Dominici saw not only the difficulty of delineating the boundaries between divinely and diabolically inspired readings of the pagans, but also the broader challenge of discerning between true and counterfeit spiritual power, and between true and false revelation. Communication from the divine through “prodigies and miracles,” these final chapters taught, was never false. But as Dominici admitted openly, true discernment was a gift rarely granted even

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 409

to good folk, and almost never to those who were evil. In between, amid all of the deceptions and falsehoods unleashed by “necromancy and its spawn,” it was nearly impossible to know true from false.95 The danger was equally great in the interpretation of dreams. Dominici acknowledged the long philosophical tradition that had reflected on how the stars and planets, complexion, and so on could influence dreams and visions.96 But only the divinely inspired pious dream, one approved by “sacred and divine wisdom,” could serve as a guide. All other teachings and “observances,” as he called them, were nothing but vanity that opened the door to demonic influence. He noted as one example the folk tradition that suggested anyone smeared with the blood of the hoopoe would endure dreams filled with demons.97 “I can say truly,” Dominici warned, “that not a few visions of this kind have been revealed in our own day.”98 He called on Salutati and his readers to renounce so many “harmful nocturnal poisons,” to “lay aside the deeds of darkness,” to “put on the armor of light,” and to “behave properly as in the day.”99 ——— Christianity in the later Middle Ages, John Van Engen has argued, was full of variety and possibility, its challenging diversity shaped by a landscape centuries in the making. Its many options were defined and constrained by Christendom’s estates and orders, its range of legal and social structures, customs and rites and traditions. They were lived out across a spectrum of intensities, from vivid zealotry to plodding indifference. They were shaped by the force of authority and tradition, yet also charged with unpredictable energies that inspired sharp reversals. A turn to Giovanni Dominici, who knew that fifteenth-century world in all of its layered complexity, has offered one fitting way to honor Van Engen’s vision. As an Observant friar, Dominici embraced and channeled his era’s zeal for reform and knew reform’s failure. As an ally of the Bianchi and of the women of Corpus Domini in Venice, he knew intimately the tensions between clerical leadership and popular piety, and between women and men both lay and religious. As an author, preacher, and teacher he knew the challenges of education and moral formation and the fierce competition over the broad ground he shared with the humanists. The reconsiderations of the Firefly offered here, too, honor the same vision. It is a treatise that mirrors

410 /

James D. Mixson

all that is best in John Van Engen’s work. In ways that scholars have most often missed, the Firefly glides gracefully among our aging scholarly dichotomies — between sacred and secular, scholasticism and humanism, magic and miracles, medieval and Renaissance. It flutters across the boundaries of our sources and settings, from the canon law and theology of Observant sermons and treatises to the religious and intellectual energies of the Florentine streets. And, like our teacher and colleague, it thrives in a habitat of so many religious and cultural possibilities — competing “observances,” as Dominici might have called them, from the catechetical and legal regimes of the church to the curriculum of the humanists, from the discretion of pastors and the divinations of magicians to the deceptions of demons.

Notes Previous versions of this paper were delivered at the New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Sarasota, Florida, and the Patristic Medieval and Renaissance Conference sponsored by the Augustinian Institute at Villanova. I would like to thank my colleagues at these venues for their insights, especially Michael Bailey, Daniel Hobbins, and Michael Waddell. Above all, I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Alabama for their critiques, suggestions, and support, especially George McClure, Daniel Riches, and the faculty and students of our European history workshop. 1. The Firefly has been edited by Edmund Hundt, Iohannis Dominici Lucula Noctis ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1940), whose introduction provides a useful outline of the exchanges that inspired it— see especially the letters of Salutati to Giovanni da Sanminiato in Francesco Novati, ed. Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, 4 vols. ( Rome: Forzani E. C. Tipografidel Senato, 1891–1911), 3:539– 43 and 4:169– 205. Hundt’s introduction (at xiv– xvi) also provides a brief and useful outline of both Salutati’s arguments and Dominici’s refutations. For the key issues and contexts at stake here, see above all G. Ronconi, “Giovanni Dominici e le dispute sulla poesia nel primo umanesimo,” in Dizionario critico della letteratura Italiana 2 (1973): 11–17; Peter Denley, “Giovanni Dominici’s Opposition to Humanism,” in Humanism and Religion, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 103–14; and Claudio Mésoniat, Poetica theologia: La “Lucula Noctis” di Giovanni Dominici e le dispute letterarie tra ’300 e ’400 (Rome: Edizioni di storia letteraria, 1984).

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 411

2. The best overviews of Dominici’s life and career are Giorgio Cracco’s article in Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani 5: 657– 64 and his essay “Giovanni Dominici e un nuovo tipo di religiosità,” in Conciliarismo, Stati Nazionali, Inizi dell’Umanesimo–Atti del convegno storico (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1990), 3– 20, each with further literature. 3. For Dominici in Venice, as founder of Corpus Domini and as an ally of the Bianchi, see Daniel E. Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Bartolomea Riccoboni, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395–1436, ed. and trans. Daniel E. Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 4. In addition to the bibliography cited in note 1 above, for the Florentine period see Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, “Political Views in the Preaching of Giovanni Dominici in Renaissance Florence, 1400 –1406,” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 19– 48, and Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino Da Siena (1380 –1444) ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); as well as Daniel R. Lesnick, “Civic Preaching in the Early Renaissance: Dominici’s Florentine Sermons,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocentro, ed. Timothy Verdon (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 208– 25. 5. Hermann Heimpel, Die Vener von Gmünd und Strassburg 1162–1447, 3 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1982), 2:341– 44. 6. B. L. Ullman, “The Dedication Copy of Giovanni Dominici’s Lucula Noctis: A Landmark in the History of the Renaissance,” Medievalia et Humanistica 1 (1943): 109– 23. 7. In addition to Mésoniat, Poetica theologia, see Concetta Carestia Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250 –1500 ( Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981), especially chapter 8. The Firefly also appears briefly in the context of poetry in Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 94. 8. Anne Reltgen-Tallon, “L’observance dominicaine et son opposition a l’humanisme: l’exemple de Jean Dominici,” Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome 330 (2004): 43– 62. 9. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 53– 54; and Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought ( Leiden: Brill, 2000), 334 – 37. 10. Pino Da Prati, Giovanni Dominici e l’umanesimo ( Naples: Istituto editoriale del Mezzogiorno, 1965); Denley, “Opposition.”

412 /

James D. Mixson

11. Cf. Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 150; Denley, “Opposition,” 113–14. 12. Hobbins, Authorship, especially chapter 4 and 144 – 46. 13. John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the FifteenthCentury Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257– 84, especially 275– 78. 14. Hobbins, Authorship, 40 – 45, 49. 15. Ibid., 122– 23. 16. David D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture without Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 17. M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow is Bent in Study”: Dominican Education Before 1350 ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998), especially 417–18, and 446– 47. See also Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), especially chapter 5. 18. Kaspar Elm, “Die Franziskanerobservanz als Bildungsreform,” in Lebenslehren und Weltentwürfe im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Politik— Bildung—Naturkunde—Theologie, ed. Hartmut Boockmann, Bernd Moeller, and Karl Stackmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989), 201–13. 19. For this debate, see my Poverty’s Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement ( Leiden: Brill, 2009), and, for Dominici, 109–11. 20. See note 1 above for editions and literature, especially Il Libro d’amore di carità, ed. Antonio Ceruti ( Bologna: Romagnoli-dall’ Acqua, 1889); Regola del governo di cura familiare, ed. P. Bargenelli ( Florence, 1927); Trattato delle dieci questioni, ed. Arrigo Levasti ( Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1957); and Lettere spirituali, ed. M.-T. Casella and G. Pozzi, Spicilegium Friburgense 13 ( Freibourg: Edizioni Universitarie Friburgo Svizzera, 1969). For discussion of these works in relation to the Firefly, see Denley, “Opposition.” See also Giuseppina Battista, L’educazione dei figli nella Regola di Giovanni Dominici ( Florence: Pagnini e Martinelli, 2002). 21. Denley, “Opposition,” 106. 22. Locula Noctis, 4: “sed etiam ex parte determinationis tue prout exquiritur huic tractatui Lucula Noctis nomen imponitur.” 23. Ibid., 3: “Me denique etiam mihi ignorantem esse negare non possum. . . . Hinc timeo in re tali non parum errare. Eos vero qui prefatis dictis meis opponunt fama non mediocriter celebrat in utroque.” 24. Ibid., 4: “Et quicquid senseris tecum sentire conabor, et quecumque apposueris vel deleveris, id verminis huius parti finali lucem a te qui colluces appositum reputabo; tuncque in lucem desinens, ‘noctiluca’ poterit nuncupari quod, sine te exorsum, a ‘luce’ Locula Noctis supra extitit appellatum.” See also Salutati’s response, describing the Firefly as “real daylight,” in Hundt’s introduction (xvi).

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 413

25. Denley, “Opposition,” 114. 26. E.g., Locula Noctis, 293, 324. For context and further literature see John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 269– 81. 27. See the discussion of manuscripts by Hundt in the introduction to the Locula Noctis, xx– xxiv. 28. Ibid., 213–16, especially 215. 29. Hobbins, Authorship, 187– 89, following Katherine Kerby-Fulton (n. 22). 30. Locula Noctis, 163– 64. 31. In addition to standard dictionary entries (e.g., Dictionnaire de spiritualité, XIV: 892– 914), see also Achim Wesjohann, “Simplicitas als franziskanisches Ideal und der Prozeß der Institutionalisierung des Minoritenordens,” in Die Bettelorden im Aufbau: Beiträge zu Institutionalisierungsprozessen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Gert Melville and Jörg Oberste (Münster: Lit, 1999), 107– 68, especially 107–18, with further literature. See also Hobbins, Authorship, 119– 25. 32. Imitation of Christ, 2:4 33. Hobbins, Authorship, 123. 34. Locula Noctis, 199– 200. 35. Ibid., 271: “Christi me simplicitas doceat, vera sapientium rusticitas ambiguitatis mee vinculum solvat.” 36. Ibid., 297: “Inflat enim sapientia huius mundi et legum ventosa loquacitas. Elegit enim non reges, non senatores, non philosophos sed plebeios, pauperes, indoctos, piscatores, ineruditos liberalibus disciplinas, non peritos grammatica, non armatos dyalectica, non rhetorica inflatos.” 37. Ibid., 164 – 65: “In disputatione fidelium cavenda est propositiunum artificiosa subtilitas, que callidis oblectationibus retia tendit. Ita enim versutis assertionibus pravorum disputatio innodatur, ut recta esse simulent que perversa persuadent.” 38. Ibid., 368. 39. Ibid., 369. 40. Ibid., 304: “Rustici nostri et etiam ubique a regulis medicorum forenses paucioribus morbis subduntur quam ceteri.” 41. Ibid., 309: “Si igitur astrologia sic necessaria reputatur ad medicandum et navigandum, quod iam sub illa non paucis erroribus ortis anime pretioso sanguine Christi redempte dampnantur, audacter dixerim bonum fore medicis carere et usu peritis mare secandi. Verumtamen, ut videtur ad liquidum, hec utilis est sub paucissimis regulis veritatis contenta, que sine periculo etiam a iuvenculis posset addisci.” 42. Ibid., 311–12, discussing the second of two propositions concerning modern rhetoricians: “Secunda, quod inreprehensibiliter potest contra modernam

414 /

James D. Mixson

rhetoricam acriter perorari, tum quia incomparabiliter plures sunt mali quam boni, in quorum buccis omnis splendor obmutescit orandi, tum quia paucissimi aut fere nulli ad sapientiam volant vel nititur volare . . . necnon quia qui pravi ignorantesve arte pollent loquendi, propria commode communi bono preponunt. Pro horum exemplis non oportet barbaros aut Indiam penetrare, cum hiis malis simus undique constipati.” 43. Ibid., 252: “Utilius est Christianis terram arare quam gentilium intendere libris.” 44. Ibid., 261: “Fateor itaque eos in pluribus dicere vera, et hoc pessimum. Utinam in eorum libris nulla esset veritas! Sed dum veris alliciunt simplices falsis necant permixtis. Non decipitur piscis ab hamo sed ab esca, sub qua mortalis absconditur hamus. Praecipue vero hanc doctrinam dixerim iunioribus metuendam, qui nondum perfecte sunt in fide fundati.” 45. Ibid., 261. 46. Rummel, Humanist-Scholastic Debate, 53– 54. 47. Locula Noctis, 261. 48. Ibid., 265: “Prohibeo sacra lege, civili favente, Aristotelem, Virgilium, Ciceronem, pariter et Anneum inter Christicolas simplices et ignaros de Catholica fide taliter edocere.” 49. Ibid.: “Quid enim aliud simplices Christiani pueri (videlicet qui scolas frequentant et qui vel que predicationes secuntur, quibus maxime poetica narrantur, quod discplicet et quod presens ferit tractatus) quam, quoad fidem perfectam, peregrine, egroti, orphani, pauperes, et imbecilles . . . ?” 50. Ibid.: “Prohibeo cum legibus sanctis profana precepta doveri vel disci, que heretici vel gentiles dederunt.” 51. Ibid., 266: “Iustum bellum igitur contra paganorum dicta non pauca habemus.” 52. Ibid., 266: “Cur propter hoc laceror, quia non privatas sed publicas sedes et maxime Christo templa sacrata reclaudo . . . ?” 53. Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), especially chapter 4 and 141– 81. 54. Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, vol. 1, Teachers, Pupils and Schools ( Leiden: Brill, 2007), 112–16. Black offers extensive transcriptions from the legal proceedings and raises the possibility that Dominici himself was the inspiration behind the accusations. 55. As Paul Grendler notes in a discussion on the immortality of the intellective soul, in the Italian schools natural science trumped theology, and “theological issues could be ignored, because theologians were seldom there in the next classroom to present them.” Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 282; and also Grend-

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 415

ler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300 – 1600 ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 117 ff. 56. Locula Noctis, 243– 44; Mésoniat, Poetica theologia, 120 – 21. 57. Locula Noctis, 342: “Igitur nostri iuvenculi calamistrati et compti . . . solum aliqua curiositate moti, initium litterarum etiam inordinate querentes, ad illas scolas non sunt admittendi.” 58. Peter Howard, “Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 325– 69. 59. Locula Noctis, 272: “Propter hoc, auctore deo, invehitur contra predicantes simplicibus turbis poetas, philosophos, et reliquos infideles. Hec sola inter plurimas causas est digna strepitu tube bellum clangentis.” 60. Ibid., 224. See also Mésoniat, Poetica theologia, 119 and note 137, with further references and literature. 61. Locula Noctis, 271– 72: “Nonne ubique terrarum, prudentissime, felix et venerande senex, ipse vidisti per eos qui, tumentibus buccis, grandia mundane sapientie evangeliis mixta trutinant populis neminem hominum (quanquam catervatim ad eorum audientiam ruant, sola verborum pruridine delectati) ad devotionem converti.” 62. Kaspar Elm, “Mendikanten und Humanisten im Florenz des Tre- und Quattrocento. Zum Problem der Legitimierung humanistischer Studien in den Bettelorden,” in Die Humanisten in ihrer politischen und sozialen Umwelt, ed. Otto Herding and Robert Stupperich ( Boppard: Boldt, 1976), 51– 85, here 61 and nn. 45– 49. 63. Denley, “Opposition,” 113. 64. Debby, “Political Views in the Preaching of Giovanni Dominici,” 38. 65. For consideration of the ways in which the “new piety” took root across Europe, see Marek Derwich and Martial Staub, eds., Die Neue Frömmigkeit in Europa im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004), especially the essay by Daniela Rando, “Le avventure della ‘devotio’ nell’Italia del TreQuattrocento, fra storia e storiografia,” 331– 51. The final section of the essay (347– 51) discusses confraternities and other “devout” circles, with reference to the Bianchi at 347. 66. John Van Engen, “Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton ( Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 30 – 65. 67. Locula Noctis, 272: “Et ubi humiliter sacra scriptura, illis omissis aut etiam despectis, predicatur, plurimos desidentes ad concordiam reduci, dirigi contractus illicitos, male parta restitui, amplecti inimicam hactenus castitatem, parsimonia corpus domari, et plurima superborum colla obedientie sancte subici iugo?” 68. Ibid., 381.

416 /

James D. Mixson

69. Ibid., 164: “Antequam in mentibus extiterit fides fundata, non concedatur illis ethnicorum scriptura, que aut fidei adversatur in cortice aut nichil admittit quod ratione naturali non capit, nisi id fuerit demonis procuratum.” 70. Ibid., 174: “Philosophicum autem genus deorum ita est obnoxium religioni Christiane ut principalis intentio Christi fuerit per suos praedicatores illud delere. Nempe teste Salomone in libro Sapientie, Paulo id approbante in principio epistole ad Romanos, Augostino xivo De Trinitate idem demonstrante, a philosophis deorum pluralitas est orta et ydolorum cultura dampnanda. Itaque dum praesumptuosa investigatione Deum conati sunt invenire, tandem ad demones terminati, mundum ydolis impleverunt. Et nunc iterum existimatur expedire revocare phisicos, ydola suscitare, demones adorare.” 71. Ibid., 340 – 41: “In promptum est dicere quare demones, Dii vocitati, quosdam ex his a casibus preservarunt, quia scilicet errant eorum satellites et membra, in quibus loquentes deludebant genus humanum.” See also 388: “non solum pugnant philosophi, a decem alieni preceptis, sed et in ipsis demones infernales inimici.” 72. Ibid., 380: “Evidenter itaque patet eterne salutis horrendum dispendium imminere, non dico defendentibus sed etiam legentibus libros pro veritatibus non solum asserentes errores sed insuper colorantibus persuadentibusque atque sophisticis rationibus probantibus apparenter, Philosophia autem fabulosa id asserit; persuadere vero moralis conatur, sed naturalis sophistice probat. . . . Sic, sic tota philosophia, dyabolo instigante reperta, totum hominem dampnat.” 73. Ibid., 413: “Hinc libri gentilium sunt ebrii pulvinaribus, processionibus, coronis, hostiis, placationibus . . . et huiusmodi obsecrationibus infinitis, in quibus specietenus prevaluit nimium demonum cultus.” 74. Ibid., 414: “Ibi, sicut arguendo summatim fuit peretactum, fulgent numerosa prodigia arte illius producta qui operibus simulatis dei equalitatem invadit.” 75. Ibid., 382: “Opinor plane rei publice et singularibus hominibus plurimorum malorum evenire incursus propter veritatem desertam divinam et celebratas philosophorum nugas.” 76. Ibid.: “Nam cum hostis antiquus per vanitates illorum occupaverit mentes humanas, velut possessor et fortis armatus in atrio suo tutus consistens. . . . Hec enim miseriarum nostrarum est una non parva, ut qui semel sponte demoni credit, credere frequenter per deceptiones cogatur.” 77. Ibid., 415. 78. An exception is Mèsoniat, who mentions them briefly: Poetica theologia, 102– 3. 79. Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially chapter 6 and 150 – 56; Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance

Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered

\ 417

Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons. Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); and Marina Montesano,“Supra acqua et supra ad vento”: superstizioni, maleficia e incantamenta nei predicatori francescani osservanti: Italia, sec. XV (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1999). 80. Locula Noctis, 423: “Quid dicam de fatua iniquitate magorum . . . ? Nam magis sunt per deceptionem, miraculorum, auguriorum, oraculorum, somniorumque philosophiam scientes, a spiritibus malis irretiti rethe Vulcani quam veri Christiani.” 81. Ibid., 426 – 27: “Item falluntur, casui subdentes ex puntis, manu, clavo vel quovis alio instrumento, dextra levaque relictis, vel taxillis proiectis, aut nescio quibus cartulis premissis quibusdam observantiis apertis.” The text here seems corrupt. The overall point regarding illicit magical “observances,” however, remains clear enough. 82. Ibid., 427, “Dampnatur orationibus impiis, pio sermone verbotenus, Deo sed realiter demonum catervis relatis.” 83. For these narratives, see ibid., 416 – 21. 84. Ibid., 418–19. 85. For a full citation and discussion of this text, with further literature, see Bailey, Battling Demons, 33– 34. 86. Locula Noctis, 424: “Plurima vidi et fideli relatu alia cognovi non pauca, que nulla demonum arte potuerunt facta putari.” 87. Her story recounted in ibid., 427– 28. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 429: “Scio hominem nondum defunctum crebro in somnis vidisse notorum animas, purgatorii penis detentas, quarum tormenta tam proprie, tam varie, tamque horrendas describit quod, si ipse fide dingus non foret, inaudita series fidem vendicat certam.” 90. Dyan Elliott, “Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc,” American Historical Review 107 (2002), 26 – 54. See also Elliott’s Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). For the longer history, see also Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). For the intersection of reform and demonology with magic and superstition, see Michael Bailey, “The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 383– 404; and Michael Bailey, “A Late Medieval Crisis of Superstition?” Speculum 84 (2009): 631– 61. 91. Bailey, “Crisis,” 645– 46. 92. Elliott, “Seeing Double,” 38– 44, especially 39– 40. See also her booklength study, Proving Woman.

418 /

James D. Mixson

93. Bailey, “Disenchantment,” 394; and Elliott, “Seeing Double,” 39. 94. Bailey, “Disenchantment,” 394 – 95. 95. Locula Noctis, 428: “Hec enim fortassis est responsionum differentia collegenda, quia omnes per nigromantiam et eius surculos respondentes, manifeste sunt pravi et persepe nuntiant falsa.” 96. Ibid., 429– 31. The passages are built around passages drawn mostly from Augustine, Gregory, Apuleius, Cicero, and Vincent of Beauvais. 97. Ibid., 431. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid.

Sixteen

J o h n P rˇ í b r a m a n d H i s Ve r n a c u l a r Tr e a t i s e s Equipping the Laity in Battle against Hussite Radicals

marcela k. perett

In Bohemia as in England, John Wyclif ’s thought gave rise to a large corpus of writings in the vernacular (as well as in Latin) that ranged from learned translations of Eucharistic theology to simple propaganda.1 As attempts to control the spread of Wycliffite heresy intensified in England in the early fifteenth century, the Hussite reform unfolded in Bohemia and with it a debate regarding the role of Wyclif ’s writings there.2 Whereas scholars have reflected at length about the ways in which the status of the English vernacular changed as a result of its ( perceived) link with heresy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, the encounter with Wyclif and its effect on the vernacular in Bohemia remain unexplored.3 This short essay examines three vernacular treatises of John Příbram, a master at the University of Prague and an ardent critic of Wyclif, who ordinarily wrote in Latin but turned to the vernacular in a desperate attempt to combat the spread of Wyclif ’s ideas in Bohemia.4 The thorough, methodical nature of his vernacular refutations, as well as the fact that he included translations of the tractates that he considered 419

420 /

Marcela K. Perett

heretical, suggests that he used the vernacular in order to equip the laity with the theological ideas and language they needed in order to be able to recognize heresy and make their own counterarguments against it. Příbram’s vernacular works, written in quick succession between 1426 and 1430, grew out of his disagreement with Peter Payne (also called Peter English), a Wycliffite master of arts from Oxford, who had arrived in Prague in 1414 and quickly established himself in the radical branch of the reform leadership there.5 Příbram also belonged to the reform party but served as a spokesman for the reform’s conservative wing. The two masters disagreed vehemently about Wyclif, especially the role that his Eucharistic doctrine ought to play in the Hussite reform. Příbram rejected Wyclif ’s views on the mass as heretical, whereas the English master promoted them. The disagreement between Payne and Příbram was emblematic of the ongoing divisions inside the Hussite reform leadership. The question of the role that Wyclif ’s teachings ought to play in the reform in Bohemia had been discussed numerous times: the university (which served, after 1407, as the chief authority on questions of religion in the reform party) debated the question in different ways, from official quodlibeta to informal conversations, but no agreement was reached.6 By the time of Příbram’s foray into the vernacular, the Hussite leadership in Prague was deeply divided by Wyclif and the role his teaching ought to play in the Czech reform. The question of Wyclif ’s role in the Hussite reform ceased to be merely academic after the reform movement splintered into two major camps following Jan Hus’s death in Constance in July of 1415. ( The councilmen at Constance called for complete eradication of heresy in Bohemia, but putting Hus to death as a heretic only inspired greater defiance of the church’s decrees, most notably among the nobility in Bohemia.)7 As a result of this division, some theological ideas (many of them attributable to Wyclif ) found themselves suddenly in the mainstream of the more radical Hussite party. By the early 1420s, the radicals had completely broken with the reform leadership in Prague and founded their own communities in southern Bohemia. Energized by eschatological hopes and expectations, some of the apocalyptically minded laity and clerics abandoned their villages and livelihoods in anticipation of the second coming of Christ, predicted for February 1420.8 When the appointed

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 421 time came and went and the world did not, in fact, end, the devotees decided to build a commune, called Tabor, where they would live like Christ’s apostles, in simplicity and devotion. What this ideal looked like in reality proved very disturbing to the reform leadership in Prague: a rejection of all rituals not specifically mandated by the Scriptures and, most shockingly perhaps, a minimalist mass celebrated outside, using clay or wooden vessels, by priests dressed in ordinary clothes. This radical rejection of tradition was accompanied by a new kind of social and political arrangement that resembled a theocracy.9 As the most frequently celebrated Christian ritual, the mass was also the most obvious reminder of disagreement and disunity among the reformers. The shape of the mass proved to be the single most divisive issue, both between Tabor and Prague and within the Hussite leadership in Prague. The theological negotiations (discussed in more detail below) revolved around the minimalism of the ritual life at Tabor, with the question of Christ’s presence in the sacrament as the main point of contention. Příbram and many of the reformers in Prague supported the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, whereas many Taborite priests did not. Of the latter group, some defended the doctrine of real presence in accordance with Wyclif ’s definition (according to which Christ is present, figuratively and sacramentally, in the bread and wine after consecration) while others argued against Christ’s real presence in the sacrament, claiming that it was a mere symbol.10 What one believed about the sacrament also had practical implications for what, if any, veneration one offered to the consecrated host: different beliefs translated into different actions, which further divided the reformers. Without an agreement regarding the mass, unity among the reformers proved elusive. The early years of the Taborite commune showed just how divisive the question of real versus figurative presence of Christ in the sacrament could be. Around 1420, the deniers of real presence, led by Martin Húska (called Loquis) and Peter Kániš, persuaded some at Tabor to abandon the doctrine of real presence and reject any kind of veneration of the sacrament as idolatrous. With time, Loquis and his followers decided to secede from Tabor and start their own commune with its own way of celebrating mass. The Taborite leadership, however, refused to allow it to happen, with fatal consequences: in 1421, at the

422 /

Marcela K. Perett

order of Tabor’s leadership, about fifty followers of Loquis, men, women, and children, were first expelled and later burned as heretics outside of Tabor’s walls.11 Their beliefs proved harder to eradicate, however, and it is likely that all subsequent debates about Eucharistic theology were tinged with a threat of a similar fragmentation. The reform leadership in Prague had repeatedly tried to come to some theological agreement with Tabor, but with little success.12 However, the demands of war, which had by now engulfed most of Bohemia, made an agreement between the reform parties vital to the reform’s survival.13 Foreign crusaders, dispatched by the pope against the heretics in Bohemia, swarmed the land in 1420, 1422, 1423 to 1424, 1426 to 1427, and 1431, and, at every occasion, made it crucial that Prague and Tabor cooperate.14 The leaders in Prague walked a political tightrope: while they wished to be seen as cooperating with Tabor because they needed its military help against crusaders, they also wanted to limit its influence because they feared losing control of the direction of the reform. These negotiations took the form of synods and occasional public disputations, in which two delegations of theologians would argue a set of prearranged points in front of a jury of judges, usually—but not always—university-educated clerics.15 The purpose was to debate various points of theology and, if possible, arrive at a formulation that both sides could agree on. They were held in Prague and at various locations around Bohemia, such as a disputation in Konopiště in June 1423 and a synod in Klatovy in November 1424, both of which featured heated discussions about liturgical vestments (which Prague masters considered necessary and Tabor rejected) as well as the usual debates about Eucharistic theology.16 The debates, conducted and recorded in Latin, were well documented, and reports of them circulated widely among the university masters and other clerics. These debates were not confined to Latin. Příbram’s remarks suggest that Tabor used the occasion of synods and disputations to disseminate its teaching in the vernacular, circulating treatises far and wide.17 For example, Příbram reported that after the synod in Klatovy in November of 1424, the Taborite clergy sent out “many tractates in Latin and in Czech across the whole land, especially about the nature of the sacrament [arguing] that the bread remains the same after consecration as before.”18 However, the fallout of the disputation in Konopiště in 1423

