Herbert Grundmann (1902-1970): Essays on Heresy, Inquisition, and Literacy 190315393X, 9781903153932, 9781787447004

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Note on the Text
1 The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic in Medieval Perception
2 Women and Literature in the Middle Ages: A Contribution on
the Origins of Vernacular Writing
3 Litteratus–Illitteratus: The Transformation of an Educational
Standard from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
4 Heresy Interrogations in the Late Middle Ages as a Source-
Critical Problem
5 Oportet et Haereses Esse: The Problem of Heresy in the Mirror of
Medieval Biblical Exegesis
6 Learned and Popular Heresies of the Middle Ages
7 Obituary Essay (1970) by Arno Borst [annotations by Dr Letha
Böhringer]
8 Bibliography of Herbert Grundmann
Index

Citation preview

Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages Volume 9

HERBERT GRUNDMANN (1902–1970)

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YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other. Editorial Board (2019) Professor Peter Biller, Emeritus (Dept of History): General Editor Dr Henry Bainton, Private Scholar Dr J. W. Binns, Honorary Fellow, Centre for Medieval Studies Dr K. P. Clarke (Dept of English and Related Literature) Dr K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology) Dr Holly James-Maddocks (Dept of English and Related Literature) Dr Harry Munt (Dept of History) Professor W. Mark Ormrod, Emeritus (Dept of History) Professor Sarah Rees Jones (Dept of History): Director, Centre for Medieval Studies Dr L. J. Sackville (Dept of History) Dr Hanna Vorholt (Dept of History of Art) Professor J. G. Wogan-Browne (English Faculty, Fordham University) All enquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Academic Editor, York Medieval Press, Department of History, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD (E-mail: [email protected]) Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages ISSN 2046–8938 Series editors John H. Arnold, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Peter Biller, Department of History, University of York L. J. Sackville, Department of History, University of York Heresy had social, cultural and political implications in the middle ages, and countering heresy was often a central component in the development of orthodoxy. This series publishes work on heresy, and the repression of heresy, from late antiquity to the Reformation, including monographs, collections of essays, and editions of texts. Previous volumes in the series are listed at the back of this volume.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Essays on Heresy, Inquisition, and Literacy

Edited by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane Translated by Steven Rowan

Y ORK MEDIEVA L P RE S S

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Translation © Steven Rowan 2019 Editorial matter © Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane 2019 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2019 A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York www.york.ac.uk/medieval-studies ISBN 978-1-903153-93-2 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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Contents Acknowledgements vi Abbreviations viii Introduction 1 Note on the Text

14

1

The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic in Medieval Perception

16

2

Women and Literature in the Middle Ages: A Contribution on the Origins of Vernacular Writing

30

3 Litteratus–Illitteratus: The Transformation of an Educational Standard from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 4

56

Heresy Interrogations in the Late Middle Ages as a SourceCritical Problem

126

Oportet et Haereses Esse: The Problem of Heresy in the Mirror of Medieval Biblical Exegesis

180

6

Learned and Popular Heresies of the Middle Ages

216

7

Obituary Essay (1970) by Arno Borst [annotations by Dr Letha Böhringer] 221

8

Bibliography of Herbert Grundmann

5

250

Index259

v

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Acknowledgements The process of translating and editing scholarly work is always challenging, and the nature of this particular volume – linguistically dense, intellectually complex and heavily sourced – made wide consultation with colleagues a necessity. I am indebted to all below, whether for precise technical assistance, the many valuable suggestions or for encouragement at tricky junctures over the course of the project. In particular, sincere appreciation to John Arnold and Peter Biller, editors of the ‘Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages’ series with York Medieval Press, for initially proposing and entrusting me with the project. No editorial pair could have been more collegial, attentive or patient – a remarkable feat given the necessarily frequent use of email to communicate across the Atlantic. It was a genuine pleasure to work with and learn from two colleagues whose own research has long inspired me and who bring such a gracious spirit to scholarship. Our collaborative day-long editing session in September 2018 and lovely meal that evening at King’s College, Cambridge, were particular high points. I would also like to thank Caroline Palmer for her patience and support as an editor, and the rest of the team at Boydell & Brewer for their expertise and efficiency in the design and production of this book. In terms of translation contributions, the debts are many. Thanks to Steven Rowan (University of Missouri, St Louis) for cheerfully and speedily providing translations of the modern German and French essays. Stephen Carey at the University of Minnesota, Morris, offered prompt and always enlightening help with medieval German passages and literary contexts. Considerable thanks are also due to Joe Canning, who translated Latin passages within the text and footnotes; Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, for providing translations from existing editions where available; and Nikolaos Poulopoulos (University of Missouri, St Louis) for help with the Greek. And finally, my dear friend and admired fellow historian, Dr Letha Böhringer, was an invaluable resource from beginning to end – suggesting alternate translations across multiple languages, helping to develop the Introduction’s framework and themes and annotating the translation of Arno Borst’s obituary essay of Herbert Grundmann with key historical and historiographical context. No one provides energising and kind Ermutigung like she does. A wide range of colleagues at various institutions also provided feedback or expertise along the way, including Stephen Anderson, Alison Armstrong, Michael Bailey, Bill Burgwinkle, Martina Duetmann, Sean Field, Anne E. Lester, Hugo Service and Shelagh Sneddon. Elizabeth Dillenburg at the University of Minnesota provided scrupulously careful and timely editorial service. At the UMM Briggs Library, Sandy Kill worked her usual magic with Interlibrary vi

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Acknowledgements Loan despite the abundance of diacritical marks and hard-to-locate journals. Generous research funding was provided by the University of Minnesota Grant-in-Aid of Research programme and Imagine Fund award, and also by the University of Minnesota, Morris, Faculty Research Enhancement Funds (FREF). Substantial blocks of work were completed while I was on retreat at St John’s Abbey, where the medieval tradition of Benedictine hospitality continues to flourish in central Minnesota. On a personal note, I would like to acknowledge my doctoral advisors Robert E. Lerner and Richard Kieckhefer for the specific introduction to Herbert Grundmann’s scholarship and its complex historical and historiographical consequences. My cherished friends and writing partners, Jennifer Rothchild and Julie Eckerle, offered unfailing moral support as well as substantial interdisciplinary insight. And to my husband, Brad – thank you for the love and support, and for gamely discussing medieval German historiography at all hours. Finally, I would like to express gratitude for permissions to publish translations, to Frau Dr Ulrike Borst for Arno Borst’s account of Herbert Grundmann, and above all to Frau Barbara Dierichs and the whole Grundmann family for Grundmann’s essays. The publication of these translations secures the wider dissemination in the English-speaking world of the works of one of the greatest medieval historians of the 20th century: this would not have been possible without their support.

vii

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Abbreviations Abh Berlin

Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin

Abh Göttingen

Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen

Abh Munich

Abhandlungen der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Abh Prague

Abhandlungen der Königlichen Böhmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften

AFH

Archivum Franciscanum Historicum

AKG

Archiv für Kulturgeschichte

Alan of Lille, De fide

Alan de Lille, De fide catholica contra hereticos sui temporis, PL 210

Alcuin Ep.

Alcuin, Epistolae, MG Epp. 4, pp. 1–481

Annales d’hist. écon. et soc.

Annales d’historie économique et sociale

Anonymous of Passau, ed. Gretser

Anonymous of Passau, , ed. J. Gretser, Lucae Tudensis episcopi, scriptores aliquot succedanei contra sectam Waldensium (Ingolstadt, 1613), cited from the unaltered reprint in MBVP 25 (1677), pp. 262–77 and 310–12

Bernard Gui, Liber sententiarum

Liber Sententiarum Inquisitionis Tholosanae Ab anno Christi mcccvii ad annum mcccxxiii, ed. P. van Limborch [= second part of P. van Limborch, Historia Inquisitionis, cui subiungitur Liber Sententiarum … (Amsterdam, 1692)]

Bernard Gui, Practica

Bernard Gui, Practica Inquisitionis Heretice Pravitatis, ed. C. Douais (Paris, 1886)

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica 65, PL 183

Bibl. lit. Ver. Stuttgart Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart Böhmer and Redlich, J. F. Böhmer and O. Redlich, Regesta Imperii, vol. Reg. Imp. (Innsbruck, VI, part 1, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter Rudolf, 1898) Albrecht, Heinrich VII, 1273–1313 (Innsbruck, 1898) viii

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Abbreviations Bouquet, Recueil

M. Bouquet, ed., Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, new 3rd edn under the direction of L. Delisle, 24 vols. (Paris, 1854–1904)

Brutus. Orator

Cicero, Brutus. Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson, H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA, 1939)

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dial. mirac., ed. Strange

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. J. Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1851)

Cassiodorus, Documents

The Variae of Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator: Being Documents of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy, trans. S. J. B. Barnish (Liverpool, 1992)

CC

Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina

CSEL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

DA

Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters

De inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger

Tractatus de inquisitione hereticorum, ed. W. Preger, ‘Der Tractat des David von Augsburg über die Waldesier’, Abhandlungen der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 14 (1879), pp. 204–35

Döllinger, Beiträge

J. J. I. von Döllinger, Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Munich, 1890).

Du Cange, Glossarium

Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange, et al., Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis, 10 vols. (Niort, 1883–87)

DVLG

Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistegeschichte

Fam.

Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares

Fließende Licht, ed. Morel

Fließende Licht der Gottheit, ed. G. Morel (Regensburg, 1869)

Frédéricq

Corpus Documentorum Inquisitionis Neerlandicae, ed. P. Frédéricq, 5 vols. (Ghent, 1889–1903)

Friedberg

Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879)

Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen

H. Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1935)

Grundmann, Religious Movements

H. Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, 1995)

ix

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Abbreviations Hartzheim, Conc. Germ.

J. Hartzheim, Concilia Germaniae, 11 vols (Cologne, 1759–90)

HV

Historische Vierteljahresschrift

Jaffé, ed. Bibl. rer. Germ.

P. Jaffé, ed. Bibliotheca rerum germanicarum, 6 vols (Berlin, 1865–73)

Mansi

J. D. Mansi et al., eds., Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 31 vols. (Florence, 1759–98)

Martianus Capella, trans. Stahl

Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, trans. W. H. Stahl, R. Johnson and E. L. Burge, 2 vols. (New York, 1971–77)

MBVP

Maxima Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, ed. M. de la Bigne, 28 vols (Geneva, 1677–1707)

MGH Auct. Ant

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores antiquissimi

MGH Capit.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Capitula episcoporum

MGH Capit. reg. Fr.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Capitularia regum Francorum

MGH Dt. MA.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Deutsches Mittelalter. Kristiche Studientexte

MGH Epp.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae

MGH Epp. sel.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae selectae

MGH Fontes iuris antiqui

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Fontes iuris Germanici antique in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae historicis separatim editi

MGH Leges

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges

MGH Libelli de lite

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum

MGH Poetae

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini

MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters

MGH Schriften

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Staatschriften des späteren Mittelalters

MGH Scr. rer. Merov. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum

x

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Abbreviations MGH SRG

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum

MGH SS

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores

MIÖG

Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung

MPL

Monumenta Philologum Londiniense

NA

Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde zur Beförderung einer Gesamtausgabe der Quellenschriften deutscher Geschichten des Mittelalters

Niederdt. Jahrb.

Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch. Jahrbuch des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung

Opera

Opera Omnia

Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici

Otto of Freising-Rahewin, Gesta Friderici Imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz and B. von Simson, MGH SRG 46, 3rd edn (Hanover, 1912)

PBB

Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur

PG

J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Graeca, 163 vols. (Paris, 1857–1912)

PL

J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1857–66)

PRE

A. Hauck, ed., Paulys Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, 24 vols. (Leipzig, 1896–1913)

Pro Archia. Post Reditum

Cicero, Pro Archia. Post Reditum in Senatu. Post Reditum ad Quirites. De Domo Sua. De Haruspicum Responsis. Pro Plancio, trans. N. H. Watts, (Cambridge, MA, 1923)

Rec. des Hist. des Croisades, Occid

Recueils des historiens des Croisades, Historiens occidentaux (Paris, 1844–1895)

Rheinische Beiträge

Rheinische Beiträge und Hülfsbücher zur germanischen Philologie und Volkskunde

SB Berlin

Sitzungsberichte der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin

SB Wien

Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien

xi

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Abbreviations Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds

A. E. Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds von Regensburg gegen die Ketzer, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 147 (Vienna, 1904)

Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus

Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirés du receuil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, Dominicain du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1877)

UB Straßburg

Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straßburg. 7 vols. (Straßburg, 1879–1900)

Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter

W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter bis zur Mitte des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, 2 vols., 6th edn (Berlin, 1893); 7th edn (Berlin, 1904)

ZKG

Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte

xii

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Introduction: Heresy, Inquisition, Literacy

The historian, with all respect and understanding for the office, cannot permit this way of seeing – the form of questioning and judging that needs only decide between orthodoxy and heresy – to intrude if he wishes to understand the intellectual and religious life of that time in its variety of views, in its tensions and contradictions, and hence in its symptoms and causes of change. (Herbert Grundmann, ‘Heresy Interrogations’ [see p. 126 in this volume])

Over the nearly fifty years since his death in 1970, Herbert Grundmann’s formative influence on the field of medieval religious history has become increasingly evident. Renowned for his innovative and scrupulous research into the beliefs, ideas, practices and processes that shaped religious worlds from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, Grundmann revealed entirely new vistas of the medieval past. Generations of scholars have since approached their research from vantage points shaped by his arguments, whether those points of view were attained via personal contact, by reading his many publications or inherited through doctoral work and other secondary scholarship. Central to this gradually widening circle of influence were his German students, whom he mentored up until his death.1 By the last decades of the twentieth century, this secular, source-based and cultural-historical approach had rippled through French, Italian, British and other European scholarship, producing in its wake research on a wide range of topics: monasticism, education, literacy, universities, theology, apostolic life, women’s religious communities and expression, heresy and inquisition, popular or lay religious life, apocalyptic thought and prophecy and so on.2 American scholars inspired by Grundmann’s methods soon generated their 1 Among

those students whose influence is best known among English speakers are Arno Borst, Kaspar Elm and Alexander Patschovsky. 2 An abbreviated reading list of English-language publications influenced by or engaged with Grundmann’s theses is included at the end of this Introduction as a starting point for readers new to the field. It is by no means intended to be an exhaustive inventory, as it would be nearly impossible to capture the vast range of relevant scholarship in the space allotted here.

1

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) own studies of the medieval religious landscape, in turn introducing their own doctoral students to the ‘Grundmann’sche’ model. That Grundmann opened his door to foreign graduate students both at home and at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica suggests awareness of, and perhaps a sense of kinship with, these far-flung circles of medieval scholarship. By the time of this publication, Grundmann’s influence has been incorporated, whether consciously or not, into the research of hundreds of medievalists around the globe. Yet, for those without skill in reading German, the precise and subtle distinctions of Grundmann’s arguments have been largely inaccessible. The 1995 English translation of his masterwork Religiöse Bewegungen into Religious Movements of the Middle Ages was an invaluable contribution to that audience and generated new waves of engagement with Grundmann’s complex and wide-ranging theses.3 Yet the majority of his writings still remain untranslated and thus difficult for students or those without advanced German to access. The present volume addresses this gap by contributing translations of six of his most significant essays written between 1927 and 1968. As indicated by the volume’s title, the central topic is Grundmann’s perceptive approach to the intellectual intertwining of heresy, inquisition and literacy, and the historical-cultural processes which gave rise to them between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Although these texts were selected in order to illustrate the essential themes, scope and method of his work, the choice of essays to represent them is itself a matter of debate and unlikely to satisfy every reader. Our goal in providing greater access to Grundmann’s scholarship is thus not so much to reflect on the past in terms of his full oeuvre but, rather, to stimulate discussion of his influence and the future of scholarship in medieval religious history. For, although sustained consideration of Grundmann’s thought and personal context is overdue, it is not yet possible to write an intellectual biography. Scarce evidence survives from his formative early years, and many of his personal papers from his later life will not be public until the late 2020s; in the meantime, readers interested in biographical details can profitably consult Robert E. Lerner’s introduction to Religious Movements. The six essays selected here for translation are presented in chronological order of publication, a sequence that also reveals the development of key themes and interests over time. Blending what one might now call literary, sociological and historical approaches, Grundmann drew attention to the diachronically shifting meaning of words and labels in an innovative manner anticipating much later historiography, and used them to map entirely new topographies of medieval religious thought and expression. A current reader of Grundmann is likely to be struck by the still-fresh insights, unexpected linkages and novel perspectives they contain – attributes gained largely as a

3 See

Bibliography, nos. 13, 59, 97 and 104.

2

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Introduction consequence of his openness to the newly developing field of sociology and its focus upon the relational dynamics of communities, individuals, women, men and institutions. In addition to this foundational attention to cultural history, ‘Grundmann embraced both rigorous source criticism and an instinct for broader synthesis – a combination in evidence across all his work, from his study of Joachim of Fiore’s thought to the broad panorama of [Religious Movements] and beyond’.4 In 1927, when he published ‘Profile of the Heretic’, Grundmann was only twenty-five years old, a young scholar ambitious to prove himself and the quality of his ideas. He opens the essay with a flourish, reflecting briefly on the ‘history of heresy’ before boldly declaring such a history intellectually impossible: ‘Fundamentally, the very process of research in intellectual history of course negates the possibility of a distinct “history of heresy”, as it does not recognise a distinction between heretical and orthodox as the last word in historical wisdom.’ In this brief piece with its electrifying thesis that ‘every heretical movement must be understood as a single intelligible facet of the broader spiritual development of its time’, he cast the distortions and misdirections of inquisitorial sources into sharp relief. ‘Whoever, as an historian, does not dare to understand what the Church judges to be heretical and orthodox as phenomena of one intellectual world assumes the position of a judge of heresy, ordering the complexity of life according to the measures of Church doctrine.’5 Never a particularly religious man himself,6 he had a rare ability to see through ecclesiastical strictures and official categories and to discern previously hidden relationships deep in the source record. Grundmann developed an equally innovative and arguably even more radical perspective in his 1935 exploration of the development of vernacular writing in the later Middle Ages. In ‘Women and Literature’, he argued that it was women’s literacy and literate interests that bridged clerical Latin and a reading laity, and which in turn ignited the dramatic late-medieval expansion of pious vernacular writing. Put succinctly, noble German women read, and, as they did so, they changed the content to reflect their increasingly spiritual interests. The following illustrates something of the scope and verve of the piece: ‘So if female readers are to be thanked both for the rise of a religious German literature as well as the reception of German poetry into script,’ he writes, ‘then the religious turn of German literature in the course of the thirteenth century has a comparable origin. From minne-poetry

4 Religious

Life Between Jerusalem, the Desert, and the World: Selected Essays by Kaspar Elm, ed. and trans. J. D. Mixson (Leiden and Boston, 2015), p. 10. 5 Chapter 1 in this volume; p. 16 below. 6 On the question of Grundmann’s personal religious and ideological leanings, see Letha Böhringer, ‘Herbert Grundmann, Confession, and “Religious Movements”’, Between Orders and Heresy: Rethinking Medieval Religious Movements, ed. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Anne E. Lester (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).

3

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) to mysticism, from Gottfried to Eckhart, the new forms emerged because of women’s interests and activities: seized by a powerful religious movement that alienated them from courtly social culture, its ideals and its arts, German women of this time were awakening instead to a life of Christian surrender and religious dedication.’7 In this essay, as with ‘Profile of the Heretic’, he demonstrated a willingness to disregard traditional intellectual boundaries in the pursuit of understanding, and a tenacious commitment to careful source analysis. His ability to see across the gender prejudices of his day thus yielded insights about medieval source materials that feminist research would take up only many decades later. At the age of thirty-seven Grundmann arrived at the University of Königsberg, with his wife and family, to assume the chair of medieval history, but was soon thereafter called to military service. From the outbreak of the Second World War, through its aftermath in the later 1940s, Grundmann’s career took several sudden turns, and his publications on medieval religious history ceased for a decade and a half. Age and poor vision kept him from the front and in more varied work – service in anti-aircraft and anti-tank units, and a stint as a truck driver, but especially lectures and presentations to diverse audiences. Not only did these include universities and Volkshochschule [community colleges] but also German officers’ camps and even French prisoners of war. In 1945 he was shot in the wrist, subsequently imprisoned in an English camp and released in July of that year to return to Münster. At the University of Münster, Grundmann continued to be a teacher and mentor who advocated freedom of thought for his pupils; the curiosity and diverse research paths of Grundmann’s many students illustrate the extent of his limber, dynamic intellectual stance. Cautioning both students and readers against theological modes, he decried judging the medieval past by modern criteria and argued with equal force against materialist frameworks which explained medieval religious movements as symptomatic of class-based social upheaval. Such positions reflect Grundmann’s dislike of rigid or static explanatory models, especially those whose misapplication to the medieval past distorted historical understanding. One would be hard pressed to see an ideologue in this curious and dedicated mentor who continued to attract bright, innovative and often strong-willed students over the years to come. In 1957, and after substantial strategising and networking towards the goal, Grundmann was named head of the MGH and entered the ‘elder statesman’ period of his career. One discerns here an evident appetite for, and skill in, administrative politics – for example, his successful efforts to organise a solid pension plan for colleagues at the MGH, or supervision of the move to new quarters in the Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek. Continuing

7 No.

18; ‘Women and Literature’, p. 30 below.

4

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Introduction to research and publish from the chair’s office in the decade from 1958 to 1968, Grundmann also published three important and quite diverse essays and a brief but compelling conference paper whose translations close out the present volume. Returning to the themes and methods of his groundbreaking 1935 argument about women’s roles in literary culture, he published in 1958 the weighty essay Literatus–Illiteratus. The essay explored, in effect, what words about words meant from antiquity through the Middle Ages, painstakingly tracing back through historical and literary materials the medieval shift ‘in the valuation and appreciation of writing, of letters, and a transformation in attitude and relation to literature’. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the apparent opposites of ‘analphabeten’ and ‘literatus’ were not polar extremes on a spectrum of value but, rather, two equally valid conditions, each appropriate for a particular station and neither burdened with negative connotations. Grundmann demonstrates that as ‘the distinction between litterati and illitterati underwent strong fluctuations over the course of time […] the meaning and value of these concepts become a sort of seismograph of intellectual history’. The original meaning of literacy-as-Latin-knowledge began to unravel and shift in response to socio-economic and political quickening in the central medieval era. By the fifteenth century, he argues, a new style of vernacular school emerged in Germany: often scorned as Winkelschulen [schools in city ‘nooks and crannies’], they had to overcome considerable clerical opposition; even Luther still railed against them. But the practical need for such German writing schools grew unstoppably, promoted by printing, while the translation of the Bible made the knowledge of Latin completely unnecessary for many.