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 423 aggravated Příbram even more. At that meeting, the leaders of the Prague and Taborite factions exchanged Eucharistic tractates for study and correction.19 Příbram later complained that the Taborites disseminated their version of the tractate without making the corrections suggested by the Prague masters. Příbram lamented that “Taborite priest [ Nicholas] sent out this tractate, uncorrected, without the changes and insertions recommended by the jury at the disputation, to villages and towns and disseminated it practically across the whole land.”20 “These tractates,” Příbram added, “corrupted and fomented many a simple heart with error and heresy.”21 Příbram’s frustration with the ongoing dissemination of heresy boiled over after a disputation that took place in Prague in October 1429, leading him to write in the vernacular. In the disputation, Příbram took on Peter Payne. Ostensibly the disputation addressed John Wyclif ’s theology of the Eucharist, but it was really Tabor’s understanding of the mass that was on trial.22 Peter Payne defended John Wyclif and his teachings and admitted to compiling summaries of the most salient points of Wyclif ’s doctrine and distributing them for the purpose of instructing the priests and laity at Tabor.23 Příbram objected vigorously, arguing that the articles were heretical and lamenting their toxic influence. A jury composed of eight university masters heard the arguments. The jury called a truce between the parties until June of the following year and banned everyone from revealing details about the disputation until then.24 The ban on publishing details about the disputation was supposed to reassert the boundaries of theological discussions, which were to take place in Latin and within the university. In principle, Příbram agreed with confining the discussion to university circles. But in this case, the ban squelched Příbram’s critique of Wyclif at a moment when Wyclif ’s own works, as well as the treatises his work inspired, had already been circulating in Latin and in Czech. By the early 1420s, Payne had begun disseminating summaries and indexes of Wyclif ’s works, which, according to Příbram, Taborite priests used to compose heretical tractates of their own, in the vernacular.25 Příbram found such activities, undertaken against the earlier prohibitions of councilmen appointed by the city, intolerable and complained that “heretics composed and disseminated many tractates in Czech and

424 /

Marcela K. Perett

Latin out of a number of theological articles by Wyclif and Payne, which Payne wrote and circulated in this land a few years ago.”26 It is not surprising, therefore, that Příbram reached the decision to break the ban on revealing the disputation’s details within weeks of the event.27 Instead of relying on the university to stop Payne from disseminating translations of Wyclif, he decided that he would teach the laity to recognize heresy and shun it. He turned directly to the laity in their language, explaining the arguments held by both sides to help them recognize heretical teaching and know how to correct it. He even made them into his collaborators in the struggle against heresy, begging them to help him “work against these errors,” to stop their dissemination.28 By turning to the vernacular, Příbram gave the laity an opportunity to make up their minds in favor of what he saw as orthodoxy. In a vernacular treatise entitled Confession of the Faithful Czechs (Vyznání věrných Čechů), he narrated what transpired at the disputation in 1429, who said what and in what sequence, paying particular attention to the arguments put forth by Payne and including his own refutations of them. Příbram’s goal was to show that Payne’s articles on the mass were derived from Wyclif ’s and were, therefore, heretical.29 Making the connection between Payne and Wyclif was important. Payne passed his treatises on to the priests at Tabor, and so, by showing Payne to be heretical, Příbram would make the point that Taborite understanding of the mass was also heretical.30 The translated articles of Payne and Příbram’s refutation of them brought the university-level discourse into the vernacular. Příbram first listed the heretical articles of Wyclif and then compared them to what Payne himself had written. This was an impressive feat of translation; Příbram excerpted from a Latin treatise that Payne had originally put together for the arbiters of the disputation, entitled Posicio M. Petri Anglici contra Przibram.31 Příbram arranged Payne’s articles right after Wyclif ’s, highlighting the similarities between them, all of which had to do with the nature of the consecrated host. Příbram’s discussion is focused around two very specific questions in order to counter two very specific sets of errors, both resulting from Wyclif ’s particular understanding of the mass.32 The first question deals with the manner in which Christ is present in the consecrated elements and the related issue of the kind of union that exists

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 425 between the body of Christ and the bread. The second question has to do with the location of Christ: is he to be found on the altar or in heaven, and, if both, how can he be located in more than one place at once? The two sets of questions grew out of the very particular way in which Wyclif had challenged the teaching on transubstantiation.33 According to the traditional teaching, at the moment of consecration the Eucharistic species of bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ. Their appearance, however, remains, because — as Aquinas explained using Aristotelian categories — the accidents of the bread remain, but “they cease to inhere in any substance, since they cannot continue to be related to the bread, which has substantially changed to become body.”34 This explanation of how the substance of the bread changes into the substance of Christ’s body while retaining its original appearance proved insurmountable to Wyclif. For complicated reasons that must be omitted here, Wyclif could not accept Aquinas’s teaching of what happens at consecration, especially the suggestion that one substance (Christ’s body) completely replaces another ( bread). Instead, he argued that the material bread (and its substance) remained in the sacrament and were, in fact, simultaneously present with the body of Christ. The nature of this union was something that Wyclif tried hard to define. He developed a position that fit somewhere between a substantial kind of presence and the notion of Christ’s presence as merely symbolic.35 Příbram’s Confession was not only a treatise on theology, however, but also a primer on how to distinguish orthodox believers from heretics based on their conduct in church. Do they venerate God in the sacrament? Do they kneel before it? Do they bow down to it? Do they praise and implore it as the true God? If they do not, if they fail to acknowledge that God dwells in the sacrament more reliably than anywhere else in the world, they reveal themselves to hold heretical beliefs about the sacrament. Thus, one’s behavior in the presence of the sacrament served as a marker of what one believed about it, whether one supported Tabor and its radical theology of the mass. In this way, Příbram’s questions helped the faithful determine by simple observation whether their parish had been contaminated by heresy or not. Příbram gave the laity access to theology in translation but did not count on them necessarily to be able to judge its logic. For this reason,

426 /

Marcela K. Perett

more than two thirds of the treatise is dedicated to nontheological kinds of arguments, which were supposed to endow his argument with additional, extra-theological weight. In particular, Příbram drew on the authority of prominent church leaders. He ended his report on Wyclif by stating that “these three articles have been renounced not only by Hus, but also by masters at the university in Prague, Paris, England and by the Roman church.”36 He also drew attention to a meeting eleven years back, in 1408, when “Master Jan Hus and all other Czech masters and doctors present together at the Black Rose proclaimed: ‘Let all know that we ban, prohibit, persecute and reject [ Wyclif ’s articles]—in Latin saying reprobamus, refutamus et prohibemus — and [order that] no masters, bachelors and students, of whom there are many here, should hold them or otherwise believe them publicly or secretly in their heretical or erroneous or scandalous interpretations. The penalty is being expelled from the corps of Czech masters.’ ”37 Příbram used the authority of Hus and Hussite leaders, not just the logic of the theology, to support his position. Příbram especially exploited the popularity and perceived saintliness of Jan Hus. By 1416, numerous masses celebrated Hus as a holy martyr and many others included him as a venerated patron of the Czech-speaking people. Many churches expressed their sympathies by displaying images of Hus and Jerome of Prague (also martyred at Constance) as saints and by singing masses for them.38 In his treatise, Příbram brought up Hus’s name frequently, alluding to two Latin documents, which show “to anyone who can read Latin” that Hus never agreed with Wyclif ’s teaching on the mass. “Master Jan Hus wrote his own letter, in which he disputed article number one,”39 that is, the belief that “God’s body is not bodily present in the sacrament.”40 In proving that Hus disputed Wyclif ’s articles two and three, Příbram promised that he had in his possession a certain letter as evidence that settled the matter. “When many witnesses testified against master Hus that he held or taught [the belief ] that material bread remained even after consecration, Master Hus wrote with his own hand and himself bequeathed to us, as the here remaining shows, and said several times to each of the witnesses: ‘know that you are lying [if you say that] I believe that the material bread remains.’ ”41 In the disputation, Příbram produced Hus’s letter and showed

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 427 it around, but in his report of the disputation, a mere description of the letter had to suffice.42 Příbram was not trying to turn every layman into a theologian, but rather sought ways, both theological and nontheological, to teach laity to identify heresy. His next vernacular treatise, entitled the Lives of the Taborite Priests (Život kněží táborských), followed a few months after the Confession, in early 1430, and offered additional ways to spot a heretic. The Lives of the Taborite Priests is a strange amalgam of theological explanations, polemical attacks, and translated theological excerpts, a combination that makes sense only if we understand it as Příbram’s attempt to present as many different ways for recognizing heresy as possible. This treatise in particular resembles a handbook for distinguishing heresy from orthodoxy by describing heresy’s distinctive markers, much like a handbook for recognizing wild mushrooms that summarizes their identifying characteristics, allowing one to distinguish the safe from the deadly. The language of the treatise suggests that Příbram wanted it to be accessible: it is expressive and avoids complicated formulations; its style is systematic and clear. The overall argument is straightforward as well: no one in his or her right mind should join, support, or even admire the commune at Tabor. It traces the rise of Tabor but interweaves a well-argued polemic against its leaders. “I intend,” Příbram says, “to describe their lives, how they based the beginning and the entire course of their lives in great error and heresy and unheard-of lies, and how they conceived their words and sermons from the devil, who is a liar and the father of lies.”43 In the first section, Příbram argued that the Taborite priests interpreted the Bible too literally and that they used it to justify any action or belief that suited them. He began with the question of correct exegesis, explaining that just because something is mentioned in the Bible does not mean that one ought automatically to follow it. This was a direct attack on what Tabor held most dearly: the conviction that their commune adhered to the Scriptures more closely than the Roman church, which went to the heart of its identity. The problem was, as Příbram saw it, that the laity at Tabor was taught “not to believe anything that is not literally [zjevně] and obviously [zřetedlně] in the Bible,” which is an error that “[the priests] hold themselves and preach to others.” In order

428 /

Marcela K. Perett

to illustrate (and mock) the flaws in Taborite exegesis, Příbram opened with Tabor’s most obvious error: the imminent end of the world predicted for 1420. “First we say, and it is apparent to the whole land, that those priests of Tabor [twenty-seven of whom are named], after being possessed by the devil ten years ago, started prophesying, writing and proclaiming that in the summer of 1420, the Day of Judgment would certainly come.” When the end of the world did not come, the priests reinterpreted their original claim, a decision that Příbram ridiculed: “So the deceitful seducers, in order to comfort the people, came up with a new lie, saying that a reform of all the Christian church would dawn, that all sinful and evil ones would perish and only God’s elect would remain in the world: those would flee to the mountains.” They prophesized that after the Judgment Day only five cities would be left standing and that the true faithful would congregate there in order to avoid punishment. Příbram explained that they based this prophecy on Isaiah 19:18, where the prophet spoke about five cities, but Příbram pointed out emphatically that Isaiah did so “according to a different sense [ k jinému rozumu].” Příbram did not go into greater detail in explaining why Tabor’s exegetical conclusions were not to be taken seriously, but he made it clear that it was their method of reading the Scriptures, rather than the Scriptures themselves, that was at fault. Příbram argued that Tabor’s erroneous interpretation of the Scriptures corrupted the commune’s ritual and social life, and interpreted examples of such ritual and social transgressions as evidence of heresy. In this way, he was able to avoid potentially complicated theological argumentation. Instead he pointed to a number of facts, both actual and invented, about the Taborite commune, employing them as evidence that something was seriously amiss at Tabor. First, he listed the various ways in which Tabor defied the church’s ritual prescriptions: they disgraced and despised the sacrament and the celebration of mass,44 celebrated a much reduced version of the mass, only saying pater noster and the words from the reading and calling that a mass.45 He then transitioned to discuss Tabor’s social perversion. He alleged that the Taborites married godfathers to godmothers,46 monks to nuns, and even disrespected marital consent, claiming that “when a maiden promised marriage without her mother’s or father’s knowledge, [the leaders] broke that marriage

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 429 and married her to another.”47 However, the main symptom of Tabor’s heresy was, according to Příbram, the commune’s violence. He described numerous instances of it, drawing an explicit link between ritual error and perverse actions. He described priests being killed while celebrating mass at the altar48 and monks being burned like heathens,49 arguing that, on account of their heresy, the Taborites killed, burned, and exterminated many priests.50 The treatise gave clear examples of the observable actions that resulted from the heretical theology at Tabor. Příbram described them as symptoms of heresy that anyone could recognize without having to make a judgment about theological matters. But Příbram did not limit himself to describing the symptoms of heresy. The second section of the treatise featured excerpts from actual treatises written by contemporary heretics, translated so that the laity could recognize heresy and its purveyors. Almost all of the excerpts pertain to the mass, the question most frequently discussed by Příbram. Accordingly, the second half of the treatise catalogues various heretics, including John Wyclif and other prominent priests at Tabor, and their views on the mass and the sacrament. By identifying the authors of heresy, many of them still living, Příbram warned the laity not only against specific doctrines but also against specific people. Příbram’s decision to let the heretics speak for themselves via the translated excerpts is unusual but perfectly suited to his goal. While allowing his opponents to condemn themselves from their own mouths, it also shows the relationship between Wyclif ’s and Taborite doctrine on the mass, cementing Příbram’s claim that Wyclif was the source of all this heresy and ritual perversion, which he had long claimed and which the reform leadership in Prague had been slow to acknowledge. Příbram wrote in the vernacular in order to help stay the dissemination of Wyclif ’s ideas, using a number of different strategies to teach the laity to recognize heresy. He translated passages from tractates by heretics, explained Wyclif ’s doctrines and showed how they related to what priests at Tabor preached and wrote, circulated explanations of orthodox doctrine, and highlighted extra-theological evidence, such as ritual and social corruption, to prove that Tabor’s beliefs were indeed heretical. Příbram’s three vernacular treatises are a small but telling example of the ways in which the vernacular was being employed to combat heresy in

430 /

Marcela K. Perett

Bohemia. The vernacular discourse did not parallel the Latin learned discourse but rather augmented it, offering information tailored specifically to the problem at hand and describing symptoms of heresy that the laity could easily identify even in the absence of proper theological training. Unlike in England at this time, the vernacular language was not seen as suspect or tinged with heresy but instead was used as a valid medium for combatting heretical beliefs. And although efforts were made to limit learned disputation to learned, Latinate circles, as in the ban on disseminating Prague’s disputation details in 1429 discussed above, such attempts proved ineffective and, more importantly, did not undermine the status of the vernacular discourse as a whole. Quite the opposite. Příbram’s example suggests that in Bohemia in the early fifteenth century, Wyclif ’s heresy and the attempts to combat it elevated the status of the vernacular language, making it an acceptable medium for theological discourse not only to laity, but also to clerics and university masters.

Notes 1. Kantik Ghosh, “Wyclif, Arundel, and the Long Fifteenth Century,” in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed, Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 545– 62. 2. See, for example, František Šmahel, “Wyclif ’s Fortunes in Hussite Bohemia,” in The Charles University in the Middle Ages, ed. František Šmahel (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 467– 89; Vilém Herold, “Zum Prager Philosophischen Wyclifismus,” in Häresie und Vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. František Šmahel and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (München: Oldenbourg, 1998), 133– 46; and František Šmahel, Die Revolution, 3 vols. (Hannover: Hahn, 2002), 2:788– 832. On LollardHussite exchange more generally, see Michael Van Dussen, From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 3. On the links between the English vernacular and heresy, see Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350 –1600 ( London: Hambledon Press, 1993); and Anne Hudson, “Lollardy, the English Heresy?” Studies in Church History 18 (1982): 261– 83. On the concept of vernacular theology, see Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822– 64, especially 823n4. Response in

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 431 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), appendix A, 397– 401. Watson’s article gave rise to a massive amount of scholarship, augmenting, reasserting, critiquing, or nuancing his thesis. See, for example, R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, D. Robertson, and N. Warren, eds., The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature ( New York: Palgrave, 2002); and Gillespie, After Arundel. For a useful bibliography, see Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds., The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 257. 4. F. M. Bartoš, Literární Činnost M. Jana Rokycana, M. Jana Příbrama, M. Petra Payne ( Prague: Nakl. Česke akademie věd a uměni, 1928). 5. Van Dussen, From England to Bohemia, 70 – 75; William Robert Cook, “Peter Payne: Theologian and Diplomat of the Hussite Revolution,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1971; J. V. Polišenský, ed., Addresses and Essays in Commemoration of the Life and Works of the English Hussite Peter-Payne-Engliš 1456– 1956 ( Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1957); F. M. Bartoš, M. Petr Payne Diplomat Husitské Revoluce ( Prague: Kalich, 1956); Bartoš, Literární Činnost. 6. Howard Kaminsky, “The University of Prague in the Hussite Revolution: The Role of the Masters,” in Universities in Politics: Case Studies from the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. John Baldwin and Richard Goldthwaite (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 79–106, 82; Howard Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 239. 7. After Hus’s death, fifty-eight Hussite barons and nobles issued a joint statement officially protesting the council’s decision to execute Hus and were, in turn, excommunicated by the council. Text in František Palacký, Documenta Mag. Joannis Hus vitam, doctrinam, causam in Constantiensi Concilio actam et controversias de religione in Bohemia annis 1403–1418 motas illustrantia (Prague: Tempsky, 1869), 580 – 84; see also Václav Novotný, Hus v Kostnici a česká slechta ( Prague: Nákladem Společnosti přátel starožitností českých v Praze, 1915). 8. Howard Kaminsky, “Hussite Radicalism and the Origins of Tabor, 1415–1418,” Medievalia et Humanistica 10 (1956): 102– 30. 9. Howard Kaminsky, “The Religion of Hussite Tabor,” in The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture, ed. M. Reichcígl ( The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 210 – 23; Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 435– 60; František Hoffman, “K Počátkům Tábora,” Československý Časopis Historický 15 (1967): 103– 20. 10. On the doctrinal disunity within Tabor’s own ranks, see Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 460 – 81. For discussion of different theological formulations, see William R. Cook, “John Wyclif and Hussite Theology, 1415–1436,” Church History 42 (1973): 335– 49, 341– 42. For a brief summary, see Thomas Fudge, “Hussite Theology and the Law of God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Reformation

432 /

Marcela K. Perett

Theology, ed. David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 22– 27, 24. When speaking about “conservation,” Fudge undoubtedly means “consecration.” 11. The followers were called “Picardi” ( Pikarts), but their origin is unclear. Rudolf Holinka, “Počátky Táborského Pikartství,” Bratislava 6 (1932): 187– 95; F. M. Bartoš, “Konec Táborských Pikartů,” Jihočeský Sborník Historický 41 (1972): 41– 44; Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 353– 60 and 430. 12. The disputations and the eventual slide into hostility and noncommunication are well documented in Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 460 – 94; František Šmahel, Die Hussitische Revolution, vol. 2, 1368– 1408, includes a brief discussion of nationalism implicit in Příbram’s attacks on Peter Payne. See also F. M. Bartoš, The Hussite Revolution, 1424–1437 ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 13. The leadership in Prague wished to unite the reformers with their (relatively moderate) program of reform, which consisted in the Four Articles: utraquism (communion in both kinds), free preaching, punishment of public sins, and clerical poverty. Text in Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 369. See also Mathilde Urlirz, “Die Genesis der Vier Prager Artikel,” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akdemie der Wissenschaften in Wien 175 (1914): 1– 98; F. M. Bartoš, “Do Čtyř Pražských Artikulí,” Sborník Příspěvků k Dějinám Hlavního Města Prahy 5 (1932): 481– 591. 14. For political and military events, see Frederick Heymann, John Žižka and the Hussite Revolution ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955); and Bartoš, Hussite Revolution. 15. For example, the disputation at Konopiště was presided over by lay arbiters. Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 467; Blanka Zilynská, Husitské Synody v Čechách 1418–1440 ( Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1985), 48– 49. 16. For a complete list of Hussite synods and disputations, see Zilynská, Husitské Synody, 5, 24 ( Klatovy) and 26 – 27 ( Konopiště); Zilynská also describes each synod and disputation in detail and lists available primary sources. See also Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 500 –16. On university disputations, see Michal Svatoš, “Kališnická Univerzita (1419–1556),” in Dějiny Univerzity Karlovy, vol. 1, ed. Michal Svatoš, 1347/48–1622 ( Prague: Karolinum, 1995), 205–17, 207. 17. Little of Tabor’s vernacular writing remains extant, as much of that literature disappeared with the demise of Tabor. See Amedeo Molnár, “O Táborském Písemnictví,” Husitský Tábor 2 (1979): 17– 31. What remains are Peter Payne’s summaries of Wyclif ’s tractates, which, according to Cook, must have circulated widely. Cook, “John Wyclif,” 340. 18. “latině i česky po zemi lidu rozepsali a zvláště o tělu božiem tatkto jsú vydali, že v té svátosti po posvěcení chléb chlebem zuostává týmž jako před posvěcením.” Jaroslav Boubín, ed., Jan z Příbramě, Život Kněží Táborských ( Příbram: Státní Okresní Archiv et al., 2000), 82. Also, see F. M. Bartoš, “Kla-

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 433 tovská Synoda Táborských Kněží z 11. Listopadu 1424,” Jihočeský Sborník Historický 8 (1935): 4 –10, which includes the text of the Latin and Czech reports that had circulated across the realm. 19. Příbram (for the Hussite faction in Prague) and Nicholas of Pelhřimov (for Tabor); see Zilynská, Husitské Synody, 50 – 51. 20. “A aj, přes to přese všecko týž kněz Mikuláš i s jinými kněžími brzo potom ten jsú traktát neopravený bez těch přídavkuov s těmito bludnými kusy svrchu pověděnými po obciech a městech rozepsali a téměř po vší zemi jej rozsieli.” Boubín, Jan z Příbramě, Život, 79. 21. “A tiem jsú přemnohá srdce sprostná bludy a kacieřstvím naprznili a nakvasili.” Boubín, Jan z Příbramě, Život, 79. 22. For Taborite understanding of the mass, see Amedeo Molnár and Romolo Cegna, eds., Confessio Taboritarum ( Rome: Istituto Palazzo Borromini, 1983). Taborite eucharistic tractates edited in Jan Sedlák, Táborské Traktáty Eucharistické ( Brno: Nákl. Papežské Knihtisk. Benedktinu Rajhradských, 1918). 23. It is not clear whether Payne wrote his registers and summaries in Latin or in Czech; of the estimated total of 35,000 entries, only several registers and one summary survived, and those appear to be in Latin. For details about the extant manuscripts, see Cook, “John Wyclif,” 339– 40; Bartoš, Literární Činnost; Peter Payne’s treatises and polemics from this time period on 101– 3, nos. 9–11, Příbram’s on 73– 74, nos. 12–14. For analysis of the disputation, see Zilynská, Husitské Synody, 63– 68. 24. Jaroslav Boubín and Alena Míšková, eds., “Spis M. Jana Příbrama “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” Folia Historica Bohemica 5 (1983): 239– 83, 247; Zilynská, Husitské Synody, 67. 25. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 271; Cook, “John Wyclif,” 339– 40. 26. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 273. 27. The vernacular portion edited in Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 262– 83. The Latin treatise, printed in Johannis Cochleus, Historiae Hussitarum Libri Duodecim ( Mainz: ex officina Francisci Behem, 1549), 503– 47, is more extensive. 28. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 273. 29. This stance fits well with Příbram’s overall crusade against Wyclif and his influence in Bohemia, evident from the long history of their interactions. Cook, “John Wyclif,” 336 – 44; also in Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 246, who follow Cook’s interpretation. 30. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 269, 271; the transmission of Wyclif by Payne discussed in Cook, “John Wyclif,” 338– 40. 31. Cook, “John Wyclif,” 343. 32. Recent literature on Wyclif includes Stephen Lahey, John Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ian Levy, A Companion to John Wyclif

434 /

Marcela K. Perett

( Leiden: Brill, 2006); and Anne Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings ( Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). See also William R. Cook, “John Wyclif and Hussite Theology, 1415–1436,” Church History 42 (1973), 35– 49. 33. For more detail, see Lahey, John Wyclif, chapter 3 (“Denying Transubstantiation”), 102– 33; and J. Patrick Hornbeck, What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 70 –101, where he summarizes Wyclif ’s Confessio. For an English summary of Wyclif ’s De Eucharistia, see David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), chapter 3. 34. Lahey, John Wyclif, 107. 35. In Wyclif ’s view, “the union between the bread and body finds its most appropriate parallel in the doctrine of the incarnation; just as two natures are there joined in a single person, so also through the words of institution are the substances of Christ’s body and bread present in the consecrated host.” Hornbeck, What Is a Lollard?, 75. 36. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 264. 37. “mistr Jan Hus se všemi jinými mistry i doktory českými všichni [za jednoho] člověka svoliti sou se a všickni z plné rady U černé ruože [vypově] deli jsou společně bez odpory [všeliké] a řkouce: Bu všem známo, [že my] tyto artikule Viklefovy: . . . všem mistruom, bakalářům i studentům, jichž tu stálo množství, zapovídáme, tupíme, a potupujeme, latině řkouc reprobamus, refutamus et prohibemus, aby jich žádný nedržel ani vedl zjvně ani tejně ve smyslech jich kacířských nebo bludných nebo pohoršlivých, a to pod pokutou touto, to jest pod vypověděním z českého zboru.” Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 263. For details about the 1408 condemnation of Wyclif, see Šmahel, Hussitische Revolution, 2:814 –16. 38. “In templis dei pro beatis depingunt ( Husa a Jeronyma), in praedicationibus eos sanctos fore astru, in officiis divinis suffragiis honorant, missas ut pro martiribus canunt.” Palacký, Documenta, 649. 39. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 265. 40. Ibid., 263. 41. “Item proti druhému a třetímu kusu Viklefu svrchu psanému dovodil jest mistr Příbram, že když jsou mnozí svědkové svědčili na mistral Husi, že by on držal nebo učil, že po požehnání chléb hmotný zůstával, napsal jest mistr Hus svou vlastní rukou a nám zde ostavil, jakž to písmo ještě zde mají, a řka několikrát každému svědku: lžeš; rozuměj: bych to držel, že by tu chléb hmotný zuostav.” Ibid., 265. 42. “aby po mně nic jiného nepřipisovali.” After dealing with the mass, he continues to describe other articles of belief, such as secular property of priests, tithing, indulgences, and war. Ibid., 265.

John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 435 43. “mieníme tuto jich život od počátku popsati, kterak jsú na bludích velikých a na nevěrách a lžech neslýchaných své počátky i běhy založili, a tak od ábla, jenž je lhář a otec lži, své běhy, řeči I kázanie počeli.” Příbram, Life of the Taborite Priests, in Boubín, Jan z Příbramě, Život, 39. 44. “Item o poslední svátosti najvětčí, to je o těle božím, i o jejiem řádu slavném takto sú zle smyslili.” Ibid., 64. 45. “Najprv že jsú řá veškeren cierkev svaté v slúžení a obětování té drahé svátosti potupili a opovrhli. A toliko řkúce páteř a slova ze čtenie, tak jsú své mše slúžili.” Ibid.,, 64. 46. “Item, ze při oddávání kmotrovstvie téměř za nic sú nevážili, ale kmotry s kmotrami sú oddávány.” Ibid., 59. 47. “Item jiný neřád vedli i ještě vedúm že když dievka bez otcovy a mateřiny vuole slíbí pravé manželství pacholkum tehdy to pravé a celé manželstvie sú roztrhali a ji jinému a jeho s jinú oddávali.” Ibid., 58– 59. 48. “Item některé jsú u oltářuov stojíce a mši svatú slúžíce mordovali.” Ibid., 60. 49. “Item že jsú i kněžie zákonné, to je mníšky, zlé i dobré jako pohany pálili, mordovali i hubili.” Ibid., 61. 50. “Item že z těch nevěr i jiných kněžstva jsú veliké množstvie zmordovali, spálili i zhubili.” Ibid., 60.

Seventeen

H e a r s a y, B e l i e f, a n d D o u b t The Arrival of Antichrist in Fifteenth-Century Italy

daniel hobbins

Textbooks may continue to describe the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a period of crisis, but specialists have been searching for a new paradigm for more than a generation. And yet, what label can do justice to such a complex period? John Van Engen appreciated its complexity as clearly as anyone when he argued that the period after 1370 represents a new and dynamic stage in the development of the medieval Church, a period of “multiple options.” He described a confluence of energies breaking out across Europe “independently and nearly simultaneously,” visible in figures such as John Wyclif, Geert Grote, the Prague reformers, Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, and Julian of Norwich. Rather than “pre-reformers,” we should imagine them as lightning rods for latent energies. In a dizzying tableau, we watch a cast of characters march across the stage of history: Observant monks purging their own monasteries, humanists attacking the schools, women inspiring new movements, university masters turning from scholastic niceties to the wider world. We see startling novelties: new saints, new devotions, new media, and ambitious new councils bending the law to their will. Across the face of Europe we see parish communities developed far beyond their twelfth-century 436

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 437 counterparts, laypeople appropriating not merely the practices of professional religious but the very Passion of Christ, the Church’s “central spiritual treasure,” even as churchmen appropriated more of the world. Above all, we see a range of options, extending even to the most basic of the Church’s prescribed practices.1 Energy, dynamism, novelty, possibility: we are a long way here from the “autumn” of the Middle Ages. Anyone who works in this period will at once recognize features of the landscape that Van Engen has sketched, though, like a skilled cartographer, he has also balanced granular detail with broad strokes, connecting the particular to the general. Yet, to suggest that a period is one of multiple options is at the same time to concede, perhaps, that we do not fully understand it, that its patterns still elude us at some basic level. It is an honest label that captures something essential about the period, even as it seems to raise new questions. The problem, at least in part, is not the limitation of our evidence but its extravagant surplus. Anyone who works much with manuscripts knows of the abundance of fifteenth-century copies in comparison with earlier centuries. This abundance extends not only to copying, but also to new literary production. Major new genres, such as the plague tract or legal consilium, arose after 1350 and remain to be untangled. We have yet to comprehend the scale of late medieval devotional literature, let alone read it all. Our understanding of the late medieval university is fragmentary, often limited to stale generalizations. The late medieval papacy has never been studied with the same diligence that scholars have shown in their studies of early and high medieval popes. Is it any wonder that, for all we have learned, our textbooks still rely on the old narrative of crisis and decline, or that Huizinga’s metaphor of an autumnal waning, of a culture past its prime, endures?2 Even in fields that have drawn much attention, such as late medieval prophecy and apocalypticism, the complexity of the evidence continues to surprise us. The text that I wish to investigate here illustrates the challenge. On the one hand, it tells the remarkable story of a wandering hermit who apparently wanted people to believe that he was a devil, perhaps even Antichrist. Sometime around the Council of Constance, he visits a group of hermits on a mountainside near Lucca and dazzles them with eloquence and marvels, but also unsettles them with his heresies, and finally departs, leaving them baffled. “If he and those like him are the

438 /

Daniel Hobbins

members of Antichrist,” the text concludes, “I leave to [those with] deeper judgment.” The story offers suspense and entertainment—relatively rare commodities in medieval stories. It presents us today with a new kind of evidence: not how Antichrist was supposed to appear, as we see in the foundational texts of Antichrist doctrine such as Pseudo-Methodius or the Tiburtine Oracle; in illuminated Apocalypses; in surviving mosaics, stained glass, and tapestries; in the prophecies studied by Robert Lerner; or in the vitae of Antichrist in the early block books, but rather how one individual went about playing the role of Antichrist.3 We see him performing strange but homely miracles, uncovering secrets, speaking in tongues, uttering incantations, terrifying but also amusing those he encountered. We can even make out the likeness of a personality, a charismatic holy man, but also a charlatan, perhaps a trickster. On the other hand, for all its entertainment value, the text that tells us all of this defies easy classification and challenges our powers of interpretation. Its analysis requires not just the technical skills of the medievalist, including close study of the manuscripts, but also the creativity of the historian to bring it to life. These in fact are skills that John Van Engen has put on display in his own scholarship: exploring the archives, reading texts sensitively, identifying larger themes, and refusing to force the evidence into received historiographical categories. This, or something like it, is what this text requires and what I shall attempt here. Entirely unstudied, the text survives in two mid-fifteenth-century manuscripts and is about four folios long in each one. Its author is anonymous. Below, I propose a date for the original composition of around 1425. It stands as a reflection of the world of northern Italy from which it emerged at that time: rumors of the birth of Antichrist, obsession with the last times, distrust of popes and spiritual leaders, and a landscape populated by charismatic figures eager to rescue their followers from the impending cataclysm. In this way, it conforms to what we know about this time and place and provides further evidence of a general preoccupation in the early fifteenth century with the arrival of Antichrist. But the text appears even more valuable for the ways in which it defies our expectations. To state the challenge in the simplest terms: what is this text? Medievalists depend heavily on the clearly definable genres in which medieval texts have reached us. The genre helps us to frame and

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 439 grasp a work, to understand not only its literary structure but also its material form and audience. So what do we do with a text that belongs to no recognizable genre? At its core, the present text is a relation passed from one person to the next until someone put it into writing. Medieval authors, especially clerical authors, typically intended their stories to deliver a moral lesson. The author of the present text could have taken this path: he might have shaped his narrative into a sermon, a prophecy, or an exemplum. But, as we shall see, he allowed it to remain a story drawn from someone’s personal experience about an event that seemed to portend the last times. Rather than stripping away precise references to people or places, as we find in the exempla literature, he filled his story with local detail, investing it with “facts” as though anxious to authenticate it.4 Rather than teach a moral, he told a story that seemed to presage the arrival of Antichrist with no real certainty that it did so. Ironically, the historical value of this text lies in this basic uncertainty. Thus the challenge of this text, its refusal to conform to our expectations, is really a clue telling us that at least for this author, the traditional storytelling genres were inadequate. Our classification system for medieval texts, embodied since 1972 in the Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental, while essential for imposing some organization onto the vast expanses of medieval literature, should not obscure for us its fabulous complexity far beyond our current taxonomy, particularly for the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A text such as this affords the opportunity to ponder a more fundamental question: what is the meaning of anomalous texts, those that do not fit our categories? What can they tell us that more recognizable texts cannot? The author of our text overcame all of the prejudices drawing him to the traditional storytelling genres, presumably because they failed to meet his needs in this particular case. Whereas the traditional genres insisted upon a clear moral, our author needed a vehicle for communicating doubt and uncertainty. The arrival of Antichrist had been predicted for centuries, even since the early days of Christianity, but rarely was there more speculation over his arrival than in early fifteenth-century Italy. By its very nature, such speculation invited hearsay. Hearsay must have generated not only belief, buttressed by “facts,” but doubt as well. That, essentially, is what this story provides: a glimpse into a lost world of storytelling about the coming of Antichrist,

440 /

Daniel Hobbins

in which rumor, hearsay, belief, and doubt compete for the upper hand. Most of this storytelling never found its way into writing. The most surprising thing about our text is the happy fact of its existence, that it passed from the oral to the written. The narrative structure of the story is more sophisticated than it first appears. To communicate this complex mixture of hearsay and belief and “fact” and doubt, the author arrived at a formula that resembles more than anything the conventions of a modern ghost story. Of course, the literary ghost story as we know it is a modern form, forged out of seventeenthcentury English collections of supernatural incidents, commercialized in the late eighteenth century to meet the demands of a growing reading public, crystallized into a distinct genre in the nineteenth century, and remaining popular to the present day.5 In that sense, no medieval text— including this one—can be called a literary ghost story.6 But the likeness of this tale to a modern ghost story, though not perfect, is striking and worth further consideration. Attempting to define their subject, the editors of a collection of modern ghost stories proposed that a ghost story should include the returning dead among its cast of characters; that it should feature a “dramatic interaction between the living and the dead,” usually with the intent to frighten or unsettle the reader; that it should display “clear literary quality”; and that it should be fairly short.7 The central character in our story, whose name is Johannes, does claim to have died and returned from hell, though he is no phantom; in fact, he resides with a hermit named Francis for an entire week. He possesses a physical “weight,” taking walks, attending confession (while insisting that he had nothing to confess), eating meals, and (one is free to assume) sleeping. He interacts with Francis throughout the tale, and this interaction leads to some disturbing scenes. But the unsettling nature of the story arises not from a ghastly or menacing presence, but from Johannes’s likeness to Antichrist and his shocking miracles. Where a modern ghost story would introduce a phantom, our text foreshadows the end of the world. That, I suppose, is what the medieval reader found thrilling in such a text. The author also has some skill in narration. He sets the story at a hermitage in the wooded hills outside Lucca. The dialogue occurs as a story within a story, with hair-raising scenes and shocking claims. The visitor, we are told at first, “called himself Johannes”— as though his

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 441 true identity remains uncertain. The story builds to a climax at midnight on the last day of Johannes’s visit, with the invocation of Lucifer and Francis frightened out of his mind. The scribe of the later of two manuscripts, searching for a title (which the earlier manuscript lacks), landed upon “Historia terribilis,” or “frightening story.” This is a form of storytelling, a kind of medieval ghost story that might have satisfied the general craving to know what Antichrist would be like, how he might behave, what he might do. Beyond these broad structural similarities between our text and the ghost story, we could point to similar narrative strategies or tropes of the genre. Ghost stories frequently insist upon the reality of the event they describe.8 The present tale vouches for its own authenticity by appealing to the unimpeachable witness of Francis, who “speaks only rarely but truly,” while at the same time leaving to the reader to decide what to make of it all. That too is a time-honored strategy of the ghost story: “Here are the facts, what do you do with them?”9 A ghost story often presents itself as a “true relation,” the product of a chain of information referring back to the experience of someone else in the recent past.10 Medieval storytellers knew this strategy well. Speaking of medieval tales of ghosts, Jean-Claude Schmitt observed that “the person who wrote down the tale never claimed to be the direct beneficiary of the apparition.”11 In the case of our text, the story is reported inside a conversation that is described by a third-person narrator, who may or may not have been the author of the text. The point here is not to claim that the author of our text was somehow involved in the “invention” of the literary ghost story or to push back its history by several centuries. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the ghost story is really a definable genre for the medieval period (despite the title of a recent anthology).12 Rather, I propose that the author worked out for himself a way of telling the story that fit his purpose at that time and place. What he left us is an anomaly, what we might call a “rumor of Antichrist” tale that belongs unmistakably to early fifteenth-century Italy but also anticipates in surprising ways the structure and narrative strategies of our modern ghost stories. These strategies allowed him to tell a story whose truth claims he could not himself verify and also satisfied the great appetite for news about the arrival of Antichrist. We see rumor

442 /

Daniel Hobbins

turning into “fact” in the form of an authenticated story. And this story draws much of its power from its claim to be an authentic narrative of a mysterious and frightening encounter at a time of crisis in the Church. Throughout the remainder of this article, I develop this argument through a consideration of the story’s basic architecture, the layers reflecting its movement from speech to writing; through an examination of the factual details embedded in it, which together give the story a certain “facticity”; through a consideration of the historical context for this story, the time and place of its construction; and finally through an analysis of the central characters, Francis and Johannes. A complete description of the manuscripts is given at the end of this chapter, and a critical edition of the text follows in an appendix. We turn first to the story itself, a gem of medieval storytelling and, happily, one brief enough to be included in its entirety in English translation.

The Story In the earlier of our two manuscripts, the story begins abruptly and without title, following a Latin verse abbreviation of Innocent III’s De miseria hominis. It is followed by a fairly popular account of the loss and miraculous rediscovery of the Moralia of Pope Gregory I. The text is written in the same hand as the rest of the manuscript, in a clear Gothic textualis: In the mountains of Tuscany, about five miles from the city of Lucca, there lies a solitary, wooded place called Petraplana, where many hermits dwell with great austerity of soul and full of good cheer. Among them, one named Francis shines forth, especially renowned and slender, and by general consent glittering beyond peer in his many virtues, and completely matchless in his abstinence. So mighty is the rigor of his abstinence that one can hardly believe it in our times. For sometimes he abstains for six, seven, or even twelve days, tasting nothing, food or drink. But what is worthy of praise and remembrance is this: he asserts that he is neither anxious nor tormented with any care or vexation on this account. Rather, if he wishes, he can abstain for even longer. And this Francis is now so renowned for his

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 443 maturity and bears such simplicity of soul with the wisdom of a serpent,13 that he speaks only rarely but truly. Accordingly, he was earnestly entreated many times in the city of Rome by the distinguished and reverend father in Christ, the noble L., bishop of Mallorca,14 to reveal to him whether he or any of his hermit companions believed that the Son of Perdition, who would raise himself above everything that is called or that is worshipped as God, was already born. He answered that he knew nothing for certain, nor did he believe that any of the hermits have any certainty on the matter. “Still,” he said, “it is true that sometimes when we come together and talk about various things, when the subject comes up — that is, whether they believe that Antichrist has been born—they all without exception believe that he has.” “Look,” the bishop added, “here’s why I’m asking you hermits who live there rather than others. I once heard a certain reverend religious of the Order of Preachers, called Master Vincent, who was preaching at the time in the kingdom of Aragon.15 And he said that when he was preaching in Lombardy, a certain man clad in white garments—a hermit’s habit — came to him. And he declared that he dwelled in the mountains around Lucca, and insisted with certainty that Antichrist had already been born into the world. Do you not know this hermit?” Francis answered: “I have not known him, nor is there anyone in our mountains who dresses in that way. But as I said we hold this as a true opinion that he has already been born, though none of us affirm this with absolute certainty. Nonetheless, it is true that at the time of the Council of Constance, when I was in my cell in Petraplana, a certain man calling himself Johannes came to me unexpectedly in a poor and mean habit, carrying neither money, purse, nor satchel.16 Upon his arrival, he showed rather too much pleasure in jesting with me. “And he said: ‘Ah Francis, I’ve long desired to see you!’ “And I made a similar greeting upon his arrival. And when I was silent, he began to fashion such extraordinary conversation, so high, holy, and deep, that it transformed us all, filling us with no small wonder and astonishment.

444 /

Daniel Hobbins

“And after he had resided with us for two days, and we with him, he feigned such great holiness, and uttered daily such learned and devout words of holy conversation and high perfection, that you would scarcely believe someone who reported such things. To be sure, he never stopped mixing those good, sweet words with the bitterness of error and many heresies. What next? When we were all saying confession together in Mass or outside of Mass, acknowledging that we had sinned against God and had offended his saints and holding ourselves blameworthy, he alone refused to say this. “And when I reproached him for this, he answered with dignified yet rash presumption: ‘I cannot lie. And if I say that I’m a sinner or that I have any fault, I would be lying since I am entirely without sin.’ “Then I replied: ‘How dare you say that you have no sin, when the blessed evangelist John in his canonical text proclaims, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us”?’17 “ ‘These things,’ he answered, ‘were spoken for you, not for me, who am free from all sin.’ “And this filled me with no small wonder. For when I heard him utter these words, as my conscience is witness, it seemed to me that I had been translated into another dimension, as his lovely and fluent eloquence lingered in my ears. “And then, as we were talking together and had both left the cell through a secluded spot in the mountains, a large herd of cattle came into our path. Suddenly, he commanded them to stop and to dare go no further. A strange thing happened next: for at his command, those animals — wild by nature — stood gentle and motionless, so that one might have supposed them to be stones instead of animals, and one could easily have touched their heads and horns, as Johannes himself fearlessly bade me do, though I was unwilling and dared not attempt it. “And when they had stood so for a while, he said to me: ‘Do you wish these cattle to depart?’ “ ‘I do wish it,’ I replied. “Then more wonders: for as soon as he made the sign of the cross and bid them leave, the cattle, as if loosened from chains, left in the swiftest haste.

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 445 “Afterward, when we turned toward the cell from which we had wandered some three miles in our conversation, he told me many things, even (as it seemed) all the inner and hidden secrets of my life. At this I marveled greatly and beyond measure, not without reason, and was utterly astonished. And both going and returning he never failed to sow his words with errors against the faith. “At last, after we had returned and entered the cell, I implored him by Him who lives forever and ever and by his most blessed Mother and by all the saints to tell me in truth who he was. “ ‘I am a Briton by nationality,’ he said. ‘I once was dead and damned in hell, but from hell’s fires I took on the soul that gives life to this body which you see me bear. Soon I shall judge all the world. And at last I shall save the demons.’ “Hearing this I laughed, supposing it to be idle, empty chatter. But upon further consideration, I also refuted these errors. “Then one day, as we were walking together outside the cell, he gazed directly into the sun’s rays with his eyes so wide open that he did not close them in the slightest by reason of that gaze nor divert them to either side, even though the sun, having now banished the haze, was burning its brightest. His face aglow like fire, he began to cry out, bellowing three times as if at the top of his lungs: ‘Justice without mercy!’ “And as he condemned the rulers of God’s Church, naming the pope and cardinals or other prelates or masters in theology, his face became enkindled, and as a raving, roaring lion or a ringing trumpet, he said: ‘O hypocrites! Soon he shall come who will subdue you! Your destruction is at hand!’ And he uttered many similar words. “And he spoke in tongues, saying: ‘I am still unknown to the world. But after I obtain the tongues of all dialects, then shall I be revealed. And I say to you, Francis, within five years you will see me in Rome in the see of Peter the apostle. For with twelve allies whom I shall elect, I shall come to Rome humbly, seated upon a donkey. And then I shall be chosen pope if I have not already been chosen at Constance. And you will see me sitting in the apostolic see of Peter.’ “And I rightly supposed that all of these things and the others that he recounted above, about the soul taken from the fires of hell

446 /

Daniel Hobbins

and so on, were tricks and jokes. Yet after pondering them, especially my own secrets, I was and I remain full of wonder and troubled in spirit. “What shall I tell you next? After he had stayed with us for six days, late on that sixth day, the two of us were alone in the cell. As he was eating at table and drinking from the wine in the cup, which he had mixed with salt, he invoked the virtues of heaven and the powers of hell one by one, and at their individual names he made the sign of the cross over the cup, saying: ‘If there is any sin in me, come and take me to hell.’ He continued doing this until nearly midnight. “But after he had invoked many demons by name, at last with a great cry he invoked Lucifer over the cup without making the sign of the cross, but saying: ‘If there is any sin in me, come and take me with you to hell!’ “Suddenly, as he pronounced the words, his face was horribly transformed into the most extraordinary semblance. At this, I was more terrified and frightened than I can say, and I dared not look him in the face or remain with him even for a moment, but left him at the table, retreated to the church of the hermitage, and waited there until morning. “Early the next day, when he said that he wished to depart, I prepared the table so that he might find strength for the labors to come. As he was eating and drinking I implored him to tell me the truth at least upon his departure. And I asked him: ‘Who are you?’ “I had scarcely spoken the words when his face began to alter, and he grew utterly terrified and speechless, and stopped eating. After a short pause, he became enraged, and he growled: ‘I am Beelzebub.’ “A moment later he arose from the table and told me many things in admonition. But since they seem to flatter myself, I have no care to express them. But at last he said to me: ‘Francis, you hold to the good life. Persevere in it, and take great care not to depart from it.’ “And so, bidding farewell, he departed. If he and those like him are the members and disciples of Antichrist, I leave to [those with] deeper judgment.”

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 447 Construction The story in its present form must have passed through various stages that are now difficult to reconstruct. It may help to establish a few basic facts from the manuscripts themselves. (I have reserved a more complete description of the manuscripts for the appendix below.) The text survives in two copies: Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, Hs. 688, copied in 1451 probably at Melk, and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 2797, copied in 1463 at the Cistercian abbey of Aldersbach, about two hundred kilometers from Melk in Lower Austria. Comparison shows that the Melk copy appears closer to the original. The Munich copy also contains a titulus that is absent from Melk: “Sequitur quedam terribilis historia congesta tempore Concilii Constantiensis de Antichristo et quodam dyabolo incarnato vel humanato nomine Beelzebub” (Here follows a certain frightening story, assembled at the time of the Council of Constance, about Antichrist and a certain devil incarnated or made human, by the name of Beelzebub). In the absence of other evidence, this titulus provides a precious clue as to how one fifteenth-century reader perceived the work and helps us locate the work’s genre. It is a story, then, but to grasp its movement from speech to writing we might better think of it as a relation passed from one person to the next and then written down. These layers are clearly evident in the text itself. The core narrative is the story of Francis and Johannes, as reported by Francis speaking to the bishop of Mallorca, Lluís de Prades, some years later, a conversation that in turn is reported by the anonymous narrator. We thus have a story reported inside a conversation that is described by a third-person narrator. The narrator begins with a reverent, almost hagiographical account of the hermit Francis, who at first appears to be the focal point of the story. The critical moment for the construction of the story is the assertion that Francis “speaks only rarely but truly” (quod rarius sed veridice verba profert), a statement that vouches for the veracity of the interview between Francis and the bishop and of Francis’s own account of his encounter with Johannes. In this way, the narrator has hit upon one of the tropes of the ghost story: the narrator’s insistence upon the reliability of the source, or what a recent introduction to the genre called “the pretence of believing.”18 We encounter the formula in childhood: “The

448 /

Daniel Hobbins

story I’m going to tell you now is true . . . ” The narrator’s insistence upon Francis’s basic honesty portends the strange tale to come. It is simplest to imagine the narrator who is speaking in the opening lines and the author as one and the same, though these might have been two different individuals. The author-narrator seems to have known Francis very well. He reports Francis’s assertion, presumably firsthand, that he suffers very little for his abstinence. Perhaps he met him near Lucca, but it seems more likely that the two met in Rome when Francis had conversations with the bishop, certainly sometime in the 1420s, which the author-narrator reproduces. The text says that the bishop asked Francis “often” ( pluries) if he and his fellow hermits believed that Antichrist was already born. So these conversations presumably took place over an extended period of weeks, months, maybe even years. In any case, it was the bishop who provoked the central narrative from Francis by describing his own earlier conversation with the Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer, and thus it was probably the bishop who served as the critical channel through which the author-narrator heard the story. Perhaps the author-narrator was present during these conversations and so heard the story from Francis himself. Perhaps he even asked Francis to repeat it until he could reconstruct (or even “record”?) the conversation between Francis and Johannes. Or, possibly, the authornarrator heard the story from the bishop. However it happened, it seems clear that at some point, someone took a preexisting oral version of this story and committed it to writing. “Facticity” In the written version as we have it, the author-narrator seems eager to press the facts of the case. Indeed, the story’s salient feature is what we might call its “facticity.” He takes care to invest his story with facts and to situate it in real time and space, to create a factual framework for the telling of an ominous and incredible story. In other words, the author is at pains to situate us not in the realm of the timeless imaginary, but rather in the present (Francis is still alive), in northern Italy, on a mountain just outside Lucca soon after the Council of Constance. Other facts—surely known to the protagonists but only implicit in the retelling—are as follows.

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 449 First, the existence of various groups of hermits in Tuscany from the eleventh century is a well-known historical fact, including one cluster in the Garfagnana region on the river Serchio north of Lucca (see map 17.1).19 Of course, hermitages by their nature are difficult to locate on a map. Our text puts the hermits on “Petraplana,” a peak that Dante mentions in Inferno 32 for its great size.20 It appears to be the modern Pania della Croce, the tallest peak in the Apuan Alps, and just a few miles from Lucca (as stated correctly in the text).21 Our text might have been referring to any one of a number of hermitages in this general area. Second, we can identify two of the individuals in the story, though unfortunately not Francis and Johannes. The story places their conversation in the past during the Council of Constance. At one point Johannes says that he might be chosen pope at Constance. Since Martin V was chosen pope in November 1417, I suppose that this conversation between Francis and Johannes — if it really took place — must have occurred sometime before November 1417, probably sometime in 1416 or early 1417. In the text, the bishop of Mallorca interviews Francis in Rome sometime after the Council of Constance and refers to the famous Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer as “Master Vincent.” The bishop is designated with the letter L in both manuscripts, and indeed the bishop of Mallorca at this period was Lluís de Prades, the scion of a powerful Catalan noble family and camerarius, or chamberlain, to the Avignonese Pope Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna), whom he served until 1417.22 Third, the bishop states that he had heard Vincent preaching in Aragon, where we know he was preaching from late September 1414 to June 1415.23 We saw that, according to the bishop, Vincent claimed that when he was preaching in Lombardy a man clothed in a white hermit’s habit came to him, claiming to be from the mountains around Lucca; and this hermit insisted that Antichrist had been born. In a letter that Vincent wrote on July 27, 1412, to Benedict XIII, Vincent tells this exact story, but he adds several details. He says that when he was preaching in Lombardy nine years earlier (so 1403), a messenger from the Tuscan hermits had told him that Antichrist had been born. And this messenger, says Vincent, told him this so that he could announce it to the world, that the faithful might prepare for this great contest ahead. In the letter, Vincent says that if this is true, then Antichrist is now nine years old.24

Map 17.1. Hermitages of medieval Tuscany

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 451 Fourth, we know that Lluís de Prades had close contacts with Vincent Ferrer, probably in part because both men supported Pedro de Luna. Vincent’s support for Benedict XIII is well known (he was the pope’s confessor), but the bishop was also one of the pope’s most faithful followers (holding the office of chamberlain in the pope’s household). The bishop also promoted the preaching campaign of Vincent in Mallorca in 1413, and now we see from our text that the bishop heard him preach in Aragon as well the following year.25 What is more, we also know that the bishop actively supported hermits in his own diocese.26 Thus, his support for Vincent Ferrer and his friendship with the devout hermit Francis seem to fit our limited understanding of his personality. Fifth, our text says that the bishop and Francis had conversations in Rome. We know that Lluís de Prades died in Rome in 1429, and therefore these conversations might actually have taken place.27 Here then we have five pieces of evidence to show that where it can be confirmed, our text conforms to what we know about Lluís de Prades, Vincent Ferrer, and the Tuscan hermits. It is possible that the story was never oral at all, and that the author, whoever it was, used the names of Vincent Ferrer and the bishop of Mallorca and the hermitage of Petraplana as the factual framework to add plausibility to a completely fictitious account. While this possibility cannot be ruled out, it seems unlikely given the inconclusive outcome of the story. Any reader of the text would have known that Johannes made empty threats about becoming the pope, and such knowledge must have diminished the story’s terror. Beyond its endorsement of ascetic spirituality, the story offers no moral and teaches no lesson. The author himself does not know what to make of it. In other words, if the story is pure invention, why is its lesson so ambiguous?

Context The facts that we have now established allow us to situate the story chronologically and geographically. Since Lluís de Prades died in 1429 at Rome, his conversation with Francis must have occurred sometime between the end of the council in 1418 and 1429. In our story, Francis

452 /

Daniel Hobbins

refers back to the council in such a way as to suggest that the event is now at least some years in the past. For that reason, I would put their conversation sometime around 1425, though a date of a few years earlier or later is entirely possible. The text does seem to refer to the bishop as though he is still alive. If so, then the actual composition must have taken place sometime before his death in 1429. Geographically the story unfolds in a Mediterranean landscape: we hear of Lucca, Rome, Aragon, Lombardy, and Mallorca. Its central theme — the appearance of Antichrist — was perennial in medieval culture, but in this particular form it belongs especially to the northern Italian landscape of the second and third decades of the fifteenth century, a time and place of heightened apocalyptic sensibility, the feverish and panicked search for Antichrist, and the expectation of the end of the world.28 The reference to Vincent Ferrer in the story is a deeper clue than it first appears, for we might even imagine this story as his stepchild. The preaching campaigns of Vincent seem to have stirred troubled spirits everywhere, souls already in despair over the lingering schism. Roberto Rusconi divided Vincent’s preaching career into two great periods — the first from 1399 to 1409, the second from 1409 to 1419—over the course of which Vincent came to hold a more apocalyptic vision of the end of the world.29 The first, always carried on in contact with the papal court at Avignon, took him into Provence, then Savoy, back down to northern Italy, and into Lombardy (perhaps in the shadow of Petraplana), and possibly also to Rome by way of Padua and Bologna in 1408 before his return westward.30 Some of this activity involved preaching against heretics, and the trip to Italy may have been a diplomatic effort to resolve the Schism.31 But his preaching in this early period, says Rusconi, was measured: Antichrist is present here and now, but in the sinner. This was a call to moral reform, and any eschatological message remained muted.32 The second decade of his preaching saw a growing preoccupation with Antichrist, verging on obsession, with sermons performed so as to terrify his listeners into repentance. In the letter to Benedict XIII from 1412, mentioned above, he warned that “the time of Antichrist and the end of the world shall come quickly, very quickly, and exceedingly soon” (tempus Antichristi, et finis mundi erunt cito, et bene cito, ac valde breviter). He recounts the legend of Saint Dominic, wherein

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 453 the Virgin Mary prevailed upon Christ to withhold punishment for a time so that the two preaching orders might attempt conversion.33 The next generation of Italian preachers inherited Vincent’s apocalyptic zeal. The energy seems to have pulsated outward from the duchy of Milan. Apparently the healing of the schism did nothing to quench enthusiasm for preaching on Antichrist. In 1418 Bernardino of Siena preached in Milan on the Apocalypse. In October, as the newly elected Martin V was passing through the city, Manfredi da Vercelli led a band of one thousand Dominican tertiaries ( half of them men, half women), proclaiming that Antichrist had already been born and that the world would end in five years. One contemporary compared him to Vincent Ferrer; clearly, memories of his earlier campaign endured. By March of 1419 he had shown up in Bologna, followed by hundreds of penitents dressed in the habit of Dominican tertiaries. He must represent for us an entire generation of Italian preachers, many of whom are now just names in chronicles.34 This is the world that gave birth to the Historia. It takes an exercise of imagination to understand just how deeply belief in Antichrist had penetrated this culture, above all in northern Italy. We might say that this place at this period was an incubator for every kind of apocalyptic mischief and that, with all of the talk about the arrival of Antichrist, characters like Johannes were bound to turn up now and then.35 Clearly, then, the text is a product of Italy. And yet it seems to have been written outside of Lucca and possibly in Rome. The first line of the text holds a small but important clue: “Est in montibus Tuscie miliaribus quasi quinque ab urbe lucana. . . .” The author here is projecting a certain distance from the place of action. To say “in the mountains of Tuscany” is to imply that one is remote from Tuscany. The narrator might have been somewhere else in Italy or perhaps outside Italy. Our two manuscripts come from Bavaria and Lower Austria. How then might a text about a story that takes place in Lucca cross the Alps? We are in the realm of conjecture, but one possibility is that the story was brought to the Council of Basel, where books and texts were brought and copied, and where the religious orders from the Empire were heavily represented and spent a great deal of time copying books.36 What is indisputable is that the story traveled far from the place of its origin.