Grundmann argues that, as a consequence, the very concept of litteratus had substantially dissolved by the late Middle Ages, becoming ‘less unified and less characteristic of specific intellectual structures or movements’ over time, eventually morphing into a label of so many possible meanings as to be functionally useless. In tracing the ‘guiding thread of one word’s history through the centuries’, Grundmann at the same time insisted upon the foundational influence of historical context upon meaning – upon the ‘manifold changing social and national conditions, ideational forces, and cultural efforts’ with which new meanings were assigned to the concept of literacy over time. A few years later, in the 1963 essay Oportet et haereses esse, Grundmann returned to the triangulation of language, erudition and understandings of heresy and inquisitorial responsibilities in the central and later Middle Ages. What authoritative texts – particularly scripture – were drawn on to engage with or excise heretics from the community? Which texts were not so deployed, and why? Pulling the title from St Paul’s assertion ‘oportet et haereses esse’ (‘there must be heresies’), Grundmann pointed out the bind 5

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) into which this statement put later theologians and inquisitorial thinkers. If heresy must be, how should one respond to it? Were heretics to be avoided, converted or pursued for punishment? And how was one to learn about heretics in the first place? Different passages from scripture and the Church Fathers, especially St Augustine, offered textual ammunition for quite distinct positions on and approaches to the problem of heresy. Indeed, the Middle Ages ‘knew the whole of patristic writings concerning and opposing the old heresies, particularly Augustine’s polemics against the Manichees, the Donatists, the Pelagians, and so on, and additionally a whole series of heretic catalogs in which names and teachings of all the old heresies were collected in a condensed, comprehensible form’.8 Replete with ancient stereotypes, medieval inquisitors and other Church authorities were thus unable to perceive and record accurately the shifting nature of contemporary religious dissent. ‘Hence in medieval testimonies on heresies it is not easy to distinguish what came from actual experience, knowledge and observation or only from an acquired literature, whose concepts and names were simply applied to present-day heretics in order to sort them out, as in a questionnaire, as long-known and long-condemned.’9 The essay incorporates the long and perhaps slightly weary backwards view of a scholar in his later years: ‘Great patience is required to read the same commentaries again and again and to establish where they originate,’ he writes. ‘One can all too easily make a mistake and discover, either later or never, that a seemingly new sentence was yet another patristic citation.’10 Such acknowledgement might well have been appreciated by his doctoral students, grappling with such methodological and interpretive quagmires in their own research for the first time. Two years later, in the essay ‘Heresy Interrogations in the Late Middle Ages as a Source-Critical Problem’ (1965), Grundmann expanded on the themes developed in ‘Profile of the Heretic’, exploring the literary machinery of inquisitorial process and the relationship between documentation and what can be known within the broader framework of intellectual history. By highlighting the process by which prefigured constructions of ‘the heretic’ decisively shaped inquisitorial procedure, he demonstrated how the documentary record (interrogatorium) revealed much about inquisitors’ assumptions and ambitions but very little regarding the original beliefs and statements of those questioned. ‘For in most cases, one wanted less to discover the actual thoughts of individual heretics than to confirm their agreement with already-condemned heresies, to determine their membership in an already-known sect.’ In keeping with his interest in language and the formulation of meaning, Grundmann also parsed the ‘translation problem’ inherent to the inquisitorial process: formularies were first ‘stated in Latin 8 Chapter

5 in this volume. below, p. 187. 10 See below, p. 195. 9 See

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Introduction and then translated point by point into the language of the interrogated person (who seldom knew Latin) for their response’, then rendered back into Latin in the protocol. ‘How then were less-educated souls to make themselves understood in an oral hearing? How far were their answers – to stereotyped questions formulated elsewhere, and protocolled in Latin – to be taken seriously as reflecting what they thought and meant?’ One of the most significant arguments in the essay is ‘how powerfully the Latin wording of the question framed the Latin form of the answer’. Grundmann’s view on the survival of authentic voices and beliefs in the source material is not entirely sceptical; his perspective was nuanced, leaving space for the echo of an original voice even through the bureaucratic interventions of the source. ‘[H]aving once experienced how the objects of these processes spoke in exceptional cases, without the pressure of questions, and sometimes even in their own writings, one notes how surprisingly different they sound from protocolled expressions before an inquisitorial court.’ Having already identified the literary construction of ‘heretic’ derived from the eight characteristics outlined in Ad nostrum (an antiheretical decree issued at the Council of Vienne in 1311 and published with some revisions in 1317), Grundmann uses the last half of the article to trace inquisitorial interpretation of suspects’ statements (via both inclusions and omission) across four cases in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here he fully develops the claim that ‘[d]espite their correspondences and dependence on set forms, the records also permitted the differences and peculiarities of each to be understood, so that they could be seen as really quite different’. Grundmann challenges historians to a critical interpretation of protocolled statements, clarifying ‘the painstaking care with which one must analyse such hearing protocols and their “templates” in order to listen to each on its own, to distinguish between more or less formulaic repetitions’. Yet the argument ultimately rests on a certainty that, textual interventions notwithstanding, it is possible via scrupulous analysis to ‘hear them [the interrogated] speak with their own words’. For Grundmann, only in this way can the history of heresy and inquisition become a source of conclusive intellectual history, in which the inquisitor and heretic, orthodox and the erring or seeker are equally involved, not as opponents, but as partners of an intellectual world encompassing both. The inquisitors, too, can become more comprehensible to us, providing the most indispensable, productive witnesses to that for which and against which they worked. The last of Grundmann’s essays contained in this volume is a brief set of comments presented in 1968, two years before his death, for the International Colloquium at Royaumont. Entitled ‘Learned and Popular Heresies of the Middle Ages’, the paper responds to several guiding questions posed by the conference organiser and medievalist Jacques Le Goff: ‘Is heresy a matter for simple people or for the learned? Were there popular heresies and learned heresies? Did they play the same roles in the process of seizing the conscience? How did learned elaboration and popular belief relate to the development of 7

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) that heresy?’ In this short piece, Grundmann contributes two key ideas about the relationship between heresy, inquisition and literacy. First, he identifies the common thread across all heresy as a fundamentally literary effort ‘to comprehend and seize the original and authentic intentions of Christianity […] to attain the true intelligence of the Bible, of the Gospels, and the apostolic writings’. All medieval heretics, he argued, fundamentally believed that their conception of scripture and divine will was superior to that of the Church and its inquisitors. Second, he complicates the familiar dichotomy of learned/popular with a sharper distinction, that ‘between primordial or initial heresies – those of the heresiarchs (learned or not, founders of sects or not), and the heresies of the sectarians’ or the later communities and networks of enthusiastic adherents. Refusing static models of medieval belief, Grundmann instead here applies the crucial historicaltemporal aspect of change over time – of differences between the originating context of ‘heretical’ ideas (such as an individual scholar in an academic milieu) and the varied settings across which such ideas subsequently rippled and were absorbed, transformed and recirculated by enthusiastic (often lay) adherents. In particular, as illustrated by the cases of Wyclif and Hus, social and political factors would separate ‘founders’ from later ‘followers’ even more profoundly than did doctrinal or spiritual tenets. The key insight here is the historian’s attention to contextual difference – to change over time and space, to the distinction between individuals and communities and to the protean adaptability of beliefs as they were mediated and remediated through institutions and texts. In contrast, the final text included here in translation – a substantial obituary written by Grundmann’s pupil and friend Arno Borst (1925–2007) – was composed with precisely the opposite aim in mind: to underscore the senior scholar’s unwavering consistency across the decades. It has been included at the end of the volume as a means of locating the older man’s life and contributions in their own historical context, and to provide readers with a sense of the atmosphere of German medieval scholarship in 1970. Borst’s task in writing the 25-page obituary essay was twofold: on the one hand, he knew Grundmann well, had been deeply influenced by him and strove to represent him in recognisable form; on the other, he faced the broader challenge of honouring the career of a man whose personal chronology stretched from the Kaiserreich all the way to the Bundesrepublik. In a sense, his piece spoke to that entire generation of historians; and it goes without saying that an intellectual life spanning much of the tumultuous twentieth century experienced Brüche und Widersprüche, or breaks and contradictions. Moreover, Borst’s text is challenging – not only because it follows a highly stylised literary convention which veers at times into hagiography, but also because it contains multiple historical allusions and contextual insinuations hardly comprehensible to a twenty-first-century reader. Thus, brief footnoted annotations provide contextual information to readers seeking to understand 8

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Introduction the shifting ground of Grundmann’s personal historical environment. Following Borst’s essay in the original German publication was a bibliography of Grundmann’s works compiled by Hilda Lietzmann, numbered chronologically for ease of reference. In this volume Borst’s essay is also followed by a bibliography, which draws mainly upon this and the ‘Literature Database for the Middle Ages’ of the Regesta Imperii; it follows Lietzmann’s numbers, whilst adding various items. Reflecting on Borst’s texts, inclusions and omissions regarding the life of his mentor offers the opportunity to explore the historical contours and pressures in which Grundmann’s thought developed. Three characteristics of Borst’s essay require brief discussion, as it was composed in a style quite unlike an honorary or memorial essay today. The first is his curious – one might well say ‘forced’ – linkage between Grundmann and the medieval figures on which his scholarship focused. At one point or another in this obituary, Borst explicitly equates Grundmann and every hero of his articles, particularly Joachim of Fiore, Alexander of Roes, Francis of Assisi and the others among ‘Grundmann’s old friends’. Borst remarks that ‘Joachim and his biographer shared the conviction … that “perfection was not sought beyond everything earthly, a negation of mutability, but rather perfection could be a condition on earth, a possibility that could be achieved both in life and history”.’11 Thus ‘per Joachim and Grundmann alike’, history ‘must be patiently derived from the interpretation of complex texts and events, and every answer remained subject to future correction’. According to Borst, Grundmann also found in the Cologne canon Alexander of Roes a kindred scholarly spirit: ‘What warmed him [Grundmann] even more to Alexander of Roes was the discovery that he had written his Memoriale in four different versions and “relentlessly believed that he could improve his first version”:12 he was a man who stood by his conclusions and yet remained open to new experience.’ And, like the famous figures of twelfth and thirteenth centuries who renounced material possessions in favour of a spiritual path, Grundmann is depicted here as uninterested in money or power and focused instead upon unearthing historical truth: ‘[t]he young Grundmann resisted commercial gain … even in his childhood he subscribed to Jesus’ motto of voluntary poverty (Matthew 19: 21) which Valdes and Francis had encountered in a similar setting’. Borst thus employs medieval historical figures to represent facets of Grundmann’s own experience, whether as the brilliant and voluntarily impoverished maverick (Francis), the scrupulous researcher (Alexander of Roes) or finally, later in life, the shrewd and powerful administrator (Innocent III). In representing Grundmann as a modern counterpart to religious heroes of the medieval past, Borst implicitly insists upon an essential link between his subject’s life and his work – in particular, that of resisting

11 No. 12 No.

1, p. 11. 43, p. 23.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) closed systems in turbulent times. The extent to which Grundmann actually enacted such systemic challenge is debatable, however; any thoughtful answer will need to wait until his private papers are made available. Second, a temporal theme weaves through Borst’s essay in which past, present and future entwine to form a particular narrative of success. Distinctly teleological in terms of the completed arc of Grundmann’s life, the account of his origins clearly shaped by what followed, this narrative paradoxically also questions outcomes and the knowability of the future. Three years before his death, Grundmann had drawn on one of Goethe’s reflections (‘Where it is going, who knows? He can hardly recall where he came from’) to make a more specific claim about the scholarly enterprise: ‘We historians attempt […] to grasp how it came about; we do this by projecting into the future, always with the wish that it will lead to the good life’.13 Having written the piece in the wake of 1968 and an era of massive social change, Borst returns repeatedly to the perhaps comforting theme of continuity between past and present in the historian’s own experience. For instance, he draws a parallel between Grundmann (departing academia to chair the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, or MGH) and the warrior-count turned pious recluse, Gottfried von Cappenberg: ‘The feelings of the 57-year-old [Grundmann] as he departed Münster in April 1959 resembled those of Gottfried von Cappenberg; he did not want to establish himself where he pleased, he wanted to work where he was needed. What would come of it remained to be seen.’ To Germans of the postwar era, history was firmly anchored to the past, whether distant or recent; but, at the same time, the spirit of history also necessarily projected its implications and consequences forward into the future. The repeated refrain ‘what would come of it remained to be seen’ evokes this sense of unease with the unknowability of a future simultaneously so dependent upon both past and present. Borst uses Grundmann’s own language and sympathetic eye for radical medieval thought to reflect on the temporal arc of history and individual lives: The movement to an open future, to world history, began in the Middle Ages, even though it perceived itself as the end time. This movement was not invented, only discovered, recognised from the twelfth century and then accelerated by Grundmann’s old friends who reappear here one more time: Joachim of Fiore, mendicant brothers and the heretical poor in spirit, Innocent III, Frederick II, Alexander of Roes, Dante, Meister Eckhart. They burst open the seemingly closed world without themselves knowing what would come from it, or where this expanding universe was headed.

To an attentive German reader of 1970, Borst’s remarks would have carried a decidedly double meaning.

13 No.

162, p. 81.

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Introduction Finally, Borst weaves the theme of a ‘Konsequentes’ and ‘glückliches Leben’ throughout the essay. Translating poorly into English as a ‘consistent’ and ‘fortunate’ or ‘happy life’, the original terms bear the implication of successful fulfilment or completion. As Grundmann himself said, remarks Borst, ‘We historians attempt to recall this and to grasp how it came about; we do this by projecting into the future, always with the wish that it will lead to the good life.’ Borst’s commitment to the theme as a structuring device for the obituary is striking, given that the life he describes included two world wars, hunger, economic hardship, early loss, paternal bankruptcy, severe injury as a soldier and a nearly fatal automobile accident. Despite all the evidence for breaks and disruptions in his subject’s lifetime, he nonetheless depicts Grundmann’s life as a blessed one of service and rich contentment.14 As mentioned earlier, Borst moulds his subject as a wise hermit, echoing Grundmann’s own descriptions of Joachim of Fiore as ‘no visionary living already half-blind in his own future, but a prudent man of peace who took seriously the day’s obligation and for its sake left his lonely cell’. That the parallel was a stretch is putting it mildly; envisioning Grundmann as a humble recluse only reluctantly engaged with the world hardly squares with his evident taste for political manoeuvring, networking and academic power brokering. Although an obituary of this style and quasi-hagiographical tone sits firmly at odds with twenty-first-century academic writing, Borst’s essay thus reveals much about the world-view of senior German academics, particularly during the turbulent late 1960s. About the content and influence of Grundmann’s life, however, it conveys considerably less. Instead, Borst offers readers an image of his mentor as turned toward the distant past, open to the future and ambivalent toward the present. And, rather than delineating change over the course of a lifetime, he emphasised his mentor’s steadiness through the decades (‘a life so frankly consistent across forty years’) and his nearly devotional commitment to historical method. Yet, in contrast to Borst’s rather static representation of his mentor, the most characteristic quality of Grundmann’s work is arguably the ability to transcend given interpretive frameworks in favour of new perspectives – an intellectual mode that yielded insights quite out of step with mid-century mores. Grundmann valued German power and, like many of his generation, longed to see the bitter defeat of the First World War undone and the Versailles treaty dismantled, and was not utterly unstained by the Nazi era; what he felt about such matters after 1945 remains to be seen. But revelations

14 In

German, the phrase ‘glückliches Leben’ implies both externally bestowed good fortune and also a feeling of happiness. ‘Ich bin glucklich’ means ‘I am happy’, while ‘ich habe Glück’ translates as I am lucky. Evoking Herbert Grundmann’s ‘glückliches Leben’ here would likely have reminded a German reader of the folktale hero Lucky Hans, who starts his adventure with a bar of gold and ends with nothing … yet is happy.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) about the pivotal and creative contribution of women to medieval literacy, for example, or the shared historical roots of (and tendentious distinctions between) ‘orthodox’ and ‘heretical’, or the insufficiency of categories such as ‘learned’ and ‘popular’ for comprehending medieval religious history hardly seem the product of an intellect bent to mass ideological will. In the meantime, it is our hope that this volume will stimulate interest in his work among a broader audience and – as Grundmann himself would certainly have wanted – catalyse fresh new perspectives on the medieval religious past.

For Further Reading A Sample of English-Language Publications Influenced by Grundmann’s Essays C. Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2009). J. H. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005). J. H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, PA, 2001). M. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 2003). A. Beach, Women As Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in TwelfthCentury Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004). P. Biller, The Waldenses, 1170–1530 (Aldershot, 2001). P. Biller and A. Hudson, eds., Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530 (Cambridge, 1994). B. Bolton, The Medieval Reformation (London, 1983). D. Bornstein and R. Rusconi, eds., Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1996). R. B. Brooke, The Coming of the Friars (London and New York, 1975). C. Bruschi, The Wandering Heretics of Languedoc (Cambridge, 2009). I. Bueno, Defining Heresy: Inquisition, Theology, and Papal Policy in the Time of Jacques Fournier (Leiden, 2015). L. Burnham, So Great a Light, so Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (Ithaca, NY, 2008). C. Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, 1987). M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. England, 1066–1307 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1979); 2nd and 3rd edns (Cambridge, MA, Chichester and Oxford, 1993, 2013). G. Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (New York, 1995).

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Introduction D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars. Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985). D. Elliot, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 2009). S. Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (Notre Dame, IN, 2012). J. Freed, The Friars and German Society in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1977). F. J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 2006). D. Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia, PA, 2009). A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988). L. Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism. Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (University Park, PA, 1998). K. Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion? Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN, 2006). R. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Philadelphia, 1979). R. Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley, CA, 1976). F. C. Kneupper, The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late-Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford, 2016) M. D. Lambert, Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus (London, 1977); 2nd and 3rd edns with revised title, Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Oxford, 1992, 2002). R. E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, 1972). A. E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca, NY, 2011). H. Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism. A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe, 1100–1500 (London, 1984). E. W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture. With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ, 1954). B. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism: 1200–1350 (New York, 1991). J. Mixson, Poverty’s Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement (Leiden, 2009). A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978). B. Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, PA, 1995). M. J. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages. A Study in Joachism (Oxford, 1969). 13

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations, Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages 1 (York, 2011). W. Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia, PA, 2001). R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1970), Ch. 3, ‘The Religious Orders’. C. Taylor-Jones, Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia, PA, 2017). The Uses of Literacy in the Early Middle Ages, ed. R. McKitterick, rev. edn (Cambridge, 2008). J. Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2008). B. Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 2009).

Note on the Text Herbert Grundmann’s publications extend from 1927 to his death in 1970; some items were published posthumously. A selection of his articles were published by the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in three volumes between 1976 and 1978, Ausgewählte Aufsätze, and we have further selected from these. We provide, in chapters 1, 4, 5 and 6 of this book, translations of articles republished in the first volume of Ausgewählte Aufsätze (1976), which concentrated on heresy and inquisition; and, in chapters 2 and 3, translations of articles republished in the third volume (1978), which focus on literacy and education. Chapter 7 provides a translation of Arno Borst’s account of Grundmann’s life and career, published in the first volume of Ausgewählte Aufsätze (1976). Our collection is rounded off in chapter 8 by a bibliography which selects from and adds to that originally compiled by Hilda Lietzmann, also published in that first volume. The translation of Grundmann’s prose tries to keep literal meaning and fluency in balance. The conventions used in Grundmann’s footnotes have been converted to the house style of York Medieval Press. We have preserved the numeration of the original footnotes; it should be noted that the footnotes of each sub-section in chapter 3 are autonomous – each series begins anew at no. 1. In the original version of chapter 7 references were contained within the text; we have converted these into footnotes. Editorial interventions – additions and corrections – in the reprints of the Ausgewählte Aufsätze have been translated, and they are signalled within square brackets thus: [1976 reprint: …]; [1978 reprint: …]. We have intervened quite freely in chapter 7, providing glosses to points and personalities in Grundmann’s career that might well be obscure to an Anglophone reader. But we have done this only very rarely in footnotes to Grundmann’s own 14

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Note on the Text essays, generally confining ourselves to references to a few important recent editions or studies. Our own editorial interventions are signalled by their being contained within undated square brackets thus: [...]. York Medieval Press requires modern English translation alongside the citation of material in medieval Latin or vernaculars, and we have provided this in all cases, apart from the trial texts edited at the end of chapter 4. Where the translation is derived from a published work, both the translation and acknowledgement are placed within square brackets.

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1 The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic in Medieval Perception* By Herbert Grundmann

‘The History of Heresy’ is a subject that strikes modern ears as old fashioned, a research topic from a bygone era. It evokes thick folios and historians motivated by theology or even dogma – for example, Sebastian Franck and Flacius, Gottfried Arnold and Mosheim, Fuesslin or Walch.i Yet this very sense of distance between their research world and ours should give us pause; those same men played such formidable roles in analysing medieval heresy over the centuries that one can discern a significant portion of our intellectual history within the history and turning points of ‘heresy studies’. Is there not therefore a deeply intractable problem lying within that intellectual history? And should we assume that this problem has already been resolved or managed for us? Certainly not resolved. For several reasons, we are no longer confident that those earlier works, documents of their own time, can teach us to recognise and understand heresy in the Middle Ages. First of all, our knowledge has since been incomparably expanded in detail and clarified through the critical work of the nineteenth century. Those efforts yielded new editions and analyses, including inquisitorial protocols and treatises on heresy, and enabled distribution of these new understandings in summary form – most impressively in the History of the Inquisition by the American H. C. Lea.1 Yet this body of work is not sufficient to meet today’s demands on medieval intellectual-historical knowledge. For while recent sociological reflection has taught us much about the socio-ethical aspects of heresy, it offers little about its historical and intellectual significance;2 the ‘sects’ remain largely inexplicable, treated as separate phenomena without

* Original

publication in Kultur und Universalgeschichte. Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 91–107. 1 H. C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (London, 1888). 2 See, for example, G. Volpe, Movimenti religiosi e sette ereticali nella Società Medievale Italiana (Florence, 1922) and E. Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, ed. H. Baron, 2nd edn (Tübingen, 1923), pp. 358 ff.

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The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic meaningful connection vis-à-vis each other, or to the ‘actual’, official Middle Ages to whose historical margins they are relegated. Thus do their origins and trajectories remain unclear, their importance in the general life of the times misunderstood. In fact, the very process of research in intellectual history fundamentally negates the possibility of a distinct ‘history of heresy’, as it does not recognise a definitive break between ‘heretical’ and ‘orthodox’; one will never successfully find a meaningful, internally coherent, seamless development of ‘Heresy’. On the contrary, every heretical movement must be understood as a single intelligible facet of the broader spiritual development of its time. In contrast to Church history, intellectual history does not ask about orthodoxy or heresy, as attempts to engage the two as opposites can only provide an answer that does justice to neither. A historian unwilling to recognise that what the Church separates into ‘heretical’ and ‘orthodox’ are actually phenomena of one intellectual world assumes the position of a judge of heresy; he forces the complexity of life into the categories of Church doctrine, rather than evaluating the past according to the measures of intellectual history. Precisely this schism between ecclesiastical and historical concerns besets anyone wishing to understand heresy within its intellectual nexus. And it is especially vexing in the technical process of ‘source criticism’, as nearly all of our sources about heretics were produced by their Catholic enemies. That is to say, not only do these texts lack almost any direct utterance, any human witness of self, but everything that we learn about the ‘heretics’ is conveyed through the conceptual and interpretive apparatus of the Church; this methodological difficulty is seldom so starkly apparent. The historical subject hidden behind the Church’s judgment can be discerned only once this bias is perceived, both in essence and function. Although simple factual reports are not entirely absent from the record, most texts simultaneously serve the multiple purposes of condemnation, terror, warning and instruction. Even when independently thinking, autonomously inclined people in the Middle Ages speak about heretics, they are (as members of the Catholic spiritual estate and specifically as educated men) dominated by a closed system of contemporary values. Such beliefs order and classify everything, constructing a framework whose formative power even the most independent spirit had difficulty eschewing. Herein lies one of the most significant and obvious functions of the heretical typus within the medieval Church’s system: the heretic is not only a negation but an inversion or anti-image of the righteous believer, both of which Church doctrine had cast as ‘ideal types’. Only a person who questioned this doctrine might have perceived heresy as a phenomenon independent of or separate from the Church’s categorical judgment; and because that person would quickly be labelled a heretic, we would in any case not be likely to have his testimony. 17

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) If this binary connection between opposites were only and always formal, meaning that heretical teaching and heretical life were invariably branded as worthless, as unbelief and error, we could simply uncouple the link between ecclesiastical judgment and actuality. But, as shall be shown, significant elements of the heretical image were in fact shaped by these very stereotyped perceptions – what is described to us about heretical doctrine and life in the sources, in other words, derives specifically (and in circular fashion) from that very ‘heretical type’. Thus more precise investigation is required to winnow typus-based prejudice rooted in Catholic doctrine from testimony about heresy. Moreover, in this image of the heretic, absolutely accurate according to Church teaching, one also gains a yardstick by which the stereotyped and the actual in our sources may be distinguished. Not every ‘typical’ expression must be ‘only typical’, of course, as may be determined by other testimony or psychological likelihood. But, in reality, understanding is often only possible when certain source problems are no longer an obstacle, their distorting interpretive effects counteracted through awareness of their stereotyped character. The following attempt to portray this heretical profile as it existed during the zenith of Western heresy (not its historical emergence nor its psychological foundation) is based on as many sources as possible from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.3 The cited examples are naturally not comprehensive, but somewhat random and only illustrative. Moreover, as the term typus implies, one should not expect to find fully articulated elements in every document.4 Thus the extent to which heresy is depicted in stereotypical terms, predetermined by the ecclesiastical theological-moral world-view of Church and inquisitors, must be established in each individual case. The externally imposed framework of the heretical typus can be sketched with brief and familiar concepts. Within Augustinian definitions, the heretic stands on the side of the civitas diaboli (city of the devil), and within an eschatological vision on the side of Antichrist. According to this system, he is not only excluded from the community of believers, but also recognisably marked by the same characteristics with which the Bible and the Fathers branded those alienated from the Kingdom of God and the disciples of the Antichrist. ‘Knowledge’ about heretics thus derives from this silhouette, rather than from experience; thus emerges an authoritative general pattern from which to construct all the remaining stereotypical traits. Two essential characteristics derive from membership in the civitas diaboli and the entourage of the Antichrist: superbia (pride) and species pietatis (the 3 For

comparison, see the collection of citations about heretics from the writings of Gregory the Great in N. Tamassia, S. Francesco d’Assisi e la sua leggenda (Padua and Venice, 1906), pp. 7 ff. 4 On the broader significance of typological categories in the Middle Ages, cf. my Studien über Joachim von Floris (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 34 ff., 199 ff.