454 /

Daniel Hobbins

Decoding the Text So far I have described a text that came into being out of a world of rumor and storytelling, situated in a landscape where preachers worked their followers into a fever pitch over the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world. But I have said little so far about the story at the heart of this text. What can we say, then, about its meaning and historical value? Can we do more than dismiss it as a frightening but idle tale of Antichrist? As I read it, the story draws its forward energy from the tension between certainty and uncertainty, between belief and doubt. It is a striking feature of this text that nothing is ever known for certain. Take, for instance, the conversation between Francis and the bishop. Asked if the hermits believe that the Son of Perdition has already been born, Francis stresses that “he knows nothing for certain, nor does he believe that any of the hermits have any certain knowledge on the matter.” And yet, he adds, the hermits all believe unanimously that Antichrist has arrived. We might imagine the rest of the story as an attempt to resolve this basic tension. The encounter between Francis and Johannes must bear the weight of our interpretation. The basic components of the character of Johannes accord with highly traditional themes. For example, his ambiguous identity as both harbinger of Antichrist (if not Antichrist himself ) and future pope reflects a view of history that became almost mainstream in the fourteenth century, the figure of the papal Antichrist.37 Likewise, in his preoccupation with clerical vice he seems to embody some of the central anxieties of the late medieval Church. Perhaps every reformer incorporated this theme into his preaching or writing, even defenders of the establishment such as Jean Gerson. It infuses some of the most popular texts of this period, such as the De ruina ecclesiae of Nicholas de Clamanges. Of course, this anxiety had much to do with the Schism. According to a common interpretation of 2 Thessalonians, the Schism heralded Antichrist.38 Authorities such as Pierre d’Ailly treated it as the central eschatological fact of modern times.39 Visionaries saw it looming in their prophecies, which prelates heeded, despite the warnings of theologians such as Henry of Langenstein, d’Ailly, and Gerson.40 Although Johannes never explicitly mentions the Schism, he is in one sense its product, arising out of the landscape as a prophet of doom and despair. Was there ever a better time

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 455 to do so? After the flight of Pope John XXIII from Constance in March 1415, the institutional Church teetered on the brink of collapse. Before long it was generally known that a new pope would be elected, and in fact Johannes implies knowledge of this fact when he says that he might be elected pope at Constance. We see here the institutional crisis, the vacancy in the highest office of the Church, as well as the sense of a Church deeply in need of reform (the other part of his message), producing anxiety at some distance from the centers of ecclesiastical power.41 But Johannes is interesting not so much for his rather conventional criticisms of the Church, but more for his colorful behavior and outrageous claims. Throughout the encounter he seems to be collapsing in his own voice two related but distinct and even contradictory messages, both of them highly topical and contemporary. This is what makes the story confusing in some ways, the fact that he communicates not one clear and consistent message, but two: (1) that by virtue of his miracles, through his concourse with demons (or demon-possession), and revealed through his prophecies, he is, if not Antichrist himself, at least a tool of Antichrist; and (2) the more conventional message, that the contemporary Church is corrupt and the life of rigorous abstinence, embodied in Francis, is the path to salvation. It is as if this character, Johannes, having listened to too many sermons on the last times, has absorbed not merely the persona of Antichrist as we find him in contemporary texts and images, but also the contemporary critique of the Church hierarchy found in those same sermons, and has then proceeded to voice in one character both the role of Antichrist and the message of corruption in the Church.42 His performance gives this text a certain honesty, in that Johannes seems — as an actor playing the role of Antichrist—genuinely confused about what Antichrist’s message should be. On a more literal level, Johannes also seems confused about his own identity. Francis is confused about Johannes as well, and uncertain how to react: laugh at him, stand in awe of him, refute him, or run away from him, each of which he does at points throughout the story. Twice he implores him to reveal himself. After all, who is he? We never learn. Upon his arrival he is clothed as a disciple of Christ. He insists repeatedly on his own sinlessness, in a parody of Christ, and he praises Francis for his austerity. But he also invokes demons and under intense pressure to

456 /

Daniel Hobbins

reveal himself claims to be Beelzebub. Is he a heretic? A demon? Or only demon-possessed? In this respect, Johannes only seems to be reflecting an uncertainty within the tradition of works on Antichrist, though by this period most authorities had come to accept that Antichrist was a human with demonic attributes.43 At the story’s end, the narrator leaves open the possibility that Johannes is Antichrist, even though Johannes never mentions that word, while the scribe who provided the titulus in the Munich manuscript distinguishes Johannes as “a certain devil incarnate or made human named Beelzebub.” We might think of Johannes as a mirror, reflecting all of the ambiguities and contradictions of the Western tradition on Antichrist. If Johannes is the outsider who threatens disruption to the Church and points to impending cataclysm, appearing out of the blue and staying just long enough to disquiet the hermits and cast a shadow over the future, we might think of Francis as the moral center around which Johannes revolves. The narrator begins with a description of Francis’s asceticism, which establishes him as a model of true holiness, as opposed to the counterfeit holiness of Johannes. In the central narrative he appears as a spiritual protagonist who resists corruption and flattery. The text thus depends on Francis for its resolution; the final words, spoken in the first person, appear to be spoken by Francis. But as with Johannes, there is no clear template for his behavior. He does not behave quite like a saint. Sometimes Francis believes Johannes, sometimes he doubts him, sometimes he is amazed and transported by his eloquence, sometimes he contradicts him. But he never turns him away or distances himself. He even seems to befriend him, taking walks with him (despite his heresies and refusal to confess), preparing his meals, and seeing him off at the story’s conclusion. Francis commands our respect, but one can imagine readers wishing for a more resolute rebuttal, for clearer lines, perhaps a more satisfying resolution at the end, when Johannes is allowed to walk off into the sunrise. In short, Francis forges his own path through this encounter, appearing as a real person and no cardboard saint. Both characters meet in a world out of joint: the see of Peter vacant, Church leaders declining into vice, rumors of the last times everywhere. What better opportunity for Antichrist to make his appearance? In fact, despite their formal opposition, Francis and Johannes share a set of as-

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 457 sumptions and values about the proper governing of the Church and even about the coming of Antichrist. Johannes feeds off the energy of a Church in crisis, while Francis and his fellow hermits live in a state of anxious expectation. The coming of Antichrist is a frequent topic of their conversation. All of this helps to explain why Francis seems predisposed to wonder at Johannes, to credit his miracles, and to be transformed into “another dimension” (aliud seculum) at one point. Johannes, who knows of Francis by reputation before meeting him, also knows how to “attack” this community, even as he acknowledges the virtue of the ascetic life against the messenger of Antichrist. In short, both Johannes and Francis are outsiders to the world of ecclesiastical power politics, and they share a common outlook. This might help to explain why the text as we have it seems to disrupt traditional forms and to upset our expectations. Conclusion One distinguishing feature of John Van Engen’s scholarship is a sensitivity to genre as a type of historical evidence. Genre offers a way of comprehending both the circumstances of composition and the potential audience of a work. It is a powerful organizing feature of medieval literature, irresistible for most authors. But authors were still free to choose, to reject, to select, to adapt, even to work out their own literary strategy. In the present case, it is as though the author found himself with a story that needed telling, as a sign of the times and another cloud on the horizon, but for which no familiar genre existed. So he worked out one for himself, a “rumor of Antichrist” tale that served as a convenient vehicle for a “true relation” of a mysterious and frightening encounter on a Tuscan mountainside during the Council of Constance.44 It would seem that he imagined the text as an alarm to his contemporaries, perhaps to confirm their anxieties. Over time, the frenzy over Antichrist cooled somewhat. The evidence of the manuscripts suggests that the next generation of readers valued the text in a different way. The copyist of the Munich manuscript actually labels the text “Historia terribilis.” An Antichrist tale was becoming literature. The compiler of the Melk manuscript similarly imagined his volume as a collection of interesting and sometimes fabulous narratives, including

458 /

Daniel Hobbins

visions, fables, and a legendary account of the rediscovery of the Moralia, as well as our text. The work was executed in a careful book hand and illustrated with decorated initials. Its margins remain empty. This was a volume intended for reflection, edification, and enjoyment more than study or devotion. Certainly the story of Johannes had little immediate relevance anymore. Fear over Antichrist never disappeared from medieval culture, but, by the time of this tale’s copying in 1452, the obsession over Antichrist in Italy that had motivated the central story of our text must have seemed distant to the monks of Melk Abbey. The compiler of the manuscript included the text with other stories, not with other works about Antichrist.45 The monks might have taken comfort from the fact that Johannes could not have been Antichrist, and the Church had survived a period of great tribulation and emerged stronger from the reforms of Basel. In short, the monks seem to have valued the text more as an interesting and frightening tale than as a harbinger of doom. How many more anomalies might there be in the vast manuscript collections of European libraries? Our current mapping of late medieval literature describes the broad contours of the landscape, but it is far from complete. There are still plenty of caves left to explore. We may not find Antichrist hiding inside any of them, but the search will be rewarding. Description of Manuscripts The work in question survives in two copies: Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, Hs. 688, ff. 257r– 260v; and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 2797, ff. 151r–154r. Both copies can be dated precisely: the Melk manuscript was copied in 1451, the Munich manuscript in 1463. The material evidence in the manuscripts has significant bearing on the interpretation of the text. Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, Hs. 688 We lack a modern description of Melk 688, which I examined in November 2011.46 The manuscript once formed a single codex with Melk 687; the two were described as one volume in a catalogue of the Melk collection produced in 1483, under the shelf mark F 162.47 Both parts of F 162 were copied on paper. The two manuscripts were apparently still bound

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 459 together in the nineteenth century, when they were separated and bound individually. The modern division of F 162 into two manuscripts reflects an original material division in that codex: the paper is nearly but not exactly the same size in each manuscript. (Hs. 687 measures 22.1 x 14.7 cm, with a writing block of 15.4 x 9.7 cm; Hs. 688 measures 22.1 x 14.4 cm, with a writing block of 15.8 x 9.7 cm.) Both were copied in or around 1451 in a clear Gothic textura, but a different scribe copied each part of the codex. Large and beautifully decorated initials grace the openings of the four books of the major work in Hs. 688, the Liber quadripertitus Cirilli. All of the evidence—the similar size of the paper and writing block and the similar handwriting— suggests that the two parts of the original codex belonged to the same copying project. The contents of the two manuscripts are as follows (my numbering of items considers the two as one codex): 687 1) ff. 1r–153r, [ Johannes of Marienwerder], Septililium 688 [f. 1r, modern list of contents] 2) ff. 2r– 99r, Liber quadripertitus Cirilli, copied 1451 3) ff. 99v–101r, Abbreviacio ricmica cuiusdam longi sermonis sancti Bernhardi Abbatis ad monachos, de strenuitate eorum ad divinum officium. Incipit: Dum in nocte video in choro conventum . . . Explicit: . . . Et partem cum ceteris meruit habere. Amen. 4) ff. 101r–105r, Latin verse abbreviation of Innocent III, De miseria hominis. Incipit: Dic michi quanta putas sit gloria . . . Explicit: . . . Vir neque femina nec sua semina morte perissent. 5) ff. 105r–108v, “Est in montibus Tuscie . . . ” 6) ff. 108v–109v, De perditione et inventione librorum moralium beatissimi Gregorii pape Rome. An excerpt from Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, bk. 22 c. 26. The same excerpt is found in other manuscripts. See, for example, Rodney M. Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 25. 7) f. 109v, six-line poem. Incipit: Omnibus esto pius secreta pandere noli . . . Explicit: . . . Non satis est tutum mellitis credere verbis.

460 /

Daniel Hobbins

The contents of F 162 (that is, Hss. 687– 88 considered as a single unit) offer hints as to how our text (Hs. 688, ff. 105r–108v) might have been read. The Septililium of Johannes Marienwerder is an account of the workings of the Lord through the Prussian recluse Dorothea of Montau (1347–1394), so called because, its author claimed, that word typifies her seven graces. Johannes wrote the work as a complement to two vitae that he had already composed for her canonization campaign. As a kind of meditation on Dorothea’s visions and revelations, the Septililium surely made for entertaining reading. But for any monk, the text also must have raised questions about the source and soundness of Dorothea’s revelations. Through a striking coincidence, we know of one monk at Melk Abbey who was anxious or perhaps hopeful about these revelations, almost certainly as a result of reading this very copy of the Septililium. In 1459, Johannes Schlitpacher, the prior at Melk Abbey, wrote a letter to Vincent, the aged former prior of the nearby charterhouse at Aggsbach.48 Johannes had read the Septililium and had three questions for Vincent: (1) Has Dorothea been canonized? (2) How many books of hers do we have? And (3) what does Vincent think about her life and deeds, especially as found in the Septililium? We need not pause to consider Vincent’s favorable reply (her humility and indeed her anonymity weigh heavily in her favor). The point for us here is that contemporary readers of this manuscript found in the Septililium an interesting and entertaining account of the revelations of a devout but unknown woman, whose holiness was open to question.49 The Septililium survives in only a few copies. Besides our copy from Melk, a manuscript in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek at Vienna was apparently the copy read by Vincent of Aggsbach.50 The next work, the Liber quadripertitus Cirilli, was a popular collection of fables (many of them beast fables) wrongly attributed to Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444) but in fact written in the first half of the fourteenth century by the Italian Dominican Bonjohannes de Messana, who apparently composed the work for his nephew.51 Though almost entirely neglected today, the work survives in some 150 manuscripts, with translations into German, Dutch, and Czech. The Septililium and the Liber formed the core of the original codex, and the quiring suggests that the five short works following the Liber quadripertitus Cirilli served only to fill out the final quire. Following the

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 461 modern paper insertion on f. 1, Hs. 688 contains nine sexternions or twelve-folio quires. The Liber quadripertitus Cirilli concludes on the second folio recto of the last quire. At the close of the work, the scribe provided the year in a colophon, “Scriptus anno 1451o” (f. 99r), perhaps to indicate the close of the volume. But he still had more than ten blank folios at his disposal, which he then filled with a series of short works: two verse abbreviations, one of a sermon of Saint Bernard on the divine office, the other of Pope Innocent III’s De miseria hominis; our text, untitled; an account of the loss and miraculous discovery of Gregory’s Moralia; and six lines of verse advising discretion with one’s friends. In sum, the compiler(s) of F 162 seem(s) to have imagined it as a collection of interesting or unusual narratives, a volume of monastic entertainment. The volume’s appearance — the decorated initials and careful book hand—is another clue. No reader wrote notes in the margins. This was a volume intended for pleasure reading, reflection, edification, and enjoyment rather than study or devotion. The volumes shelved next to F 162 provide additional evidence for how the volume might have been read. F 161 is very similar; it included the “revelations” of Catherine of Siena (presumably her Dialogue) along with Pseudo-Methodius, De principio et fine seculorum, which treats the rise of Antichrist and his defeat, and the end of the world to follow. F 163 was a more varied collection: a life of John Climacus, works of Nicholas of Cusa, works on mystical theology, Gerson’s tract on Joan of Arc, and other spiritual works. The location of these volumes at Melk does seem to reflect a certain way of ordering knowledge. Thus, our text belonged to a corner of the library that one might have visited for alternatives to academic theology, for works by or about saints who pushed the boundaries of orthodoxy, for information about Antichrist, and for good stories. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 2797 The Munich copy of our text is the less important of the two witnesses, though the volume as a whole would be worth more study than I can give it here.52 Clm. 2797 is an octavo paper manuscript, at least part of which was copied in 1463, including our text.53 At some point it entered the Cistercian abbey of Aldersbach, about two hundred kilometers from Melk in Lower Bavaria. The scribe Caspar Strengberger copied the section of

462 /

Daniel Hobbins

the manuscript that includes our text (ff. 151r–154r).54 The manuscript includes a miscellaneous assortment of devotional and spiritual texts: works attributed to Augustine, Anselm, Benedict, Bernard, and others; an ars moriendi attributed to Gerson, dated 1463 ( but probably the work of Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl);55 an excerpt from the Speculum Ecclesiae of Honorius Augustodunensis, immediately preceding our text; and a work De officio missae, immediately following our text. The critical edition in the appendix shows that this copy of our text is insignificant as an independent textual witness, with one important exception. In this manuscript, our text is described in a titulus in the following terms: “Sequitur quedam terribilis historia congesta tempore Concilii Constantiensis de Antichristo et quodam dyabolo incarnato vel humanato nomine Beelzebub.” In the absence of other evidence, this titulus provides a precious clue as to how one fifteenth-century reader perceived the work, as a “frightening story.” The reference to the Council of Constance is critical, because it places the story’s composition some forty years in the past. Antichrist may have walked abroad, but if he did so, the world did not end. Perhaps this basic contradiction might explain why the work had such a limited circulation.

Notes My thanks for their advice and suggestions to David C. Mengel, Lisa Wolverton, Christine Glassner, Fiona Somerset, Halle McGuire, Bruce Woll, James Bartholomew, Laura Ackerman Smoller, and two anonymous readers. 1. John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the FifteenthCentury Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257– 84, quotations at 261 and 278. 2. For recent challenges, see the references in Van Engen, “Multiple Options,” 257n2. 3. See, in general, Richard K. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981). On Apocalypses, see Nigel J. Morgan, Illuminating the End of Time: The Getty Apocalypse Manuscript ( Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 9–13. On prophecies, see Robert E. Lerner, The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 463 4. On the exempla, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 60, 124, 129. 5. See E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5– 7; and Peter Marshall, “Transformations of the Ghost Story in Post-Reformation England,” in The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne Stevens ( Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 17. 6. Cf. Andrew Joynes, ed., Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels, and Prodigies ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001). 7. Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, eds., The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xvi. A final criterion applies narrowly to the regional nature of their book: “a definable Englishness about the story.” See also R. A. Gilbert, “Ghost Stories,” in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts ( New York: NYU Press, 1998), 68– 69. 8. Marshall, “Transformations,” 19, remarks that “the great majority of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ghost stories purported to be accounts of real incidents.” Sometimes the authenticity is vouched for even in the title of a work, as in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand,” chapter 12 of his House by the Churchyard. 9. Again, consider the opening paragraph of Le Fanu’s “Authentic Narrative,” which carries the trope of “authenticity” further while acknowledging bafflement: “I’m sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is. . . . Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth — an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can’t.” 10. Marshall, “Transformations,” 19. 11. Schmitt, Ghosts, 8. 12. See note 6 above. 13. Matthew 10:16. 14. Lluís de Prades, bishop of Mallorca, translated from Tortosa on June 20, 1407. He later served as chamberlain for Benedict XIII in exile until 1417. He died in Rome in 1429. Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Listas episcopales medievales ( Zaragoza: Anubar Ediciones, 1989), 226. 15. Clearly a reference to Vincent Ferrer, who conducted a preaching campaign in Aragon from late September 1414 to June 1415. 16. Cf. Luke 10:4, where Christ sends forth the disciples: “Carry neither purse, nor satchel, nor shoes.” 17. 1 John 1:8.

464 /

Daniel Hobbins

18. Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi. Cf. on Peter the Venerable’s belief that his stories about the supernatural were true, Schmitt, Ghosts, 77. 19. Frances Andrews, The Other Friars: Carmelite, Augustinian, Sack and Pied Friars in the Middle Ages ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 72. The map is from Benigno van Luijk, Gli eremiti neri nel dugento con particolare riguardo al territorio pisano e toscano: Origine, sviluppo ed unione ( Pisa: Il Telegrafo, 1968), 48. Kaspar Elm also worked on this problem. See his “Italienische Eremitengemeinschaften des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts: Studien zur Vorgeschichte des AugustinerEremitenordens,” in L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII (Atti della seconda Settimana internazionale di studio Mendola, 30 agosto– 6 settembre 1962) (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1965), 491– 559. 20. Inferno 32.28– 30: “che se Tambernicchi | vi fosse sù caduto, o Pietrapana, | non avria pur da l’orlo fatto cricchi.” Robert Pinsky translates: “Had Mount Tambernic fallen to strike that ice, | Or Pietrapana, it would not even then | Creak, even at its edge.” Robert Pinsky, trans., The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 340 – 41. 21. Paget Toynbee, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 431. See also Douglas W. Freshfield, “The Alpine Notes of Leonardo da Vinci,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society n.s. 6 (1884): 339; and Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, trans. Michael Papio ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 708n27. 22. Arteta, Listas, 226: installed as bishop of Mallorca June 20, 1407, translated from Tortosa; dies in Rome in 1429. For a brief overview, see also Antoni Pladevall, “Prades I d’Arenós, Lluís de,” Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana ( Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1978), 12:23. On the office held by Lluís de Prades, see Daniel Williman, “Letters of Etienne Cambarou, Camerarius Apostolicus (1347–1361),” Archivum Historicum Pontificiae 15 (1977): 195– 96. 23. H. Fages, Histoire de Saint Vincent Ferrier ( Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1901), 2.64. 24. H. Fages, Notes et documents de l’histoire de Saint Vincent Ferrier ( Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1905), 222, quoting from the Epistola Fratris Vincentii de tempore Antichristi et fine mundi: “Quarto, eadem conclusio ostenditur per aliam revelationem mihi relatam per quemdam virum devotum (ut mihi videtur) et sanctum. Nam cum ego predicarem in partibus Lombardie prima vice (modo jam sunt novem anni completi), venit ad me de Tuscia ille vir, missus (ut dicebat) a quibusdam sanctissimis eremitis in partibus Tuscie, in maxima vite austeritate per magna tempora degentibus, annuncians quod eisdem viris expresse revelationes divinitus facte fuerant, quod Antichristus jam erat natus, et quod istud debebat mundo denunciari, ut fideles ad tam terribile prelium se pararent, et quod propterea dicti sancti Eremite ipsum ad me mittebant, ut hoc mundo denunciarem; sic ergo patet ex hujusmodi revelationibus, si vere sunt, quod jam Antichris-

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 465 tus est natus, et habet completos novem annos sue maledicte etatis, et per consequens predicta conclusio vera.” This letter of Vincent was fairly well known: see Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi ( Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 1970 – 93), 4:463– 46, which lists sixteen copies, including one ( Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 903) originating in Regensburg in Bavaria. My thanks to Laura Ackerman Smoller for drawing my attention to this list. 25. Juan Rosselló Lliteras, “San Vicente Ferrer: su misión en Mallorca (1413–1414),” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueològica Luliana 43 (1987): 72– 73; A. Santamaria Arándee and M. Barceló Crespí, “Església I administració a Mallorca en l’época del Cisma d’Occident,” in Jornades sobre el Cisma d’Occident a Catalunya, les Illes i el País Valencià: Barcelona-Peníscola, 19– 21 d’abril de 1979: ponències i comunicacions (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1986– 88), 1:265. For the text of the open letter to the cities of Mallorca publicizing the upcoming preaching campaign, see Andres Ferrer de Valdecebro, Historia de la vida maravillosa y admirable del segundo Pablo, Apóstol de Valencia, San Vicente Ferrer ( Madrid, 1791), 261– 62. On the relationship between Lluís de Prades and Vincent Ferrer, see also Pere Xamena and Francesc Riera, Història de l’església a Mallorca ( Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 1986), 70 – 74. 26. J. N. Hillgarth, “Some Notes on Lullian Hermits in Majorca Saec. XIII – XVII,” Studia Monastica 6 (1964): 315, 318. 27. Arteta, Listas, 226. 28. For general bibliography on Antichrist in the medieval period, see Michael A. Ryan, “Antichrist in the Middle Ages: Plus ça change . . .” History Compass 7, no. 6 (2009): 1581– 92. 29. Roberto Rusconi, L’attesa della fine: Crisi della società, profezia ed apocalisse in Italia al tempo del Grande Scisma d’Occidente (1378–1417) ( Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1979), 220. 30. For a critical overview, see Matthieu-Maxime Gorce, Saint Vincent Ferrier (1350 –1419) ( Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1924), 72– 76 and the helpful map at the end of the volume. 31. Rusconi, L’attesa della fine, 221. 32. Ibid., 221– 22. 33. Ibid., 225. 34. Ibid., 237– 42; Daniel Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 39– 41. 35. Jean Gerson mentions a similar case around 1401 that served as a cautionary tale. An educated man (litteratus) became convinced that he would become pope, then Antichrist, then perhaps not Antichrist but at least the precursor of Antichrist. He was so carried away by the idea that he wished to kill himself to avoid bringing such great harm to Christian people. Finally, he came to his senses and wrote about his experience to warn others. See Jean Gerson,

466 /

Daniel Hobbins

Oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Glorieux (Paris: Desclee, 1960 – 73), 3:38: “De alio similiter litterato per relationem accepi primo persuasum esse sibi quod foret Papa, deinde quod Antichristus, deinde quod si non Antichristus saltem praecursor Antichristi; novissime ut seipsum perimeret instigatus est vehementer, ne videretur tantum affere nocumentum populo christiano. Tandem miserante Deo ad saniorem mentem conversus, ista de se scripsit ad eruditionem et cautelam aliorum.” 36. See, in general, on copying at the councils, Johannes Helmrath, “Kommunikation auf den spätmittelalterlichen Konzilien,” in Die Bedeutung der Kommunikation für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Hans Pohl (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1989), 116 – 72. On the heavy representation of the religious orders, see Antony Black, Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth Century Heritage ( London: Burns & Oates, 1979), 33 ff. 37. Bernard McGinn, “Angel Pope and Papal Antichrist,” Church History 47 (1978): 155– 73, here 161. 38. Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4. 39. Ibid., 85–101. 40. Hélène Millet, “Ecoute et usage des prophéties par les prélats pendant le Grand Schisme d’Occident,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome (Moyen-Age, Temps modernes) 102 (1990): 425– 55, esp. 438; Hélène Millet, Le cardinal Martin de Zalba (†1403) face aux prophéties du Grand Schisme d’Occident,” in Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome (Moyen-Age, Temps modernes) 98 (1986): 265– 93; André Vauchez, “Les Théologiens face aux prophéties à l’époque des papes d’Avignon et du Grand Schisme,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome (Moyen-Age, Temps modernes) 102 (1990): 577– 88. 41. For a recent treatment of the theme of the Great Schism in contemporary literature, see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 42. On illustrations of Antichrist’s life and deeds, see Emmerson, Antichrist, 124 – 45, 279n5; Richard K. Emmerson, The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 206n19; and Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 148– 89. For a facsimile of a fifteenth-century block book life of Antichrist, see H. Theodor Musper, ed., Der Antichrist und die Fünfzehn Zeichen, 2 vols. ( Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1970). Relevant scenes for the character of Johannes in the Historia terribilis include f. 5r– v (Antichrist performs marvels), f. 6r (the adherents of Antichrist are marked with a sign, and Antichrist sends disciples to announce a new Messiah), and f. 13v (Antichrist parodies Pentecost with his followers and speaks in tongues). 43. Bernard McGinn, “Portraying Antichrist in the Middle Ages,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke, Daniel Ver-

Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 467 helst, and Andries Welkenhuysen ( Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 2; Emmerson, Antichrist, 82, 127. Cf. Gerson, Oeuvres complètes, 7.2.814. 44. An interesting parallel to this text is found in an anecdote related by Trithemius about one Ferrandus of Cordova, a twenty-year-old scholar who in the year 1445 confounded all the doctors of Paris with his learning and profound knowledge of many languages. Like Johannes, he was accused by some of being Antichrist. See further Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 341– 43, who translates the account found in Jean de Launoy, Regii Navarrae Gymnasii Parisiensis historia ( Paris, 1667), 1:157– 58. 45. For a complete description, see the appendix below. 46. My thanks to Dr. Christine Glassner for her help with this manuscript. Dr. Glassner is publishing the modern catalogue of the Melk Stiftsbibliothek. 47. Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs, vol. 1, ed. Theodor Gottlieb, Niederösterreich ( Vienna: A. Holzhausen, 1915; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1974), 221. 48. Earlier letters between the two are discussed in Joachim Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, the Council of Basel, and the Secular and Ecclesiastical Authorities in the Empire: The Conflict over Supreme Authority and Power in the Church (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 338– 40. 49. F. Hipler, “Septililium B. Dorotheae Montoviensis auctore Joanne Marienwerder,” Analecta Bollandiana 2 (1883): 381– 82; compare the full letter in Bernhard Pez, Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus . . . , vol. 6 (Augsburg, 1729), 3:332. The Septililium is edited in vols. 2– 4 (1883–1885) of the Analecta Bollandiana. 50. Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1265. Cf. Hipler, “Septililium,” 382. 51. For orientation, see Ulrike Bodemann, Die Cyrillusfabeln und ihre deutsche Übersetzung durch Ulrich von Pottenstein: Untersuchungen und Editionsprobe (Munich: Artemis, 1988), 1– 3. For a list of about 150 Latin manuscripts of the work, see Kaeppeli, Scriptores, 1:251– 53, supplemented by Bodemann, Cyrillusfabeln, 50 – 53. 52. The summary description of the manuscript in the catalogue does not list the complete contents: Catalogus codicum latinorum Bibliothecae Regiae Monacensis, t. 1 pars 2 ( Munich: Bibliotheca Regia, 1894), 39. I examined this manuscript in 2007. The current description also relies on a digitized microfilm of the manuscript. 53. This scribe also copied in 1463 a German translation of De heraldis of Aeneas Silvius. See Wolfgang Stammler, Christine Stollinger-Loser, Karl Langosch, Kurt Ruh, and Burghart Wachinger, Die Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977– 2008), 9:232. 54. He gives his name and the year, 1463, on f. 119v, and his name again later on f. 155r. 55. See further Rainer Rudolf, Ars moriendi: Von der Kunst des heilsamen Lebens und Sterbens (Cologne: Böhlau, 1957), 75– 78.

468 /

Daniel Hobbins

Appendix A Medieval Antichrist Story Edition Sigla M = Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, Hs. 688, ff. 105r–108v N = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 2797, ff. 151r–154r Base Text M, with variants from N in the apparatus. In the following edition, I have modernized capitalization and punctuation and silently expanded all abbreviations, but I have retained the orthography of the manuscript. I have also retained the underlining found in the Melk manuscript. There, the underlining is in red. Abbreviations in the Critical Apparatus add. corr. del. inv. lin. marg. om. scr. sup. vid.

addidit correxit delevit invertit linea(m) margine omisit scripsit supra videtur

Est1 in montibus Tuscie, miliaribus quasi quinque ab urbe lucana, locus heremiticus et silvestris Petraplana vocatus, in quo heremite quamplures animi austeritate multa et hilari famulantur altissimo. Inter quos fulget unus Franciscus nomine, vir utique famosus et gracilis, et secundum es-

Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story \ 469 timationem communem singularior virtutibus multis coruscans, singularissimus autem in abstinendo. Tanta inquam abstinencie severitate hic pollet, ut vix sit fas credi nostris diebus. Nam quandoque sextam, quandoque septimam, et quandoque duodecimam diem attigit abstinendo, nil commestibile, nil omnino potabile degustando. Sed quod laudabili memoria dignum est, nulla anxietate, nulla penitus molestia asserit se ob id deprimi vel torqueri. Quinymo si vellet, valeret ulterius ipsam abstinenciam dilatare. Est tandem vir iste Franciscus maturitate conspicuus, et tanta simplicitate animi cum prudencia serpentina dotatus, quod rarius sed veridice verba profert. Hic, itaque, affectuosissime rogatus est pluries in civitate Romana2 per illustrem virum reverendum in Christo patrem dominum L., episcopum Maioricensis, quatenus ei manifestaret an ipse vel alii eius consocii heremite quicumque sentirent de filio illo perdicionis, qui se elevaturus est supra omne quod dicitur aut quod3 colitur deus, utrum esset iam natus. Respondit se nichil scire decerto, nec credit quempiam de ipsis heremitis certitudinem ullam habere.“Bene tamen,” inquit, “est verum, quod quandoque convenientibus nobis in unum et conferentibus adinvicem de diversis, dum materia hec in medium tollitur, utrum scilicet credant antichristum4 natum, omnes unanimiter opinantur quod sic.” Adyecit idem, dicens, “Ecce causam quare magis a vobis heremum ibi colentibus quam ab aliis istud peto. Quendam venerabilem religiosum ordinis predicatorum, vocatum magistrum Vincencium hactenus in regno Aragonum predicantem, audivi narrantem quod dum ipse in lumbardia predicaret, ad se venit quidam in vestibus albis heremitico habitu, asserens se in lucanis montibus habitare, contestans antichristum procerto iam natum in mundo. Nostis ne hunc heremitum?” Respondit ipse Franciscus: “Neque novi, neque in montibus nostris est aliquis sic indutus, neque qui talia profiteatur. Sed hanc ut dixi tanquam veridicam opinionem habemus, quod ille sit natus, quamquam nullus nostri sub asseverationis certitudine hoc affirmet. Est tamen5 verum quod tempore Constanciensis concilii, cum essem in cella mea in Petraplana, homo quidam qui se dicebat Iohannem insperato venit ad me in habitu quidem despectibili et pauperculo, non portans secum pecuniam, sacculum, neque peram.

470 /

Daniel Hobbins

“Qui suo adventu nimiam mecum ostendens iocunditatis complacenciam ait, ‘O Francisce, diu est quod desideraveram te videre.’ “Cui vicem reddens, consimile eius adventui demonstravi. Cumque tacuissem, incepit singularia, alta, sancta, et profunda verba componere, adeo ut nos omnes in non modicam admirationem et stuporem converteret. Postquam duobus diebus conversatus est sic nobiscum, tantam sanctitatem fingebat, et tam scientifica, devota, sancte conversationis, et magne perfectionis verba quotidie proferebat, quod vix crederetur alicui recitanti. Sane cum illis bonis et dulcibus verbis errorum amaritudines et6 multas hereses commiscere non cessabat. “Quid inde? Dum in missa vel extra missam confessionem omnes in simul diceremus, profitentes nos peccasse in Deum, et sanctos eius offendisse, et culpam in nobis habere, solus ille hoc dicere recusabat. Et cum super hiis per me reprehenderetur, honeste, audaci temeritate respondit: ‘Ego nolo mentiri. Et si dicerem me peccatorem, vel ullam culpam habentem mentirer, quoniam sum absque omni peccato.’ “Subiunxi: ‘Quomodo dicere audes te nullum peccatum habere, cum beatus ewangelista Iohannes in canonica sua clamet: “Si dixerimus quoniam peccatum non habemus, nosipsos seducimus et veritas in nobis non est.”’ ‘Hec,’ inquit ille, ‘pro vobis dicta sunt, non pro me, qui sum immunis7 ab omni peccato.’ Et quod vertit me in ammirationem non modicam, dum enim sua verba promentem audirem, consciencia teste, videbatur michi quod iam essem translatus in aliud seculum, sic attractiva et effabilis eius facundia meis in auribus resonabat. “Denique cum colloquentes8 extra cellam ambo pariter exissemus per moncium devia, obvius nobis affuit9 boum grex satis ingens. Quibus ille subito imperavit ut starent nec procedere ultra presumerent. Mirabile valde, ad huiusmodi enim iussionem animalia illa, indomita per naturam, sic micia et immobilia perstiterunt ut pocius lapides quam animalia iudicarentur, in tantum ut facile quisque posset illorum capita et cornua manibus contrectare, sicuti Iohannes ille intrepide faciebat me idem facere invitando, quod minime fui ausus. “Cumque sic per pausam10 stetissent, ait michi: ‘Vis ut boves isti discedant?’ ‘Volo,’ aio. Mirum dictu. Mox enim facto signaculo crucis iussit abire, qui ac si soluti a vinculis extitissent, cursu velocissimo recesserunt.

Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story \ 471 “Hiis factis, dum versus cellam a qua pene miliaribus tribus fueramus colloquendo pertracti iremus, dixit michi multa, et quasi omnia secreta et intrinseca vite mee. Quo nimium supra modum admiratus extiti,11 nec immerito, et totus attonitus in meipso. Nec desinebat12 tam eundo quam eciam13 redeundo, quin suis in14 verbis errores insereret contra fidem. “Tandem ex quo cellulam redeuntes fuimus ingressi, adiuravi illum per viventem in secula seclorum, et beatissimam eius matrem, et omnes sanctos, ut michi in veritate diceret quis nam esset. ‘Ego,’ inquit ille, ‘sum natione brito, fui actenus mortuus et in inferno dampnatus, sed ex ignibus infernalibus sumpsi animam que corpus hoc vivificat, quod gestare me cernis. Sum eciam iudicaturus universum mundum. Et finaliter demones ego salvabo.’ “Hiis auditis subrisi, nenias vanas15 talia iudicans, sed et errores considerans refellebam. Factum est autem una dierum, dum simul extra cellam iremus, prospiciens ille dyametraliter solares radios sic apertissimis oculis quod nec tantillum propter illum intuitum eos clauderet aut hinc inde diverteret ex transverso, licet omni fugata caligine limpidissime sol ferveret, incepit clamare velut mugitibus validissimis succensa illius facies16 tanquam ignis, ter dicens ‘iusticia sine misericordia.’ “Et cum regentes Dei ecclesiam increparet, nominando papam aut cardinales vel alios quosvis prelatos seu magistros in theologia, eciam eius17 facies incendebatur, et quasi rugiens leo rabidus vel tuba clangens, dicebat: ‘O yppocrite, cito veniet qui pacabit vos. In proximo est solutio vestra.’ Et multa verba consimilia proferebat, et cum lingwis loquetur diversis, aiebat: ‘Ego adhuc non sum notus mundo. Sed postquam habuero omnium ydiomatum lingwas, tunc manifestabor. Et dico tibi Francisce, infra quinquennium videbis me Rome in sede Petri apostoli. Nam cum xii sociis quos michi eligam, super asinum sedens et humiliter veniam Romam, et ero tunc electus in papam si nunc non fuero electus Constancie, et tu videbis me sedentem in sede apostolica Petri.’ Unde quamvis hec omnia et alia que superius referebat de assumpta anima ex ignibus inferni et cetera, truffas et ridicula merito reputarem. Nichilominus tamen consideratus omnibus antedictis, potissime tamen18 secreta mea, non eram nec sum sine ammiratione et conturbatione animi in meipso. “Quid dicam vobis? Cum sic nobiscum stetisset sex diebus, sero huius sexti diei nobis ambobus tantum in cella sistentibus et illo edente super

472 /

Daniel Hobbins

mensa et bibente posito vino in cifo et infra vinum per illum sale commixto, invocabat singillatim virtutes celorum, et potestates inferorum, singulis nominationibus, signum19 crucis faciens supra cifum et20 dicens: ‘Si peccatum aliquod in me est, venite et me perducite ad infernum.’ Hoc continuavit ferme usque ad mediam noctem. Postquam vero multos demones invocasset nominatim, novissime clamando invocavit Luciferum super cifo, non tamen facto tunc signo crucis, sed dicens: ‘Si peccatum aliquod in me est, veni et duc me tecum ad inferos.’ Subito ad huiusmodi verborum prolationem sic facies eius horribiliter immutatur21 in speciem enormissimam. Quod ego plus quam possem dicere perterritus et pertimescens, eum extunc in faciem non fui ausus respicere, nec secum vel ad morulam permanere, quinymo illo sic super mensa relicto, intra ecclesiam dicti heremitorii me receptans, ibidem usque mane permansi. “Die crastino mane facto cum22 diceret se iam velle proficisci, apponere mensam curavi, ut refecto corpore validior fieret ad labores. Quo edente et bibente, adiurans ipsum ut michi diceret veritatem saltem in recessu, interrogavi: ‘Tu quis es?’ Vix verbum perfeceram incepit facie alterari, et totus attonitus ac sine loquela cessavit ab esu. Post paululum furens23 ac fremens respondit: ‘Ego sum beelzebub.’ Tantillo temporis interiecto, surgens a mensa dixit michi multa verba, monendo. Que scilicet verba24 quoniam videntur aliquantulum adulationem michi concernere, non curo exprimere. Sed tandem dixit michi: ‘Francisce, bonam viam tenes, persevera in illa, et cave sumopere ne discedas ab ea.’ Et sic valedicens, abscessit.25 “Si hic et consimiles sint membra et discipuli26 antichristi, relinquo iudicio graviori.” Explicit. Notes 1. Est] Sequitur quedam terribilis historia congesta tempore Concilii Constantiensis de Antichristo et quodam dyabolo incarnato vel humanato nomine Beelzebub. Est N 2. Romana] Romanen- Romana scr. sed del. Romanen- ut vid. M 3. quod om. N 4. antichristum] iam add. N 5. tamen in marg. M 6. et om. N

Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story \ 473 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

sum immunis inv. N colloquentes] alloquentes N affuit] fuit N pausam] paussam N extiti] exstiti N desinebat] disinebat N eciam om. N in om. N nenias vanas] venias falsas N facies] faciens scr. sed corr. N eciam eius] inv. sed corr. N tamen om. N signum om. N et om. N immutatur] mutatur N cum] dum N furens] fre- sed del. et furens scr. M scilicet verba sup. lin. scr. M abscessit] discessit sed corr. M et discipuli om. N

Eighteen

Martin Luther The Reformed Augustinian Beggar

roy hammerling

Interpreters of Martin Luther’s legacy have often had difficulty reconciling an apparent sharp divide between the early, gaunt, stern Augustinian friar and the older, well-fed, fiery Protestant Reformer. Jost Amman (1539–1591), a Swiss artist, illustrated the tension visually in his sixteenthcentury image of Luther as an ascetic Augustinian hermit sitting across a table from a later version of himself as a plump Protestant professor, as if the two parts of Luther’s life were in fact two completely different people. (See figure 18.1.)1 This essay suggests that an in-depth look at the continuity between the younger and older Luther can provide insight into both his life and theology. Amman’s image illustrates a connection between the two figures: the lean friar points to the work of the reformer, who in turn appears to be contemplating what to write, as if he has just taken advice from his youthful self. Both hold books: the friar sits in front of a medieval manuscript, whether a Bible, a volume by a revered church author, or one of his own early works; the reformer writes the book before him. Both have laurel wreaths above their heads, held by cherubs. They are

474

Martin Luther \ 475

Figure 18.1. Jost Amman, Luther the Monk and Professor, late sixteenth century. Used by permission of Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, photo: Monika Runge.

honored together by Amman’s vision of the friar informing the reformer. The older Luther grows out of and is inseparable from the younger Augustinian. The focus here will be not only to put the youthful and more mature Luther at the same table, but also to see them as one person by looking at an illustrative continuity, the spiritual ideal of the beggar. Luther’s persistent use of the beggar image throughout his life demonstrates that he always considered himself to be a beggar of one kind or another, either as an Augustinian or simply as a Christian. During Luther’s days as a mendicant friar he highlighted first of all the physical side of a religious beggarly life, symbolized in his habit and outward devotional actions, and then secondly the spiritual reward of such a piety. However, as Luther despaired of reliance on such external emphases, he came to underscore the spiritual implications of being a beggar before a gracious and

476 /

Roy Hammerling

merciful God. Luther ultimately argued that an emphasis upon being spiritual beggars eliminated the need for physical beggars in society, be they mendicant friars or actual vagrants, because as Luther saw it, spiritual Christian beggars before God transformed the world to make the earth a better place, where begging was unnecessary. Luther’s last written words —“We are all beggars. This is true.”— reveal how comforting an image the metaphor of a beggar had become for him over his lifetime. Luther’s early Augustinian spirituality, which emphasized being a mendicant, profoundly affected his view of his relationship to God. Luther readily acknowledged his Augustinian beggarly status before his Lord in his earliest postdoctoral lectures on the Psalms. However, his Augustinian mendicant life, which he perceived to emphasize a physically beggarly lifestyle, eventually gave way to a re-formed understanding of being a spiritual beggar before God. At every stage of his life Luther employed the metaphor of a beggar in relationship with a gracious Lord in order to explain how Christians ought to perceive their connection to the divine. The image, while remaining essentially the same in content, nonetheless changed in meaning over time, depending upon Luther’s historical context. There was never any time, however, when Luther did not find comfort in the beggar image. When his relationship with God was at last before him in the starkest reality of death, Luther had nothing left to write but “We are all beggars. This is true.”

Martin Luther’s Augustinian Habits Heiko Oberman has pointed out that when Luther entered the Augustinian religious life he “did not seek the monastery as a place of meditation and study to exercise a faith he lacked. . . . He was driven by a desire to find the merciful God.”2 Luther’s ritualized entrance as a hopeful candidate into an Augustinian convent began with the prior’s question, “What do you seek?” The proper response was, “A gracious God and your mercy.”3 The words foreshadow what Luther desired, but was unable to find. For the young Luther, God was a harsh judge. However, Luther’s religious habit and prayer life were two aspects of his Augustinian mendicant spirituality that helped him to seek a gracious and merciful Lord.

Martin Luther \ 477 At his installation ceremony, when Luther became a mendicant novice, the prior blessed Luther’s Augustinian habit, the symbol of his new lifestyle, by saying, “Lord Jesus Christ, who deemed it worthy to take the cloak of mortality, we beseech . . . that you might thus see fit to bless this form of dress which the holy fathers renouncing the world sanctified by wearing to symbolize humility and innocence, so that this your servant Martin, who will use these vestments, might be worthy to dress himself with you.” The blessing “signified a humility of the heart” as well as a renunciation of the world, specifically detailed in his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Luther’s habit reminded him that he had left behind his earthly life, that is, his family, future career as a lawyer, and all material means, and had put on Christ, taking on a spiritual life of outward devotions and prayer dedicated to God, as expressly laid out in the Rule of Augustine and Augustinian ideals.4 One of the Augustinian order’s deepest commitments as mendicants was to the ideal of spiritual poverty. Luther’s black habit, like those of his brothers, was considered to be an outward representation of what Augustinians for centuries had considered to be a dedication to a life of being holy beggars. The Augustinian author Jordan of Quedlinburg (ca. 1300 –1370/80), in his important work, The Lives of the Brethren (Liber Vitasfratrum), explained that “in its modern state the Order is founded upon begging and reckoned among the mendicants.” Jordan grounded this identity upon the example of Augustine, whom Jordan argued was the order’s founder and model of a begging lifestyle. Jordan quoted one of Augustine’s sermons as evidence of this claim: “Come, therefore, my brothers, be poor, not only in name but in deed and in love, paying heed to what he says to us who made himself our ransom on the altar of the cross.” Augustine, as Jordan (and later Luther)5 understood him, believed that Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” was not simply about those who pretended or preached poverty, but about those who were real beggars, who embraced voluntary physical poverty as a way of spiritual life. Jordan was quick to qualify, however, that he did not advocate absolute poverty like some Franciscans, but rather endorsed common ownership of the necessities of a communal life and worship, including books and clothing. These possessions, said Jordan, were consistent with the goals of the Order of Saint Augustine because they were grounded in

478 /

Roy Hammerling

biblical models and examples of common property, especially as reflected in the early Christian communal ideals of Acts 4, a key biblical text in Augustine’s Rule. Nevertheless, Jordan clarified, “In all cases, however, the starkness of poverty should remain intact, compelling [Augustinians] to engage in actual begging, and to this extent their unrestricted begging should provide them with a livelihood through public alms-giving.”6 The Augustinian order, Jordan explained, was a mendicant order, in which the brothers were physical beggars who thereby attained spiritual reward. Jordan argued that three types of begging had occurred during the course of Christian history. Christ and the apostles solicited alms as beggars in what Jordan called the first way of evangelical poverty. A second way, or apostolic poverty, was lived out in the common life of the disciples in Acts (especially chapter 4) and of other biblical figures, such as the “holy women of the Bible.” Lastly, Jordan stated that apostolic poverty continued on in the life of Saint Augustine specifically and in the entire Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine more generally in Augustinian begging. For Jordan, the Augustinian friars were beggars who willingly and voluntarily embraced physical poverty and a life of begging in deepest humility, like those before them, in order to better love God and attain spiritual fruit.7 Augustinian beggars acquired three “spiritual fruits,” according to Jordan. First, they “conformed to Christ and the apostles, who lived on alms,” or that which was precisely hinted at in Luther’s ceremony of putting on the habit. Second, by begging and collecting alms, Jordan noted, “pride is healed at its root,” because to “beg is an immense humility, for thus we lower ourselves to ask those who are weaker than we are for the worthless temporal things which we despise.” Luther would make this same point in his important lecture on Psalm 101 (see below). And third, begging was a way “to build up their store of merits.”8 Although he later abandoned the notion of a store of merits as an inadequate means to understand God as a merciful and gracious Lord, early in his time as an Augustinian Luther trusted in the physical reality of being a beggar of the Augustinian order. All in all, Luther identified various physical or outward aspects of the religious life with being an Augustinian mendicant beggar, including

Martin Luther \ 479 especially regularized prayers and his habit. While at first these comforted Luther, he eventually came to see these outward expressions of his Augustinian lifestyle as unbearable burdens. This led him to question his physical life as an Augustinian beggar before God and his mendicant way of life, so that he began to pursue a more spiritual view of being a beggar as a Christian before God without vows to an order. Luther came to describe the outward expressions of his religious life, especially in prayer, as external façades. Later in his life, reflecting on his days as an Augustinian, he said, “Formerly, when I was a monk, I, too, was far saintlier than I am now so far as the external mask is concerned. I prayed more, kept vigils, practiced abstinence, and tormented my flesh. In short, my whole life was altogether showy in the eyes of others, although not in my own eyes; for I was intensely crushed and distressed.”9 By “distressed” Luther meant that he had come to feel abandoned and cast away from God’s presence; Luther despaired both physically and spiritually because of his own inability to draw closer by means of his own works to God.10 Luther at times called this despair his Anfechtungen, his deep inner spiritual struggles or temptations. On one occasion he remarked that not recognizing these “spiritual attacks” of crushing desperation as coming from God was for him the “worst possible plight.”11 Historically speaking, Luther’s “plight” in part grew out of an Augustinian concern for prayer that had developed many centuries earlier in the works of Hugh of Saint-Victor (ca. 1096–1141), a Canon Regular, who wrote a popular commentary on Augustine’s Rule that Luther and other Augustinians eagerly took to heart. Hugh encouraged religious to be diligent in praying the divine office and in giving an account of every “syllable” that they skipped.12 Luther tells of one occasion early on in 151513 when he neglected to pray the hours because he attended the graduation of some doctoral candidates. A thunderstorm broke out later that day, and he interpreted the storm as God’s anger directed toward his neglect. Quickly, Luther went to his knees to make up the skipped hours as swiftly as possible. Luther in hindsight noted that in this instance he relied upon the goodness of his own outward prayerful efforts to make himself right with God.14 Luther on another occasion vividly remembered his early life by saying, “When I was a monk I was unwilling to omit any of the prayers, but when I was busy . . . I often accumulated my

480 /

Roy Hammerling

appointed prayers for a whole week, or even two or three weeks.” Luther noted that he would take off “as long as three days without food and drink,” until he had caught up with his “prescribed prayers.” Commenting on the toll his devotions took on him, he stated, “This made my head split, and . . . I couldn’t close my eyes for five nights, lay sick to death, and went out of my senses.” Luther recalled how in these early years of 1515 to 1517 he came to despair physically in body and spiritually in his soul.15 Pictures of the young, emaciated Luther, like Ammon’s above, demonstrate how Luther’s relentless focus on outward pious acts as a mendicant beggar drove him to utter exhaustion. When Luther first lectured on the Psalms (more below), and also the letters of Paul, he slowly came to consider his own and all outward monastic prayers done out of a sense of duty, in haste, and without true earnest humility, as nothing more than petitions flapping in the wind (Flattergebet)16 and empty murmurings (inane murmur).17 Thinking back on his problematic Augustinian habits and a religious life grounded in reliance upon his own outward goodness, Luther concluded that the Lord God had abandoned him in order to reveal his destitute state. God did this in order to drag him, “as if by force, from that torment of prayers” of his outwardly focused religious life, pulling him by means of humility, as if from a “prison,” away from pride in his own deeds and back into a proper relationship with his merciful and gracious Lord. The reader will note the similarity of this point to the second fruit of Jordan already mentioned, with the caveat that here God humbles rather than the action of the friar.18 The eternal mask was forcibly removed, and Luther the Augustinian was left with his naked, foolish conceit and his empty reliance on religious trappings such as prayer and his habit. The story behind Luther’s habit, however, and his trust in this outward symbol of his Augustinian lifestyle, indicates that Luther’s Augustinian religious life, convictions, and view of himself as a beggar before God were intimately connected. Since one physical sign of his Augustinian humility was his habit, a look at Luther’s attitude toward his cowl during his years of struggling despair can help illuminate an important and oft-unnoticed continuity between the younger and older Luther.

Martin Luther \ 481 After putting on the habit, the physical sign of his Augustinian mendicant lifestyle, Luther was very slow to take off the substantive symbol of clothing himself in Christ. Luther only abandoned his robes many years after he had been removed from his order and the good graces of the Catholic Church—long after many scholars often assume he had already made a stark break with his Augustinian convictions. Not until October 9, 1524, when his Augustinian habit hung somewhat threadbare on his body, did Luther finally appear in public without it. Eric Saak calls this Luther’s “self-defrocking.”19 That day was three years after the day, January 3, 1521, when the Roman Catholic Church and his own Augustinian order excommunicated him, Luther burned the papal bull against him, and his vicar-general, Johannes Staupitz, released him from his vows.20 For Saak, Luther remained true to the Rule of Augustine, his vows, and his Augustinian ideals until he at last set aside the habit, its most visible symbol.21 But why did Luther cling to the cowl so long, and why did he finally abandon it? Luther, in a May 1524 letter to Wolfgang Capito, just a few months before he hung up his habit, stated that he was considering giving up his Augustinian apparel because some, in his estimation, no longer understood its true meaning. Luther wrote, “Indeed, in these years I have given enough consideration to the weak. Therefore, because they are hardened day-by-day, everything should be done and said most openly. For I too should finally start to cast aside even my cowl, which up until now I have kept on to support the weak and to ridicule the pope.”22 Luther wore his mendicant clothing long after his reforms had taken hold in Germany in part because it remained a powerful outward symbol of his religious devotion and connection to the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, some continued to see habits in general, and Luther’s own cowl in particular, as an outward good work in and of itself: even as supporters rallied to Luther’s cause, the “weak” among them clung to the idea that the habit somehow provided spiritual merit to those who wore it. For Luther, physical realities such as repetitive daily prayers and habits were incapable of providing spiritual fruits of merit. If some believed that Luther trusted in his cowl, then Luther had to abandon it, not because he wanted to—for him it was a symbol of his dedication to humility and being clothed in Christ—but

482 /

Roy Hammerling

for the sake of preventing misunderstanding. Luther insisted in 1532 that his religious habit had become an “accursed cowl” only because he as a young friar and others had seen it as a physical means contributing to his salvation.23 The Roman curia, in Luther’s view, interpreted his insistence upon wearing his habit after his excommunication as “ridicule” and a mockery because they had formally condemned his writings and the man himself. Still, if a cowl was understood properly, he had no problem wearing one. As late as 1537, in response to some religious who wished to join the reformation and retain their habits, he declared it fine with him if people wanted to continue to wear cowls, so long as they did not put any trust in them as good works.24 The habit was for Luther a spiritual reality of putting on Christ, a call to humility as a beggar, and a quest for a gracious and merciful God. As long as that was clear, he wore the habit and remained dedicated to the Augustinian ideal of being a beggar. When he and others lost sight of this, he abandoned outward shows in favor of what he believed was true inward spiritual devotion. However, just what true spiritual devotion as a beggar before God was had been developing in his mind over these years. To trace just how his intellectual understanding of being a beggar before God changed, we turn now to examine the evolution of his spiritual interpretation of metaphorical beggars. Indeed, this further discussion will suggest that even though he gave up the physical cowl, Luther did not give up the ideal of being a spiritual beggar before Christ.