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The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic outward appearance of piety). The importance of superbia, the radix vitiorum (root of vices), is well known as the basic evil behind all separation from God and his Church. When applied to heretics, this vice branches out through vana gloria (vainglory) to the special sins: hypocrisis, inobedientia, novitatum presumptio, arrogantia, jactantia, pertinacia, loquacitas (hypocrisy, disobedience, presumption through seeking novelty, arrogance, boasting, obstinacy, verbosity).5 Not simply a theoretical ordering, this systematic ‘Tree of Vices’ claims to reproduce the very foundation and consequence of the moral world, in this case heresy: ‘superbia radix est omnis hereseos et apostasie’ (‘pride is the root of all heresy and apostasy’).6 In the Middle Ages, ‘omnis hereticus superbus est’ (‘Every heretic is proud’) was valued not only as a saying of Augustine7 but, even more, as a thesis about the moral order of the world that explained observable heretical behaviour. The learned opponents of heresy loved to mention this arrogance towards a particular end: namely, that heretics arrogated to themselves education, knowledge, mind. Jealously longing to be equal to the doctores ecclesiae (doctors of the church), they insisted on their own ideas – indeed, that was the root of all heretical doctrines!8 When Walter Map, so proud of his education and intellectual superiority, sought to demonstrate that the Waldensian delegates sent to him by the pope were idiotae, illiterati (simple, illiterate), he perceives their motives to debate the faith as: ‘non amore veritatis inquirende, sed ut me convicto clauderetur os meum quasi loquentis iniqua’ (‘not from love of finding out the truth, but so that, with me refuted, my mouth should be closed as of one speaking iniquity’).9 Stephen of Bourbon decisively uses the category superbia (pride) against Waldensians in his writings on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.10 In the chapter De superbia (‘On Pride’), the section De presumptione (‘On Presumption’) and one of the species superbie (‘kinds of pride’) he comes to speak of heretics – such is the schema. Then he reports on Valdes and applies the pattern, asserting his motivation: ‘ex presumptione et officii apostolici usurpatione cecidit in inobædientiam’(‘out of presumption and usurpation of the apostolic office he fell into disobedience’). David of

5 On

the ‘arbor vitiorum’ (‘tree of vices’), see Hugh of St Victor, De fructibus carnis et spiritus, PL 176, 999 and 1007–8. 6 For example, as in the clergy of Utrecht’s letter on the heretic Tanchelm in 1112, in Fredericq, I, 16. 7 S. Jacobus de Marchia, Dialogus contra Fraticellos, ed. L. Oliger, AFH 4 (1911), 11. 8 Anonymous of Passau, ed. Gretser, p. 263; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica, 65, PL 183, 1089; Alan, De fide ii.1, PL 210, 380. 9 The commonplace assertion that heretics were uneducated, simple people (see note 25 below) should not be taken at face value. The same applies to the social position of heretics, which prevailing opinion was inclined to underestimate. [See Walter Map, De nugis curialium i.31, ed. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), pp. 126–7.] 10 Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus, pp. 274, 292; see also p. 307.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Augsburg11 and Bernard Gui12 explained the beginnings of the Waldensians quite similarly. The paradoxical nature of these assessments is especially evident in the case of the Waldensians. On the one hand, their actual psychological motives cannot be accurately described as superbia; but in the Christian-Catholic value system superbia is not an observable psychological fact (in that sense the motivation would be slander or error) but instead indicates classification in this moral structure whose truth is independent of appearance. It is striking that the Franciscan and Waldensian movements, so similar in terms of inner motivation, became opposites along this watershed of values – as representing the most extreme humilitas (humility) on the one hand and the most extreme superbia on the other. The heretical profile also contains within itself the means to reconcile observed reality with predetermined stereotype through a single sign presumed to mark the anti-Christian character of all heresy: the species pietatis (outward appearance of piety). Arising out of II Timothy 3. 5, the concept – indeed, the entire passage – became crucial for conceiving the Antichrist. In polemic, it is the universal means of describing the outward appearance of heresy, extending the internal concept of superbia to describe the external presentation and nature of heresy: ‘mores eorum in apparentia humiles videntur, sed in corde elatissimi’ (‘their behaviour seems humble in appearance, but in their hearts they are very lofty’).13 In all other characteristics of the heretical type as well, the concept of species pietatis allowed one to denigrate visible, observed reality as a falsehood, a mask obfuscating the heretic’s wicked essence. In this function it appears at the beginning of the Western history of heresy, and later became an indispensable part of all judgments against heretics.14 It was particularly necessary and effective

11 De

inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger, pp. 205–6: ‘quidam simplices layci … supra ceteros de se presumentes iactabant se omnino vivere secundum evangelii doctrinam; … sic superba presumptio palliate sanctitatis et affectate singularitatis cecitatem induxit heretice pravitatis’ (‘Some simple laymen …, with presumption greater than others, put it about that they lived entirely according to the doctrine of the gospel … thus the proud presumption of feigned holiness and studied uniqueness brought about the blindness of heretical depravity’). Cf. De inquisitione hereticorum, p. 212. 12 Bernard Gui, Practica, p. 244. 13 De inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger, p. 212. Berthold of Regensburg puts it more concretely: ‘omnis hereticus est superbus, sed heretici suam superbiam valde occultant’ (‘every heretic is proud, but heretics very much hide their pride’); and generalising: ‘quanto homo superbior, tanto minus agnoscat se esse superbum; patet in omnibus hereticis’ (‘the more proud a man is, the less he acknowledges that he is proud; this is apparent in all heretics’); Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds, p. 68. 14 As early as 1119, the concept of ‘species pietatis’ was represented at the Council of Toulouse as equivalent to heresy: ‘religionis speciem simulantes’ (‘feigning the outward appearance of religion’); Mansi, XXI, 226; Fredericq, I, 29; cf. I, 17. The

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The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic against sects such as the Waldensians or Spirituals, who did not reject but rather ardently embraced the Christian evangelical ideal. Thus the fact that zealous proponents of the evangelical life had to appear as models of piety and faith was used against them, ‘speciem sanctitatis et fidei pretendunt, veritatem autem eius non habent’ (‘they simulate the outward appearance of sanctity and faith, but they do not possess its truth’).15 Consequently, the Church of the thirteenth century felt more threatened by these heretics than by those who split from it out of conviction: ‘tanto periculosiores sunt, quanto sub sanctitatis simulatione se palliant’(‘the more they cloak themselves with the pretence of holiness, the more dangerous they are’).16 Attention to feigned sanctity not only offered a means of uncovering sham virtue, but also of recognising another standard element in the moral stereotype of heresy, hypocrisis (hypocrisy), one of the fruits of superbia.17 To be bad and yet to appear good is a double sin; and heretics are hypocrites, whether out of anxiety or diplomacy, for they do not confess their basic evil nature to the world, and ‘nihil est ita contrarium veritati quam fictio’ (‘nothing is so contrary to truth as fiction’).18 Berthold of Regensburg explains this quality with his usual clarity: even if your heretical belief were true – which it is not – we would still condemn you for denying it, for hiding it with lies and hypocrisy.19 As authentic and direct as it sounds, however, Berthold’s formula is merely another, more concrete, rendering of stereotype taken directly from the arsenal of theology about heretics. Heretical hypocrisy is symbolised by the biblical image of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, ‘lupus sub pelle ovina’ (Matthew 7.15), a trope made all the more popular since the authors of medieval polemics preferred to use

formula was used in the crucial heresy decree of Verona in 1184; Mansi, XXII, 477; Fredericq, I, 54. From there it entered the heresy decree of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and thereafter, along with the Fourth Lateran decree, into the Five Books of the Decretals 5.7.13; Friedberg, II, 788. Cf. also my Joachim von Floris, p. 166. 15 Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus, p. 293; Bernard Gui, Practica, p. 244. 16 De inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger, p. 211; Anonymous of Passau, ed. Gretser, p. 264: Waldensians are more dangerous, ‘quia … haec secta magnam habet speciem pietatis, eo quod coram hominibus juste vivant, bene omnia de deo credant et omnes articulos, qui in symbolo continentur’ (‘because this sect has a great outward appearance of piety, in that they live justly amongst men and well believe everything concerning God and all the articles which are contained in the Creed’); see also Alan, De Fide, PL 210, 380. 17 See pp. 18–19 above. 18 De inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger, p. 17. [1976 reprint: the reference is a mistake; the page number is outside those of the cited work, and the passage cannot be located within it]. See J. Nider, Formicarius iii.5, ed. G. Colvener (Douai, 1602), p. 214: ‘omnis hereticus est hypocrita in eo quod catholicum et virtuosum se – qualis non est – simulat’ (‘every heretic is a hypocrite in that he pretends that he is Catholic and virtuous, which he is not’). 19 Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds, p. 32.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) animals in teaching fables. In fact, the image – used only as metaphor in the Gospel – was so frequently employed that theologians and inquisitors sought to illustrate the wolf-like nature of heresy via additional qualities.20 In this way, the nature of the fox or cat was also equated to the essence of heretics. The hidden side of species pietatis – their secrecy – provided additional fodder for arguments against the life and doctrine of heretics. For species pietatis actually contains two ideas: the hypocritical participation in Catholic ecclesiastical life, and the superficial nature of heretical piety. The argument from secrecy thus refers to the threatening tactic that heretics are increasingly dangerous, the more hidden their actions.21 At the same time, the very secrecy of this heretical faith evinces its own falsity and anti-Christian nature – not only through the suspicion of how shameful any belief must be to so shun the light,22 but more essentially, more uncontestably, through the conviction that a secret faith is a false faith. Of course, the fact that Christianity (once upon a time, before it was ‘Catholic’) was itself a secret faith forced to assert its own truth against similar polemic23 had had a thousand years to be forgotten. Any objections that the argument is fundamentally unjust and misguided, since heretics can only choose between secrecy and condemnation, belong to another world entirely; understanding and justice toward human motivation are not up for discussion in this context, but only the Catholicity of belief. Even those alternatives reinforce Catholic perception that heretical belief is not true – not Christian, not evangelical – because it is not, nor ever can be, catholic [in the sense of universal and all-embracing].24 In the end, a proof of power was used for questions of truth. The right of greater numbers to make spiritual decisions25 could not appear dubious to those for whom Church authority and doctrinal truth mutually justified

20 For

example, De inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger, pp. 212, 223, 228 ff.; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus, p. 286; Alan, De fide, PL 210, 377. 21 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica 65, PL 183, 1089; Bull of Gregory IX, 1227 [1976 reprint: Potthast no. 7931] in Fredericq, I, 72; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus, p. 293; De inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger, p. 205. 22 Berthold of Regensburg in Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds, pp. 31–2, 45–6; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica 65, PL 183, 1089. 23 Cf. for example, T. Keim, Celsus’ Wahres Wort (Zürich, 1873), p. 3. 24 Cf. Anonymous of Passau, ed. Gretser, p. 263: ‘probat catholicam fidem, quod ecclesia predicat palam in ecclesiis, sed haeretici in antris’ (‘it makes the Catholic faith credible, that the church preaches openly in churches but heretics in secret’). 25 The argument of large numbers is used throughout as probative, since the nature of Catholic belief required by the Bible demands a ‘majority’. To the ‘proofs’ for the Catholic faith the Anonymous of Passau adds: ‘multitudo credentium; … sed hereticorum pauci et hoc tantum pauperes et opifices, mulieres et idiote’ (‘there is a multitude of believers … but few heretics and only the poor, workmen, women and the unlearned, at that’); Anonymous of Passau, ed. Gretser, p. 263. Cf. Salvo Burci, Liber supra stella (1235), in Döllinger, Beiträge, II, 63, 74f. [See now Salvo Burci, Liber suprastella, ed. C. Bruschi (Rome, 2002), pp. 71, 290–91.]

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The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic and proved one another. On behalf of this overarching structure of power and spirit, not only was belief in almighty God’s beneficent ordaining called upon, giving power to truth, but God also supported every column of this structure with the letters of Scripture. ‘Ego palam locutus sum mundo’ (‘I have spoken openly to the world’; John 18. 20) Jesus said; he sent out his apostles to teach in all the world. ‘Whoever does the truth, he comes to the light … but whoever does what is wicked, he hates the light’ (John 3. 20). Accordingly, heretics – all these secret, strange persons, acting in antris et occultis, ‘in corners and in the darkness’ – were prevented from any claim to truth, and the sole possession of the public, general, Catholic faith was guaranteed.26 In short: a faith that remained hidden for over a thousand years after Christ cannot be the true faith that God wished to reveal through his Son to the entire world. Designed to include every heretic regardless of the content of his teaching, these general outlines were sufficiently vague as to contain the essential core of all heresy. Such flexibility depended upon another characteristic of the ‘heretical’ profile: the fundamental unity of heresy despite its externally diverse appearance. From the Catholic point of view, the most salient point is the essential nature of the heretic; division of erring belief into distinct doctrines and sects is secondary: ‘licet diversa doceant, in errore tamen conveniunt’ (‘although they teach different things, they agree however in error’).27 In this way, ‘heretic’ becomes more than a word, a general concept or a pure negation. For the Catholic Church is not gazing at a plurality of doctrines existing alongside itself within the Christian world, or at simply the sum total of those who are not orthodox. Rather, what it is in its sight is something wholly and essentially as much an opposite image to Catholicism as Antichrist is to Christ: Heresy. Another biblical image clarifies this picture – once again, an animal metaphor. Just as Samson bound the tails of foxes together so that they carried fire to the grain fields of the Philistines (Judges 15. 4–5), so is it with heretics: ‘facies quidem habentes diversas, sed caudas ad invicem colligatas’ (‘having different faces, but their tails are tied together’).ii Contained in all treatises on heretics, the image is so regularly employed in antiheretical bulls that quotes are pointless. Even more useful is that the passage rhymes with yet another comparison to foxes, one applied universally and with nearly official authority to heretics: the ‘vulpes parvulae quae demoliuntur vineas’ (‘the little foxes which destroy the vineyards’; Song of Songs, 2. 15). From of old, all explications of the Song of Songs apply this passage to heretics.28 Catholic 26 Cf.

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica 65, PL 183, 1090 f.; Eckbert of Schönau, Sermones XIII contra Catharos, PL 195, 18 ff; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus, p. 311. 27 Alan, De fide, PL 210, 212. Cf. Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus, p. 278; Anonymous of Passau, ed. Gretser, p. 264. 28 Provost Evervin of Steinfeld sent Bernard of Clairvaux a report on heresy in Cologne

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) authorities could on the one hand assert the fundamental unity of all heresy, and on the other point to the very array of sectarian doctrines as evidence against heretics’ claim to truth – a claim to which Catholic unity declared itself superior.29 The secret to Catholicity is that it first perceives itself as a unity in the highest sense – ‘Unity’ is precisely the idol of medieval thought – and brackets the enemies of the faith as one body; only then does one exult that the others, divided and disunited among themselves, have no unity in spirit and hence possess no truth. Berthold of Regensburg performs this mental exercise splendidly. He declares ‘nulla fides est communis et una nisi sola christiana’ (‘no faith is held in common and as a unity but the Christian’); the Jews are split into schools, among the heathen every people believes differently, and heretics especially lack the unity of belief; everyone believes differently, and everyone thinks he alone has the right belief. Could an outsider not just as well turn this argument against the Church, in which several groups believing the same evangelical Christian faith assert that they alone represent it correctly? But Berthold knows that this idea, the postulate of Catholicity which rejects the relativity of such arguments, is the cornerstone proof against enemies of the faith: the single word catholica in the creed determines which is the true holy Church.30 Such is the Archimedic point of all Catholic thought. Thus can the framework described above contain both the Catholic theory of heresy and concrete observations about heretical life. In the process, however, it was not only the worst aspects of heresy that were collected and exaggerated into an image of terror; such a coarse tactic would have failed. One had to recognise the heretics’ pious appearance as zealous for the faith and pleasing to God, and then emphasise rather than obscure these traits – for therein lay the danger. Such apparently laudatory characteristics had to be acknowledged and then explained away as illusory, as standard features of heresy’s false and deceptive nature, so that no one enlightened about heresy could be thereby fooled. As a result, many descriptions of heretical life are almost positive in tone, depicting an alluring superficial appearance. This fact is eagerly wielded against slander and suspicions from judges of heresy,

(PL 182, 677) as material to explicate Song of Songs 2.15, on which Bernard drew extensively. The interpretation remains consistent even in exegesis gathered by Waldensians from patristic works: for them, too, heretics are the ‘vulpes parvulae’ (Lea, History of the Inquisition, I, 77 f.). A fresco in the Spagnuoli Chapel in [Santa Maria Novella] in Florence shows the foxes in the vineyard, hunted down by the black-and-white speckled ‘hounds of the Lord’, the Dominican Inquisition. [In fact, the myth of a Latin pun – Domenicani (Dominicans) / Domini canes (‘hounds of the Lord’) – was demolished by P. Mandonnet, Saint Dominique. L’idée, l’homme, l’oeuvre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1937), II, 69–81.] 29 Anonymous of Passau, ed. Gretser, p. 263; Berthold of Regensburg in Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds, pp. 8, 18, 28, 31, 42; Salvo Burci, Liber supra stella, in Döllinger, Beiträge, II, 53 f., 72 f. 30 In Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds, pp. 27–8.

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The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic as if such passages were grounded in reality, truths coming to light amid all the inquisitorial lies. Yet that is only partly correct, for the premise is false: an ecclesiastical judge would not and could not concede that a good life proves good faith. The pious life of the heretic must be discussed and interpreted precisely as proof of heresy, revealing for uneducated people how treacherous the link is between life and teachings, or intensity of faith and truth. For as soon as intensity of faith exceeds the Church’s limits, it becomes a sign of the heretic and the Antichrist, a marker of the servants of Satan, ‘qui transfigurat se in angelum lucis’ (‘who transfigures himself into the angel of light’; II Corinthians 11. 14). Thus, such passages are not unwilling concessions to the compelling truth of the facts but, rather, a link in the chain of proof, an element in the typus-based image of the heretic. An example, more striking than many others,31 renders this idea concrete. The Anonymous of Passau (MBVP, XXV, 272) poses the question, how does one recognise a heretic? The answer is, from their way of life and their words. Their life is exemplary, their character fulfilling all the demands of the Christian ideal: moral, modest, measured, economically virtuous, hard working, eager to learn; and they also participate in the ritual of the Church (although that is described as a fictio). Their words are deliberate, simple, without levity, libel, lies or oaths; when asked of their faith, they respond evasively and ambiguously. All of this is set forth as if a fellow member were describing heretics. Yet the author does not say that, despite all this piety, they are heretics – on the contrary, he says that precisely this attractive appearance is how to recognise a heretic. And so the inquisitorial verdict on heresy is not undermined by such findings, but in fact strengthened; it fights the art of Satan, he who causes evil to appear good, who seeks to transform himself into the angel of light. Unfortunately, that is only one side of the matter; for just as the commonplace species pietatis reveals heretical belief, the argument of secrecy reveals the ‘true’ face of heresy hidden behind the mask. Since testimony about such secret activities is virtually unchecked, the stereotype’s fictitious scope could become unlimited, malicious, terrifying. Yet nothing could be more natural than for heretics to encounter one another at rituals in hidden places, often cellar space and under the protection of night – for when else do poor people have the time? – and, to protect themselves from discovery, sometimes in total darkness. Indeed, reasonable inquisitors knew of reasonable explanations for such behaviours.32 Judges of heresy and moralists of the worst sort, however, easily stoked ordinary people’s horror of night-time underground gatherings of men and women into incredible fantasies. To these external conditions were added other factors predisposing suspicion about heretics’ 31 Bernard

of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica 65, PL 183, 1092; De inquisitione hereticorum, ed. Preger, pp. 216 f.; Bernard Gui, Practica, p. 249; Berthold of Regensburg in Schönbach, Das Wirken Bertholds, p. 19. 32 Cf. especially Bernard Gui, Practica, p. 250.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) sexual morality. Religious minorities compelled to secrecy are almost always subjected to this miserable psychology equating secrecy with vice, with a primitive preference for sexual vice. ‘Honesta semper publico gaudent, scelera secreta sunt’ (‘honest things always enjoy the light of day, crimes are secret’). The fact that first Christians in Rome were accused of literally the same dreadful vices as Church authorities would use against the sects a thousand years later tempts one to wonder about literary dependence.33 But the main medieval sects with a comprehensive world-view always posed new questions in their religious doctrines concerning sin and grace, seeking a new meaning of the relationship between the sexes in marriage and procreation. Building on this point, polemics always tended to suspect and libel their ways of life – all the more effectively once educated opponents understood how to justify and make credible the idea that the so-called vices of heretical life derive from heretical doctrine. Whenever the voices of the persecuted come down to us, they protest against such fabrication. We know that the Cathars particularly countered the lax compromises of the Catholic way of life with a rigorous morality, derived from the dualist conviction that all fleshly creations sprang from the evil principle and could be rendered holy by no sacrament. That the ascetic life of the Cathars corresponded to this strict doctrine is occasionally expressly confirmed.34 Just as clearly, the Waldensians and Spirituals confronted the practice of the average faithful with their ideal. Later the Free Spirit movement fought Catholic moral teaching from the other side, seeking to transcend moral rules and restrictions by a godly life in spirit and freedom, one unifying human nature and God’s will. But all the factual reporting about the deplorable life of these heretics as a ‘consequence’ of their Free-Spirit doctrine becomes questionable once its own literary tradition (precisely the same for centuries) is recognised – a tradition which had been spread as a ‘consequence’ of entirely different teachings about heretics of every kind. The Catholic spirit had reacted against every breach of its own compromise between spirit and flesh – regardless whether from rigorists or libertines – with the same vehemence and entirely the same means. The overarching theses with which heretics revolted against the prevailing morality seemed to the Catholic spirit a mask and diabolical 33 For

example, M. Felix, Octavius, ed. C. Halm, CSEL 2 (1867), pp. 12 ff., 40 ff; Tertullian, Apologeticum, PL 1, 358 ff. Cf. M. Conrat, Christenverfolgung im römischen Reich vom Standpunkt des Juristen (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 29 ff.; T. Keim, Rom und das Christenthum (Berlin, 1881), pp. 363 f. [See now K. U. Tremp, Von der Häresie zur Hexerei. “Wirkliche” und imaginäre Sekten im Spätmittelalter, MGH Schriften 59 (Hannover, 2008).] 34 See especially Jacobus de Capellis, Summa contra haereticos, in C. Molinier, ‘Rapport à M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique sur une mission exécutée en Italie de février à avril 1885’, Archives des missions scientifiques et littéraires, 3rd s., 14 (1888), 150 ff., 289. [See now Pseudo Giacomo de Capellis, Summa contra hereticos, ed. P. Romagnoli (Milan, 2018), § 40, p. 205.]

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The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic pretence, their visible lives a deceptive appearance; thus one had free rein to portray heretical life according to one’s own fantasy and traditional concepts. Indeed, this was done in such a stereotyped, traditional, literary form that it seems a marvel that anyone could on closer investigation take such musings as reflecting real actions instead of imaginary preconceptions used to guide the faithful. Already at the first great event in Western heretical history, the proceedings against the Cathars in Orléans in 1022, a contemporary chronicler35 portrayed the secret rites of these heretics with all the essential requisites that were from then on part and parcel of such ‘Heretical Sabbaths’. When a monk of Chartres recited this procedure seventy years later – a reliable, source-based account of a nearly theological conflict between learned, educated people (as would be expected in this town of school and education) – he suddenly interrupts this factual account ‘to reveal something of their way of life’ to the ignorant. There follows a literarily polished version of the same horror story: subterranean gatherings by night, demons appearing in the form of animals or the Devil as a black man who transforms himself into an angel of light and then the light is extinguished for ritual orgies; they burn the children produced in this setting in a bonfire, and their ashes become a viaticum for the dying and a magical treatment against losing faith in the sect.36 Thus is the typical fantasy of heretical rituals already complete in the eleventh century.37 Four hundred years later, it leads to the Hammer of Witches, which adds little but elaborates on all the variants. In the meantime, all sects are branded with this profile, and there is no sense in trying to attach it to any particular heresy when it appears. Such typus-generated history is entirely independent, thoroughly literary and so unmoored that it actually created heresies that never existed in reality.38 Anyone familiar with the endless monotony of these accusations can

35 Adémar

of Chabannes, in Bouquet, Recueil, X, 159; MGH SS 4 (1841), p. 143. [Historians of heresy no longer refer to those tried at Orléans in 1022 as Cathars.] 36 Paul of Chartres, Liber Aganonis, ed. B. E. C. Guérard, Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Père de Chartres, Collection des documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, 1st s., Collection des Cartulaires de France 1 (Paris, 1840), pp. 109 ff.; Bouquet, Recueil X, 635 ff. 37 Greek polemics of the eleventh century also contain reports of demonic presence, ritual sex and child murder. Cf. M. Psellos, De daemonorum operatione dialogus, PG 122, 819 ff., 831 ff. Had a tradition persisted from the time of early Christian apologetics? 38 Medieval heresiologists included Luciferans and Adamites, two names from the earliest lists of heresies that originally had nothing to do either with the devil or sexual libertinism. By fusing those names with stereotyped concepts of devil-worshippers and antinomians, two terrifying heretical sects were created. Augustine, De haeresibus xxxi and lxxxi, PL 42, 31 and 45; Isidore, Etymologiae VIII.v.14 and 55, PL 82, 299, and 303; and PRE I, 164 ff. An example of this confusion is that the Anonymous of Passau’s citation of Isidore (ob. 636) on the Adamites (ed. Gretser, p. 272) was still being used in 1882, by Balthasar Kaltner, to designate

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) spare himself the trouble of investigating their credibility in each individual case; he can abandon once and for all the search for any kernel of reality behind such fables, especially where there are ‘confessions’ – produced, of course, by torture!39 Scepticism against reports of heresy set in with the sixteenth century and Sebastian Franck, and, because of such accusations, sympathy for the libelled has grown. Since then, whatever violates the laws of nature – appearance of devils, demons, magic – has been stricken from the testimony about heresy, and that which seems incompatible dismissed as deriving from error or malice. The doctrines of heresy have been drawn from purer sources, from witnesses that already in the Middle Ages declared the worst accusations as improper; one always has to be aware of the ‘unfortunate inclination to see heresy’. Yet, even with all of that, one gains no positive, clear view of heresy. In contrast to efforts made thus far, the path to such a view requires understanding the Catholic concept of the heretic. Once one has understood the perspectives and patterns which a stereotyped, preconceived heretical profile established in clerical imagination, there are few actual facts remaining to be gleaned from the typical factors. However, then one recognises the reflecting medium through which all knowledge of heresy passes. With the help of this knowledge such events can be viewed – not ‘as they really were’ [as Ranke

‘Luciferans’ in the thirteenth century; Kaltner, Konrad von Marburg und die Inquisition in Deutschland (Prague, 1882), p. 60. Cf. also the fantastic account of Alberic of Troisfontaines of the rise of the cultus Luciferi (cult of Lucifer) (MGH SS 23 (1874), p. 932). What the Byzantine Nicetas Choniates writes about the ‘Adamiani’ and ‘Adamitae’ around 1200 appears to have been collected from old heresy lists and polemic against late-antique cults; Thesaurus orthodoxiae iv.10 and 24, MBVP, XXV, 117 and 125. 39 Compare to the cases of these ‘Heretic Sabbaths’ – mentioned in J. Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozeß im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der großen Hexenverfolgung (Munich, 1900), pp. 227 ff., and in H. Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition im südöstlichen Deutschland (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1890), pp. 39 ff. – the statements of Waldensians in Strasbourg 1212 in C. Schmidt, ‘Über die Secten zu Straßburg im Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie 10.3 (1840), 42 ff. See also the story applied to heretics by Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dial. mirac., ed. Strange, I, 307–8. On the equally fictional accusation against the Guglielmite sect in Milan around 1300, see F. Tocco, ‘Guglielma Boema e i Guglielmiti’, Atti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei 5th s., 8, I (Rome, 1901), 3 ff. and 20–1, and my Joachim von Floris, p. 166. See also the hearing of the Fraticelli in Poli in 1466, in F. Ehrle, Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 4 (1888), 110 ff.; the rumours about the Hussites at the Council of Constance, in L. Březina, ‘De Gestis et Variis Accidentibus Regni Bohemiae’, ed. K. A. C. Höfler, Fontes rerum Austriacarum, vols. I and II, Geschichtsschreiber der husitischen Bewegung in Böhmen (Vienna, 1856), pp. 32 ff. Finally, on the exaggerated stories about Adamites in fifteenth-century Bohemia, see J. Dobrowsky, ‘Geschichte der böhmischen Pikarden und Adamiten’, Abh. Prague 4 (Prague, 1788), pp. 300 ff.

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The Profile (Typus) of the Heretic put it] – or from ecclesiastical stereotypes, but from our historical understanding of the Middle Ages. How this heretical profile arose in the literature is another question. It was suggested that its sources came from early Christian apologetics and patristics, both in Christian polemic against heretics and in the surviving heathen polemic against the Christians as preserved by Christian authors. Augustine’s attacks on the Manichaeans doubtless contributed to seeing the heretics of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as their successors. The dominance of his personality and his psychological skill made Augustine irreplaceable among the coarse methods of later times. But, even in the Middle Ages, some polemics against heretics show this higher standard, as with Bernard of Clairvaux and even Bernard Gui. Yet such did not depend on the era but, rather, on human qualities, characteristics which become all the rarer as the Church unleashed the horde of its enthusiasts and officials against heretics.

Notes i [See the account of these heresiologists in A. Borst, Die Katharer, Schriften der MGH 12 (Stuttgart, 1953), ch. 1. Sebastian Franck (German humanist and Protestant reformer, 1499–c. 1543), Chronica, Zeÿtbuoch und geschÿcht bible (Strasbourg, 1531). Matthew Flacius Illyricus (Lutheran reformer and scholar from Croatia, 1520–75), Catalogus testium veritatis (Basel, 1556). Gottfried Arnold (German Lutheran theologian and church historian, 1666–1714), Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1699–1700). Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (German Lutheran preacher, theologian and church historian, 1693–1755), Versuch einer unpartheyischen und gründlichen Ketzergeschichte (Helmstedt, 1746). Johann Conrad Fuesslin (Swiss Reformed theologian and church historian, 1704–75), Neue und unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie der mittleren Zeit, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, 1770–74). Christian Wilhelm Franz Walch (German Lutheran theologian, 1726–84), Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Ketzereien, Spaltungen und Religionsstreitigkeiten bis auf die Zeiten der Reformation, 11 vols. (Leipzig, 1762–85).] ii [From the heresy decree of the Fourth Lateran Council: N. P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London and Washington, 1990), I, 233.]

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2 Women and Literature in the Middle Ages: A Contribution on the Origins of Vernacular Writing* By Herbert Grundmann

Between the discovery of printing and the invention of radio, language and writing were so closely combined that the concept of ‘literature’ covered all linguistic creations and forms. It was only under ‘literature’, and along its margins, that mere speech or expressions that were ‘not yet literature’ existed. And speech was so little heeded or valued as a subject worthy of intellectual effort that the same term applied for ‘speaking’ as for literature. That ‘speech’ was not and did not need to be ‘writing’ was often all that would be said about it; that poetry achieved its effect through word and language, not text and reading, was increasingly forgotten in the reading centuries. Only in certain individual genres of artistic word usage did the distinction not entirely vanish, as it shaped how a listener or reader would grasp the presentation or book. The fact that drama was still spoken and heard rather than simply read – as was once the case for all poetry – seemed a shortcoming since mere ‘book dramas’ were not deemed ‘stage worthy’. Even if one finally becomes accustomed to reading drama, opera texts are usually a struggle, not to mention film scripts – even good film scripts. Many contemporary experiences make the differences between text and ‘spoken word’ even more palpable and clear: for example, the effect and linguistic power of political speeches strike the listener immediately but remain muted to the newspaper reader; the meaning and value of marching tunes and communal songs cannot be appreciated if only seen in print; and radio plays and musicals can certainly be good without being easily readable. The impact of language that does not pass through the detour of script or book is unmistakeably expanding today; that the listener is resuming his place alongside the reader cannot fail to have an effect on our language and composition. Yet it also raises new questions for looking back on ‘literature’ and makes possible new insights into its historical meaning. During the Middle Ages, ‘literature’ and composition, text and spoken word, were distinct to a much higher degree than today. The modern field * Original

publication in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 26, no. 2 (1935), 129–61 (the whole volume bears the date of 1936).

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages of ‘literature’ can ignore this fact because, for us, only the text survives; we only know poetry so far as it became literature. But in the early period of the Christian West a solid, almost impenetrable, barrier separated the larger and arguably best part of the living, artistic linguistic heritage from literature. This is because ‘literature’ – using books, writing and reading itself – was reserved for the spiritual class, for clergy and monks, and was only of concern to educated ecclesiastical circles. Illitteratus in the Middle Ages did not mean uneducated in the modern sense, but was instead nearly equivalent to the concept ‘laity’;1 in no way did it preclude a high level of education. But in terms of script, there was only spiritual, clerical writing, in Latin – for centuries, the only written language. Everyone who could read and write learned to do so through Latin,2 and it became the language of the literary class. To register expressions in the vernacular, as occasionally happened, was a misuse of script. Yet alongside this Latin clerical writing there always existed a powerful stream of poetry and speech in the living language. In contrast to literature, poetry has always been a subject for the other, specifically non-clerical classes; indeed, many poetic forms and subjects were forbidden to literate clerics and reserved for the laity alone. Since such non-clerical material was never written down, it could not be passed down to us in script. Among the people, however, unwritten speech lived on, passing from mouth to mouth, until it broke the surface of ‘literature’ in the form of myths, sagas, fairy tales, stories and songs.

1 Count

Bernhard zur Lippe’s entry into the monastic order around 1200 is reported by Henry ‘the Lithuanian’ with the words ‘religionem discens et litteras’ (‘after learning letters and religion’); Chronicon Livoniae, MGH SS 23 (1874), p. 277; [The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, trans. J. A. Brundage (Madison, 1961), p. 113.] Ordericus Vitalis (Historia ecclesiastica vi.8, ed. A. Le Prevost, 5 vols. (Paris, 1845), III, p. 43) tells of two brothers: one ‘relicta militia religiose vixit et in monachatu litteras didicit’;‘abandoned a career of arms and lived as a monk where he learned his letters … served as a knight until he grew old’, while the other ‘usque ad senium militiae inhaesit’ – or ‘grew old in the knight’s manner’, meaning that he never learned to read; [Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History vi.8, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1969–80), III, 255]. See also G. Zappert, Vita b. Petri Acotanti (Vienna, 1839), p. 30. [L]itteris dare meant to commit someone to the clerical order, as in Chronica Polonorum ii.4, MGH SS 9 (1851), p. 446; cf. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, 6th edn, II, 2, 5. The ‘Crown’ of Henry von dem Türlin, v. 2075 f. reports of Lancelot: ‘der der zweier ampte pflac, daz er ritter und pfaffe was’ (‘that one who served in two official capacities was both knight and priest’), because Lancelot could read and read aloud; Heinrich von dem Türlin, Diŭ Crône, ed. G. H. F. Scholl, Bibl. lit. Ver. Stuttgart 27 (Stuttgart, 1852), p. 26. Knowledge of Latin was the sign of a clergyman: ‘er antwurt mir in der latin, er mac wol ein pfaffe sin’ (‘He answered me in Latin, he’s probably a priest’); Wernher der Gartenaere, Meier Helmbrecht, v. 742, ed. F. Panzer, 4th edn (Halle, 1926), p. 26. 2 Litera could hence simply mean the ‘written language’ or Latin – literate (or literaliter, literatorie) loqui can mean ‘to speak Latin’; see Du Cange, Glossarium, under litera, literate, etc.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) And although the prejudices of our historical tradition make it appear rare or isolated, ‘unwritten literature’ not only accompanied but outlived the entire body of Latin literature. Consequently, spoken literature certainly cannot have been less influential and instructive than what was written and read. One must keep this fact in mind to grasp the significance of questions that literary research has so far hardly posed, let alone answered. How and when did the linguistic creation of the poet (and of the preacher!), which was performed and heard, but not written or read, become literature? And how did the vernacular, with its own unique formulations, gain admission into ‘Literature’? We may speak of ‘accidents’ in our earliest known individual cases of German language and poetry – the writing down of the Song of Hildebrand, magical spells, the Wessobrunn Prayer and the like – when a literate cleric happened to be moved to such a novel act, without any intention of literary dissemination. In the case of German spiritual poetry after the Heliand and the Otfried, we can speak of a ‘missionary literature’ aimed not at the laity (it would have found no readers), but to literate clergy as material for conveying Christian stories and doctrine in the people’s language. Such missionary material is not actually ‘literature for the laity’, however, since it still required a cleric able to read and translate written Latin into spoken vernacular. Change first came in the eleventh century, when a religious, spiritual literature arose in the German language – one no longer intended only as a source for oral teaching and instruction, but also circulated in written form intended for reading. Then, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, literature absorbed secular poetry, material which was similarly no longer only to be spoken and heard, but also circulated and read in books. And finally, in the century of German mysticism (the fourteenth century), the religious prose of sermons, tracts and descriptions of experiences entered German literature; the preachers’ word became the reading material of mystics. How did that happen? What penetrated the barriers that separated the people’s language and the people’s poetry from literature? Dante, the first to consider such questions, once wondered how it had transpired that about 150 years earlier vernacular Provençal and Italian love poetry joined Latin formal poetry. He discovered a very simple answer: in the Vita nuova3 he said that the first to compose in the vernacular did so to 3 La

vita nuova, c. 25: ‘Lo primo, che cominciò a dire siccome poeta volgare, si mosse però che volle fare intendere le sue parole a donna, alla quale era malagevole d’intendere i versi latini. E questo è contro a coloro che rimano sopra altra materia che amorosa; conciossiacosachè cotal modo di parlare fosse dal principio trovato per dire d’amore’ (‘The first to begin writing in the vernacular was moved to do so by a desire to be understandable to women, for whom it was difficult to understand Latin verses. And this is an argument against those who compose in the vernacular on a subject other than love, since composition in this [vernacular] style was from the beginning intended for treating love’).

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages make his words accessible to women who did not understand Latin verses well. The young Dante’s remark was only intended to describe formal love poetry; and it was only in this arena that he wanted the vernacular to operate, precisely because this poetry was aimed at women. However, that he later abandoned this restriction on vernacular writing suggests that his explanation about women’s influence might be more universally valid – that it might explain the broader reception of vernacular material into the category of ‘literature’ earlier reserved for Latin. Yet one cannot explain the advent of vernacular composition merely by invoking the lack of Latin knowledge among women. Rather, a much more important fact was operative here: the women of medieval society were more involved in reading (even if they did not live in convents) than any other lay group; laymen, in contrast, could read only in exceptional cases. And, unlike the clergy, these women did not restrict themselves to Latin and religious reading, but formed literature and secular poetry in their own language. A vernacular literature hence arose for them. Even old German law acknowledged that only women were regarded as readers within the laity. In the Sachsenspiegel4 – and derivatively, also in the Deutschenspiegel and Schwabenspiegel – a category of objects was reserved exclusively for female inheritance, which were never to pass to a male heir. Along with jewellery, clothing and household articles needed only by women or used and kept by them (including small animals) were books, specifically the Psalter and all books belonging to God’s service. Texts ‘that women tend to read’, added an editor of the Sachsenspiegel around 1270, not as a restriction,5 but rather to explain and clarify the inheritance rule: as such 4 ‘Unde

alliz daz zu der râde hôrt, daz sint alle schâph unde gense, kesten mit opgehavenen leden, al garn, bedde, pole, kussene, lînlakene, dischlakene, dwêlen, badelakene, beckene, lûchtere, lîn unde alle wîphliche cleydere, vingerlîne unde armgolt, tzapel, saltere und alle bûke, die zu goddes dienste hôret, [die vrowen pleget to lesene], sedelen unde laden, teppedhe ummehank unde ruchelaken unde al gebende; diz ist daz zu vrowen râde hȏret. Noch ist manger hande clinôte, daz in hôret, al ne nenne ich is nicht sunderliche, alse borst unde schêre unde spêgele’ (‘And all that belonged to the council, that is, all sheep and geese, chests with raised drawers, all cloth, beds, bed poles, pillows, bed clothes, table cloths, wash cloths, bath cloths, tubs, linen and women’s cloths, rings and bracelets, head coverings, psalters and all books, that are fitting to the service of God, [that women generally read], sitting pillows and boards and wall hangings and tapestries, and all bands and bindings; this is what belongs to the woman’s council. There are some other pieces of jewellery that belong to them, everything I’ve mentioned is no more sinful than brushes, scissors and mirrors’); Sachsenspiegel, Landrecht I.xxiv.3, ed. K. A. Eckhardt, MGH Fontes iuris antiqui n.s. 1 (1933), p. 35. See also Deutschenspiegel xxix.1, ed. K. A. Eckhardt and A. Hübner, MGH Fontes iuris antiqui n.s. 3 (1933), p. 102; and Schwabenspiegel xxvi.2, ed. H. G. Gengler, 2nd edn (Erlangen, 1875), p. 26. 5 In many later legal sources from the region where the Sachsenspiegel was law, objects directly inherited by women include ‘all books in which women read’. See J. Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer, 2 vols., 4th edn (Leipzig, 1889), II, 114, 117.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) books were read only by women, so they should be the ones to inherit them. In 1220, the flourishing age of Middle High German poetry, the Sachsenspiegel names only the Psalter and books of devotion; other books are not mentioned at all. It was precisely with the Psalter that women learned to read, since religious writings were available to women before they read secular poetry. The young maiden of the medieval nobility read the Psalms even if she were not going into the convent, and the Psalter would accompany women of the laity throughout life.6 By reading the Psalter they learned the fundamentals of Latin and, in so doing, many noble women readers advanced beyond men of the laity.7 Empress Judith, the wife of Louis the Pious, was so well read that Hrabanus Maurus could dedicate to her his commentary on Judith, Walafrid Strabo his Latin poems and Bishop Frechulf of Lisieux the second part of his world history.8 Similarly, the women of the tenth-century Saxon dynasty were educated in Latin, whether they wished to live in a convent or not. Otto I’s daughter, Mathilde, was abbess of Quedlinburg and dedicatee of Widikund of Corvey’s Saxon histories; Otto’s niece Gerberga, abbess of Gandersheim, read Roman classics together with the poetess Hrotsvit; and Otto’s mother, Mathilde, a cloistered widow, required her entire household to read like her.9 In addition, Otto’s wife, Adelheid, who did not live in a convent, was celebrated as 6 See

F. A. Specht, Geschichte des Unterrichtswesens in Deutschland, von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1885), p. 262 (and the table of contents under ‘Psalmen’); K. Weinhold, Die deutschen Frauen in dem Mittelalter, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1897), I, 117 f.; Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, 7th edn, I, 356, n. 1. H. Jacobius refers to many examples in French literature of women reading the Psalter; Die Erziehung des Edelfräuleins im alten Frankreich, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, supplementary volume 16 (Halle, 1908), p. 58 n. 2. See also F. Meyer, ‘Jugenderziehung im Mittelalter’, 31. Jahresbericht der Realschule Solingen (1896), p. 14 n. 60; and ‘Frau Ilse’ in Der Nibelungen Klage (v. 1840): ‘las an ir salter alle ir tagezît’ (‘She read her Psalter all of her days’). In 1223, Ulrich von Dachsberg bequeathed a foundation to the Indersdorf cloister on the condition that his daughter be kept there ‘quoad psalterium discat’; Monumenta Boica 14, 145 f. 7 Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, 7th edn, I, 356; Weinhold, Die deutschen Frauen, I, 125 ff.; C. Jourdain, ‘L’éducation des femmes au Moyen Âge’, Mémoires de l’Institut de France 28, no. 1 (1874), 89 ff. 8 F. von Bezold, ‘Kaiserin Judith und ihr Dichter Walahfrid Strabo’, Historische Zeitschrift 130 (1924), 377 ff.; MGH Epp. 5 (1899), pp. 319 ff., 420 ff. 9 ‘Domesticos omnes famulos et ancillas variis artibus, litteris quoque instituit; nam et ipsa litteras novit, quas post mortem regis lucide satis didicit’ (‘She instructed the household servants, both the men and the women, in a variety of skills, and also taught them their letters. She herself knew her letters, which she had learned very well after the death of the king’); Widukind lxxiv, ed. K. A. Kehr, MGH SRG 60, 4th edn (1904), p. 125; [1978 reprint: = ed. H.-E. Lohmann and P. Hirsch, 5th edn, MGH SRG 60 (1935), p. 151.] [Widukind of Corvey, Deeds of the Saxons, trans. B. S. Bachrach and D. S. Bachrach (Washington DC, 2014), pp. 149–50]. Cf. Vita Mathildis ant. c. 11, MGH SS 10 (1852), p. 579.

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages litterissima (most learned)10 and lectionibus intenta (intent upon reading)11 and exchanged letters with the scholar Gerbert of Reims. Otto’s sister Gerberga, the wife of the French King Louis IV, was praised by the monk Adso for her literary zeal;12 for her, he composed his tract on the Antichrist. And Otto’s niece Hadwig, Duchess of Swabia, had Ekkehart at Hohentweil teach her Virgil and Ovid in Latin – the most impressive and well-known of these Latinist ladies of the Ottonian era. Evidently there was no shortage of Latin-trained women among the nobility, then or later. But knowledge of the Psalter, to which most women restricted themselves, did not suffice for easily reading other Latin works. Of Hildegard of Bingen, a contemporary says that although she had learned to read the Psalter in the tradition of prominent girls, she did not have enough Latin to read the Bible and other texts.13 Her case is in many ways particularly instructive. Hildegard herself assures us repeatedly that she was without learned education,14 but her familiarity with Latin language and literature was certainly greater than she concedes – sufficiently advanced, in fact, that she was even able to preach in Latin.15 And although she denied her literary training, preferring the role of uneducated prophetess, she nonetheless drew on help from spiritual mentors to publish her extensive visions in Latin. Thus, on the one hand, Hildegard consciously and willingly aligned her message within the demands, norms and order of ecclesiastical and spiritual

10 Ekkehart,

Casus S. Galli c. 144, ed. G. M. von Knonau, St. Gallische Geschichtsquellen, 5 vols. (St Gallen, 1870–81), III, 446. 11 Odilo, Epitaphium Adalheidae xx, MGH SS 4 (1841), p. 644. 12 E. Sackur, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen (Halle, 1898), p. 104. 13 Alberic of Troisfontaines, Chronicon, MGH SS 23 (1874), p. 834: ‘Non autem interpretationem verborum textus eorum (scil. veteris et novi testamenti voluminum) nec divisionem sillabarum nec cognitionem casuum aut temporum habebat; solum psalterium legere dedicerat more nobilium puellarum a quadam inclusa’ (‘she could not interpret the words of their text [that is, of the Old and New Testaments] nor divide syllables nor understand cases and tenses; she had only learned, from an enclosed nun, to read the Psalter in the manner of noble girls’). The sister of bishop Burchard of Worms, whom he wished to make an abbess, objected: ‘Tantum psalterio excepto, libros penitus ignoro’ (‘with the sole exception of the Psalter, I am totally ignorant of books’); MGH SS 4 (1941), p. 838. Salimbene has Hugo of Digne say the same thing almost like a proverb: ‘legisti sicut una mulier legit psalterium, que quando est in fine ignorat et non recordatur quid legerit in principio; sed multi sunt legentes et non intelligentes’; MGH SS 32 (1905–13), p. 240. [The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, trans. J. L. Baird, G. Baglivi and J. R. Kane (Binghampton, 1986), pp. 231–2: ‘I think you read like a woman reads the psalter, who forgets the beginning before she reaches the end. There are many who read but few who understand.’] 14 H. Liebeschütz, Das allegorische Weltbild der hl. Hildegard von Bingen, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 16 (Leipzig, 1930), pp. 2 ff., 159 ff. 15 J. Greven, ‘Engelbert der Heilige und die Bettelorden’, Bonner Zeitschrift für Theologie und Seelsorge 2 (1925), 38.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) education, in which only the Latin language of the Church operated.16 Yet, on the other, those traditional social rules were already shifting and fracturing beneath her feet as emergent deep cultural change began to break the Latin clerical monopoly on education. Even as Hildegard was publishing her Latin works, sisters of her order could already immerse themselves in the mystical ideas of the German Song of Songs of St Trudpert. Women’s participation in literary life had already begun to dissolve the rigid bonds of Latin ecclesiastical education, in turn adding momentum to the acceptance of the vernacular into script and the Germanisation of religious literature. As early as Charlemagne’s famous ban against writing down and circulating winileodos17 – by which he must have meant love songs, communal songs or all worldly, popular poems18 – another prohibition emerged: a regulation for women’s religious houses, as if the nuns had to be specifically warned against abusing the art of writing with profane, unspiritual, un-Latin poems. Perhaps it is no accident that Otfried of Weißenburg includes a woman, the veneranda matrona (honourable matron) Judith, among the supporters of his German Gospel book along with his monastic brethren.19 The manuscript of the Old Saxon Psalm commentary of the tenth century comes from the venerable women’s foundation of Gernrode on the Harz;20 and, as we have seen, translations and interpretations of the Psalms played a substantial role in the beginnings of vernacular writing, assisting as they did female edification and reading ability.21 Notker’s German Psalter, remarkably the only one of his translations that found wide use, was ordered copied in St Gallen by the Empress Gisela, the wife of Conrad II (who could not read!).22 Her extensive library also contained Notker’s German translation of Job (now lost).23 In addition to the Psalter, however, editions of the Song of Songs and

16 In

the same vein, she defended the social order in which basically only nobles had access to monastic education. Cf. her letter 116, in PL 197, 337 f. 17 MGH Capit. 1 (1883), p. 63, c. 19. 18 See H. de Boor, Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1929), III, col. 503 ff., with bibliography. 19 Otfrieds Evangelienbuch, ed. O. Erdmann and E. Schröder, 2nd edn (Halle, 1934), p. 5. 20 G. Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Munich, 1918), I, 262. 21 Weinhold, Die deutschen Frauen, I, 118. 22 ‘Quamquam litteras ignoraret …’ (‘Although he was ignorant of letters’); Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi c. 6, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH SRG, 3rd edn (1915), p. 28; [Wipo, ‘The Deeds of Conrad II’, Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, trans. T. E. Mommsen and K. F. Morrison (New York, 1962), pp. 52–100, at 72]; ‘per omnia litterarum inscius atque idiota’, Novaleser Chronik, MGH SS 7 (1846), p. 127. 23 Ekkehart IV of St. Gallen, Liber benedictionum, ed. J. Egli, Mitteilungen zur vaterländischen Geschichte 31 (St Gallen, 1909, p. 231, no. 44, v. 67; E. Dümmler, ‘Ekkehard von St. Gallen’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 14 (1869), 28 f.; G. Scherrer, Verzeichnis der Handschriften der Stiftsbibliothek von St. Gallen (St Gallen, 1875), pp. 9 f.; R. Kögel, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, only