Martin Luther’s Beggar Story for Augustinians Luther delivered his first postdoctoral lectures at the recently established Wittenberg University; he gave his first lectures on the Psalms in 1513 (published in 1515 as the Dictata super Psalterium).25 In them, Luther provided his Augustinian students with not only theological education but also spiritual direction. His lectures focused on interpreting scripture and also, at times, his understanding of what it meant to be an Augustinian friar. The image of a beggar and her lord in particular summed up his

Martin Luther \ 483 view of what it meant to be a mendicant Augustinian. This lecture laid the foundations for the broader, more spiritualized understanding of being a beggar before God that Luther developed later.26 In his lecture on Psalm 101, Luther told of a destitute girl who received unwarranted gifts from a gracious and merciful lord: once there was a prince who took in a beggar girl (mendica puella) “in filth and vermin” and dressed her in the finest clothes, jewels, and gold (cf. Ezekiel 16:17).27 Luther noted that if she were a wise beggar, she would not dare to claim that the objects of her lord’s goodness belonged to her in any way. If she was foolish, however, and declared that the gifts were in some manner hers or that she deserved praise because of them, she exposed her pride, discredited the graciousness of the lord, and falsely represented her true beggarly station before her master. Should she erroneously or deceitfully assert that she inherited the gifts from her family, she would be a liar. Therefore, the only proper response to the lord’s mercy was for her to acknowledge her good fortune with heartfelt humility. In fact, she should desire that others not even notice her, but only her lord and his graciousness in providing physical and spiritual gifts. If someone should happen to point out that she had once been poor, she should readily acknowledge her lowly beggarly estate and the greatness of her prince’s generosity. Luther concluded, “But if she confuses and mixes up everything and, forgetting herself, does not maintain the distinction and difference between herself and the gifts given her, just as queen Vashti did [in Esther 1:12– 22],28 what will the prince do now? Why he will either remove her or reject her together with these ornaments and cast her out.”29 Luther noted specifically that the prince saved the beggar girl from her material poverty by means of physical objects, that is, clothing and gems. Luther’s audience, young Augustinians, would have primarily identified the poverty of the girl with their physical destitution, resulting from the voluntary renunciation of their possessions upon entering the order. Likewise, such sacrifices, as Jordan of Quedlinburg had noted, provided “spiritual fruit” and lives of dedication to God.30 What Luther proposed with his illustration was that the true state of his mendicant audience was one that began in physical destitution and ended in spiritual beggarly

484 /

Roy Hammerling

poverty, or true lives of humility, which praised the gracious and merciful Lord and claimed no credit whatsoever for their own deeds.31 Luther’s inspiration for his parable may derive from multiple sources. Most obviously, Luther directly alluded to the book of Esther and the story of Vashti. However, Vashti was not a beggar redeemed, but a queen, chosen as a king’s bride, only to be cast out when she refused to obey her husband and lord. Similarly, a popular folktale retold by Boccaccio,32 Petrarch, and Chaucer 33 notes that a wealthy and seemingly generous lord married a beggar girl, Griselda, but then harshly demanded unfailing obedience in the form of a series of horrible trials. Eventually, he dismissed Griselda as his wife, but because of her patient, faithful obedience and refusal to complain at any stage of the testing, he restored her as bride. Her famous storytellers praise Griselda as a model of patient virtue and forbearance.34 While Luther, like many before him, believed that people should endure hardships with patience and perseverance and not presume to judge God’s actions, no matter how they might appear to humanity, his version of the beggar girl story had different emphases.35 Luther stressed not the righteousness of the beggar, nor certainly the cruelty of the lord, but her lack of virtue and his boundless generosity. Most importantly, Luther echoed a remark by the aforementioned Jordan of Quedlinburg.36 Jordan described how God was like a lord who granted to a poor vassal goods, not to claim or possess in any way, but to hold and use for the sake of his lord. Jordan then applied the comparison to his Augustinian audience: “God did give us those goods, which we have from God not on account of our own merits, or so to say, on account of our beautiful hair, but on account of God’s own goodness and for God’s service.” Jordan concluded, “The goods which we hold from God, are not to be considered . . . as our own.”37 Here there is no girl, and the metaphor is patently feudal. But Jordan’s point and Luther’s are the same. Both argued that salvation comes not through trust in one’s own physical or spiritual goodness, but by God’s merciful and gracious gift of grace alone.38 Following most closely after Jordan’s model,39 Luther presented the beggar girl as an example to his audience of mendicant friars, illustrating how they ought to live in relation to God in proper humility and devotion, focused not on their own goodness but on the wealthy generosity of

Martin Luther \ 485 God as a merciful Lord. Understood properly, explained Luther, the true benefit of such a gift may only be grasped with a genuine spiritual humility in the face of such overwhelming and undeserved kindness. Once Luther came to this conclusion, he began to realize that the emphasis of the image was primarily upon the kind Lord and only secondarily upon the beggar. This shift rendered the physical reality of the beggar a moot point. Whether physically poor or not, all people were spiritually poor before God, and if this was the case, then perhaps the physical nature of the beggar was important in light of the goodness of the master. Luther’s interpretation of the beggar image would ultimately remove the distinction between those who pursued voluntary poverty, who were poor by circumstance, and who were poor by nature of their spiritual depravity. In the end, all were in need of a gracious Lord and merciful master to rescue them from their spiritual need.

Martin Luther’s Re-Formed Beggar Metaphor for All Christians Luther, during his days as an Augustinian, had come to rely on the outward expressions of his religious convictions, such as regular monastic prayers and his habit. As discussed above, his cowl in particular was a symbol of the reality of putting on Christ and of being humble before a gracious Lord who granted Luther mercy despite his own unworthiness, something he felt most acutely in his times of spiritual distress. As Luther removed his habit and gave up praying the hours, the beggar image— with its Augustinian origins — initially seems an unlikely metaphor to continue as a regular part of Luther’s self-identification or as a model for others outside religious orders. However, for the rest of his life, Luther constantly returned to the image. He slowly reshaped the beggar girl metaphor by altering the starting point, wherein the beggar’s status is defined, from physical conditions to a direct emphasis upon spiritual ones. Over time Luther connected the image more frequently to biblical heroines, especially the Virgin Mary, and heroes, including Christ, in a way that allowed him to define the image more inclusively, as one that applied to all Christians.

486 /

Roy Hammerling

The metaphor appeared next — and most famously — in two of his most important reformation texts, written some years after his Psalm 101 lecture and during the same year Pope Leo X’s bull Exsurge Domine denounced Luther’s writings. In his The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), discussing the Mass and Lord’s Supper, Luther told the story of a “very rich lord” who gave a “thousand gulden” to a “beggar . . . an unworthy and wicked servant.” While it is likely, said Luther, that such a vagrant might boldly claim the gracious riches as his own “without regard to his unworthiness and the greatness of the bequest,” he urged his readers, now not Augustinians but all Christians, to acknowledge their own beggarly worthlessness by putting faith in the gracious promises of their merciful Lord, Christ. Luther in this instance once again opened by emphasizing the servant’s physical beggarliness, in particular with reference to the money he received. He then turned to examine the beggar’s trust in outward confession, prayer, and preparation for the sacrament, as if such public actions made the beggar worthy of receiving God’s grace, while their absence — and the servant’s persistence in his own self-righteousness — would cause God to cast him out. The clear Augustinian resonances of the beggar image still can be heard here: the physical mercy of the Lord represented in wealth is still present. However, the context has shifted from an Augustinian audience in a university setting to a public document aimed at all Christians. It is they whom he identifies broadly as spiritual beggars, who dare not trust in any of their physical goods or outward appearances, in this case even their own confessions, prayers, and preparation for the sacraments, but only in a Lord who is mercifully gracious to all in need.40 In another significant work from the same year, On the Freedom of the Christian (1520), Luther invited a Christian audience to consider once again the importance of a beggar girl. Luther, however, here called the protagonist of his metaphor “a poor unfaithful little harlot” (paupercula impia meretricula), thus emphasizing her spiritual depravity. The lord, in this text a “rich and divine bridegroom” expressly named “Christ,” gave to the harlot not fine clothes or jewels, but himself in marriage, “adorning her with all goodness” and righteousness. The gift of an ennobling relationship transformed her, the lowliest member of society, into a

Martin Luther \ 487 princess. The sins of her harlotry and utter poverty of virtue, as well as indirectly her physical poverty, no longer had any power to destroy her, said Luther, because as the spouse of a gracious Lord she had all the privileges of her beloved husband, both in her status and wealth. On account of Christ’s merciful gift of unmerited grace she had become true royalty, a free lord subject to none. At the same time, her lowly origins remained; she persisted as a humble servant without any merit of her own, and thus she was subject to all. Those familiar with Luther’s work will recognize its central paradox embodied in the poor little harlot: the Christian is free lord subject to none and simultaneously humble servant subject to all. For Luther at this time, it did not matter whether his audience was in religious orders, a great king, a learned reader, or a lay washerwoman; all who stood before God came as poor harlots in need of grace from a merciful Lord.41 One year later, in 1521, the same year Luther was excommunicated by the pope and declared outlaw by the emperor, he returned to the image of the beggar. This time, in his Commentary on the Magnificat, the metaphor appeared as part of an analysis of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a model beggar. Rather than lifting up an abstract ideal of a beggar girl, or even Jordan of Quedlinburg’s Augustinian exemplar of beggars, Saint Augustine, as before,42 he pointed to Mary as the perfect model of physical and spiritual poverty for all Christians.43 Mary’s virtue, said Luther in his analysis of the Magnificat ( Luke 1:46 – 50), lay in the fact that God had chosen her not on account of her own merit, but because of God’s graciousness toward her. Luther stated that Mary herself recognized this reality: “She glorified . . . only in the gracious regard of God. Hence the stress lies not on the word ‘low estate,’ but on the word ‘regarded.’ For it is not her humility but God’s regard that is to be praised. When a prince takes a poor beggar [einen armen bettler] by the hand, it is not the beggar’s lowliness but the prince’s gracious goodness that is to be commended.”44 Here he not only implicitly compares Mary to a beggar but also, through emulation of her example, instructs Christians, as beggars, to regard God’s mercy above all else. Luther continued to refer to beggars often, drawing on illustrations rooted in the lives of scriptural saints. For instance, in his Sermons on the

488 /

Roy Hammerling

Gospel of John (1537), he wrote, “Christ comes along and shows that He wants to select as His disciples, those who are beggars, ignoramuses, and fools. It might even be the poor harlot Mary Magdalene, or the murderer and knave Paul, or the malefactor on the cross. He wants it to be apparent to all that no one acquires God’s mercy because of their own gifts, such as riches, wisdom, and power.”45 Saints as great as Peter and Paul, said Luther, were lowly beggars because even they had no merits of their own to stand upon and instead stood in need of their Lord’s goodness.46 Biblical representations of beggars who led exemplary virtuous lives, and who might then serve as models for all Christians, were everywhere for Luther— and all were to be emulated for their spiritual poverty of humility and trust in a merciful and gracious lord. Besides seeing Christ as the most merciful Lord, on a number of occasions Luther also specifically referred to Jesus as a beggar and model of humility for all Christians.47 Luther combined the notion of Christ as gracious Lord and servant in Sermons on the Gospel of John (on John 1:29). Once there was a lord, said Luther, the son of a king, who entered the home of a sick male beggar and treated the beggar’s disgusting illness by washing off his filthy stench. Certainly, the prince could have ordered servants to perform such a nasty task, but instead this kind lord, in a remarkable act of divine humility, willingly chose to become the servant of the beggar. Luther says, “But what is a king or an emperor compared with the Son of God?” And beyond that, “What is a beggar’s filth and stench compared with the filth of sin which is ours by nature, stinking a hundred thousand times worse and looking infinitely more repulsive to God than any foul matter found in a hospital?” Luther observed that the love of the Son of God for humanity is of such a marvelous magnitude that the greater the filth and stench of sins, the more he befriends and serves the beggars and sinners. God cleanses people, relieving them of all their misery and of their burdens and sins “by placing them upon His own back.” By way of contrast Luther then abruptly recalled his own religious life, as well as the lives of others, who trusted in outward masks of righteousness as filthy sores. Says Luther, “All the holiness of the monks stinks in comparison with this service of Christ, the fact that the beloved Lamb, the great Man, yes the Son of the Exalted Majesty, descends from heaven to serve me.”48

Martin Luther \ 489 In the very years that Luther turned away from the life of an Augustinian friar and began to compose some of his most famous reformation works, Luther reshaped — re-formed, even — his interpretation of the beggar metaphor to emphasize the spiritual nature of all Christians as beggars. Indeed, beggars in religious orders had become a part of the problem for Luther. The former trust Luther had placed in his outwardly mendicant lifestyle — habit and prayers in particular — was now for him a part of the larger “stinking” and “filthy” problem of society, which allowed religious beggars and ignored the needs of the truly destitute. Christ the servant of beggars had cleansed him and all sinners, not out of obligation or on account of any goodness in the sick beggars, but purely out of love.49 Luther concluded that attitudes and actions toward beggars needed reform.

Martin Luther’s Reforms for Mendicants and Needy Beggars In the process of rethinking the spiritual significance of beggars, Luther realized that his reforms would ultimately have to deal directly with the reality of physical beggars on the streets, including those in religious orders. He drew sharp distinctions between what he called the insincerity of many religious mendicants, the reality of harsh poverty among the masses, and faithful Christians who were spiritually impoverished and in need of God’s grace. When put in the context of his social reforms, Luther ultimately felt compelled to call for an end to public begging altogether, especially by mendicant orders, but among others as well.50 For Luther, the only way to bring this about was with specific reforms that sought the elimination of outward begging altogether and promoted an understanding of being spiritual beggars, who willingly helped others so begging would become unnecessary. The first step in the development of Luther’s social ideas on poverty emerged from the belief that all were beggars, whatever their earthly means. If all people were spiritual beggars, then the only logical conclusion was that even the greatest kings on earth ought rightly to be called

490 /

Roy Hammerling

spiritual beggars. In fact, kings who recognized their spiritual destitution were even truer beggars than those who had lived self-righteous lives as physical beggars on account of religious vows. In his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, specifically discussing Matthew 5:3,51 Luther wrote, “So be poor or rich physically and externally, as it is granted to you — God does not care about this — and know that before God, in his heart, all people must be spiritually poor. That is, they must not set their confidence, comfort, and trust on temporal goods, nor hang their hearts upon them and make mammon their idol.” Surprisingly, Luther lifts up as his model King David: “[ He] was an outstanding king, and he really had his wallet and treasury full of money, his barns full of grain, his land full of all kinds of goods and provisions. In spite of all this he had to be a poor beggar spiritually [geistlich ein armer bettler sein], as he sings of himself : ‘I am poor, and a guest in the land, like all my fathers [ Psalm 39:12].’” Luther encouraged all to look to King David, sitting amid possessions, a lord over land and people, as an exemplary beggar because “he does not dare to call himself anything but a guest or a pilgrim, one who walks around on the street because he has no place to stay. This is truly a heart that does not tie itself to property and riches; but though it has, it behaves as a destitute beggar, as St. Paul boasts of Christians: ‘As poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything [2 Corinthians 6:10].’ ”52 For Luther, all true beggars are defined spiritually, regardless of their station in life or abilities.53 Indeed, this view ultimately led Luther to look critically at his world and conclude that physical poverty must be eliminated as spiritual poverty flourished among Christians. Luther and his contemporaries were all too familiar with beggars in the streets, both those genuinely in desperate need and religious brothers from monasteries who called themselves beggars while living in various levels of luxury. Catherina Lis and Hugo Soly have suggested that at least 50 percent, if not 65 percent of sixteenth-century people were barely surviving from day to day, while as much as “25 percent of the population was chronically underfed.” Many of these needed to beg daily and to live hand to mouth.54 Samuel Torvend has commented, “It is no small thing that Luther the monk, raised in a peasant household, was conscious of those who were ‘perched precariously on the edge of poverty.’ ”55 In

Martin Luther \ 491 begging for alms, noted Luther, mendicants of his day robbed from true, poor beggars in dire need. Charlatan beggars did the same.56 Referring to Abraham’s kindness to strangers in Genesis 18, Luther writes, “The devil, too, has his beggars; but whenever these have nothing, they nevertheless have enough and have it in abundance, as we see in the case of the monks and the idle vagrants. But the true beggars are those who are beggars because of the promise of the Word. These the world hates and neither helps nor supports.” Luther explained that Abraham understood the true nature of strangers and beggars because he had himself endured great hardships, both physical and spiritual; therefore, out of humble hospitality he showed kindness to all, even the needy who showed up unexpectedly at his doorstep, whether poor in body or in spirit.57 On the other hand, Luther argued that beggars from religious orders who asked for physical offerings, often in exchange for prayers, deserved nothing. Those who falsely believed that their acts of physical humility provided them with spiritual wealth were mistaken; they should therefore be discouraged from promoting this misconception.58 Moreover, Luther felt that Abraham’s kindness toward true beggars served not as a means to make Abraham worthy of God, but rather as a way by which God acted through Abraham in the world.59 Luther thus encouraged social reforms to provide truly needy beggars with physical necessities, for instance, by establishing common chests ( like one in Leisnig); in this way, the community might imitate the example of the disciples in Acts 4, where all things were held in common. The same Acts 4 passage had guided the Augustinian understanding of poverty, insofar as it was an organizing and ideological principle in the Rule of Augustine and influenced Jordan of Quedlinburg’s teaching about Augustinian lives as beggars. Monastic, mendicant, and ecclesiastical properties, Luther concluded, were to be seized and their incomes used to provide for the poor, maintain public services, and offer education. In a good society, said Luther, poor beggars should be cared for; there should be no need whatsoever for them to beg. In his so-called Long Sermon on Usury, in 1520, Luther argued, “It ought to be established and decreed, either by the mandate of [the pope, bishops, kings, princes, and lords] or in general council that every town and locality should build and furnish its own churches, towers, and bells, and make provision itself for its own

492 /

Roy Hammerling

poor. Then begging would cease entirely.”60 Having eliminated physical poverty, Luther hoped that all people would see themselves as spiritual beggars before God. Commenting on Deuteronomy 15:4, “There will be no poor among you,” Luther stated in 1525 that this was a “most beautiful order, but one that is never kept.” He wondered, “If begging is forbidden to [the people of Israel in this passage], by what right is it set up among Christians by law, as though it were something sacred?” Luther concluded, “Spiritual poverty is to be praised [again, cf. Matthew 5:3],” but unfortunately, “those who boast of outward poverty do not take upon themselves wounds, sicknesses, imprisonments, nakedness, or exile, hunger, thirst, swords, dangers, deaths, sins, the devil, and all other evils by means of new vows set up for these, just as they have done for poverty [cf. Matthew 25].”61 In other words, religious beggars took vows of poverty justifying their own piety before God even as they lived lives of ease, rather than embracing the reality of true spiritual poverty, which involved harsh lives of facing very real outward and spiritual hardships in the world. Luther believed those who, like the mendicants, boast of physical poverty were really “servants of Satan” because they avoided both true physical and spiritual poverty and instead, through their vows, enjoyed lives of plenty. Luther concluded, “Constant care should be taken that, since these evils [ like the need for begging and beggars] are always in the world, [those who seek mendicant poverty] are always to be opposed.”62 Luther abandoned his life of outward poverty as an Augustinian beggar because he and others had misunderstood it as a means of being justified before God and claiming the lord’s gracious gift as his own. As he sought to live as a true spiritual beggar, and as he promoted this ideal, he sought to reform a society in which begging played a major role. In some ways, Luther pushed the beggar ideal he had learned from the Augustinians toward what he believed was its logical conclusion, namely, that being truly destitute before God spiritually was more important than being a beggar physically. He did not so much abandon his Augustinian ideals, which also had emphasized the spiritual aspects of begging, as adapt them to apply to all around him. This meant that he and others, in the monasteries in particular, needed to recognize that their physical

Martin Luther \ 493 poverty mattered little in comparison with true spiritual poverty, which also demanded that they needed to suffer the genuine hardships of spiritual begging by sacrificing for the most destitute members of society. God worked through Christians, argued Luther, in such a way that they were required to provide for a poor neighbor’s every need. As a result, in a world where people took their status as spiritual beggars seriously, there would be no reason for physical begging, either in or outside the monastery.

Martin Luther’s Final Days— The Reformed Augustinian Beggar Even after Luther had turned his beggar ideal into a call for social reform, he continued to use the beggar metaphor in his writings. Moreover, the image slowly came to encompass thoughts about mortality. When Luther faced his own impending death, he did so in a manner that took comfort in, and hearkened back to, typically Augustinian attitudes concerning ritualized preparation for dying. Shortly before he breathed his last, Luther repeated three times the words of Psalm 31:5, the last words of Christ on the cross ( Luke 23:46), “Into your hands, I commend my spirit,” and then he added, “You have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.” In this Luther followed Jordan of Quedlinburg’s admonition from the Lives of the Brethren, in a chapter entitled “On the Brother’s Preparation for Death,” where he instructed Augustinians to imitate their brother Henry of Friemar (d. 1340), who with his last breath repeated three times, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”63 The Augustinian and the reformer in Luther were still inseparable. The personal addition of the words, “You have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God,” likewise suggested a beggar acknowledging indebtedness to his Lord one last time. A few days earlier, Luther had left a scrawled note on a piece of paper that has puzzled scholars ever since. Two similar accounts relate that Luther was unable to finish his last sermon in Eisleben, so he went to a local house to rest. Fearing that he was dying, he wrote his last words in a cryptic note mostly in Latin, but with some key words in German:

494 /

Roy Hammerling

Nobody can understand Virgil in his Bucolics and Georgics unless he has spent five years as a shepherd or farmer. No one understands Cicero in his letters unless he has served under an outstanding government for twenty years. No one should believe that he has tasted the Holy Scriptures sufficiently unless he has spent one hundred years leading churches with the prophets. That is why: 1. John the Baptist, 2. Jesus Christ, 3. the Apostles were a prodigious miracle. Do not profane this divine Aeneid, but bow to it and honor its vestiges. [German:] We are all beggars [ Wir sein pettler]. [Latin:] This is true [ Hoc est verum].64 Scholarly explanations of this text have ranged from wondering if Luther’s last written words reflected a dejected man resigned to death or if he was simply waxing poetic about scripture.65 Oberman has insightfully argued that these words must be read in light of Luther’s entire career, from friar to reformer. Some authors falsely assume, said Oberman, that over time the inexperienced friar had overcome his lack of understanding of scripture, abandoned his superstitious religious roots, become an expert biblical scholar, and thus emerged as a confident “Reformation Luther.” On the contrary, argued Oberman, facing death, Luther was still “overwhelmed by the depth and wealth of scripture,” which no one was able to fathom, especially he himself.66 To Oberman’s observation, however, we must add that Luther’s dependence upon the beggar illustration allows for a more complete analysis of these German and Latin words. On a very basic level it must be noted that the Latin hints at the primary language of Luther as an Augustinian scholar and the German points to the preferred language of Luther as a reformer. When Luther declared, “Wir sein pettler,” the German breaks the rhythm of the Latin in a way that emphasizes the declaration that all are beggars. The conclusion of the Latin words “Hoc est verum” rings like an ancient exclamation point adding weight to the German pronunciation. Two key aspects of Luther’s world are inseparable in one final statement about life. There is a clear contrast between the two great classical authors, Virgil and Cicero, and scripture. Luther’s references to ancient Roman writers acknowledge his early education, which focused on studying the classics. The declaration about the

Martin Luther \ 495 scriptures suggests Luther’s personal lifelong quest, as an Augustinian and reformer, to grasp what is ultimately beyond human comprehension. For Luther, great literature can be understood through experience; scripture, however, is a gift, an incomprehensible treasure, from a gracious God to an undeserving beggar. On his deathbed, therefore, Luther was able to refer back to two major themes of his life, namely that he was a spiritual beggar before God and the undeserving recipient of God’s gracious treasures, such as scripture, which were so tremendous that he would never fully grasp their meaning, nor the graciousness of the Giver. Luther’s final puzzling note had been anticipated earlier, in his Sermons on the Gospel of John (14:12, written in 1537), where he wrote: On earth we are all beggars, as Christ Himself was; but before God we are bountifully blessed with all good things. In comparison the world is poor and destitute, nor can it retain its goods without us. I, on the other hand, have abiding goods in my hour of death; for I have the Lord Christ Himself, who sits enthroned in heaven above. But in that hour you all will be obliged to depart naked and bare, and will not take as much as a shred of clothing with you. And up there you will be bereft of all property, even though you were a mighty king on earth and owned all the wealth of the world. Christians will not leave one bit of their goods behind: for they have none and already have laid up their treasure in heaven, in and with Christ.67 Luther believed that he had entered the world bare, as a beggar; that he had joined the Augustinians as a beggar; that he had defined his life as a reformer as a spiritual beggar; and that, at last, he died a naked beggar, bountifully blessed by his gracious Lord. In the end, then, it is not surprising to find the reformed Augustinian beggar summing up his life and theology with the words “Wir sein pettler. Hoc est verum.”

Notes This article is dedicated with deepest gratitude and appreciation to John Van Engen on the joyous occasion of celebrating thirty-five years at the University of Notre Dame. The author sincerely thanks Lisa Wolverton and David C. Mengel

496 /

Roy Hammerling

for their expert editorial and substantive help in providing clarity to the present argument. The author also is grateful to Jonathan Lyon and Remie Constable; Kenneth Christopherson, Ralph Gehrke, and Ralph Quere; his colleagues at Concordia College, especially the religion department; and Joshua Hammerling for his editorial insight. 1. Jost Amman’s Martin Luther als Monch und als Professor is dated variously, 1551 or the last part of the sixteenth century. The image may be found at http:// www.all-art.org/DICTIONARY_of_Art/a/amman1.htm. 2. Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil ( New York: Image Books, 1989), 127. Scripture references are from the New Revised Standard Version ( NRSV) unless otherwise noted. 3. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 128. 4. Johannes Staupitz, Constitutiones fratrum Eremitarum sancti Augustini ad Apostolicorum privilegiorum formam pro reformation Alemanniae, ed. Wolfgang Günter, in Johann von Staupitz, Sämtliche Schriften. Abhandlungen, Predigten, Zeugnisse, ed. Lothar Graf zu Dohna and Richard Wetzel, vol. 5, Spätmittelalter und Reformation Neue Reihe 17 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), 195f; slightly altered trans. in Erik Leeland Saak, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform Between Reform and Reformation, 1292–1524 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 634f. 5. Cf. Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 121 vols. ( Weimar: Böhlau, 1908– 2009) (hereafter WA [Weimarer Ausgabe]), 3:27f, trans. in Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing, 1955–1986) ( hereafter LW ), 10:26 f. Cf. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 672, which also discusses how Luther lifted up Augustine as a model in his early lecture on Psalm 1. 6. Jordani de Saxonia ( Jordan of Quedlinburg), Liber Vitasfratrum, ed. Rudolphus Arbesmann and Winfridus Hümpfner ( New York: Cosmopolitan, 1943), 3:IX– X, 350 f, trans. in Jordan of Saxony, The Life of the Brethren, trans. Gerard Deighan ( Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1993), 324 f. 7. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 3:IX– X, 350 f, trans. in Life of the Brethren, 324 f. 8. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 3:XII, 363 ff, trans. in Life of the Brethren, 339 ff. 9. Genesis 29:3 commented upon in WA 43:612 ff, trans. in LW 5:271 ff. 10. Below we will see that Luther’s earliest lectures on the Psalms, especially Psalm 101, which is central to the focus of this article, make the point forcefully that Luther the Augustinian believed that God abandoned friars in their pride in order to call them back to true faith in God. WA 4:131 f, trans. in LW 11:280 ff. 11. Luther’s Treatise on Good Works (1520) in WA 6:236, trans. in LW 44:62; WA 43:612 ff, trans. in LW 5:271 ff.

Martin Luther \ 497 12. WA Tr 1: no. 495, trans. in LW 54:85; WA Tr 2: no. 1253; WA Tr 4: no. 5094; WA Tr 5: nos. 5428, 6077. Cf. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation 1483– 1521, trans. James L. Schaaf ( Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 65 f; and Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther ( New York: Penguin, 1995), 195 f. 13. More on this below, but this will be the same year he finished his important first lectures on the Psalms in which Luther first developed his story of the beggar. 14. WA Tr 4: no. 4082. 15. WA Tr 1: 220f, trans. slightly altered in LW 54:85, in the spring of 1533. 16. WA 17:112; WA 41:695; WA 45:681, trans. in LW 24:241. Cf. Brecht, Road to Reformation, 65 f. 17. Lectures on Genesis 32:12 (1535) in WA 44:82 f, trans. slightly altered from LW 6:111. Cf. WA 43:284 ff, trans. in LW 4:209 ff; Genesis 24:15 in WA 43:326 ff, trans. in LW 4:267 f; Genesis 29:3 in WA 43:612 ff, trans. in LW 5:271 ff; Genesis 44:18 in WA 44:574 ff, trans. in LW 7:369 ff; WA 4:131 f, trans. in LW 11:280 ff. 18. WA Tr 1: 220 f, trans. slightly altered in LW 54:85. 19. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 630. 20. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 286; Saak, High Way to Heaven, 640 ff. 21. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 627. 22. WA Br 3:299, trans. in Saak, High Way to Heaven, 660. 23. WA 30, 3:530. 24. Luther’s Commentary on John 2:24 in WA 46:776ff, trans. in LW 22:267ff. 25. Cf. Luther’s Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings 1545 in WA 54:179– 87, trans. in LW 34:327– 38; Heiko Oberman, Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism ( New York: Backer Academic, 2001); Adolar Zumkeller, Theology & History of the Augustinian School in the Middle Ages ( Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1996), 207 ff; David Gutierrez, The Augustinians from the Protestant Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia 1518–1648 ( Villanova, PA: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1979), 19– 66; Saak, High Way to Heaven, 587– 680; Adolar Zumkeller, Martin Luther und sein Orden ( Rome: Institutum Historicum Ord. Erem. S. Augustini, 1962); Willigis Eckerman and Cornelius Petrus Mayer, eds., Studien über Augustinus, den Augustinismus und den Augustinerordern. Festschrift P. Dr. theol. Dr. phil. Adolar Zumkeller OSA zum 60 Geburtstag ( Würtzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1975); Thomas F. Martin, Our Restless Heart: The Augustinian Tradition ( Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 120 ff. 26. Brecht, Road to Reformation, 107 ff; Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 113 ff. 27. LW 10:ix.

498 /

Roy Hammerling

28. Cf. Queen Vashti in Ezekiel 1– 2; cf. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 292, trans. in Life of the Brethren, 278. 29. WA 4:131 f, trans. slightly altered from LW 11:280 ff. In Latin Luther generally uses the word mendicus for beggar, but at times he also uses pauper; in German he most often uses Bettler or armer Bettler. 30. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 3:XII, 363 ff, trans. in Life of the Brethren, 339 ff. 31. WA 4:131 f and LW 11:280 ff. 32. WA Tr 3:349, trans. in LW 54:208; Anthony Lauterbach and Jerome Well, No. 3479, talk about Luther’s use of Boccaccio; hence, if Luther’s story is based on the Griselda story, perhaps Boccaccio is the most likely origin, but this is speculation. 33. I am indebted to Barbara Newman and David Sprunger for their help with these references. Petrarch, De Patientia Griseldis; Boccaccio, The Decameron, the final story; Chaucer, “The Clerk’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales. 34. Helen Cooper, The Oxford Guide to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 187 ff. 35. For more, see WA 4:131 f and LW 11:280 ff and Luther’s early development of the Theology of the Cross in his Lectures on Hebrews (1517–1518), WA 57 and LW 29. 36. Jordan, aka Jordan of Saxony, is not to be confused with the famous Dominican, Jordan of Saxony, ca. 1190 –1237. 37. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Sermon 436A text and trans., slight alteration, in Saak, High Way to Heaven, 401; Adolar Zumkeller, Erbsünde, Gnade, Rechtfertigung und Verdienst nach der Lehre der Erfurter Augustinertheologen des Spätmittelaters, Cassiciacum 34 ( Würtzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1984): 289, 378. Jordan also lived in Erfurt, where Luther joined the Augustinian Order. 38. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 410 ff, 642 has an excellent discussion of the similarity of Luther and Jordan on this point. Jordan uses the phrase gratia gratis data or a “grace gratuitously given,” an idea akin to Luther’s notion and language of infused righteousness in LW 25:28 ff; LW 26:127 ff, 233 ff; LW 27:28 ff; LW 31:101, 136; LW 32:229 ff; LW 34:167 f, 187 f; LW 44:280; LW 48:366. Luther does use a similar phrase in WA 9:368 in a collection of sermons, i.e., spiritualia gratis data. For more, see The Bondage of the Will 1525 WA 18:735 f, trans. in LW 33:218 f; A Sermon on the Three Kinds of Good Life for the Instruction of Consciences 1521 in WA 7:795 ff, trans. in LW 44:241 ff; A Treatise on the New Testament, i.e., The Holy Mass in 1520 WA 6:353 ff, trans. in LW 35:109; The Gospel for the Festival of the Epiphany, Matthew 2:1–12 in 1522 WA 10, 1, trans. in LW 52:252. 39. WA 4:129ff, trans. in LW 11:280ff. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum 3:6, trans. in Lives of the Brethren, 316. Other Augustinian authors can be pointed to in this regard as well. Cf. Eric L. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 10; Eric Leland Saak, “Quilibet Christianus: Saints in Society in the Sermons of Jordan of

Martin Luther \ 499 Quedlinburg, OESA” in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle with Edith Wilks Dolnikowski, Rosemary Drage Hale, Darleen Pryds, and Anne T. Thayer, Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études du Moyen Âge 5 (Louvain-la-Neue: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1996), 317– 38. 40. WA 6: 519 f, trans. in LW 36:46. 41. Cf. WA 7:55 f, trans. in LW 31:352 f. 42. WA 3:27 f, trans. in LW 10:26 f . Cf. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 672, which also discusses how Luther lifted up Augustine as a model in his early lecture on Psalm 1. 43. Earlier Luther had declared, in his On the Freedom of the Christian, that the Blessed Mother was in fact the “pre-eminent example” of the Christian life. Cf. WA 7:66, trans. in LW 31:368. 44. WA 7:561 f, trans. in LW 21:314 f, Luke 1:48 Commentary on the Magnificat written in 1521. 45. WA 46:647 ff, trans. in LW 22:189 ff, Sermons on the Gospel of John 1:45. 46. WA 33:9 ff, trans. in LW 23:11 ff, Luther in his Sermons on the Gospel of John 6:27. 47. Luther refers to Christ as a beggar in a number of places. E.g., WA 30:637 f, trans. in LW 23:391– 92, or his Sermons on the Gospel of John (8:30). Cf. WA 46:649 ff, trans. in LW 22:128 f, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John 1:16; WA 3:201– 2; WA 45:690 ff, trans. in LW 24:251, Luther in his Sermon on the Gospel of John 15:14. For Luther’s clearest statement about Christ the beggar, see WA 45:483 ff, trans. in LW 24:84 ff. 48. WA 46:680 f, trans. in LW 22:166 f. 49. WA 45:492 f, trans. in LW 24:35 f. 50. WA 42:493 ff, trans. in LW 2:330 ff. 51. The reader will remember that this text has been mentioned above in relation to Jordan of Quedlinburg and Augustine. 52. WA 32:305 ff, trans. slightly altered in LW 21:13 ff. 53. WA 45:532 f, trans. in LW 24:78 f. Cf. Martin, Our Restless Heart, 67. 54. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1979), 53– 96. Cf. Samuel Torvend, Luther and the Hungry Poor: Gathered Fragments (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). 55. Torvend, Luther and the Hungry Poor, 20. 56. Ibid., 23. 57. WA 43:2 ff, trans. in LW 3:180 f. 58. Torvend, Luther and the Hungry Poor, 23. 59. WA 43:2 ff, trans. in LW 3:180 f. 60. WA 6:36 – 60, trans. in LW 45:286 f. Cf. an extended discussion of this in Torvend, Luther and the Hungry Poor, 107. 61. WA14:657 f, trans. in LW 9:147 f.

500 /

Roy Hammerling

62. WA14:657 f, trans. in LW 9:147 f. 63. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 2:13, trans. in Lives of the Brethren, 172 ff.; Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church, vol. 3, 1532–1546 ( Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 375. 64. WA Tr 5:317 f, no. 5677, trans. in Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and Devil, 166 and LW 54:476. Another, slightly different version of the note may be found in WA Tr 5:168, no. 5468, trans. in Walther Von Loewenich, Martin Luther: The Man and His Work (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1986), 383. 65. Brecht, Preservation of the Church, 375. Eric W. Gritsch, Martin—God’s Court Jester: Luther in Retrospect ( Ramsey, NJ: Sigler Press, 1990), 87. 66. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 166. 67. WA 45:483 ff, trans. slightly altered in LW 24:84 ff.

P u b l i c a t i o n s o f J o h n Va n E n g e n

Books Rupert of Deutz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Awarded: John Nicholas Brown Prize, Medieval Academy of America, 1987. Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. Religion in the History of the Medieval West. Burlington, VT: Ashgate/ Variorum, 2004. Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Modern Devotion and the World of the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Awarded: The John Gilmary Shea Prize, American Catholic Historical Society, 2010; The Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History, 2010; Otto Gruendler Prize, International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 2010; Haskins Medal, Medieval Academy of America, 2013. The Writings of Alijt Bake (1413– 55), forthcoming. Edited C ollec tions Ed., The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Ed., Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. Ed., with Michael A. Signer. Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Ed., Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004. Ed., with Thomas F. X. Noble. European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. A rtic les “Rupert von Deutz und das sogenannte Chronicon sancti Laurentii Leodiensis.” Deutsches Archiv 35 (1979): 33– 81.

501

502 / Publications of John Van Engen “Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: The Manual Arts and Benedictine Theology in the Early Twelfth Century.” Viator 11 (1980): 147– 63. “Rupert of Deutz and William of Saint Thierry.” Revue Bénédictine 93 (1983): 327– 36. “False Decretals,” “Benedictus Levita,” “Donation of Constantine,” and “Right of Presentation.” In The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph Strayer, 2.178– 79; 4.124 – 27, 257– 59; 10.117–18. New York: Scribner, 1983– 84. “Observations on Gratian’s De Consecratione.” In Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, edited by Stephan Kuttner and Kenneth Pennington, 309– 20. Monumenta iuris canonici Series C, Subsidia 7. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1985. “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050 –1150.” Speculum 61 (1986): 269– 304. “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem.” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519– 52. “Rupert de Deutz.” In Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 13.1126 – 33. Paris: G. Beauchesne et ses fils, 1986. “Christianity and the University: The Medieval and Reformation Legacies.” In Making Higher Education Christian, edited by Joel A. Carpenter and Kenneth W. Shipps, 19– 37. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1987. “The Virtues, The Brothers, and the Schools: A Text from the Brothers of the Common Life.” Revue Bénédictine 98 (1988): 178– 217. “Images and Ideas: The Achievements of Gerhart B. Ladner, with a Bibliography of his Published Works.” Viator 20 (1989): 85–115. “Faith as a Concept of Order in Medieval Christendom.” In Belief in History, edited by Thomas Kselman, 19– 67. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. “‘God is no Respecter of Persons’: Sacred Texts and Social Realities.” In Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Studies for Margaret Gibson, edited by Leslie Smith and Benedicta Ward, 243– 64. London: Hambledon Press, 1992. “A Brabantine Perspective on the Origins of the Modern Devotion: The First Book of Petrus Impens’ Compendium Decursus Temporum Monasterii Christifere Bethleemitice Puerpere.” In Serta Devota in memoriam Guillelmi Lourdaux, Pars Prior: Devotio Windeshemensis, 3– 78. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1992. “Late Medieval Anticlericalism: The Case of the New Devout.” In Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Peter Dykema and Heiko Oberman, 19– 52. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 51. Leiden: Brill, 1993. “Anticlericalism among the Lollards.” In ibid., 53– 63. “An Afterword on Medieval Studies, or the Future of Abelard and Heloise.” In The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, edited by John Van Engen, 401– 31. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

Publications of John Van Engen \ 503 “Obituary: Gerhart Burian Ladner.” Catholic Historical Review 80 (1994): 415–18. “The Church in the Fifteenth Century.” In Handbook of European History in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, edited by Thomas Brady Jr., Heiko Oberman, and James Tracy, 305– 30. Leiden: Brill, 1994. “Sacred Sanctions for Lordship.” In Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Thomas N. Bisson, 203– 30. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. “Studying Scripture in the Early University.” In Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Exegese, edited by Robert Lerner, 17– 38. Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 32. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. “Obituary: Gerhart Burian Ladner.” Speculum 71 (1996): 802– 4. “Christening the Romans.” Traditio 52 (1997): 1– 45. “Letters, Schools, and Written Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.” In Dialektik und Rhetorik im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, edited by Johannes Fried, 97–132. Schriften des historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 27. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997. Preface to Carthusian Spirituality: The Writings of Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte, by Dennis Martin, xv– xx. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. “From Practical Theology to Divine Law: The Work and Mind of the Medieval Canonists.” In Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, edited by Peter Landau and Joers Mueller, 874 – 96. Monumenta iuris canonici C, Subsidia 10. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1997. “Mother and Teacher: Hildegard as Abbess.” In Voice of the Living Light, edited by Barbara Newman, 30 – 51. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. “Religious Profession: From Liturgy to Law.” Viator 29 (1998): 323– 43. “Privileging the Devout: A Text from the Brothers at Deventer.” In Roma, magistra mundi. Itineraria culturae medievalis: Mélanges offerts au Père L.E. Boyle à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, edited by Jacqueline Hammesse, 951– 63. Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1998. “Dominic and the Brothers: Vitae as Life-forming exempla in the Order of Preachers.” In Christ among the Medieval Dominicans, edited by Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow, 7– 25. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. “Managing the Common Life: The Brothers at Deventer and the Codex of the Household ( The Hague, MS KB 70 H 75).” In Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter, edited by Hagen Keller, Christel Meier, and Thomas Scharff, 111– 69. Munich: W. Fink, 1999. “Friar Johannes Nyder on Laypeople Living as Religious in the World.” In Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Franz J. Felten, 583– 615. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1999. “The Work of Gerlach Peters (d. 1411), Spiritual Diarist and Letter-Writer, a Mystic among the Devout.” Ons Geestlijke Erf 73 (1999): 150 – 77.

504 / Publications of John Van Engen “Letters and the Public persona of Hildegard of Bingen.” In Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, edited by Alfred Haverkamp, 375– 418. Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2000. “The Sayings of the Fathers: An Inside Look at the New Devout in Deventer.” In Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History. Essays Presented to Heiko A. Oberman on his 70th Birthday, edited by Robert J. Bast and Andrew Colin Gow, 279– 302. Leiden: Brill, 2000. “Appendix: A Working Edition of the Dicta patrum.” In ibid., 303– 20. “Introduction: Jews and Christians Together in Twelfth-Century Europe.” In Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, 1– 8. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. “Ralph of Flaix: The Book of Leviticus Interpreted as Christian Community.” In ibid., 150 – 70. “The Future of Medieval Church History.” Church History 71 (2002): 492– 523. “Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth Century.” In Conversions Old and New, edited by Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills, 30 – 65. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003. “Devout Communities and Inquisitorial Orders: The Legal Defense of the New Devout.” In Reform von unten: Gerhart Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder vom Gemeinsamen Leben, edited by Nikolaus Staubach, 44 –101. Frankfurt: P. Lang, 2004. “Epistolae fratrum: An Edition.” In ibid., 143– 61. “Formative Religious Practices in Pre-Modern European Life.” In Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, edited by John Van Engen, 1– 26. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004. “Practice Beyond the Confines of the Medieval Parish.” In ibid., 150 – 77. “The Voices of Women in Twelfth-Century Europe.” In Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Linda Olsen and Kathryn KerbyFulton, 199– 212. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. “New Devotion in the Low Countries.” Ons geestelijk erf 77 (2003, appeared 2005): 235– 63. “From Canons to Preachers: A Revolution in Medieval Governance.” In Domenico di Caleruega e la nascita dell’ordine dei Frati Predicatori: atti del XLI Convego storico internazionale, 261– 95. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2005. “Illicit Religion: The Case of Friar Matthew Grabow O.P.” In Law and the Illicit in Medieval Society, edited by Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter, 103–16. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. “The Writings of Master Geert Grote of Deventer, Deacon (1340 – 84).” Ons geestelijk erf 78 (2004, appeared 2008): 345– 68.

Publications of John Van Engen \ 505 “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church.” Church History 77 (2008): 257– 84. “Conclusion: Christendom c. 1100: On the Cusp of the Twelfth Century: Latin Christendom and the Kingdoms of the Christened.” In Early Medieval Christianities, edited by Thomas Noble and Julia Smith, 625– 43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. “Alijt Bake, Four Ways of the Cross.” In Late Medieval Mysticism of the Low Countries, edited by Rik van Neiuwenhove, Robert Faesen, and Helen Rolfson, 176 – 202. New York: Paulist Press, 2008. “The Practices of Devotio Moderna.” In Medieval Christianity in Practice, edited by Miri Rubin, 256 – 62. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. “Wrestling with the Word: Rupert’s Quest for Exegetical Understanding.” In Rupert von Deutz—Ein Denker zwischen den Zeiten, edited by Heinz Finger, Harold Horst, and Rainer Klotz, 185– 99. Libelli rhenani 31. Cologne: Köln Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, 2009. “Foreword: Michael Signer.” In Transforming Relations: Essay on Jews and Christians throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, edited by Franklin T. Harkins, xi– xix. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. “The Sister-books.” In Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100 –c. 1500, edited by Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, 105– 31. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. “The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom.” In European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, edited by Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen, 17– 44. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. “Letters, the Lettered Voice, and Public Culture in the Carolingian Era.” In Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medio evo, 403– 25. Settimana di studi sull’alto medioevo 59. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2012. “Sabine G. MacCormack,” Speculum 88 (2013): 891– 93. “Marguerite of Hainaut and the Medieval Low Countries.” In Marguerite Porete et le “Miroir des simples âmes”: Perspectives historiques, philosophiques et littéraires, edited by Sean Field, Robert Lerner, and Sylvain Piron, 25– 68. Paris: Vrin, 2013. “Medieval Monks on Labor and Leisure.” In Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity in History, edited by Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk, 47– 62. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. “Christening, the Kingdom of the Carolingians, and European Humanity,” in Rome and Religion in the Medieval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas F.X. Noble, edited by Valerie L. Garver and Owen M. Phelan, 101– 28. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.

506 / Publications of John Van Engen “Deventer and Zwolle.” In Regeneration: A Literary History of Europe, 1348–1418, edited by David Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. (also at http://www.english.upenn.edu /~dwallace/europe) “The Religious Women of Liège at the Turn of the Thirteenth Century: Recluses, Cistercian Nuns, Beguines?” In Medieval Liège at the Crossroads of Europe: Monastic Society and Culture, 1000 –1300, edited by Tjamke Snijders and Steven Vanderputten. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming.

Contributors

Christine Caldwell Ames is a historian of medieval Europe with particular interests in heresy and orthodoxy, interreligious relations, and the taxonomy of religion. Her articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, History Compass, Heresis, and Comitatus, and her book Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2009. She is an associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina. Giles Constable is Professor emeritus of History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. He held positions at the University of Iowa from 1955 to 1957 and at Harvard University from 1958 to 1985. He was director of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, from 1977 to 1984. He has been a visiting professor at several universities and still serves on the editorial boards of a number of periodicals and book series. He has written and edited about twenty books and published over a hundred articles, mostly in the area of medieval religious and monastic history. William J. Courtenay, Ph.D. Harvard (1967), Hilldale and Charles Homer Haskins Professor emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin, is a specialist in medieval intellectual history. He is also a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Historical Society, and the British Academy. His recent books include Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Rotuli Parisienses, 3 vols. ( Brill, 2002, 2004, 2013), and Ockham and Ockhamism ( Brill, 2008). He is presently preparing a book on relations between the University of Paris, the papacy, and the French monarchy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 507

508 / Contributors Susan Einbinder is Professor of Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She arrived in Storrs in 2012 after teaching for nineteen years at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. She is the author of two books, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom from Medieval France (Princeton University Press, 1999) and No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion and the Memory of Medieval France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). She is currently working on a linked series of studies on medieval Jewish trauma and memory. Dyan Elliott is Peter B. Ritzma Chair of the Humanities, Department of History, Northwestern University. Her most recent book is The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200 – 1500 ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She is currently working on the concept of scandal and its impact on the medieval church. Roy Hammerling is Professor of Religion at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN. His publications include of A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth Century ( Brill, 2008) and The Lord’s Prayer in the History of the Church: The Pearl of Great Price ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Besides writing about Christian spirituality he also enjoys collaborating with his sons on documentary film projects such as A Message from the East and My Country, No More. Daniel Hobbins is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His book Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning appeared in 2009 from the University of Pennsylvania Press. His research interests include authorship, media, and the general cultural background to print. He is currently working on a history of the authorial colophon from 1100 to 1500. William Chester Jordan is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Chairman of the History Department at Princeton University. A Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Jordan is the author of several books, including The French Monarchy and the Jews

Contributors \ 509 from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) and, most recently, Men at the Center: Redemptive Governance under Louis IX (Central European Press, 2012). Professor Jordan’s current research focuses on French–English relations in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. Ruth Mazo Karras is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She has published numerous books and articles on medieval gender and sexuality, most recently Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in Medieval Europe ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She coedited the Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (2013). Her current research concerns King David as a figure of masculinity across Jewish and Christian cultures. Rachel Koopmans is Associate Professor of History at York University in Toronto. Her book, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011. Her research interests focus on hagiography, stained glass, and the religious culture of medieval England. She is currently writing a book on the Thomas Becket “miracle windows” of Canterbury Cathedral. Jonathan R. Lyon is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2005. His fields of specialization include family history and the history of the medieval Holy Roman Empire. He is the author of Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100 –1250 (Cornell University Press, 2013). David C. Mengel, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Xavier University, has published articles on urban religious culture, prostitution, and maps of the Black Death that have appeared in journals such as Speculum and Past and Present. He is currently completing a book on religion, space, and power in Prague during the reign of Charles IV (1346 –1378).

510 / Contributors Maureen C. Miller, University of California, Berkeley, is a historian of medieval Europe with a particular interest in Italy. She earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from Harvard University, where she studied with the distinguished social and economic historian David Herlihy. She has published three monographs: The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950 –1150 (1993), The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (2000), and Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800 –1200 (2014), all with Cornell University Press. James D. Mixson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Poverty’s Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement (Brill, 2009). His current projects include a translation of the seminal essays of Kaspar Elm, a handbook on the Observant Movement (coedited with Bert Roest), and a study of the Franciscan Observant John of Capistrano. R.I. Moore is Professor emeritus at the University of Newcastle. He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley and is a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. His books include The Formation of a Persecuting Society ( University of Vermont Press, 2007), The First European Revolution ( Blackwell, 2001) and The War on Heresy ( Belknap, 2012). He is series editor of the Blackwell History of the World. Marcela K. Perett is on the faculty at Bard College, Berlin. Her research interests are centered around theological writing in late medieval Bohemia, asking questions about the consequences of Latin theology becoming vernacularized and about the role it played in the formation of distinct religious groups, particularly Hussites in Bohemia and Lollards in England.  Walter Simons is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He studies religious movements and their social context in the high and late Middle Ages. His books include Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200 –1565 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and, as editor with Miri Rubin, The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100 –c. 1500 (2009).

Contributors \ 511 Lisa Wolverton, Professor of History at the University of Oregon, concentrates her research on the Czech Lands in the early and central Middle Ages. Her books include Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), a translation of Cosmas of Prague’s Chronicle of the Czechs (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), and Cosmas of Prague: Narrative, Classicism, Politics (Catholic University of America Press, 2015). She is also the author, with Ian F. McNeely, of Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet ( W. W. Norton, 2008).

Index

Abbreviations t and f refer to table and figure, respectively. Abelard, Peter, xi, 203, 210 –15, 218, 229n31, 229n34, 230n42, 230n53, 231n54; and Heloise, 237. See also Heloise Abraham (Abram), biblical patriarch, 213, 264, 491 Abraham, bishop of Freising, 150 Ad abolendam, 62 Adalbert ( Vojtěch), bishop of Prague, 32, 36, 38, 40, 41, 52n17, 54n44 Adalgis of Benevento ( Duke), 145, 147 Adam, 142, 244; and Eve, 7, 203, 213–15 Adam, abbot of Shrewsbury, 176 – 77, 182, 191t Ad nostrum, 332– 36, 344 advocate (advocatus), 141– 67 (ch. 6) Aelred of Rievaulx, 238 Alan of Lille, 203, 219– 25 Alan of Tewkesbury, 196n5 Albero, archbishop of Trier, 158, 160 – 61. See also Gesta Alberonis Albi, France, 59, 62, 68 Albigensian Crusade, 58, 63, 73, 233n88, 284 Albigensians (Albigenses), 59, 71, 233n88. See also Cathars Aldersbach, abbey, 447, 461 Alexander (the Great), 401 Alexander II, pope, 61

Alexander III, pope, 13, 79n15, 360, 379n6, 381n19 Alexius, saint, 126, 130 Alfonso X of Castile, 253– 73 (ch. 10, appendix) Algeciras, seige of, 253, 256, 261 Ambrose of Milan, 11 Amman, Jost, 474 – 75, 475f Ancrene Riwle, 239 Anno, bishop of Freising, 150 Anselm, abbot of Lorsch, 157 Anselm, monk of Reading, 192t, 196n7 Anselm of Alessandria, 60, 70 Anselm of Baggio. See Alexander II Anselm of Bec/Canterbury, xi, 177, 181, 205, 238, 462 Anselm of Havelberg, 239 Anthony of Padua, saint, 284 anthropology, 75, 87, 92, 97– 99, 105, 108 Anthusa, saint, 241 Antichrist, 164n16, 436 – 73 (ch. 17, appendix) Ariald of Cucciago, 61 Aristotle, 224 – 25, 269n16, 271, 399, 425 Armleder persecution, 301– 2 Arnoldists, 62 Arnold of Brescia, 72. See also Arnoldists

512

Index \ 513 Arnulf of Bavaria, 145, 147– 48 Arnulf of Lisieux, 196n9, 238 Arthur, king, 215 Artisans’ Revolt, 299, 303, 305 asceticism, 8, 64, 126, 130, 205, 242, 451, 457, 474 Attala, abbot of Bobbio, 243 Attila the Hun, 145, 147 Augustine, monk of Reading, 173– 74, 190t Augustine of Hippo, 9, 11, 203– 6, 213–14, 217, 391– 92, 394, 403, 462, 477– 78, 487; rule of, 477– 79, 481, 491 Augustinian canons, 190, 192, 194, 248n46 Augustinian Friars (Augustinian Hermits), 337, 401, 464n19, 476 – 85, 493– 95. See also mendicants Avignon, 339, 343, 346, 375, 452 Babenbergs, 142 Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 486 Bake, Alijt, xii Balderich, author of Gesta Alberonis, 160 – 61 Baldwin, archbishop of Trier, 302– 3 baptism, 5, 19– 20, 26, 30, 36 – 37, 212, 218, 241 Barabbas, 288 Barcilonai, 255, 264 Becket, Thomas, xii, 168– 201 (ch. 7) Beelzebub, 446 – 47, 456, 462, 472 beghard, 331– 34, 344 beguines, 331– 57 (ch. 13, appendix) Benedetto di Nicolello da Gubbio, 400 Benedict VIII, pope, 364 Benedict XII, pope, 371, 374 – 75. See also Fournier, Jacques Benedict XIII, pope, 449, 451– 52 Benedictines, xi, 31, 47– 48, 194 Benedict of Nursia, 46, 243, 462; rule of, 29

Benedict of Peterborough, 171– 76, 182, 187, 190t, 194t Beno de Rapiza, 129– 33 Berengar II, king of Italy, 145– 47 Berengar of Tours, 232n68 Bernardino of Siena, 405, 453 Bernard of Clairvaux, xi, 59, 67, 180, 237– 39, 392, 394 – 96, 461– 62 Bernard of Cluny, 244 Bernard Silvestris, 233n82 Bernart de Caux, 75 Berthold II of Zähringen, 145 Berthold (of Hohenberg), advocate of Lorsch, 157 Berthold of Zwiefalten, 148, 159– 60 Besse, Guillaume, 70 Bianchi, 388, 393, 402, 409 Birgitta of Sweden, 436 Black Death ( plague), 294, 301– 2, 315, 391, 437 Blanche, daughter of Louis IX of France, 256 Blanche of Castile, mother of Louis IX of France, 284 Boccaccio, 484 Boethius, 214 Bogomils, 65, 67, 69, 223 Boleslav I, duke of Bohemia, 32 Boleslav II, duke of Bohemia, 28– 32, 40 Bonaventure, 392 Boniface VIII, pope, 136n8, 359, 364, 368 Boniface IX, pope, 388 Bonizo of Sutri, 132, 140n33 Bonjohannes de Messana, 460 Bořivoj I, duke of Bohemia, 31 Borluut, Fulco, 342 Božetěch, abbot of Sázava, 46 Braem, Henry ( Hendrik), 340 – 42, 347 Břetislav I, duke of Bohemia, 36, 46; decrees, 36 – 38