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages poems on Mary also emerged at the centre of this new German literature; even if not composed by women, these works were mostly created for, and preferred by, them for communal use and personal reading. The St Trudpert Song of Songs was expressly written in the middle of the twelfth century for nuns, although it remains unclear whether its author was a woman, as was the case with its approximate contemporary, the Arnstein Song of Mary.24 If the St Trudpert Song of Songs is described as ‘the first work of German mysticism’,25 then this first work (like all later works of German mysticism) was created for women and determined by the particular characteristics of female piety: on the inclination to the veneration of Mary, on receptivity for the ideas of bridehood of the soul and on the minnichliche gotes erkennusse (the loving knowledge of God).26 Examples abound, as in the German songs to Mary composed for noble women by the priest Wernher (about 1172) and intended for copying and circulation.27 The poems of the priest Wernher of the Lower Rhine and the so-called ‘Wild Man’ are known to us from only one manuscript, written for a woman.28 And in many other German spiritual compositions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one may presume (if not prove) that they were created for women – for nuns or pious, educated women who could read and demand religious instruction and improvement without having mastered the language of clerical literature. In most cases it may simply be said that this poetry and writing was intended for the laity,

vol. 1, parts 1–2, published (Strasbourg, 1894–7), I.2, 609 ff.; Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, I, 436. 24 A. Waag, Kleinere deutsche Gedichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edn (Halle, 1916), pp. 124 ff., v. 123, 219; L. Jörss, Das Arnsteiner Mariengebet und die Sequenzen des Mittelalters, dissertation (Marburg, 1920), p. 6 f. See also the survey of surviving women’s prayers in Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, I, 169 ff. and the German entries in women’s breviaries in A. Schönbach, ‘Über einige breviarien von Sanct Lambrecht’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 20 (1876), 129 ff., 192. 25 Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, I, 31; H. Menhardt in his new edition, ‘Das St. Trudperter Höhe Lied’, Rheinische Beiträge 22 (Halle, 1934), p. v. 26 Menhardt, ‘Das St. Trudperter Höhe Lied’, p. 286, v. 145, 13. 27 ‘Von sant Marien unt von gote wart geheizen und geboten allen frumen wiben, daz si ez abe schriben unt senden ez ze minne in dem umberinge verre unde nahen’ (‘From the Virgin Mary and God it has been decreed and that all pious women should copy it and send it with love in the environs near and far’). Cf. also pp. 8, v. 139 ff. He composed it in German ‘daz si ez alle musen lesen, die gotes kint wellen wesen, unt ouch mugen schowen phaffen, laien, frouwen’ [in another version: ‘die laigen unt die frowen’] (‘so that they must all read, if they want to become children of God and priests, the laity [and] women’); Priester Wernhers Maria, ed. C. Wesle (Halle, 1927), p. 142, v. 3049 ff. Since the songs’ healing power was thought to help in pregnancy, they could not have been intended only for cloistered women; p. 139, v. 2505 ff. Cf. p. 10, v. 182ff. 28 W. Grimm, Wernher vom Niederrhein (Göttingen, 1839), p. v; K. Köhn, Die Gedichte des Wilden Mannes und Wernhers vom Niederrhein, Schriften zur germanischen Philologie 6 (Berlin 1891).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) who might not lack all knowledge of Latin. And who else comes to mind as readers but the women of the nobility and the nunneries, figures who occupied a sort of middle position in terms of spiritual development between the unlettered laity and the Latinate clergy? Paltry, scattered evidence alone contradicts this claim. The sole woman named as a German poet comes from this period, Frau Ava, and addresses her readers or hearers on one occasion as lieben mîne herren (‘my beloved men’);29 she thus composes neither expressly nor exclusively for women. Similarly, the Exodus poem from roughly the same time period (around 1120) refers once to mîne herren.30 One certainly cannot claim that the special position of a female readership was the only reason that one might choose to write and compose in German rather than Latin. But the fact that women began regularly to cross and blur the border dividing the people’s language from literature was obviously the strongest, most decisive spur to dissolving the strict division between Latin literature and non-literary speech – that language previously deemed unworthy of script. One might test the significance and scope of these observations by asking whether secular poetry’s entry into literature during the period of courtly culture can be explained the same way. Here it is hardly necessary to emphasise how much courtly poetry of the Hohenstaufen era was marked in nature, content and function by the social and erotic position of women. But the fact that secular poetry, adventure, love romances and the lyric of elevated love (minne) became socially acceptable in court is not the sole factor distinguishing it from early vernacular poetry. Rather, later secular poetry was also distinct for its entry into book form, the ability to become ‘literary’ and thus written. Otherwise as little of it would survive today as the German poetry of earlier times, which – although it had doubtless long existed – we do not know because it was not written down. The same was true of German preaching before the thirteenth century, before the era of German mysticism developed a religious prose literature in the vernacular. The transformation of courtly poetry into literature during the Hohenstaufen era is also partly explicable by the fact that poetry had passed into the hands of different classes. Like the players of earlier times, the chivalric world (from the high nobility to the ministerials now emerging as poets) did not compose for readers but for performance in society. Moreover, their work was not created to be taken in hand as a book, but rather to be ‘sung and spoken’ and heard within the circle of their fellows. For the songs of the Minnesänger and the great epics alike, their artistic meanings would have been just as fulfilled without ever being placed on paper or parchment. A conscious desire to 29 ‘Die

Gedichte der Ava’, ed. P. Piper, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 19 (1887), 150, v. 297. 30 Die altdeutsche Exodus, ed. E. Kossmann, Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der germanischen Völker 57 (Strasbourg, 1886), p. 131, v. 2907.

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages render permanent something unique might have been at work when court poets wrote down or dictated their materials, subsequently distributing them as books. However, the sentiment that compositions should remain the same and be passed on in unchanged textual form is almost never expressed.31 In any case, authorial motive cannot be sufficient explanation for a poem’s reception into literature as a book, as chivalric circles of the Hohenstaufen period generally lacked any decisive impetus for presenting one’s own or another’s poems in book form. Like the noble lords and knights of the Middle Ages in general, courtly poets at the beginning of the thirteenth century usually could not read or write.32 When Hartmann von Aue says of himself, ‘Ein ritter sô gelêret was, daz er an den buochen las, swaz er dar an geschriben vant’ (‘There was a knight so learned that he read in books what he found written there’),33 his claim achieves its intended humorous and boastful effect only by being exceptional. And when, probably referring back to Hartmann’s verse, Wolfram von Eschenbach assures us in Parzival (115, 27) ‘ine kan decheinen buochstap’ (‘I know no letters’), and in Willehalm (2, 19 f.) declares again, ‘swaz an den buochen stêt geschriben, des bin ich künstelôs beliben’ (‘I have remained ignorant of those things which are written in books’), one wonders whether it is to be taken literally or only as a joking formula of modesty, a ‘humorous exaggeration’ and rejection of book learning.34 But even if one insists that Wolfram really could read, his statement retains its undiminished importance, akin to Hildegard of Bingen’s similarly exaggerated claim to not know Latin. How she can present herself as 31 K.

Burdach, Reinmar der Alte und Walther von der Vogelweide, 2nd edn (Halle, 1928), p. 30; K. Viëtor, ‘Die Kunstanschauung der höfischen Epigonen’, PBB 46 (1922), 85 ff., 90 ff., 112 ff. 32 See below at note 38 and following; Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, 6th edn, II, 1, 4 f.; R. Köpke and E. Dümmler, Kaiser Otto der Große (Leipzig, 1876), p. 515 n. 6. 33 Armer Heinrich v. 1 ff.; the same Iwain v. 21 ff. 34 Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, II, 218. Cf. L. Grimm, Wolfram von Eschenbach und die Zeitgenossen, Part I: Zur Entstehung des Parzival, dissertation (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 6 ff.; S. Singer, Wolframs Willehalm (Bern, 1918), pp. 4, 7. H. Schneider observes that ‘a Latin education then remained an exception for poets of the knightly class’, but this was also true of reading – in those days it was hard to learn to read without Latin. Thus it seems contradictory when Schneider says of Wolfram, ‘he certainly could read’, but ‘Wolfram knows Latin even less than French’. Schneider, Heldendichtung – Geistlichendichtung – Ritterdichtung (Heidelberg, 1925), pp. 211 and 213. [The passage referring to not knowing letters is a quote from Psalm 70. 15–16: ‘Quoniam non cognovi litteraturam, introibo in potentias Domini’ (‘Because I have not known letters, I will enter into the power of the Lord’). On the theme, see H. Eggers, ‘Non cognovi litteraturam (zu Parzival 115, 27)’, Festgabe für Ulrich Pretzel zum 65.Geburtstag dargebracht von Freunden und Schülern, ed. W. Simon, W. Bachofer and W. Dittmann (Berlin, 1963), pp. 162–72. Grundmann responded with ‘Dichtete Wolfram von Eschenbach am Schreibtisch?’, AKG 49, no. 3 (1967), 391–405. The editor would like to thank Steven Carey for the references].

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) ‘uneducated’ and yet write Latin works of astonishing intellectual content and traditional continuity? Because the ordo of the Christian-ecclesiastical educational world so desires it. Wolfram composes Parzival and the Willehalm and yet emphatically declares that he cannot read, that he understands nothing in books, because that does not pertain to the ordo of a knight – because, according to Wolfram’s sensibility, involving himself with reading and writing and books is not only unnecessary but actually improper, not in keeping with his class. Wolfram jokingly threatens that the Parzival should never be a ‘Book’,35 but the matter is certainly entirely serious: writing books and being able to read is fundamentally incompatible with his chivalric honour. For his way is schildes ambet (‘knighthood’) (Parz. 115, 11); it is entirely proper to serve women as a poet, but not to be a writer and reader and a bookperson. Paradoxically, it was Parzival precisely as a book, in manuscript form, that found distribution as wide as almost any other Middle High German poem. Wolfram’s concept of the uselessness of literary education and knowledge of writing for knights and the lay nobility finds frequent confirmation in the reality as well as the poetry of the Hohenstaufen period. Even Frederick Barbarossa, like Otto the Great,36 learned to read a little only in his old age;37 35 Parzival

115, 29 ff.: ‘Disiu âventiure vert âne der buoche stiure. ê man si hete für ein buoch, ich waere ê nacket âne tuoch, sô ich in dem bade saeze, ob ichs questen niht vergaeze’ (‘This story progresses without aid of other books. Before one would consider this a book, I would rather be naked without a bath towel, as if I were in a bathtub, as long as I did not forget my scrub brush’). 36 ‘Post mortem Edidis reginae (946), cum antea nescierit, litteras in tantum didicit, ut pleniter libros legere et intelligere noverit’; Widukind II, c. 36, ed. K. A. Kehr, 5th edn, MGH SRG 60 (1935), p. 81; [1978 reprint: = ed. Lohmann and P. Hirsch, 5th edn, p. 96.] . [‘For after the death of Queen Edith, he learned his letters, which he had not done previously, and did so well that he can now easily read and understand books’; Widukind, trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, p. 93.] ‘Post obitum Edith illustris reginae sacras lectiones studiose legebat’. Vita Mathildis reg. post. c. 15, MGH SS 4 (1841), p. 292. [‘After the death of the distinguished Queen Edith … [he] devoutly read the sacred texts’; Queenship and Sanctity: The Lives of Mathilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid, trans. S. Gilsdorf (Washington DC, 2004), p. 168.] He was nonetheless compelled to rely on translators to understand Latin texts or to make himself understandable to the Romans. See Liutprand, Historia Ottonis c. 11, ed. J. Becker, 3rd edn, MGH SRG (1915), p. 167; Flodoard, Annales, MGH SS 3 (1839), p. 397; and Historia Remensis ecclesiae, MGH SS 13 (1881), p. 588; Ekkehart, Casus S. Galli c. 130 and 144, ed. von Knonau St. Gallische Geschichtsquellen, III, 419, 445 f. 37 Rahewin, Gesta Friderici IV, 86, ed. G. Waitz and B. von Simson, 3rd edn, MGH SRG 46 (1912), p. 344, actually says ‘Scripturas et antiquorum regum gesta sedule perquirit’ (‘He earnestly searches the Scriptures and the exploits of ancient kings’) but: ‘Latinam (linguam) melius intelligere potest quam pronuntiare’ (‘Can understand Latin more readily than he can speak it’); [Rahewin, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa by Otto of Freising and his Continuator, Rahewin, trans. C. C. Mierow (New York, 1966), p. 333.] The same, however, is said by Einhard (xxv) on Charlemagne, and Thegan (ix) on Louis the Pious’s knowledge of Greek! By contrast, Bishop

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages Henry the Lion probably always had things read to him;38 and the Imperial Truchsess Markward von Annweiler, Duke of Ravenna and Margrave of Ancona, the closest advisor and executor of the political testament of Emperor Henry VI, could say to papal negotiators who recalled his written approvals that he had never learned to read and hence did not know what a written text contained.39 Rudolf von Habsburg could read or write as little40 as his Hohenzollern brother-in-law, Burgrave Friedrich of Nuremberg;41 and even Louis the Bavarian declared that, as a knight, he did not know the secrets of writing.42 If other princes read and wrote, 43 which always meant the remarkable fact that they could understand Latin,44 it was truly an exception Sicard of Cremona, who knew the emperor very well, expressly called him ‘illitteratus, sed morali experientia doctus’ (‘untrained in letters, but learned in moral practice’); MGH SS 31 (1903), p. 165. And Acerbus Morena, who could never praise him enough, is silent on this point, while he calls the Empress Beatrice litterata immediately after, and Rainald von Dassel even optime litteratus; MGH SS n.s. 7 (1930), pp. 167 ff. 38 ‘antiqua scripta chronicorum sollicite colligi precepit et conscribi et coram recitari, et in hac occupatione saepe totam noctem duxit insomnem’ (‘he commanded that the ancient writings of the chronicles should be carefully collected and written down and recited before him, and, thus occupied, he often passed the whole night without sleep’); Provost Gerhard von Stederburg, MG SS 16 (1859), p. 230. 39 ‘Respondit se non didicisse scripturam ideoque quid notarius eius scripserit ignorare’; Gesta Innocentii III, ix, PL 214, 23. [‘He replied that he had never learned to read and therefore did not know what the notary had written’; The Deeds of Pope Innocent III, trans. J. M. Powell (Washington DC, 2004), p. 10.] 40 See O. Redlich, Rudolf von Habsburg (Innsbruck, 1903), p. 732 with reference to other events. The coronation ordo for Rudolph of Habsburg stipulated here that the liturgical formulas should be translated into German, ‘quia rex tamquam illitteratus et laicus premissas interrogationes et earum responsiones in latino non intelligit’ (‘because the king as an unlearned layman did not understand the preliminary questions and the responses to them in Latin’). P. E. Schramm has confirmed that this was actually for Henry VII’s coronation, not Rudolph’s. It is printed in MGH Leges 2 (1837), pp. 384 ff. See J. E. Kopp, Geschichte der eidgenössischen Bünde, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1845–82), I, 26. 41 Böhmer and Redlich, Reg. Imp. 6, part 1, p. 53 n. 172: Burgrave Friedrich (as also the count of Sain) can understand ‘nec litteras nec linguam latinam’ (‘neither letters nor the Latin language’). Cf. p. 269 at n. 1062. 42 ‘sicut miles scripturarum et litterarum subtilitatum ignari (sumus)’ (‘as knights [we are] ignorant of the subtleties of writing and letters’); S. Riezler, Vatikanische Akten zur deutschen Geschichte in der Zeit Kaiser Ludwigs des Bayern (Innsbruck, 1891), p. 639. 43 Among the German rulers, the first representatives of a new dynasty who had not been reared for the throne were illitterati; the sons of such rulers, in contrast, were always prepared for their coming office, which included literary training. Otto of Sankt Blasien said of Frederick I, ‘Liberos suos omnes litteris adprime erudiri faciens’ (‘having all his sons [or children] instructed to a high degree in letters’); Chronica xxi, ed. A. Hofmeister, MGH SRG 47 (1912), p. 30. 44 Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione (Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock and G. F. Warner, 8 vols. (London, 1861–91), VIII, 7: written about 1217) on the oldest son of King Philip II of France: ‘Litteris et literalibus studiis affatim est a teneris

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) among the lay nobility as a whole.45 The many descriptions and textbooks of chivalric virtues and arts from the golden age of courtly poetry contain hardly a single hint that a knight should be able to read and write. Only when the initial chivalric pose favoured around 1200 began to lose its original power (around mid-century) did the ability to read and write occasionally begin to receive praise. In Germany,46 the first was surely Konrad of Würzburg, who, just prior to 1270, viewed knighthood from an urban perspective, and in his Engelhard (v. 747 ff.) placed reading and writing among the arts that made his hero beloved in the court. In his translated legend of St Eckenberg, the schoolmaster Heinrich Michael characteristically has his educator, the abbot of Limburg, say: ‘Wer da ritter werden wil, dem kan es geschaden auch nicht viel, daß er lernet die bücher lesen; wil er aber geistlichen wesen, so hilft es ihm ein michel teil’ (‘Whoever wants to become a knight, it will not hurt him much to learn to read books; if he, however, wants to be a

annis imbutus, quae virtus quidem, quanto in principibus est hodie rarior, tanto ubi affuerit longe preciosior et praeclarior’ (‘he has been deeply instructed in letters and liberal arts from his earliest years, a quality that, as it is today rarer among rulers, is far more precious and excellent when it is present’); Instruction for a Ruler, first Preface, ed. and trans. R. Bartlett (Oxford, 2018), p. 39; on the composition of the work between the early 1190s and c. 1217, see ibid., pp. xiii–xix.] Cf. also P. Kirn, ‘Die mittelalterliche Staatsverwaltung als geistesgeschichtliches Problem’, HV 27 (1932), 532 ff. and especially the numerous witnesses collected by G. Zappert, ‘Maximilians I. Gesprächbüchlein’, SB Wien 28 (1858), 201 ff. 45 Wipo, Tetralogus v. 199 f. (3rd edn, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH SRG (1915), p. 81): ‘Solis Teutonicis vacuum vel turpe videtur, ut doceant aliquem nisi clericus accipiatur’ (‘it appears idle and shameful only to the Germans, that they should teach anyone, unless he is to be accepted as a cleric’). Walter Map, De nugis curialium i.10, ed. M. R. James (Oxford, 1914), p. 7: ‘Generosi partium nostrarum [of England] aut dedignantur aut pigri sunt applicare litteris liberos suos’. [‘It is because the gentry of our land are too proud or too lazy to put their children to learning’; M. R. James’s edn, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), p. 13.] Petrus von Andlau, De imperio Romano-Germanico ii.11 (circa 1460), ed. J. Hürbin, ‘Der “Libellus de Cesarea monarchia” von Hermann Peter aus Andlau’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 13 (1892), 192: ‘Id moris apud eos irrepsit, ut dedecori habendum sit nobilium filios scientia et virtutum exercitio imbui … et mox postquam literarum apices vix ruditer depingere sciant, illico puerulos ad canes et equos alendum applicare solent, quasi si diutius literarum insisterent studio, aliquam turpem inde notam contraherent’ (‘This custom crept up on them [the Germans] that they considered it to be shameful for the sons of the nobility to be instructed in knowledge and the exercise of the virtues … and as soon as they scarcely knew how to roughly draw the outlines of letters, they are accustomed to apply them as little boys to caring for dogs and horses, as if, should they press on any longer studying their letters, they would contract a shameful marking on themselves’). 46 Otto Müller discusses some witnesses from French epics, Die täglichen Lebensgewohnheiten in den altfranzösischen Artusromanen, dissertation (Marburg, 1889), pp. 52, 55.

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages priest, it will help him a great deal’). 47 Later it is said of the Duke’s sons, in the Friedrich von Schwaben (v. 18 ff.): ‘zu schul waren sy gewesen, sy kunden schryben unde lesen, darzu turnieren unde stechen’ (‘They had been to school, they could read and write but also take parts in tournaments and joust’). Such is already a sign of the decline of chivalric attitude and the courtly way of life. The difference before this shift is most clearly demonstrated by Ulrich of Lichtenstein, a man who began his life as a knight approximately at the time of Wolfram’s death and who died just as Konrad of Würzburg began to compose. From his youth, this remarkable lord had pursued only one goal, to the point of obsession: to educate himself completely in all forms of chivalric life and poetry. He never failed to master whatever he thought belonged to chivalric and courtly life, particularly what ladies of society demanded from a chivalric singer – but he never learned to read or write. We know this not only from his own assertions, which we might doubt as with Wolfram, but also from the reliable portrayal of his chivalric efforts in his autobiography, the Frauendienst. When he received a letter from a lady, he immediately went to his clerk to have it read it to him. Once, when he did not have his clerk with him, he was completely at a loss; he carried the letter with him next to his heart, laid it at night under his pillow and imagined what beauties it might contain, but he could not read it. Only after ten days, when his clerk returned and read it to him, did he learn the contents: a mocking rejection in ten short verses!48 Such scenes demonstrate beyond a doubt that Ulrich really could not read a word, so engrossed was he about being a chivalric poet comme il faut. In contrast, the women with whom he exchanged such letters and poems could all read without a clerk’s assistance,49 and also write their own answers.50 Ulrich never says that he read something himself, but always that it was read to him;51 in contrast, his women friends always let the courier wait until they 47 A.

Kaufmann, ‘Ein Gedicht auf den h. Eckenbert, den Stifter des Klosters Frankenthal’, Monatsschrift für die Geschichte Westdeutschlands 4 (1878), 28; H. Boos, Monumenta Wormatiensa, Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Worms 3 (Berlin, 1893), p. 130. The Latin legend reads ‘dicebat literarum peritiam nemini militaturo obesse, seculum relicturo plurimum prodesse’ (‘he said the knowledge of letters hurt no one who was going to be a knight, but it very much benefited someone who was going to leave the world’). 48 Ulrich von Lichtenstein, ed. K. Lachmann (Berlin, 1841), p. 60. 49 Ibid., pp. 20, 22; 31, 29; 44, 6; 59, 13; 99, 23; 154, 27; 321, 23; 323, 8; 382, 9; 394, 8 ff.; 395, 14. 50 Ibid., pp. 28, 30; 31, 30; 100, 24 among many others. Jacobius addresses examples of women who read and wrote on their own in French literature. Die Erziehung des Edelfräuleins im alten Frankreich, p. 59 n. 1. 51 Ulrich von Lichtenstein, pp. 32, 21; 61, 4; 101, 23; 195, 22; 231, 24; 233, 1. Similar reports from other poems by Zappert, SB Wien 28 (1858), 202 ff., 213 ff.; Müller, Die täglichen Lebensgewohnheiten, pp. 57 f., n. 370 and 377; Meyer, ‘Jugenderziehung im Mittelalter’, pp. 9 ff. n. 38.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) read the letter in their chamber and had written the answer. Such was quite expected and characteristic of courtly society in general. For, unlike the knights and princes (and even the poets) of this time, the women in courtly society all appear to read; it was expected of them, in fact assumed, that they all could read, as it was proper for a lady.52 Gottfried often remarks about Isolde that she could write and read; she also knew Latin, which a priest had taught her as a girl ‘beidiu buoch und seitspil’ (‘both books and stringed instruments’).53 To be sure, Tristan was also taught ‘in der buoche lêre’ (‘in the teachings of books’)54 to pass the time with Isolde;55 but Gottfried depicts reading and writing as a troublesome bother for an aspiring knight, ‘der maneger jugent schaden tuot’ (‘that does damage to some youths’),56 while Isolde’s ability belonged firmly in the realm of courtly female education. It is not knights but women, particularly girls (8008 ff. = 202, 12 ff.), whom Gottfried advises to read ‘morâliteit daz süeze [lesen]’ (‘morality, the sweet education’); that is, books and poetry from which the forms of courtly life were to be learned. Ulrich of Türheim, the continuator of Tristan, closes his work (v. 3655 ff.) with the request that ‘Swelhe frouwen an disem Bouche lesen, die suln mir wünschen heiles unt danken mir’ (‘Any women who read this book should wish me well and thank me’). Similar passages at the end of courtly epics reveal that these poets also frequently thought of their readers as women.57 Heinrich von dem Türlin closes his Krone (v. 29, 998 ff.) with a plea for favour from the women for whom he composed.

52 Cf.

E. Wechsler, Das Kulturproblem des Minnesangs, 2 vols. (Halle, 1909), I, 74 ff. Vincentius of Prague calls the Bohemian Queen Jutta, daughter of Landgrave Ludwig of Thuringia, ‘litteris et Latino optime eruditam eloquio, quod maxime domizellarum nobilium exornat decorem’ (‘excellently learned in letters and Latin eloquence, which very greatly embellishes the charms of the ladies of the court’), MGH SS 17 (1861), p. 664. 53 Gottfrieds Tristan, ed. F. Ranke (Berlin, 1930), v. 7697, 7727, 7986, 8055, 8141. I add the old Tristan citations from H. F. Massmann’s edition (Leipzig, 1843), through which the passages in K. Marold’s edition, Teutonia 6 (Leipzig, 1912) can be found: 194, 23; 195, 13; 201, 32; 203, 21; 205, 27. 8139 = 205, 25 says that she could ‘brieve und schanzune tihten’ (‘compose letters and songs’). Even Ulrich of Lichtenstein (9, 17) was taught in his youth ‘an prieven tihten süezin wort’ (‘to compose sweet words in letters’). 54 2065 = 53, 25; 2085 = 54, 5; 2090 = 54, 10. 55 19189 = 481, 35; 16281 = 409, 7. Many knights in Parzival can also write, including Gahmuret (55, 18 ff.), Gawan (645, 1 ff.) and Trevrizent (462, 11), with the express remark: ‘doch (= although) ich ein leie waere, der waren buoche maere kund ich lesen unde schriben’ (‘if I were a lay person, there would be book’s tales that I could read and write’). The French Perceval expressly says ‘Pierchevaus ne savoit lire’ (‘Perceval did not know how to read’); but see v. 40268 ff., v. 33957, ed. C. Potvin 4 (Paris, 1870). Cf. also Zappert, ‘Maximilians I. Gesprächbüchlein’, pp. 212 ff. 56 2081 = 54, 1. 57 See K. Iwand, Die Schlüsse der mittelhochdeutschen Epen, Germanische Studien 16, ed. E. Ebering (Berlin, 1922).