514 / Břetislav II, duke of Bohemia, 43, 47, 49 Břevnov, Bohemian monastery, 47, 48– 49 Brothers of the Sack, 337. See also mendicants Buridan, Jean, 374 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 239 Caiphas (Caiaphas), 286, 289 Camaldolese, 387 Cantelupe, Thomas de, 365 Cantigas de Santa Maria, 254, 261– 63, 265, 267n8, 272– 73 Capito, Wolfgang, 481 Carolingians, xii, 12, 16, 123, 126, 131, 145, 147, 148– 49, 156 Carthusians, 395. See also La Chartreuse; Denys the Carthusian Casus monasterii Petrishusensis, 155– 56, 158. See also Petershausen Cathars, 58– 86 (ch. 3), 118n71, 224, 234n88 Catherine of Siena, xii, 388, 461 Cavalcanti, Aldobrandino, 392– 93, 396 Charlemagne, 33, 55n48, 128, 146, 157 Charles IV, emperor, 294 – 328 (ch. 12) Charles of Valois, count, 345 La Chartreuse, 240 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 392, 484 Christina, daughter of Haakon IV, 284 Christina of Markyate, 240 Christina Psalter, 280 – 93 (ch. 11) Chronica Boemorum. See Cosmas of Prague Chronicon Laureshamense, 156, 158. See also Lorsch Cicero, 399, 401, 494

Index Cistercians, xi, 73– 74, 76, 82n48, 143– 44, 162, 180, 234, 238, 311, 447, 461 Clare of Assisi, 284 Clavis physicae, 219 Clement I, saint and pope, 126, 129– 30, 138n23, 140n33. See also San Clemente, basilica Clement III, pope, 124, 127– 28 Clement V, pope, 332, 335, 338. See also Clementinae Clement VI, pope, 323n46, 373, 375 Clementinae (Clementine decrees), 331– 57 (ch. 13, appendix) Clericis laicos, 364 Cluny (Cluniac), 74, 178, 180, 185, 191– 92, 242, 244, 245n14, 248n52. See also individuals by name Concordat of Worms, 134 Confessions (Augustine of Hippo), 9–10, 204, 206 Conrad III, German king, 142, 148, 152– 53 Conrad of Porto, 71 Constantine (Cyril). See Cyril Constantine, Roman emperor, 128, 146 Corbinelli, Angelo, 387 Corbridge, Thomas de, 373 Cosmas of Prague, 27– 32, 35– 48, 50, 309 Cosmas the priest, 69 Cotta, Landolf, 61 Council of Basel, 391, 453 Council of Constance, 389, 391, 393, 420, 426, 437, 443, 447– 49, 455, 457, 462 Council of Lyons II (Second Council of Lyons), 337, 362 Council of Saint-Felix, 74 Council of Ten, 388 Council of Toledo, 11 Council of Tours, 68

Index Council of Verona, 62 Council of Vienne, 331– 35, 338 Crescente fide, 32 Crosiers with the Red Heart, 310 Crosiers with the Red Star, 326n87 Crusade, 339; Albigensian, 58– 59, 63, 71, 73, 233n88, 284; against Hussites, 422; in Iberia, 261; of Louis IX, 288; Second, 156, 239, 307 crusaders, 61, 240, 422 Çuleyma (Solomon ben Isaac), 260 Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, 333– 34, 336, 338– 39, 341– 42, 344, 346 – 77 Cum ex eo, 359, 364 – 71, 373, 375– 76 Cyril (Constantine), saint, 47, 139n29 Cyril of Alexandria, saint, 460 Dādisho’, 242 d’Ailly, Pierre, 454 Damian, Peter. See Peter Damian Daniel, 258, 264 – 65, 407 Dante, 212, 449 David, biblical king, 490 De Incendio, 157 Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite. See Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite Denys the Carthusian, 393 De ruina ecclesiae, 454 Desiderius, 146 Desiderius ( pope). See Victor III devil, 94 – 95, 97, 102, 205, 214, 224, 390, 403– 8, 427– 28, 437, 447, 456, 491– 92. See also Beelzebub; Lucifer Devotio Moderna, 397. See also Modern Devout Diethard, abbot of Sázava, 47 Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite ( Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite or Pseudo-Dionysius), 219, 241 divorce, 9, 11, 14, 37

\ 515 Dominic, saint, xii, 284, 452 Dominicans, 351n26, 388– 89, 393, 396, 400 – 401, 405, 448– 49, 453, 460; as inquisitors, xii, 59– 60, 62– 63, 69, 73, 88, 114n27; tertiaries, 453. See also mendicants; and individuals by name Dominici, Giovanni, 387– 418 (ch. 15) Dominic Loricatus, 242 Donatists, 62 Dorothea of Montau, 460 dreams, 202– 3, 206 – 8, 261– 62, 265, 272, 404 – 9 dualism, 59– 60, 62– 64, 67– 71, 73, 76, 219– 20, 223– 24. See also Bogomils; Manichees Durkheim, Emile, 103 Eberwin of Steinfeld, 67– 68, 74 Eckbert of Schönau, 76, 233n88, 238 Eckhart, 396 Eilward of Westoning, 184, 188, 190t, 191t Ekkehard, bishop of Prague, 32 Eliduc, 215 Enlightenment, 64, 87, 95, 102 Ephraim, saint, 236 Ermine of Reims, 408 Eteriano, Hugh, 71 Étienne de Bourbon, 88– 89, 94 – 95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 107– 8 Étienne de Nérac, 339– 40 Eucharist, 4, 20, 131, 133, 203, 215–18, 225, 231n68, 419– 20, 422– 23, 425 Eusebius, 146 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 98 Eve. See Adam, and Eve Exsurge Domine, 486 Exultet rolls, 131 Fadrique of Castile, 256 Felice da Montefalco, 88

516 / Index Ferdinand III, king of Castile, 260 Fernando de la Cerda, 256 Ferrer, Vincent, 443, 448– 53 Firefly, 387– 418 (ch. 15) Foliot, Gilbert, bishop of London, 179 folklore, 87, 92, 97, 99–100 Formicarius, 405 Fournier, Jacques, bishop of Pamiers, 88– 89. See also Benedict XII Franciscans, 80n31, 88, 242, 254, 334, 339, 342, 346, 477. See also mendicants; Observants Francis of Assisi, 242, 284 Frederick I, Barbarossa, 142, 144, 146, 153– 54 Frederick II, emperor, 298 Free Spirit, heresy of the, 66, 72, 334 Frutolf of Michelsberg, 146 – 47 Gaillard de Pomiès, 88 Gall, saint, 242 Gandolfo, Francesco, 127 Gebhard, bishop of Prague. See Jaromír/Gebhard Gerard of Saint Albinus, 240 Gerald of Wales, 216 –18 Gerhoh of Reichersberg, 243 Gerson, Jean, xii, 392– 93, 397, 407– 8, 452, 461– 62, 465n35 Gesta Alberonis, 158, 160 – 61 Gesta Friderici, 142, 144 – 46, 148, 153– 54, 162 ghosts, 44, 204, 207– 8, 440 – 47 Giffard, Walter, bishop of Bath and Wells, archbishop of York, 362 Gilbert of Merton, 240 Gilbert of Sempringham, 197n13 Giles of Klemskerke, 342 Giles of Repen, 335 Giovanni della Casa, 16 Giulio d’Assisi, 88 Glagolitic (script), 47 Golden Bull of 1356, 298

Goliath, 222, 224 Good Werner persecution, 301 Grabow, Matthew, xii Grandes Chroniques de France, 345 Grandmontines (Order of Grandmont), 239 Gratian, xii, 12–13, 406 Greenfield, William, archbishop of York, 366 Gregorian reform, xi, 61, 67, 123 Gregory I, the Great, 128, 212, 392, 442, 461 Gregory VII, 49– 50, 61, 123– 29, 132– 33 Gregory X, 362, 365 Gregory XI, 375 Griselda, 484 Grosseteste, Robert, 359 Grote (Groote), Geert, xii, 331, 436 Gui, Bernard, 64, 88, 340 Guibert of Nogent, 203–10, 212, 217–18, 225 Guinefort, dog-saint, 88, 94, 99–101 Gumpold of Mantua, 48 Günther von Schwarzburg, 299 Guy, count of Flanders, 338, 344 Haakon IV, 284 Hazzicha of Krauftal, 240 Heloise, 14 –15, 232n72, 237 Henry, bishop of Freising, 151 Henry II, king of England, 172, 178, 191t, 195n2, 199n36, 232n73 Henry IV, emperor, 124, 133, 155 Henry VII, emperor, 323n51 Henry VIII, king of England, 12 Henry de Beaumont, bishop of Bayeux, 185– 86, 193t Henry Jasomirgott, duke of Bavaria, 145 Henry of Friemar, 493 Henry of Langenstein, 392, 454 Henry of Lausanne, 84n63 Henry of Marcy, 237

Index Henry of Tegernsee, 167n69 Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria, 159– 60 Herman, count-palatine of the Rhine, 160 – 61 Herman, Jewish convert, 243 hermits, 237, 248n50, 437, 443, 448– 49, 451, 454, 456 – 57. See also Augustinian Friars Hildebrand. See Gregory VII Hildegard of Bingen, xii, 197n11, 240 homosexuality, 220 Honorius III, 361 Honorius Augustodunensis, 219, 247n44, 462 Horace, 401 hospital, 179, 310, 335– 36, 399, 488 Hospitallers, 179, 337 Hostiensis, 17 Hotot, Thomas de, 373 Hugh Candidus, 126 – 27 Hugh Eteriano, 71 Hugh of Saint-Victor, xi, 391– 92, 479 humanism, 64, 101– 2, 108, 389– 92, 394, 396 – 97, 402, 406, 409–10, 436 Hume, David, 95– 98, 100 –103, 108 Humiliati, 62 Hus, Jan, 295, 420, 426. See also Hussites Húska, Martin ( Loquis), 421 Hussites, xii, 66, 295, 419– 35 (ch. 16) Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, 42 Innocent III, 61, 380n11, 442, 459, 461 inquisition, 58– 63, 69, 71, 73, 75– 76, 87–119 (ch. 4), 233n88, 333– 34, 406. See also Dominicans, as inquisitors investiture, 30, 260; contest over, 49, 124, 133– 34, 156 Isaac ben Zadoq. See Zag de la Maleha

\ 517 Isaac Ibn Sahula, 269n16, 270n19, 271n29 Isaac of Meiningen, 301 Isaac of Scheßlitz, 313 Isidore of Seville, 146 – 47 Ivo of Chartres, 12 Ivo of Eglesheyl, 385n46 James I, king of Aragon, 256 James of Vitry, 240 Jaromír, duke of Bohemia, 56n76 Jaromír/Gebhard, bishop of Prague, 43, 49 Jean de Beaune, Dominican friar, 88 Jean de Saint-Pierre, 75 Jerome, saint, 9, 125, 391, 394 Jerome of Prague, 426 Jesus (Christ), 9, 12–13, 19, 30, 21n12, 114n27, 131, 161, 179, 211–12, 218, 222– 23, 230n40, 235n106, 236 – 44, 285– 89, 355, 397, 399, 404, 420 – 25, 437, 453, 456, 477– 78, 481– 82, 485– 89, 493– 95. See also Eucharist Jews, xii-xiii, 5–11, 42, 85n71, 118n79, 222, 243, 253– 79 (ch. 10, appendix), 280, 282, 285– 91, 295– 317 Joachimites, 345 Joan, countess of Flanders, 344 Joan of Arc, 408, 461 John, saint and evangelist, 223; gospel of, 285– 86, 444, 487– 88, 495 John XIII, pope, 52n13 John XXII, pope, 332, 335– 36, 338– 40, 346, 353, 369– 70, 372, 385n47, 386n56, 455 John Chrysostom, 236 John Climacus, 461 John of Canterbury, 172, 181 John of Elham, 372 John of Salisbury, 141, 147– 48, 172, 181, 196n6, 197n16, 394

518 / John of Sanminiato, 387 John of Strassburg, bishop, 364 John Scotus Eriugena, 219 John the Baptist, 209, 213, 494 Jordan of Quedlinburg, 477, 483– 84, 487, 491, 493 Jordan of Saxony, 498n36 Joseph, 407 Josephini, 62 Jovinian, 9 Judas, 286 – 87 Judenregal, 298, 303– 4 Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, 12 Julian, emperor, 236 Julian of Norwich, 436 Justinian, Roman emperor, 399– 400 Kániš, Peter, 421 Kramer, Heinrich, 405 Lanval, 215 Lateran III ( Third Lateran Council), 62, 360 – 61 Lateran IV ( Fourth Lateran Council), 223, 334, 359, 361 Lechfeld, Battle of, 143 Leo I, pope, 16 Leo IX, pope, 124, 126, 129, 133 Leo X, pope, 486 Leonor, daughter of Alfonso X of Castile, 256 lepers, 183, 185– 86, 192t, 193t, 156 Liber Vitasfratrum. See Lives of the Brethren Licet canon, 362– 65, 367, 370, 372, 375 Lives of the Brethren, 477, 493 Lives of the Taborite Priests, 427 Lluís de Prades, bishop of Mallorca, 447, 449, 451 Lollards, 66, 402, 430n2 Lombard, Peter. See Peter Lombard Lorsch, monastery, 156 – 57

Index Lothar II, emperor, 12 Louis VI (the Fat), king of France, 141, 147– 48 Louis VII, king of France, 79n15 Louis VIII (the Lion), king of France, 284, 290 Louis IX, king of France, saint, 256, 281, 288, 345; Psalter of Saint Louis, 281 Lucifer, 222, 441, 446, 472 Lucretia, 213 Ludwig of Bavaria, 299 Ludwig of Brandenburg, 304 Luke, gospel of, 244n1, 285– 86, 463n16, 487, 493 Lusanna of Florence, 16 Luther, Martin, 474 – 500 (ch. 18) Lutheran pastoral concern, 108 magic, 43, 73, 87, 90, 103, 202– 3, 215–18, 225, 405, 407– 8, 410 Malatesta, Carlo, 393 Malleus Maleficiarum, 405 Manfredi da Vercelli, 453 Manichees, 62, 69 Marguerite Porete. See Porete, Marguerite Maria Macellaria, 129– 33 Marie de France, 203, 215–18 Marienwerder, Johannes, 459– 60 Margaret, countess of Flanders, 344 Mark, gospel of, 285– 88 marriage, 4 – 24, 37– 38, 126, 130, 205– 6, 208, 256, 345, 356, 428, 486 Marsigli, Luigi, 401 Martin V, pope, 449 Martin of Tours, 236 Mary, Virgin, 92, 206, 254, 259, 261– 63, 265, 272– 73, 284, 401, 406, 453, 484 – 85, 487; church dedicated to, 31, 157, 300, 313–14. See also Cantigas de Santa Maria

Index Mary Magdalene, 287, 488 Master of Arts, 358, 362, 369, 373, 383n30, 386n63, 420 Matilda, queen of England, 181 Matilda of Tuscany, 127 Matthew, gospel of, 236, 285– 87, 463n13, 477, 490, 492, 498n38 Maxentius, 146 Melk, monastery, 447, 457– 58, 460 – 61, 468 mendicants, 242, 284, 334, 337, 344, 359, 392, 476, 478, 489– 91. See also Augustinian Friars; Brothers of the Sack; Dominicans; Franciscans; Observants Menocchio, 88, 101 Mepham, Simon de, archbishop of Canterbury, 373 Merovingians, 12 Methodius, 45, 47– 48. See also Pseudo-Methodius Michael of Regensburg, bishop, 31 Milvian Bridge, Battle of the, 146 miracles, xii, 92, 126, 129, 131, 168– 94, 203, 232n73, 239, 272, 398, 401, 404 –10, 438, 440, 455, 457, 494 missionaries, 26 – 28, 30, 33– 34, 45, 129, 334 Mlada ( Maria), 29 Modern Devotion. See Devotio Moderna Modern Devout ( New Devout), xii, 331, 395, 402 Moneta of Cremona, 224 Montacute, Simon de, bishop of Worcester, 366 Montaillou, 88– 89, 98, 100 Monte Cassino, Italy, 127; Exultet of, 131 Moses, 405 Mstiš, 42 Muslims ( Moors, Saracens), 21n3, 42, 240, 253, 255, 258, 261– 62, 272– 73, 346

\ 519 Nicholas I, pope, 16 Nicholas de Clamanges, 454 Nicholas Magni of Jauer, 407– 8 Nicholas of Cusa, 461 Nicolaitan heretics, 61 Nider, John, 12, 405– 6, 408 Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, 462 Nimrod, 158 Nitker, bishop of Freising, 151 Nominoë, Breton ruler, 145 Observants, 388, 392, 400, 402– 3, 405, 407–10, 436. See also Dominicans; Franciscans Octavian, 401 Odilo, abbot of Cluny, saint, 248n51 Odo, abbot of Cluny, saint, 236 Odo, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, 176 – 77, 182, 190t –193t Odoacer, 147 Odo of Saint-Martin, Autun, 242 Olaf, saint, 284 Old Church Slavonic (OCS), 47– 48. See also Slavonic liturgy Oldřich, duke of Bohemia, 46, 54n44 Omne Bonum, 17 On the Freedom of the Christian, 486 ordeal, 22n23, 38– 39 Ordinance of Melun, 290 Orléans, burning of heretics at, 64, 73 Orosius, 145 Ortlieb, 158– 60 Ostrov, Bohemian monastery, 49 Otto I, count-palatine of Bavaria, 148, 151– 53 Otto I, emperor, 29– 30, 128 Otto II, count-palatine of Bavaria, 148, 151– 54 Otto II, emperor, 28, 30 – 31, 34 Otto III, emperor, 30 Ottokar. See Přemysl Ottokar II Ottonians, 26 – 28, 127 Otto of Freising, 141– 67 (ch. 6)

520 / Pachomius, saint, 237 parish, 18, 26, 119n81, 425, 436; parish church, 16 –18, 311; parish clergy, 91, 310, 358– 86 (ch. 14); parishioners, 184, 188, 399; parish tithes, 310, 377 Pascal II, pope. See Rainerius Passagini, 62 Passavanti, Jacopo, 392– 93, 396 Patarenes ( Pataria), 61– 62, 67 Paul, saint, 212–14, 222, 403, 480, 488, 490 Payne, Peter ( Peter English), 420, 423 Peace of God, 68 Peche, Richard, bishop of Coventry, 184 – 85, 187, 192t Pedro III, 256 Pedro de Luna. See Benedict XIII Peter, saint, 286, 445, 288 Peter Abelard. See Abelard Peter Damian ( Damiani), 126, 238, 394, 396 – 97 Peter Isarn, 70 Peter Lombard, 12–13, 391 Peter of Bruys, 74 Peter of Celle, 172, 190t, 238– 39 Peter of Jouy, 180, 192t Peter of Pontigny, 180, 182 Peters, Gerlach, xii Petershausen, 155– 56 Peter the Venerable, 73– 74, 76, 83n62, 163n4, 242, 464n18 Pharailde of Ghent, saint, 341 Philip, brother of Robert of Flanders, 345 Philip V, king of France, 339 Philip of Castile and León, 284 Philip of Harvengt, 241 Pierleoni, 127 Pierre d’Ailly. See D’Ailly, Pierre Pierre de la Palud, 346 Pierozzi, Antonio, 389

Index Pippin, emperor, 157 Plato, 204, 210 –11, 219– 25 Pontius ( Pons of Melgueil), abbot of Cluny, 245n14 Pontius Pilate, 288 Poor Lombards, 63 Poor Men of Lyons, 63 Porete, Marguerite, xii, 333 Premonstratensians (Order of Canons Regular of Prémontré), 74, 241 Přemyslid dynasty, 27, 35, 39– 41, 44 Přemysl Ottokar II, king of Bohemia, 298 Příbram, John, 419– 35 (ch. 16) Prokop, 46 – 47 Protestantism, 64 – 65, 87, 96, 474 Pseudo-Methodius, 438, 461 Puiset, Hugh, bishop of Durham, 173, 183– 84, 187, 190t, 192t Pyro, saint, 209 Quivil, Peter, bishop of Exeter, 365 Rabanus Maurus, 236 Rainerius, cardinal priest of San Clemente, 126 Ralph (Glaber), 178 Ralph (of Sully), abbot of Cluny, 178, 192t Ralph Niger, 240 Ralph of Flaix, xii Raymond, master of Hospitallers, Jerusalem, 179 Raymond of Capua, 388 Raymond of Piacenza, 240 Regino of Prüm, 146, 147 Remigio dei Girolami, 392 renovatio imperii, 127 Richard of Saint-Vanne, 242 Richard of Saint-Victor, 392 Rintfleisch persecution, 301– 2, 308 Robert of Arbrissel, 243

Index Robert of Betun, 243 Robert of Béthune, count of Flanders, 331– 57 (ch. 13, appendix) Robert of Liège. See Rupert of Deutz Roger II, king of Sicily, 146 Roscelinus, 211 Rupert of Deutz ( Robert), xi– xii, 157, 243 Sacconi, Raniero, 62– 63 Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Benedictine abbey, 17, 284 Salian, 148, 155– 56 Salutati, Coluccio, 387– 89, 392– 97, 399, 401, 403– 4, 407, 409 Salvin Hours, 289 San Clemente, basilica, 125– 40 Sancho IV, king of Castile, 254, 256 – 58, 264 – 65 Savonarola, 240 Sázava, Benedictine monastery in Bohemia, 46 – 50 Schlitpacher, Johannes, prior of Melk, 460 Seilan, Pier, inquisitor, 75 Seneca, 401 ser Braems, Elizabeth, 341 Severus, bishop of Prague, 36, 53n28 Siete Partidas, 256 Sigebert of Gembloux, 128 Sigehard, patriarch of Aquileia, 156 Silvester of Lisieux, 174, 181, 190t Slavník, 41 Slavníkids, 40 – 41 Slavonic liturgy, 27, 45– 50. See also Old Church Slavonic; Prokop; Sázava Solomon, biblical king, 405 Solomon ben Isaac. See Çuleyma Spitihněv II (Spytihněv), duke of Bohemia, 42, 46, 49– 50 Staufen, 144, 148

\ 521 Staupitz, Johannes, 481 Stephen, prior of Taunton Stephen of Muret Strengberger, Caspar, 461 Stromer, Conrad and Ulrich, 312–14 Stromer, Ulman, 300, 312 Studium generale, 359, 362, 366 Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis, 141, 147, 162 Sutton, Oliver, 365 Swinfield, Richard de, 365 Sylvester I, pope, 128 synagogue, 8, 255, 297– 98, 300, 308, 310, 313, 315 Tabor ( Taborites), 421– 25, 427– 29 Talmud, 8, 231n62 Templars, 66, 332, 337 Tertullian, 9 Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, 180 – 81, 192t Theoderic, Gothic king, 145, 147 Theophilus Presbyter, xii Thieddag, bishop of Prague, 30 Thietmar, bishop of Prague, 29– 30, 32, 34, 52n17 Thomas Aquinas, 66, 141, 228n22, 391– 94, 396, 425. See also Thomist Thomas of Celano, 242 Thomas of Citeaux, 237 Thomist, 389, 396, 402 Tiburtine Oracle, 438 tithes, 32– 34, 264, 310, 377 Todros Abulafia ( Todros ben Judah Halevi Abulafia), 254 – 71, 273– 79 Todros ben Joseph, 255, 261 Trajan, Roman emperor, 212 Treaty of Pontoise, 339 troubadours, 58 Turbe, William, bishop of Norwich, 174, 186

522 / Ulrich of Cluny, saint and abbot of Zell, 250n70 universities: of Cambridge, 362, 368; and education of clergy, 358– 86 (ch. 14); of Oxford, 362– 63, 368– 69, 372– 73, 377, 426; of Paris, 362– 63, 368– 71, 373– 75, 377, 426; of Prague, 294 – 95, 311, 317, 419– 26, 430; of Wittenberg, 482 Václav ( Wenceslas), 31– 32, 34, 37, 40 – 41, 44; church of saints Vitus and Václav, 29, 32, 41– 42; feast of, 41, 43; vitae of, 27, 32, 40, 47– 48 Valdès ( Peter Waldo), 63. See also Waldenses Vashti, biblical queen, 483– 84 Vatican II (Second Vatican Council), 65, 92 Victor III, pope, 127– 28 Vincent, prior of Aggsbach, 460 Violante, queen of Castile, 254, 256, 260 Virgil, 399, 401, 494 Voltaire, 95 Vratislav, duke/king of Bohemia, 43, 46, 49 Waldenses ( Waldensians), 59, 62– 64, 66, 75 Welf V, 159 Welf VI, 145, 160 Wenceslas IV, king of Bohemia 297– 98, 311

Index Wibert of Ravenna. See Clement III Wickwane, William, archbishop of York, 362, 365 Wido of Ferrara, 128 William, castellan of Saint-Omer, 188 William II, count of Nevers, 240 William VIII, count of Montpellier, 234n88 William Firmat, 243 William of Canterbury, 171– 76, 179, 182, 185– 87, 190t–194t William of Champeaux, 210 William of Gellone, 241 William of Ghent, 340 William of Rouen, 185– 86 William of Saint-Thierry, xii, 232n70 William of Vercelli, 242 William the Monk, 84n63 Wittelsbachs, 142– 45, 148– 49, 151– 55, 162, 299, 304, 312 Wolbero of Saint-Pantaleon, 239 Wolfgang, bishop of Regensburg, 28 Wyclif, John, 292, 419– 21, 423– 26, 429– 30, 436 Yonec, 215–16 Zag de la Maleha ( Yitzhaq or Isaac ben Zadoq), 253– 79 (ch. 10, appendix) Zähringens, 145 Zell, Katharina, 15 Zengi, 156 Zwiefalten, 158– 59, 161

“Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages is a fitting tribute to one of America’s leading medievalists by his former students and other distinguished colleagues in the fields that Van Engen has investigated. The essays are wonderfully conceived and well executed to show the wide-ranging influence Van Engen has had on the interpretation of medieval Christianity and Judaism from the twelfth-century context of his early work to the late medieval world of his recent studies. The volume has an unusual unity and compelling narrative flow for a collection of essays by different authors.” Paul Freedman • Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University “Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen is a thrilling collection, both wide-ranging and informative. The contributions are well structured, well argued, and comprehensive in bibliography and source materials—a welcome volume to celebrate the work of John Van Engen.” Anthony Lappin • National University of Ireland, Maynooth “The editors of Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen have succeeded in producing a very fine volume. Most of the contributions honor John Van Engen by referring in various ways to his work. A remarkably large number are well written, original, thoughtful, and trenchant.” Robert E. Lerner • Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University “Here is a collection as multifaceted as the scholar it honors. John Van Engen came to prominence as a force for renewal in the study of medieval religious and intellectual culture. How well he succeeded is written on every page by luminaries of his generation to rising stars of the future, many his former students. Every medievalist will find something of value here. Highly recommended.” James Murray • the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Contributors   Christine Caldwell Ames, Giles Constable, William J. Courtenay, Susan Einbinder, Dyan Elliott, Roy Hammerling, Daniel Hobbins, William Chester Jordan, Ruth Mazo Karras, Rachel Koopmans, Jonathan R. Lyon, David C. Mengel, Maureen C. Miller, James D. Mixson, R. I. Moore, Marcela K. Perett, Walter Simons, Lisa Wolverton

David C. Mengel is an associate professor of history at Xavier University. Lisa Wolverton is professor of history at the University of Oregon.

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

GALLERY

Figure 5.1. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, dado of the Miracle at Cherson fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.

Figure 5.2. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Life of Saint Alexius fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.

Figure 5.3. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Miracle of Saint Clement’s Tomb at Cherson fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.

Figure 5.4. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Mass of Saint Clement fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.

Figure 5.5. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Translation of Saint Clement’s Relics fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.

Figure 11.1. Psalm 26, The Lord is my light / Dominus illuminatio mea, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.2. Psalm 52, The fool said in his heart: There is no God / Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est deus, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.3. Psalm 68, Save me, O God / Salvum me fac deus, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.4. Psalm 80, Sing out your joy / Exultate deo adiutori nostro, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.5. Psalm 87, O Lord, the God of my salvation / Domine, Deus salutis, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.6. Psalm 109, The Lord said to my Lord / Dixit dominus domino meo, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.7. Annunciation and Visitation, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.8. Jews plotting Jesus’s arrest and execution, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.9. Women at the tomb and Noli me tangere, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.

Figure 11.10. Jesus Before Caiaphas, in the Salvin Hours. Image © British Library Board, Add. 48985.