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages And even Parzival, the most thoughtful work of this period, ended with the verses: ‘Ist das durh ein wîp geschehn’ – composed for a woman – ‘diu muoz mir süezer worte jehn’ (‘she should say sweet words to me’). That is neither merely a gallant concluding turn,58 nor a pure poetic fiction. In the very middle of his poem (v. 337, 1 ff.) Wolfram calls out to every understanding, faithful woman, ‘diu diz maere geschriben siht’ (‘those [women] who see this tale being written’), to witness that he spoke the truth about women. And he, too, begins to think of his work as a book – unexpectedly and despite his own reluctance – with the image of reading women in mind for whom others have expressly conceived of their poetry as literature. The best example is perhaps Ulrich of Lichtenstein, who closes the ‘Service of Women’ with the words ‘Ditz buoch sol guoter wîbe sîn’ (‘This book should be for good women’), and sends his smaller late work, the ‘Women’s Book’ of 1257, on its way with the wish, ‘Die frowen süln ez gerne lesen’ (‘women should read it eagerly’).59 The same may be observed in the earliest beginnings of courtly poetry. Heinrich von Veldeke composed his first work, the Legend of St Servatius, ‘the first German poem in the new regular form’, at the wish of Countess Agnes von Looz, the wife of his superior60 – and probably the same person who also encouraged and promoted the Tristan poet, Eilhart of Oberg, to his work.61 Even more significant is that Veldeke also entrusted his second work, the Aeneas poem, to another woman, the Countess Margarete von Cleve, who would lesen und schauen (‘read and look at’) (13, 446) the manuscript even before he had finished it or was ready to present it. Thus transpired the well-known mishap in which a lady of the court passed the manuscript to another (perhaps also to read), and, in the excitement of her wedding to the landgrave of Thüringia, the poem was lost; it was not until Veldeke himself went to Thüringia nine years later that the poet finally collected his incomplete work – which other hands had worked on in the meantime. The Veldeke manuscript’s textual destiny is similar to that of another work shortly thereafter, about which the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach complains.62

58 Viëtor,

‘Die Kunstanschauung der höfischen Epigonen’, p. 90. von Lichtenstein, ed. Lachmann, pp. 593, 11 and 660, 28. 60 See F. Wilhelm, Sanct Servatius (Munich, 1910), p. XXXII; Eneide, ed. O. Behaghel (Heilbronn, 1882), pp. clxix ff. 61 Eilhart von Oberge, Tristrant, ed. K. Wagner 1, Rheinische Beiträge 5 (Bonn, 1924), 15 ff.; H. Naumann, ‘Ritterliche Standeskultur um 1200’, in H. Naumann and G. Müller, Höfische Kultur, DVLG Buchreihe 17 (Halle, 1929), 62. Mathilde, Henry the Lion’s wife, was previously thought to be Eilhart’s sponsor. The oldest surviving manuscript of the Tristrant was written at the end of the twelfth century in the Canoness house of Obermünster (Regensburg), ‘whose canonesses, besides transcription for pay also educated the daughters of the wealthy nobility as a business’; see von Oberge, Tristrant, ed. Wagner, 23 ff. 62 See A. E. Schönbach, ‘Studien zur Erzählungsliteratur des Mittelalters’, 4, SB Wien 144, 9 (1902), 5 ff. 59 Ulrich

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Prior to completing a manuscript, he had also lent it to women (in this case nuns) to read; they transcribed it, and when the author encountered his own work again, he was furious and decided in the future to allow only authorised transcripts to be given to the public. Similar episodes appear frequently; Meister Eckhart63 and Suso64 in particular harboured similar complaints due to their female readership. Evaluation of the transmission chain not only reveals such patterns, particularly the tradition of mystical texts enabled in large part by transcription work by women and nuns; it also illuminates the extraordinary (one might almost say excessive) zeal of women of this time for reading and writing – for books. Among the laity, women are almost the only ones who mastered these arts, who made literary rather than simply practical use thereof, who could read and wanted to read, who had the time and appetite to absorb everything written and readable, and who were more than once able to heckle poets, so to speak – for in conception these poems were meant to be presented, not to be read. Later yet, around 1300, the Bamberg schoolmaster Hugo of Trimberg complained in the Renner (v. 21, 691 ff.) that women of his own time lamented and wept more over the heroes of literature with their battles and sorrows in the service of minne than they do over the wounds of the Lord. And in the few cases among thirteenth-century poems when anyone is portrayed reading from books, it is almost without exception women: in the Wigalois (v. 2710) it is the maid and the lady overseer of the Persian king’s daughter who reads from the Aeneid to her mistress; in the Iwein (v. 6455) a girl reads from a French book.65 All of these witnesses and observations point to the fact that women were the readers of courtly poetry, if not exclusively so, and that through them and for them vernacular poetry was taken up into writing, becoming ‘literature’. Furthermore, the theory is hardly disproved by the fact that so many poems of this time identify princely lords as benefactors. Princes and great lords certainly sheltered poets and singers in their courts: they provided literary sources and costly parchment and other means to support poetic endeavours, and permitted them to present their creations. For this they harvested the poets’ thanks. Yet, alongside these male patrons and promoters, wives often appear as the true source of encouragement and demand.66 When 63 Rechtfertigungsschrift,

ed. A. Daniels, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 23, no. 5 (Münster, 1923), p. 12. 64 H. Seuse, Deutsche Schriften, ed. K. Bihlmeyer (Stuttgart, 1907), p. 4. 65 For examples of women reading from twelfth- to fourteenth-century French romances and epics, see Jourdain, ‘L’éducation des femmes au Moyen Âge’, pp. 113 ff.; Jacobius, Die Erziehung des Edelfräuleins im alten Frankreich, p. 58 n. 3 and 4; Meyer, ‘Jugenderziehung im Mittelalter’, p. 54 n. 61; A. Schultz, Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger, 2nd edn (Leipzig 1889), p. 160 n. 4. 66 As a brief supplement to the exclusively German literary material discussed here, see the following references to corresponding evidence in French literature. Philip of Thaon wrote the ‘Marvellous Journeys of St. Brendan’ and a book on animals

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages the priest Konrad praises Heinrich, duke of Bavaria, as his high patron for commissioning a translation of the Song of Roland into German and providing him with the French source, it is clearly at the wish of his wife: ‘des gerte di edele herzoginne’ (‘This was desired by the noble duchess’).67 Reinbot of Durne composed this Heilige Georg on behalf of the Bavarian ducal couple and, incidentally, as he assures us (v. 49 ff.), followed the duchess’s wishes by avoiding false poetic embellishment of the legend; thus, here as well it was her literary taste that prevailed. The Reichsschenk Konrad von Winterstetten not only commissioned Ulrich of Türheim to compose the Tristan, oriented as mentioned to female readers, but also prompted the Willehalm of Rudolf of Ems to be composed ‘ze dinste sîner vrouwen’ (‘for the service of his women’) (v. 15, 655).68 Since the great lords of this time evidently spent much to fulfil their ladies’ desires for poetry and reading materials, one may assess the relationship of princes to Middle High German literature as even more valuable than the ancient concept of Maecenas’s patronage. Further investigation will be necessary to determine exactly how style and form were so altered from the period of courtly poetry’s decline to

and stones for Adelheid of Louvain, who married Henry I of England in 1121. Around 1150, Geoffrey Gaimar wrote the Estoire des Engleis, the first Anglo-Norman rhyming chronicle, at the request of Constance, Baron Ralph FitzGilbert’s wife; and Wace dedicated his Roman de Brut (1155) and Benoît de S. More [Sainte-Maure] his Roman de Troie (1165) to the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, then queen of England and previously queen of France. Her daughter [1978 reprint: with Louis VII], Countess Marie of Champagne, was celebrated in Chrestien de Troyes’s Lancelot, where he thanked her for giving him the matier et san, the material and spirit, of his poem. Eleanor’s other daughter, Alix, was the countess of Blois at whose court Gautier of Arras lived. In the dedication to his Eracles [1978 reprint: soon after 1164], Gautier not only names Count Baldwin of Hennegau but also his wife, Marie [correction: Thibaut of Blois and his daughter-in-law], and composed his romance ‘Ille and Galeron’ [1978 reprint: after 1167] for Beatrice of Burgundy, the wife of Barbarossa. Marie de France wrote her Lays prior to 1167, and the Espurgatoire de S. Patrice around 1185. Shortly thereafter, Gautier de Coincy wrote his Mary poems for the noble nuns of Soissons and so on. The significance of woman for the unfolding of French literature is evident from these little-known examples and would be confirmed many times over by further investigation. 67 Rolandslied v. 9024. M. Linzel confirms the view of W. Grimm, Massmann and Giesebrecht that this can only mean Henry the Lion and Mathilde, daughter of Henry II of England. The previously dominant opinion was that the duke is Henry the Proud and his wife Gertrud, daughter of the Emperor Lothar. Linzel, ‘Zur Datierung des deutschen Rolandslieds’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 51 (1926), 13 ff. The latest editor of the Rolandslied, C. Wesle, Rheinische Beiträge 15 (Bonn, 1928), 11 f.; and Naumann, ‘Ritterliche Standeskultur um 1200’, pp. 57 f., both agree. For the older identification, see Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, II, 1, 258; and J. Schwietering, ‘Die deutsche Dichtung des Mittelalters’, in Walzels Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft (Potsdam, 1932), p. 99. 68 Further citations in J. Schwietering, ‘Die Demutsformel mittelhochdeutscher Dichter’, Abh. Göttingen n.s. 17, 3 (Göttingen, 1921), 21 ff.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) the recasting of epic content into prose romances that out of oral poetic performance there arose a written literature for a predominantly female readership.69 Above all else, one must consider why courtly chivalric romance literature lost momentum after the middle of the thirteenth century, overtaken by a powerful wave of religious, edifying and instructive writing in the vernacular. In part, this new writing drew upon courtly poetry and spiritual texts; but it also relinquished all artistry and, for the first time, introduced German prose in unrestricted form directly into script, transformed into readable literary material. If one explores this still under-appreciated German religious writing70 just after the apex of courtly poetry and before the flourishing of German mysticism at the beginning of the fourteenth century, one will find, on the one hand, a surprising repetition and confirmation of our observations regarding the decisive role of female readership in the rise of vernacular literature. And, on the other, the scale and significance of these relationships for the broader development of literary and spiritual history is herein also fully illuminated. As had happened earlier with secular poetry, so now preaching and other vernacular religious expressions were able to enter German writing as literature. What was once written only in Latin and only spoken in German – sermons and prayers, religious contemplations and theological statements, the descriptions of religious experiences and visions, and finally the Bible itself – all became more essential from the middle of the thirteenth century. Indeed, with the flourishing of German mysticism after the start of the fourteenth century they became the most important part of German literature. But how did the spoken word of the preacher, which fulfilled its purpose once heard, give rise to vernacular religious texts intended to be read over and again? Who were these readers who earlier spoke and listened only in the people’s language, who read only in the Latin written language, and who now wished (and were able) to read German? The answer to these questions has often been sought within the religious sects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Cathars and Waldensians, who supposedly came from the lower social levels. According to this theory, their members were too uneducated to read religious writings and the Vulgate for themselves. Desiring religious teaching and personal knowledge of Scripture more intensely than the general Catholic laity, they consequently had the Bible and other religious works translated; thus was a religious literature in the vernacular created.71 However, this

69 F.

Karg provides a preliminary investigation, ‘Die Wandlungen des höfischen Epos in Deutschland vom 13. zum 14. Jahrhundert’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 11 (1923), 321 ff. 70 Survey in Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, II.3, 357 ff. 71 As still depicted by K. Burdach, ‘Die nationale Aneignung der Bibel und die Anfänge der germanischen Philologie’, in Festschrift Eugen Mogk zum 70. Geburtstag (Halle, 1924), pp. 236 ff.

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages interpretation is unconvincing. These sects organised themselves precisely like the Catholic Church into a ‘laity’ and a ‘clergy’ – the latter a narrow circle of active itinerant preachers, the ‘perfect’, the ‘poor ones’ or however they were named, who had completely removed themselves from worldly life. Forming the actual core of the sect, they proclaimed their doctrine and dispensed their sacraments to the larger communal circle of ‘believers’, adherents of these itinerant preachers. Many, although not all, lacked a Latin-based clerical education – most notably the founder Valdes himself, who thus had vernacular translations of the Holy Scripture and some other religious works, particularly patristic writings. Yet such vernacular works served these heretic preachers only as a foundation for their doctrinal proclamation (precisely as Latin literature served the Catholic clergy), not as reading material for believers, nor as a religious literature of edification. Followers and adherents of these heretics were every bit as unable and unwilling to read as the Church’s laity. Although they listened to the words of the preacher, desire to read religious writings or even the Bible was far from their minds. Even during the peak period of these sects in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they generated no writings in the vernacular. Heretical Bible translations and other vernacular texts from this time provided preachers only with materials for training and preparation, not reading for the faithful. In this soil no literary forms of their own grew.72 Just as with heretical preaching, the popular preaching of the mendicant orders likewise stimulated no vernacular literature of edification – they too addressed a laity that could neither read nor write, only listen. To be sure, the practice and impact of vernacular preaching were greatly expanded through Francis and Dominic and their disciples. But no vernacular literature worthy of the name arose in Italy and southern France, the homeland of the new orders. The fact that we have the great German Franciscan preachers (especially Berthold of Regensburg and David of Augsburg) and the Dominican preachers of German mysticism to thank for the first works of religious German prose to find broad readership through manuscript distribution is rooted in quite telling circumstances. Despite his enormous effect, Berthold of Regensburg never wrote down or published his German sermons in the German language, and was as little involved in writing as Meister Eckhart would later be. Moreover, Berthold’s sermons to the people were not immediately recorded in German by his hearers. It was only when Berthold preached, not publicly to the people, but in a convent, to nuns, that his

72 See

Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 442 ff.; [Grundmann, Religious Movements, pp. 192 ff., 237 ff.] The last chapter of this book investigates the rise of vernacular religious writings; here I attempt to place those results in the broader general context of German literature. The following also draws from my essay, ‘Die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik’, DVLG 12 (1934), 400 ff. [MGH Schriften 25.1 (1976), pp. 243–68.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) words were written down, preserved and read again!73 All the other Berthold sermons were retranslated after the fact from Latin to German; exactly like other preachers before and after him, Berthold wrote and published his sermons (preached in German) in Latin, as a model and primer for other preachers, not as a textbook for believers. He spoke German only in order to be heard, and he wrote Latin only to be read. Thus his sermons became vernacular reading material only when his Latin texts were retranslated into German, probably in the last third of the thirteenth century within the circle of his Augsburg brethren.74 Many signs point clearly to this German translation being undertaken to create an edifying literature for the female readers of nuns’ convents, primarily for the Clarissans, entrusted to the Franciscans.75 It seems to have transpired similarly with the tracts of David of Augsburg, Berthold’s colleague and helper, who is often called the first German mystic but whose fame as a German author has been disputed.76 He too naturally 73 In

addition to the six convent sermons of Berthold of Regensburg published by J. Strobl, there are the sermons of the so-called St George preacher, which their editor, K. Rieder, regarded as a ‘precipitate of Berthold’s German convent sermons’. See ‘Das sogennante St. Georgender Prediger aus der Freiburger und der Karlsruher Handscrif herausgegeben’, Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters 10 (Berlin, 1908), 21 ff. Many of these were demonstrably written for female readers (XIX); parts of them can already be found in a mid-thirteenth-century manuscript. Berthold’s convent sermons: F. Pfeiffer and J. Strobl, Berthold von Regensburg, Vollständige Ausgabe seiner Deutsche Predigten, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1862–80), II, 258 ff., n. 66–71. See also A. E. Schönbach, ‘Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt’, SB Wien 153, 4 (1906) 19. 74 This was the same Franciscan ‘working community’ in Augsburg in which the Deutschenspiegel and then the Schwabenspiegel arose (c. 1274–75), which used some of the ideas of David of Augsburg and must have been known to the editors of Berthold’s German sermons; cf. K. A. Eckhardt, Rechtsbücherstudien 1, Abh. Göttingen n.s. 22, 2 (Göttingen, 1927), 135; A. Hübner, Vorstudien zur Ausgabe des Buches der Könige; A. Hübner, MGH Fontes iuris antiqui n.s. 3 (1933), p. 102. Folge 2 (1932), 100 ff. I thank A. Hübner for the following point, which he himself did not use in his book. A. E. Schönbach had dated the German translations of Berthold’s sermons to shortly after 1278/79; SB Wien 153, 4 (1906), 92 ff. On the basis of a subsequent correction by O. Holder-Egger (NA 32 (1907), 532 ff.) he gave up this chronology; SB Wien 160, 6 (1909), 50. He now conceded the possibility that the sermons could have been translated while Berthold († 1272) was still alive. But it is the relation established for the German Berthold sermons (Hübner, pp. 104 ff.) to the Schwabenspiegel and the Königebuch that still seems to confirm the dating of some (and perhaps all) of the German sermons to the period around 1278. In any case these questions still merit sustained investigation. 75 See Schönbach, ‘Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt’, pp. 54 ff., 69, 73 and passim. The German translation of the Clarissan Rule for the Regensburg community took place in the same Augsburg Franciscan circle around 1286; ed. Schönbach SB Wien 160, 6 (1909). 76 Cf. W. Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1874–81), I, 268 ff., II, 9 ff.; P. Strauch, [review of Preger’s Geschichte der deutschen Mystik], Anzeiger für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 9 (1883), 117 ff.

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages preached in German but probably wrote only in Latin, and his treatises were translated into German (and thus transformed into edifying vernacular literature) only at a later date. And similarly, they are almost always found in manuscripts that once belonged to a nuns’ convent, usually in close proximity to allegorical-educational German texts whose intended female readership is indubitable.77 As with Berthold’s sermons and David’s treatises, the transformation of the spoken word and Latin literature into German script and edifying reading material materialises only where women’s need for reading comes into play. Closer examination ubiquitously reveals78 that the edifying vernacular religious literature blooming in thirteenth-century Germany and culminating in German mysticism appears first and only there, arising wherever female audiences wanted to read for themselves. Among desired works were religious texts, sermons, contemplations, prayers and, not least of all, Holy Scriptures,79 and even their own written texts – which previously only the clergy and monks had created. Unlike the spiritual classes that grew up with ecclesiastical Latin education, schooled in it and obligated to it, women took up the religious content immediately in their own language, forming it for themselves and to their own ends. D. Stöckerl, ‘Bruder David von Augsburg’, Veröffentlichungen aus dem kirchenhistorischen Seminar München 4, no. 4 (Munich 1914), 210 ff. E. Michael, ‘Allgemeine kritische Würdigung der Privat-Offenbarungen’, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 25 (1901), 396; and E. Michael, Deutsche Wissenschaft und deutsche Mystik während des 13. Jahrhunderts, in his Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, 6 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1897–1915), III, 133 ff. David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione (Quaracchi, 1899), p. xv. H. Lehmann, ‘Stilistische Untersuchungen zu David von Augsburg’, PBB 51 (1927), 383 ff. The question of the ‘genuineness’ of David’s German texts – that is, whether he himself wrote German – naturally rests on the correspondence of their contents with the contents of his Latin treatises; as Stöckerl demonstrates, it has not been established. E. Krebs in Stammler’s Verfasserlexikon (1933), I, col. 404, does not deal with the question, and Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, II, 3, 416, refers to it only vaguely. 77 See P. Strauch, ‘Palma contemplationis’, PBB 48 (1923), 335 ff.; Stöckerl, ‘Bruder David’, pp. 258 ff.; Schönbach, ‘Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt’, pp. 100 f. 78 Instead of presenting all the individual witnesses, here I must refer to the summary in my book Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 459, 467 ff. To name only a few known works of Germanists referring to female readers, I recall Brother Hermann’s Leben der Gräfin Jolande, ed. J. Meier, Germanische Studien 7 (Berlin 1889); Lilie, written in rhyming prose, ed. P. Wüst, Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters 15 (Berlin, 1909); see p. xxviii; J. B. Schoemann, Die Rede von den 15 Graden, Germanische Studien 80 (Berlin, 1930), pp. 27, 61; Das Rheinische Marienlob, ed. A. Bach, Bibl. lit. Ver. Stuttgart 281 (Stuttgart, 1934), xlviii; the so-called St. Georgener Predigten (as in note 73 above). Today it is well known that we have mainly women to thank for copies and transcripts. 79 F. Maurer, Studien zur mitteldeutschen Bibelübersetzung vor Luther, Germanische Bibliothek 26 (Heidelberg, 1929), pp. 68 ff., refers to the importance of Dominican female houses for German translations of the Bible.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) If female readers are to be thanked both for the rise of a religious German literature as well as the reception of German poetry into script, then the religious turn of German literature in the course of the thirteenth century has a comparable origin. From minne-poetry to mysticism, from Gottfried to Eckhart, the new forms emerged because of women’s interests and activities: seized by a powerful religious movement that alienated them from courtly social culture, its ideals and its arts, German women of this time were awakening instead to a life of Christian surrender and religious dedication. Two well-known figures clearly demonstrate the significance of this turn for German literature and spiritual history: the Landgravin Elisabeth of Thuringia and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Elisabeth lived at a centre of courtly art and culture, but she took no part in the goings-on of poets and singers. The festivals and flirtations of chivalric courtly life had nothing to offer her, since from childhood Elisabeth had instead been utterly filled with the religious impulse to self-abnegation, renunciation, humility and the service of God. Finally separating from her social equals, who regarded her as an irritation, she became one of the first Franciscan women in Eisenach. The monastic sensibility and attitude attracted her, but it harboured no possibility for living the new ideal of voluntary poverty and self-abnegation – nor did she discover any new order she could join. Thus she remained dutifully obedient to her confessor, Konrad of Marburg, and sought to practise Christian humility in caring for the sick and pestilent. During her short lifetime, soon extinguished at the age of twenty-four, the gathering spiritual forces were not yet powerful enough to create a new Christian form of life through which the crisis of courtly culture would be made manifest. That Elisabeth did not stand alone in her conviction is best illustrated by Mechthild of Magdeburg,80 who was probably precisely of Elisabeth’s age and from a comparable background. Born into a chivalric house, she too separated herself voluntarily from family, and from the honour and wealth of her class.81 And at about the same time as Elisabeth, Mechthild left her unknown homeland and came to Magdeburg for spiritual purposes – not to

80 Offenbarungen

der Schwester Mechtild von Magdeburg, oder Das Fließende Licht v.34, ed. G. Morel (Regensburg, 1869), p. 166: ‘der Herr spricht: Elyzabeth die ist und si was ein botte, den ich gesant habe ze den unseligen vrowen, die in den burgen sassen, mit der unkúscheit also sere durflossen und mit dem homuote also sere úberzogen und mit der italkeit also stete umbevangen, das si nach rehte in das abgrúnde solten sin gegangen. Irme bilde ist manig vrowe gevolget, dermasse si wolten und mohten’ (‘The Lord speaks, Elyzabeth she is and she was a messenger that I had sent to the immoral women who sat in their castles pulsing intensely with promiscuity and so severely overcome with arrogance and constantly taken with idleness, that they should by rights have gone to hell. Some women follow this model to the extent that they want and desire it’). Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. 81 Fließende Licht i.1, ed. Morel, p. 4; iv.2, p. 91; vii.64, p. 279.

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages find a secure home in a convent, however, but in order to be ‘guiltlessly cursed by all the world’, as she said herself. Yet she did not remain alone. For forty years she lived in Magdeburg among like-minded women, perhaps as leader of a ‘beguinage’, and there she found what had been denied to the young Elisabeth – a spiritual connection with the new orders that provided the religious movement of this time its organisational structure. Only within that relationship could her own religious strengths and inclinations completely unfurl. She never became a Dominican herself, and in her old age, when she was sick and weak, she found shelter in a house of Cistercian women (Helfta); but for decades she stood in the closest relation and personal interaction with the Dominicans of Magdeburg and Halle, who were entrusted with the descriptions of her experiences and ideas. She knew no Latin,82 as she herself remarked, and could not have sought spiritual support in the clerical, ecclesiastical literature; but she could read and write like most of the women of her time and class. She might have derived much of her doctrine directly from Dominican sermons, but we know that the mendicant orders were already beginning to create a religious literature for the nuns and beguines under their spiritual care83 – materials certainly not unknown to her. The finest fruit from this encounter, this joining of new piety with the particular qualities of feminine education, is Mechthild’s own work, the ‘Flowing Light of the Godhead’. Written – or one might as well say composed – fully in the language, sounds and images of courtly poetry and songs of minne,84 the text reflects how women absorbed, and then specifically rejected, the world of chivalric service to women. Instead, it was filled with the new sensitivities of the love of God, the bridehood of the soul and loving unity with God. Yet Mechthild is not the only, nor even the first, to announce the fullness of such religious experiences and senses in the words of her own

82 Fließende

Licht ii.3, ed. Morel, p. 30: ‘des latines kan ich nit’ (‘I do not know Latin’), iii.1, p. 56: ‘wa ich der schrift ungeleret bin’ (‘for I am untaught in writing). Cf. J. Ancelet-Hustache, Mechtilde de Magdebourg (Paris, 1926), pp. 17 f. 83 Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 459 ff.; [Religious Movements, pp. 237 ff.] F. Karg’s suspicion of connections between Berthold of Regensburg and David of Augsburg and Mechthild’s work and language was put forward in his Das literarische Erwachen des deutschen Ostens in Mittelalter, Theutonista, supplementary volume 3 (Halle, 1932), pp. 11 f. Even if the two Franciscans really had worked in Magdeburg, it seems to me that these connections hardly come into consideration when set against the lasting influence of Dominican preaching and its literary fall-out. Before 1276 the Magdeburg lector Heinrich von Höxter, barvuzbruder und predigere (‘barefoot brother and preacher’ – was he Franciscan or Dominican?) had pressed Brun of Schönbecke in the direction of Mechtild’s Song of Songs poetry; Brun von Schönbecke, Das Hohe Lied, v. 12458 ff., ed. A. Fischer, Bib. lit. Ver. Stuttgart 198 (Stuttgart, 1893), p. 372. Mechthild could not yet have known Berthold’s and David’s German texts. 84 G. Lüers, Die Sprache der deutschen Mystik des Mittelalters im Werke der Mechthild von Magdeburg (Munich, 1926).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) language. Sister Hadewich had probably written her visions, poems and letters before her, and hundreds of German women of the same social level had effected the same withdrawal – exchanging courtly class culture for a life with God, setting aside secular poetry, and demanding new and different books in which their religious need could find satisfaction. Contemporaries remarked on this change with amazement and sometimes hostility, perhaps none so dramatic as Ulrich of Lichtenstein’s complaint in his Frauenbuch of 125785: How can we sustain the true knightly style of life if women suddenly all walk around like nuns, veiled and with the rosary, going to church day and night and granting us no glance, no word, no joy any more? Even Lamprecht of Regensburg, the first Franciscan poet, marvelled at the fact that suddenly, everywhere, in Brabant as in Bavaria, women believed they understood better than the men the new ‘art’ of experiencing divine wisdom in visions, raptures and blessings.86 Through the German women of this time there suddenly passed a distaste for, an intolerance of, everything associated with courtly society and its culture, and a sudden impulse to withdraw from worldly pleasures toward religious instruction and religious experience. After the start of the thirteenth century, this religious movement spread quickly from Brabant and Flanders – where courtly poetry had emerged a generation earlier – and found its audience among German women. The effect of the mendicant orders was not yet visible, but in its nature and goals, its ideals and way of life, this new female piety corresponded very closely with contemporary movements in romance-language regions. There one found rejection of the social and the familial joys of life, and repudiation not only of worldly honour and riches, but also of the cloistered life; embraced instead were voluntary poverty and chastity, self-abnegation and denial. But only in Germany did this movement primarily grasp women – especially women of the nobility, the chivalric houses and the urban patriciate – and yet it lacked autonomous organising forces to achieve the formation of its own orders. When the waves of this movement encountered and absorbed the propaganda of the mendicant orders from Italy and France, the spontaneously formed religious female communities of Germany sought association and acceptance in the new orders and, despite opposition, most often found it through papal intervention. In no other country were so many women’s communities incorporated by mendicants, particularly the Dominican Order, alongside a mass of other unincorporated women’s communities (‘beguine houses’ or ‘gatherings’) placed under their pastoral care. Obligated to the religious and spiritual supervision of all these women, the German Dominicans and Franciscans rose to meet a unique task. Aligning the doctrine of the Church with its traditions and then melding with new desires for 85 Ulrich

von Lichtenstein, ed. Lachmann, pp. 601 f. of Regensburg, Sanct Francisken Leben und Tochter Syon, v. 2827 ff., ed. K. Weinhold (Paderborn, 1880), pp. 430.

86 Lamprecht

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Women and Literature in the Middle Ages religious experience and spiritual receptivity generated by German women, they created the language of a new piety, rich in inventiveness and strong in feeling. The resolution of this mission is ‘German mysticism’, whose works have survived in such an immeasurable abundance because women, to whom the mystical doctrine was preached, created from it a literature – an incomparable monument of the German language, German spirit and faith, belonging only to our people. In acknowledging women’s significance for the emergence of the Word in poetry and religious doctrine, one may also discern another, even deeper meaning to these developments and changes. The sequence of ‘male’ and ‘female’ eras that Wilhelm Scherer once believed he saw in the history of German literature and spiritual development87 corresponds largely with the distinction between ‘hearing’ and ‘reading’ centuries. Not only were the forms of communication altered by reading women, but the spirit and content of poetry as well as piety were also cast anew. The difference is sufficiently clear between the heroic poetry of the early medieval era, which was only listened to in communities, and in which woman had no significant role – and the gallant, chivalric, courtly, entirely unheroic poetry in the era of Minnesang and Frauendienst, which was read, and concerned the love of woman, not the deeds of men, not adventure and not battle. The difference is no less palpable between the cultic, sacramental piety of the ‘Roman’ early Middle Ages on the one hand, and the subjective experiential piety of the Gothic and mysticism embodying service for God on the other. The former consisted of the militia Dei, work for God or opus Dei as the Rule of St Benedict says, and indeed service and work across the full community through static, externally normative performance of cult song and esteem for Christ the King; in contrast, the latter dissolved the dichotomy of God and humanity into a deeply felt unification of the soul with God, the bridehood of the soul and the birth of God in humans. How far differences between male and female attitudes decisively determine entire cultural epochs certainly cannot be assessed on the basis of these brief facts, for the question would require much consideration and testing of literary development among other peoples and languages. But the witnesses indicate that it is no waste of effort to research such connections. If we today find ourselves estranged from a literary, reading-obsessed and ink-stained world, then perhaps a backwards glance will open a new perspective on our history – on its essential coordinates, its shaping and driving forces, its spiritual changes.

87 W.

Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert (Strasbourg, 1875), pp. 1 ff.

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3 Litteratus–Illitteratus: The Transformation of an Educational Standard from Antiquity to the Middle Ages* By Herbert Grundmann

Over the last hundred years, the word Literat has acquired a negative, almost noxious connotation in German usage. No one refers to himself this way, and no writer wants to be called a Literat – the word has nearly become an insult. Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878), for example, the programmatic leader of the ‘Young Germany’ movement, used it to disparage ‘abstract literacy’ in a review of Briefe aus Paris, in the Deutsche Jahrbüchern (V, 1196), ‘A dubious character, an actual Litterat who writes in order to write, not to help realise a single moral idea important to his life’, and again, ‘A true Litterat does not think of himself, but of his consumer’. Gutzkow later recalled the emerging usage of the word during his youth in Rückblick auf mein Leben: ‘One called these people “Literaten” in contempt, who appeared to have embodied in themselves nothing but a writing pen.’1 In German, this insulting quality hovers around the term, while the corresponding French word ‘lettré’ still bears positive connotations of the scholar, the studied person, the scientifically or literarily educated person (like letterato in Italian, also letrado in Spanish). Indeed, in the eighteenth century, homme de lettres was a highly regarded, coveted title of honour far beyond France, even in Germany. And in Georges’s dictionary, the Latin adjective litteratus was rendered into German as ‘knowing literature, learned, academically educated’, words of praise without the disreputable connotation of Literaten. Evidently a recent shift in meaning correlates to a related change in the valuation and appreciation of writing, of letters, and to transformed attitudes toward and relationships with literature. * Original

publication in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 40, no. 1 (1958), 1–65. Gutzkow, Rückblick auf mein Leben [‘Looking back at my Life’] (Berlin, 1875), p. 65. These and other definitions (since 1838) in H. Schulz, Deutsches Fremdwörterbuch, continued by O. Basler, 7 vols. (Strasbourg and Berlin, 1913–88), II.1, 33 f. The Literat Kurt Tucholsky wryly commented, ‘There is nothing worse than when Literaten call Literaten “Literaten”’.

1 K.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus Most surprising, however, is that, on closer observation, the phenomenon of shifting meanings of litteratus may be traced even further back; it is in fact characteristic of the early centuries after antiquity and thus highly revealing for educational and intellectual history. Although the counter-concept of illitteratus was common in classical and medieval Latin alike – defined according to Georges as ‘unlearned, unknowing, not scientifically educated’, in French as illettré, in Italian as illetterato, preserved in Spanish as iletrado and iliterato – it never made its way into German, nor did the corresponding Greek word ἀγράμματος. In the early nineteenth century,2 its originally intended meaning was first articulated as Analphabet (though artificially derived from scholarly knowledge of the imported Greek word) – one who does not know the alphabet, the γράμματα, the litterae, the letters. Since that time, it has carried a negative connotation as a quality that – at least among civilised people – could no longer occur, an anomaly or a backward phenomenon of primitive peoples and times.3 A word bearing almost exactly the same meaning for centuries, ‘idiot’, begins after 1800 to indicate stupid, weak-minded persons;4 earlier, by contrast, it referred only to a layperson without knowledge of Latin and of writing – even if he were a king. The Apostles Peter and John are called idiotae in the Vulgate. The two extremes of Literaten and Analphabeten (not to mention idiots), representing too much and too little knowledge, bracket the space of

2 Earliest

record around 1800 in Schulz, Fremdwörterbuch, I, 32 f. sampling in popular encyclopedias we see, nevertheless, that illiteracy recently is on the rise. It is no longer seen as ‘unconditionally’ a ‘measure for the level of culture’ (Der Grosser Brockhaus, 16th edn, 12 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1952–7), I, 259; it had not been yet so in the 15th edn, 20 vols. (Leipzig, 1938–35), I, 424). For its decline is accompanied by the disappearance of oral tradition, ‘which assumes an inner mastery of the material’; Schweizer Lexikon, 7 vols. (Zürich, 1945–8), I, 339. Indeed, its decline ‘is not unconditionally cultural progress, since illiterate education often has a more direct relationship with the world’; Grosser Herder, 5th edn, 9 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1952–6), I, 340; not yet so in the 4th edn, 13 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1931–5), I, 558. 4 Schulz, Fremdwörterbuch, I, 280 f. gives clear evidence for the meaning of idiot as mentally deficient only from 1838. For the earlier use it cites for example the Zimmerische Chronik of 1564/7 (ed. K. A. Barack, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1881–2), II, 501): ‘die, so uf historias sich zum wenigsten versteen und sich als idioten und ungelerte leut deren zum wenigsten wissen zu geprauchen’ (‘… those, who understand the least of histories, and who, as being themselves idiots and unlearned people, need knowledge the least’.) It also cites a ‘Neuen Kalender’ of 1590: ‘Das ich die wörtlein idiot, ungelert, lay, gmain mann, pöfel und dergleichen nit aus oder zu verachtung schreibe, sundern das mann diejenigen, die nit studiret, anderst nit nennen kan, wie die glerten wissen’ (‘That I write the little words idiot, unlearned, lay person, common man, peasants and the like is not out of disrespect or in order to disrespect but rather that one cannot name in any other way those who do not study as the learned know how to’). 3 Through

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) inquiry granted to the written word, and to interaction with writing and literature, within our modern culture. Yet it is rarely noted how relatively young and historically late this norm is; so self-evident and immutable do these polarities seem that it is difficult – even for scholars – to imagine that it could ever have been otherwise. And yet even in periods of heightened cultural production such as antiquity and the Middle Ages, the concepts of litteratus and illitteratus were not extremes from which general attitudes toward writing and literature were kept distant. Rather, they offered alternatives: one was either litteratus or illitteratus and neither earned reproach – or at least, need not. In fact, educational norms were determined by the various estates and their forms of education; as a consequence, neither label bore a disparaging meaning but instead simply referred to a marked, expected characteristic of that group. And, as the distinction between litterati and illitterati fluctuated significantly over time, the meaning and value of these concepts become a sort of seismograph of intellectual history.

I Before turning to the earliest history of the word litteratus in antiquity, its transformation is perhaps best explained by considering its usage in the medieval tradition, in which the the conceptual opposition of litteratus and illitteratus was most often to be found. Although often translated indiscriminately as ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’, that is misleading if applied in the modern sense of general, classical or scholarly education. As will be seen, litteratus still intermittently denoted a high, special educational level in the Middle Ages as it had in antiquity. In most cases, however, it meant nothing other than knowing letters, being capable of writing and reading – as it had also meant in ancient Latin. The term thus described the lowest degree of literary ability one would assume for any school child, and especially any adult. But in the Middle Ages, at least until the twelfth century, this lowest measure was absent in almost all laypersons up to the highest levels of society; even there, it could not be assumed as it would with clerics and monks. Laypersons are and remain mostly illitterati – they are Analphabeten. On the other hand, however, litteratus always meant knowing Latin. For it was only in Latin – in which, with very isolated exceptions, the whole literary tradition of the West into the twelfth century was written – that one could learn to read and write at all. Only one who learned Latin writing and reading could then occasionally add words, sentences or verses in the vernacular that were only spoken and heard from others, not written and read. The word littera can hence mean the Latin language itself, since it was the sole written language; in the Middle Ages, literaliter loqui or literate loqui meant to speak in Latin. Pope Innocent III was ‘sermone tam vulgari quam litterali disertus’, 58

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Litteratus–Illitteratus says his biographer:5 as eloquent in the people’s language as he was in Latin. Pope Alexander III gave a sermon at the Peace Congress in Venice in 1177, and Emperor Frederick I listened closely to it, but the pope had what he said in Latin rendered into German for the emperor by the patriarch of Aquileia, ‘que ipse litteratorie proferebat’ (‘what he himself was uttering in Latin’).6 When Pope Paschal II came to France in 1107 and negotiated a disputed election of the bishop of Laon, Abbot Guibert of Nogent, who tells the story himself, uses the word ‘non materno sermone, sed literis’ (‘not in his mother tongue but in Latin’)7 – that does not mean letter by letter, but in Latin. In the fourteenth century, council resolutions still specify that a cleric could only be ordained who could at least speak literaliter; similarly, the confiteor (‘I confess’) should also be spoken by women literaliter8 – again, that means not letter by letter, but in Latin. Such examples abound. The litterati poeti are still distinguished by Dante from the volgari poeti in his Vita Nuova (c. 25) as the ‘poeti in lingua latina’. Everywhere the littera is obviously Latin, even spoken Latin,9 for it is the written language. A ‘non-Latin literature’ would be, by these medieval concepts, a contradictio in adjecto (‘contradiction between the adjective and the noun’). This distinction is crucial in order to recognise what a change came, starting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the introduction and acceptance of the vernacular in written literature. Until the end of the Middle Ages, German, French and Italian could be read and written only by those who had learned this art in Latin – or to put it another way, those who had learned grammar. For, like littera, grammatica in medieval language usage specifically meant Latin. Grammatics, the basic

5 Gesta

Innocentii III papae i, PL 214, 17. of Salerno reports this as an eye-witness; MGH SS 19 (1866), p. 451; L. A. Muratori, Scriptores rerum Italicarum, 2nd series, 7.1(1935), p. 285. He also says that in negotiations with the Lombard towns in Venice in 1177 Frederick I spoke German, Christiano cancellario verba sua vulgariter exponente, that is, with his chancellor Christian of Mainz translating his words into Italian. 7 Guibert of Nogent, De vita sua iii, ed. G. Bourgin, Collection de textes pour servir à l’étude et à l’enseignement de l’histoire, 4th edn (Paris, 1907), p. 141. [Guibert de Nogent, Autobiographie iii.4, ed. and trans. E.-R. Labande, Les Classiques de l’Histoire de France au Moyen Age 34 (Paris, 1981), p. 288.] 8 Texts in Du Cange, Glossarium, V, 126. Cf. Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum, ed. B. Bretholz, MGH SS n.s. 2 (1923), p. 253 on the founding of the church of Wischehrad [Vyšehrad]: ‘quod sonat litteraliter (= in Latin) ‘altior civitatibus’ (‘which denotes literally (= in Latin) “higher than cities”’. John of Victring, Liber certarum historiarum, ed. F. Schneider, 2 vols., MGH SRG 36 (1909–10), I, 270. Cf. p. 222: Rudolf of Habsburg, litterature expers (himself ‘expert in Latin’), allows King Ottocar’s ambassadors to bring forward their complaints only in collegiate consistories in Latin (‘in collegiatis consistoriis litteraliter), because the lay princes would be offended if they understood them. 9 Cf. the letter of Adémar of Chabannes 1028, PL 141, 107: ‘scio bene facere sermonem de littera’ – that is, ‘I can preach in Latin’. 6 Romuald

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) first of the seven artes liberales,10 was the teaching and knowledge of letters, of writing and reading and the rules of the Latin written language. A grammar of other, unwritten languages did not at first exist in the medieval West and was in fact hardly conceivable; to create one seemed a revolutionary novelty that not even Charlemagne could accomplish.11 Hence grammatice loqui meant the same as litterate loqui: to speak Latin. In 1240 the papal agent Albert of Beheim recommended a German noble to Pope Gregory IX for an office in Italy who ‘grammaticam novit et gallicum satis bene’12 – he can speak Latin and also southern European romance, Italian, rather well. After Beatrice’s death, Dante began reading Cicero and Boëthius, ‘quanto l’arte di grammatica ch’io avea, e un poco di mio ingegno potea fare’ – as far as his Latin and his understanding extended (Conv. II, 13). The Golden Bull of Emperor Charles IV of 1356 demanded (ch. 31) that all electors’ sons be instructed from their seventh year of life in ‘grammatica, italica et slavica linguis’ – they should learn Latin, Italian and Czech. Even Reinecke (Reynard) the Fox was trilingual: ‘ungarice, turce grammaticeque loquens’ – besides Hungarian and Turkish, he speaks Latin.13 In 1501 Jakob Wimpfeling in his Germania still translates the word grammatica with buchstabliche Geschrift, to mean Latin;14 and around the middle of the sixteenth century an educational reformer suggested first learning to read and write in the mother language before moving on to foreign languages in other countries; in this way one might learn grammatica, Latin, all the quicker.15 But in the early and high Middle Ages one who did not learn grammar could also neither read nor write: he was illitteratus, meaning in those days 10 Cf.

on this point E. R. Curtius, ‘Das mittelalterliche Bildungswesen und die Grammatik’, Romanische Forschungen 6 (1947), 1–26; little changed in his Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Bern, 1954), pp. 52 ff. [European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), pp. 42 ff.] 11 See pp. 97–8 below. It is something different when Bishop William of Modena, active as papal legate to the Baltic lands around 1228, learned the language of the Prussians and ‘insuper principium artis grammatice, videlicet Donatum, in illorum barbaram linguam cum maximo labore transtulit’ (‘in addition he translated with very great labour, the principles of the art of grammar, namely Donatus, into their barbarous language’); Alberic of Troisfontaines, Chronicon, MGH SS 22 (1872), p. 921. He wanted in this way to make learning Latin easier for the Prussians, rather than to make their language capable of being written through a grammar. 12 C. Höfler, Albert von Beheim und Regesten Papst Innocenz IV, Bibl. lit. Ver. Stuttgart 16 (1847), 22. 13 Ysengrimus iii.382, ed. E. Voigt (Halle, 1884), p. 143. Cf. Ysengrimus V.v.550 (and 556), p. 290: grammatica voce dicere = to say in Latin, for which grammaticare also appears, according to Voigt, p. 436. 14 E. von Borries, Wimpfeling und Murner im Kampf um die ältere Geschichte des Elsasses, Schriften des Wissenschaftlichen Institutes der Elsaß-Lothringer im Reich (Heidelberg, 1926), p. 127. 15 K. Sudhoff, ‘Gedanken eines unbekannten Anhängers des Theophrastus Paracelsus aus der Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts über deutsche Jugenderziehung’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für deutsche Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte 5 (1895), 87 f.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus not simply ‘uneducated, unlearned’, but actually Analphabet, since only rarely could anyone understand Latin or even speak it without the ability to read and write. The word idiota has almost the same meaning after Augustine at the latest, originally a Latin term borrowed from Greek to describe the private man in contrast with the bearer of a public office.16 In the Acts of the Apostles (4. 13), Peter and John are called ‘ἄνθρωποι ἀγράμματοι καὶ ἰδιῶται’ by the astounded High Priests and scribes; in Latin translation it is homines illitterati (Itala; sine litteris Vulgata) et idiotae – a word-pair that appeared a century and a half earlier with the Roman satirist Lucilius,17 and then became common through Scripture in the Middle Ages. In his explanation of the Pentecost miracle, Augustine18 gladly refers to the apostles as homines idiotae, who only knew their own language, but through the working of the Spirit they spoke in all the world’s languages. Homines idiotae tells him immediately that they are unius tantum linguae (‘of only one language’), monolingual, only speaking and understanding their mother tongue. Bede took this over19 and passed it to

16 Thesaurus

linguae latinae, in progress (Leipzig and Munich, 1900–), VII, col. 221 f. With Cicero idiota is almost always a pejorative description used by other people; In Pisonem 62 and 65; In Verrem IV.ii.4; Pro Sestio 110; Pro Sexto 51. For Vitruvius, De architectura VI.viii.10, an idiota is just a layman, a non-architect, who can evaluate a building, but only when it has been built, not as a design. 17 See pp. 71–2 below. 18 Augustinus, Sermo clxxv.III.3, PL 38, 946; Enarrationes in Psalmos xcvi.2 and cxxxviii.8, PL 37, 1238 and 1238. Cf. Enarrationes in Psalmos lxv.4, PL 36, 788: why Jesus at first chose idiotas, not doctos as disciples. 19 Bede, Expositio super Acta iv.13, PL 92, 953: ‘Illiterati mittuntur ad praedicandum … Idiotae enim dicebantur, qui propria tantum linguae naturalique scientia contenti litterarum studia nesciebant’. [‘Unlettered men were sent to preach … They were called “simple men” who were content with only their own language and natural knowledge, and did not know the study of letters’); Bede, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, trans. L. T. Martin (Kalamazoo, 1989), p. 50.] Shortly before his death, in 735, Bede wrote to Bishop Eckbert of York: ‘Omnes, qui latinam linguam lectionis usu didicerunt, etiam haec (the creed and the Lord’s Prayer) optime didicisse certissimum est; set idiotes, hoc est eos, qui propriae tantum linguae notitiam habent, haec ipsa sua lingua discere ac sedulo decantare facito. Quod non solum de laicis, id est in populari adhuc vita constitutis, verum etiam de clericis sive monachis, qui latinae sunt linguae expertis, fieri oportet … Propter quod et ipse multis saepe sacerdotibus idiotis haec utraque, et symbolum videlicet et dominicam orationem, in linguam Anglorum translatam optuli’; Baedae opera historica, ed. C. Plummer, 2 vols. in 1 (Oxford, 1896; 2nd edn Oxford, 1946), I, 408 f. [‘It is most certain that all those who have learned to read Latin will know these well, but the unlearned, that is to say those who only know their own language, must learn to say them in their own tongue and to chant them carefully. This ought to be done not only by the laity, that is to say those living the ordinary life of the populace, but also by the clergy and the monks, who are experts in Latin … Because of this I have frequently offered an English translation of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer to uneducated priests’; ‘Bede’s Letter to Egbert’, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. J. McClure and R. Collins (Oxford, 1994), pp. 345–6.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) posterity: idiotae are those who know only their own language, whether they are laypeople, priests or monks. For Bede this is no defect, although it also means that these idiotae can neither read nor write Latin. In a similar sense – without disparagement – Boniface also called the Alamanni, Bavarians and Franconians idiotae, as Alcuin did the recently converted Saxons.20 Pope Gregory I had already written21 (and it was often repeated in the Middle Ages) that pictures in church showed idiotae what books communicated to readers: the images told the non-readers, the non-Latinate, what they should observe. Bede, however, developed the further point that for these idiotae, the confession of faith and the Lord’s Prayer had to be translated, from which to learn and pray; he had done that even for sacerdotes idiotae (priests without Latin). But to the extent that knowledge of Latin and the art of writing became an obligatory duty for the clergy even with newly converted peoples, and in fact for them alone in terms of canon law, the idiota became identical with the layman. The Anglo-Saxon glossary of Abbot Aelfric (around 1000) explained the word idiota as ‘ungelaerd, id est illitteratas, indoctus’ (‘ungelaerd, that is, illiterate, uneducated’),22 the Lexicon of Papias (around 1050) with ‘propria vel

20 S.

Bonifatii et Lulli Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, MGH Epp. sel. 1 (1916), p. 84; Alcuin, Ep. 107, MGH Epp. 4 (1895), p. 154. 21 Gregory I, Registrum xi.10, MHG Epp. 2 (1899), p. 270, to the bishop of Marseille in 600: ‘Aliud est enim picturam adorare, aliud picturae historia, quid sit adorandum, addiscere. Nam quod legentibus scriptura, hoc idiotis praestat pictura cernentibus, quia in ipsa … legunt, qui litteras nesciunt; unde praecipue gentibus pro lectione pictura est’ [‘For the worship of a picture is one thing but learning what should be worshipped through the story on a picture is something else. For what writing provides for readers, this a picture provides for uneducated people looking at it, for in it the ignorant see what they should follow and the illiterate read the same from it’; The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. J. R. C. Martyn, 3 vols. (Toronto, 2004), III, 745.] Similar: ix.208, MGH Epp. 2 (1899), p. 195, line 21. In the Jena MS of the Chronicle of Otto of Freising, the front of Book 8 contains a picture of the future, showing heaven and earth, put to the side with the explanation ‘hoc laicorum est et non litteratorum’ (‘this is for laymen, not the literate’ – this concern was unnecessary, since all was in any case evident to the reader; ed. A. Hofmeister, MGH SRG 45 (1912), p. 374. 22 Cited in Du Cange, Glossarium, IV, col. 285, also Papias and Gulielmus Brito. Bishop Meinwerk of Paderborn was mocked as an idiota for his inadequate knowledge of Latin; Vita Meinwerci clxiii, ed. F. Tenckhoff, MGH SRG 59 (1921), p. 85. The Milanese Archbishop Wido, invested by Henry III in 1045, was described by the Gregorian Bonizo of Sutri as a vir illiteratus; Liber ad amicum vi, Libelli de Lite I, pp. 591, 17; and by the Milanese chronicler Arnulf as idiota et a rure veniens (idiot, and coming from the country) – indeed facundus, but not eruditus; (‘eloquent’, but not ‘wellinstructed’); MGH SS 8 (1848), pp. 17, line 23. Cf. Briefsammlungen der Zeit Heinrichs IV, ed. C. Erdmann and N. Fickermann, MGH Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 5 (1950), p. 368, line 20: ‘litteratus seculi et idiota Dei’ (‘literate of the world and idiot of God’). See the index for other instances of idiota. Even in his canonisation acts, Johannes Bonus [Giovanni Bono] from Mantua (†1249), the former entertainer at markets and courts who converted to the perfectissima vita, is described as an idiota,

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Litteratus–Illitteratus rustica lingua contentus’ (‘content with his own or rustic language’), and the Bible Vocabulary composed by the Franciscan Guilelmus Brito in 1356 repeated Bede’s rules, but adds: the apostles were called ‘idiotae, non quod litteras non scirent, sed quia artem grammaticae propitiam non haberent’ (‘not because they did not know their letters, but because they did not possess the gracious art of grammar’) – indicating that by the more literate later Middle Ages, Analphabeten had gradually become contemptible. Although ignorant of Latin and writing, illitterati and idiotae did not have to be ‘uneducated’; they could actually be highly educated in their lay manner. For alongside the literary and written Latin education, there always ran a distinct lay and noble education with its own manifold traditions, not written down and read but ‘sung and spoken’ and heard and remembered in noble courts and peasant farms.23 It is more difficult to detect because, naturally, fewer documents survived. But what was newly composed and then written down in the twelfth century dealt with the heroes and deeds of early times, of the Burgundians and the Nibelungen, Dietrich von Bern and Gudrun, of King Arthur and his Round Table, Charlemagne and his Paladins, all of which must have passed through the earlier centuries unwritten, remaining alive and vigorously educational as did all legal traditions; thus were lay people, the lay nobility of the Middle Ages, educated in their own way. Particularly in Hohenstaufen courtly culture, knighthood had its own high ideal of education – one in which writing and reading and being capable of Latin like the clerics and monks played no part. Wolfram von Eschenbach, the composer of Parzifal, even declared it explicitly (115: 27): ‘ine kan decheinen Buochstap’ (‘I don’t know a single letter’), that is, ‘I am illiteratus’, and again in Willehalm (2: 19 f.) ‘swaz an den buochen stet geschriben, des bin ich künstelos beliben’ (‘I have remained artless as to what is written in books’). As hard as it might be for bookish people to take Wolfram at his word that he (who evidently did not understand Latin, hence could not read it) had the power of memory to create his works without resorting to writing, Wolfram does not in any case see being literate as in keeping with his social status. He further emphasises (Parzifal, 115: 11): schildes ambet ist min art – I am of knightly lineage, and it is entirely proper for me to be a poet and singer in the service of ladies, but not to be a writer and reader of books. In the middle of Parzifal (115: 29 ff.) is a humorous curse on those who take this aventiure

illiteratus, laicus; Acta Sanctorum Oct. IX (1869), p. 774. The Johannboniten [Order of Giamboniti], founded by him, entered the order of Augustinian hermits in 1256. 23 K. Hauck has recently focused on the accomplishment of noble education and culture, summarising it in preliminary form in his account of ‘medieval literature’ in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß, ed. W. Stammler, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1952–7), II, cols. 1841–1904; see col. 1851 for his previous essays. However, he appears to me to have overestimated the contribution of the lay nobility to medieval writing, particularly its ability to read and its knowledge of Latin.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) to be a book! Parzifal’s uncle Trevrizent, brother of the Grail-King Amfortas, is described as a most unusual person: ‘Doch ich ein leie waere’ – if I were a layman – ‘der waren buoche maere kund ich lesen unde schriben’ (‘there would be tales in books that I could read and write’). And Hartmann von Aue describes it as something particularly unusual at the beginning of the ‘Armer Heinrich’ (v. 1 f.) and again in ‘Iwain’, (v. 21 ff.) of himself: ‘Ein ritter so geleret was, daz er an den buochen las, swaz er daran geschriben vant’ (‘There was a knight so learned that he read in books what he found written there’). He was litteratus, but would not have repeatedly stated so had it not been a remarkable exception. Such exceptions of literate laity – that is, those capable of Latin – among the nobility were not entirely infrequent even before the thirteenth century; such cases are often documented precisely because they surprised their contemporaries.24 However, those should not diminish the fact that the lay nobility, like the laity in general, lived entirely without writing. Only one who became a cleric or entered a monastery learned to read and write in Latin. To litteras discere (learn letters) in medieval usage meant almost the same as to become a cleric or monk. Litteris dare (to give to letters) meant a child was intended for the clergy or a monastery.25 And among the few noble laity designated as litterati were those who, originally slated for an ecclesiastical career or monastic life, were thus educated for a time before returning to secular life.26 Only the wives of the nobility, particularly of the ruling house, were from early on presumed to have a certain amount of literary education and knowledge of Latin, sufficient at least to read in the Latin Psalter and to pray – that was part of the noble education of women in the Middle Ages.27 As I have shown elsewhere, 24 They

are collected and critically examined by J. W. Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages, University of California Publications in Education 9 (Berkeley, 1939). He always attributes too much rather than too little ‘literacy’ and knowledge of Latin to the lay nobility. P. Kirn also provides some references, in his Das Bild des Menschen in der Geschichtsschreibung von Polybius bis Ranke (Göttingen, 1955), pp. 55 ff. 25 See the examples in ‘Women and Literature’, p. 31 above. Besides these, see Vita s. Odonis i.5–7, PL 133, 45 f.; Vita Gerardi abb. Bronensis ix, MGH SS 15.2 (1888), p. 659; Vita Theodorici abb. S. Huberti, MGH SS 12 (1856), p. 39; Vita s. Herluini, PL 150, 700; cf. ibid., 708; Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum ii.18, ed. Bretholtz, p. 110; Historia Welforum xv (ed. E. König, Schwäbische Chroniken der Stauferzeit 1 (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1938), p. 26) on Henry the Proud’s brother Konrad. Also Burchard of Ursberg, Chronicon, ed. O. Holder-Egger and B. von Simson, 2nd edn, MGH SRG 16 (1916), p. 12. 26 Thus the comes litteratus (literate count) Henry II of Stade (1016, uncle of Thietmar of Merseburg); see Annalista Saxo, MGH SS 6, p. 661, line 5. Another: Count Ansfrid, raised first in Trier, then in Cologne, who was bearer of the sword at the imperial coronation of Otto I in 962, became bishop of Utrecht in 995, Thietmar, Chronicon iv.31, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SS n.s. 9 (1935), p. 168. On Count Gerald of Aurillac, see Odo of Cluny, Vita sancti Geraldi i.4–5, PL 133, 645. Such examples abound. 27 See Grundmann, ‘Women and Literature’, pp. 34–8 above. Grundmann, Religiöse

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Litteratus–Illitteratus the phenomenon was connected to the fact that for women, because they learned to read with the basics of Latin, the vernacular was written out or the Latin was translated. Very few men of the laity read at all, and could only have things read out to them. One finds perhaps the most striking example in Count Baldwin II of Guines (east of Calais) at the turn of the thirteenth century– ‘licet omnino laicus esset et illitteratus’ (‘although he was in every way a layman and illiterate’) – who burned with interest for all the disciplines and intensely debated them with scholars quasi litteratus (‘as if a literate person’). He collected many books, and had the Song of Songs and the Gospels, theological commentaries, sermons and saints’ lives and treatises on physics and nature, translated into French. Yet he did not learn them by reading; instead, they were often read out loud to him, and he learned much by heart.28 In exchange, he presented to his clerics vernacular poems which he had learned from minstrels29 – two worlds of education and tradition encountering each other. Only one layman in his service learned to read, while looking after the count’s rich collection of books; he became a litteratus,30 while the count himself, despite his hunger

Bewegungen, pp. 542 ff. [Religious Movements, pp. 192 ff.] of Ardres, Historia comitum Ghisnensium lxxx-lxxxi, MGH SS 24 (1879), p. 598: Count Baldwin was ‘theologice scripture non surdus auditor … diligentissimus auditorum conservator’; he learned much ‘auditu … propter hoc secum clericos et magistros retinebat et eos in multis interrogabat et diligenter audiebat’; but he could not ‘omnem omnium scientiam corde tenus retinere’, so that he had much translated ‘et sepius ante se legere fecit, … diligenter didicit’. [‘He was no deaf auditor of theological writing … with his attentive hearing … For this reason, he kept clerics and masters with him and asked them about many things and listened to them diligently… he was not able to retain all knowledge in his heart … and frequently read it to him, [and]… diligently learned’; Lambert of Ardres, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, trans. L. Shopkow (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 113–14.] But he obviously did not learn by reading, since otherwise Lambert of Ardres would have mentioned it and expressed himself differently. The same was done two centuries earlier by Count Megingoz († c. 998), father of Abbess Adelheid of Vilich (near Bonn), who had his chaplains translate biblical writings into German and read it out loud. See Vita s. Adelheidis primae abbatissae Viliciensis, MGH SS 15.2 (1888), p. 758, written 1056/7: ‘allocutione usus capellanorum, ut per eos Theutonice exponentur lectiones voluminum divinorum, quas ideo tam ardenter audire expetivit …’ (‘he had his chaplains read to him, so that they might explain to him in German the readings of divine Scripture which he so ardently desired to hear’). 29 Historia comitum Ghisnensium lxxx, p. 598, line 9: ‘Ab illis (clericis) enim divinum accepit eloquium et eis, quas a fabulatoribus accepit, gentilium nenias vicario modo communicavit et impartivit’. [‘Indeed, he received divine eloquence from them, and in exchange he told and related to them popular trifles that he got from storytellers’; trans. Shopkow, p.113.] 30 Historia comitum Ghisnensium lxxxi, p. 598, line 41: ‘Quis autem nisi expertum et auditum crederet Hasardum de Aldehem omnino laicum ab ipso (Count Baldwin) simili modo omnino laico litteras didicisse et litteratum factum? Ipse enim quem 28 Lambert

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) for knowledge, did not. Similarly, Henry the Lion had the Lucidarius translated into German and encouraged the Tristan poetry of Eilhart of Oberge, but produced nothing that he himself could read; others read to him from old chronicles during the sleepless nights of his old age.31 And when the Englishman Gervase of Tilbury dedicated his Otia imperialia (Recreation for an Emperor) to Henry’s son Otto IV, he was careful in the preface to commend the work to the emperor’s ears, not his eyes, as material preferable to the minstrel’s blandishments.32 iam diximus Hasardus totam comitis bibliothecam comitis retinens et custodiens omnes eius libros de Latino in Romanam linguam interpretatos et legit et intelligit’. [‘If one had not seen and heard of it, who, moreover, would not believe that Hasard of Aldehem, who was completely a layman, learned letters and in an entirely lay manner was similarly made literate by Baldwin? The man I just called Hasard, indeed, while keeping and guarding the whole library of the count, read and understood all the books he had that were translated from Latin to French’; trans. Shopkow, pp. 114–15.] According to this, he learned to read in French the books translated for the Count, and – being a layman – without being able to understand Latin. For Lambert of Ardres that is amazing, almost unbelievable! 31 Annales Stederburgenses for 1194, MGH SS 16 (1859), p. 230: ‘Antiqua scripta cronicarum colligi praecepit et conscribi et coram recitari et in hac occupatione saepe totam noctam duxit insomnem’ (‘he commanded that the ancient writings of the chronicles should be collected and written down and recited before him, and, thus occupied, he often passed the whole night without sleep’). This does not amount to saying that Henry the Lion could understand the Latin of chronicles, as was assumed by M. Philippson, Heinrich der Löwe, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1918), 383, 552; first correctly understood by F. Philippi, ‘Heinrich der Löwe als Beförderer von Kunst und Wissenschaft’, Historische Zeitschrift 127 (1922), 63. Those reading aloud normally translated at the same time. Cf. by contrast Adémar of Chabannes, Chronique ii.54, ed. J. Chavanon (Paris, 1897), 176 f. on Duke William V of Aquitaine (993–1030), who could read: ‘Librorum copiam in palatio suo servavit, et si forte a tumultu vacaret, lectioni per se ipsum operam dabat, longioribus noctibus elucubrans in libris, donec somno vinceretur. Hoc Hludovicus imperator, hoc pater eius Magnus Karolus assuescebant’ (‘he kept a number of books in his palace, and if perchance he had leisure from bustle, he would give attention to reading by himself, spending very long nights with his books until he was overcome by sleep. This is what the emperor Louis and his father Charlemagne were accustomed to’) – and Theodosius and Augustus even wrote by themselves! [Here Grundmann paraphrases Adémar’s next sentence.] 32 MGH SS 27 (1885), p. 366: ‘Quia vero optimum nature fatigate remedium est amare novitates et gaudere variis, nec decet tam sacras aures spiritu mimorum fallaci ventilari, dignum duxi aliquid auribus vestris ingerere, quo humana operetur recuperacio’. [‘Since therefore the best remedy for a weary nature is to delight in novelties and to enjoy variety, and since it is not fitting that such sacred ears should be fanned by the lying breath of players, I have decided to present something for your hearing to refresh you in the midst of your worldly cares’; Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), pp. 13–15.] Whether Otto IV understood Latin is not documented. On readings and presentations for laity see R. Crosby, ‘Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 11 (1936), 88–110.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus As hard as it is for us to conceive – and as much as it periodically troubled contemporaries since at least the twelfth century – it has long been known that not all medieval rulers, kings and emperors could read and write.33 If not originally intended for the throne, they received no education in reading and writing Latin as training for royal office. And if they were not raised for a career in the Church (as were Emperor Henry II34 and the Hohenstaufer Philip of Swabia and probably also Henry I of England), then writing remained as distant for them as for the lay noblemen from whom they descended. Such was the case with Rudolph of Habsburg, Adolf of Nassau and Louis the Bavarian,35 for Conrad I and especially Henry I, the first Salians and the first two Hohenstaufen, and for Lothar of Supplinburg and his Welf greatgrandson Otto IV. It was no less true for most of the Capetian kings into the twelfth century, for Philip III of France, son of St Louis,36 for the Anglo-Saxon kings after Alfred the Great and the first Anglo-Norman kings before Henry I; like many other laymen, Henry I received the nickname of clericus (later beauclerc),37 because he could write. Emperor Conrad II was expressly called ‘per omnia litterarum inscius atque idiota’ (‘in everything ignorant of letters and illiterate’) by a Latin contemporary, while his son Henry III was ‘bene pericia

33 See

below, pp. 106 f. the ‘Nenia de mortuo Henrico II. imp.’ in the Cambridge songs, Carmina Cantabrigiensia, ed. K. Strecker, MGH SRG 40 (1926), p. 5, no. 17, verse 4: ‘Possumus mirari / de domino tali /res tractando laicatus / fit litteratus’. [‘We can marvel/at such a master: dealing with lay matters, he becomes a man of letters’; The Cambridge Songs, trans. J. M. Ziolkowski (New York, 1994), p. 75.] 35 O. Redlich, Rudolph von Habsburg (Innsbruck, 1903), p. 732. Cf. Grundmann, ‘Women and Literature’, p. 41 above; P. Kirn, ‘Die mittelalterliche Staatsverwaltung als geistesgeschichtliches Problem’, HV 27 (1932), 526 f. 36 Cf. Thompson, Literacy, pp. 123 ff. Philip III (1270–1285) is described by his biographer William of Nangis as illitteratus; see Bouquet, Recueil XX, 466. That he had his Dominican father confessor write the ‘Somme des vertus et des vices’ does not prove that he could read, as claimed by C. Langlois, Le règne de Philippe II le Hardi (Paris, 1887), pp. 3 f. 37 V. H. Galbraith, ‘The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings’, Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935), 201–38. Worth attention here is the general treatment of the theme, and the conclusion at 305 f.: ‘From 597 to 1100 it is exceptional for a king to be able to write at all, or to read Latin; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries kings learn to read Latin but do not (even if they can) write it; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they are taught both to read and write Latin, but in fact are far more occupied with French and English.’ See 230 on the word clericus for laymen who are able to write and know Latin; 211 f. on Henry I (1100–1135), whom Ordericus Vitalis already called litteratus rex. Cf. C. W. David, ‘The Claim of King Henry I to be Called Learned’, Anniversary Essays in Mediaeval History by Students of Charles H. Haskins (Boston, 1929), pp. 45–56. He does not give enough weight to the fact that the small – and later exaggerated – learning that he attributes to Henry I was extraordinary for a king of the time; see Thompson, Literacy, 168 ff. 34 Cf.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) litterarum imbutus’ (‘well instructed in the practical knowledge of letters’).38 Although the Chronicler of Novalesa certainly had ecclesio-political grounds to deprecate the first Salian, the term Idioten was not an insult; Conrad’s chaplain and biographer Wipo, for example, praised his powers and mentioned in passing that he was balanced and helpful to the clergy, quamquam litteras ignoraret (‘although he did not know his letters’).39 Conrad, the orphaned son of a count, had been entrusted to the learned Bishop Burchard of Worms for his education;40 though the education of a noble obviously did not include writing and learning Latin even in a bishop’s court, Conrad as king had his own son and successor educated that way. And Conrad III, the younger son of the Hohenstaufen duke of Swabia not destined for the throne, was actually called by his chancellor Wibald of Stablo litterarum amator (‘lover of letters’): at table he could enjoy the learned jokes of the litterati and thought they had a jolly life,41 but he could not be counted among their number. He was seen as a vir simplex (‘simple man’) by the crusade chronicler William of Tyre.42 Similarly, Frederick I (Conrad II’s nephew) was likely eloquent only in his mother tongue, despite his enthusiasm for Latin chronicles and the poetry of his time; he could understand Latin better than he could speak it, but he could hardly read. In the continuation of Otto of Freising’s Gesta Friderici (Deeds of Frederick), Rahewin found Frederick’s gift of oration all the more admirable with one ‘qui litteras non nosset’ (‘who did not know

38 Chronicon

Novalese [correction: Novaliciense], App. xvii, ed. C. Cipolla, Monumenta Novaliciensia vetustiora, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia 32 (Rome, 1901), pp. 304 f.; MGH SS 7 (1846), p. 128. 39 Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi vi, in Die Werke Wipos, ed. H. Breslau, 3rd edn, MGH SRG (1915), p. 28. 40 Vita Burchardi vii and xxi, MGH SS 4, pp. 835, 844. 41 Wibald, Ep. 167, ed. Jaffé, Bibl. rer. Germ., I, 283: ‘Mirabatur dominus noster Conradus rex ea, quae a litteratis vafre dicebantur … Iocundi eramus in convivio et plerique non illitterati’ (‘our lord King Conrad wondered at what was artfully said by the learned … We were cheerful at our meals together and many with us were not unlearned’). When Wibald entertained the king with joking entertainers’ routines, ‘iocundam vitam dicebat habere litteratos’ (‘he said that the learned had a cheerful life’). Litterarum amator et Grece sciens (‘loving learning and knowing Greek’), apparently Conrad could even compose a Greek epigram; ibid., p. 288. 42 William of Tyre, Historia xvi.2 [correction: xvi.21], Rec. des Hist. des Croisades, Occid., I.2, 740. On the other hand William calls King Baldwin III of Jerusalem (1143–62) commode litteratus (Historia xvi.2, XVI; I.2, 136 [correction: I.2, 705] and his brother successor Amalrich (1162–73) modice litteratus (‘moderately lettered’; Historia xix.2; I.2, 884). Both liked to read in quiet hours. William of Tyre calls both of them historiarium (avidus) auditor (‘an avid pupil of history’), Amalrich also ‘promptus et fidelissimus recitator’ (‘recited with ease and accuracy’), while Baldwin III was ‘litterorum maxime, sed et prudentium laicorum confabulationibus plurimum recreabatur’. [‘with men of letters and wise laymen he loved above all to converse’, William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. E. Atwater Babcock and A. C. Krey, 2 vols. (New York, 1943), II, 138, 296–7.]

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Litteratus–Illitteratus letters’).43 Bishop Sicard of Cremona called him directly an ‘illitteratus, sed morali scientia doctus’ (‘illiterate, but learned in moral philosophy’),44 while Empress Beatrice was litterata. Still, it is no insult that the emperor is illitteratus, for he has other knowledge and ability and is educated in a different manner: almost four centuries earlier Paul the Deacon also said of the king of the Lombards, Liutprand: ‘litterarum quidem ignarus, sed philosophis aequandus’ (‘ignorant indeed of letters, but comparable to philosophers’),45 and a contemporary had already spoken similarly about the East Gothic king, Theodoric the Great.46 Wise men, equal to the philosophers and educated in their lay manner, could and should be the rulers, even if they were illitteratus and left writing, reading and Latin to others. Although much study of individual cases remains to be done, the basic outlines of this limited sketch are clear: the concepts litteratus and illitteratus did not distinguish different levels of education in the Middle Ages but, rather, different educational directions, even educational worlds. At the same time, these different modes existed with and alongside one another, just as the Latin writing and book culture of Roman antiquity and biblical-patriarchal origin were parallelled by vernacular languages – local tongues with their own traditions in poetry, history and saga. These two forms of education and tradition are, apart from certain overlap and exceptions, divided into various social estates: Latinate litterati were in general only clerics and monks, men of the Church and cloister, to whom princes surrendered the entire writing work of chanceries. Illitterati, ignorant of writing and Latin, were in general laymen of all social levels: only noble women and the sons of kings were conceded a certain amount of literary education and capacity. It was unusual and surprising for other laity to be litterati, while for clergy and monks it is a lack and a blemish to be illitteratus.

43 Otto

of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici iv.5, ed. G. Waitz and B. von Simson, 3rd edn, MGH SRG 46 (1912), p. 237. Ibid. iv.86, p. 344: ‘In patria lingua admodum facundus, Latinam vero melius intelligere potest quam pronuntiare’. [‘He is very eloquent in his mother tongue, but can understand Latin more readily than he can speak it’; The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa by Otto of Freising and his continuator, Rahewin, trans. C. C. Mierow (New York, 1966), p. 333.] Einhard says much the same of Charles the Great (xxv; ed. O. Holder-Egger, 6th edn, MGH SRG in usum scholarum 25 (1911), p. 30), as does Thegan of Louis the Pious’s ‘knowledge of Greek’ (xix; MGH SS 2 (1829), p. 594). Cf. P. Lehmann, ‘Vom Leben des Lateinschen im Mittelalter’, in his Erforschung des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1941), pp. 75 f. 44 Sicard of Cremona, Chronica, MGH SS 31 (1903), p. 165, line 17. On Beatrix, see Acerbus Morena, Historia Frederici I, ed. F. Güterbock, MGH SS n.s. 7 (1930), p. 168. Among the princes Morena characterised, he named only Rainald of Dassel as disertus et optime litteratus and Count Konrad of Ballhausen as litteratus et sapiens; p. 170. 45 Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum vi.58, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SRG 48 (1878), p. 242. 46 See below, pp. 81–2.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) In our more recent era of general school-based education and enthusiasm for writing and reading, one can hardly fathom that the laity had no part in all the rich Latin writings of the Middle Ages unless listening to translations. It is similarly difficult to accept that the politically leading lay nobility and even many important rulers could not themselves read anything that the clergy wrote and often dedicated to them. A comparable modern example might be our relationship to music and musical notation: even musically inclined ‘laity’ cannot for the most part read a score, as our general education does not require this ability. One must, rather, have it presented aurally by musicians, just as the medieval laity, unable to read themselves, had books read out loud or poetry presented by clergy. In our day, many people, even educated people, have again become more receptive to sounds and images than to reading and the text. Men of state, bureaucrats and even many scholars dictate to secretaries rather than write themselves, often not learning the typewriter themselves, but simply adding a signature under dictated letters and acts, like the final stroke to the monogram of medieval documents. In light of these familiar circumstances, the division into clerici litterati and laici illitterati – and their interactions – seem less alien and inconceivable. Since involvement with letters was constitutive for the intellectual-cultural and social life of the Western Middle Ages, tracing its origins and subsequent transformation reveals fundamental insights into the relationship of the medieval age to antiquity and to modern times. In particular, the shift of meaning within the concepts litteratus and illitteratus thus serves as a guiding thread.

II Inherited from classical Latin, the meaning of the terms litteratus and illiteratus changed in the Middle Ages. For the ancient Romans the word litteratus could not simultaneously have meant knowing Latin – they all did this – and being clergy – they were not that. For the Romans, the word originally meant simply being able to read and write. Litteratus was one who knew the letters, and litterae were those who knew and used what was written. Litteras discere or scire meant to learn and use reading and writing or not, and nescire thus to be unable. Illitteratus is the opposite of that; the Analphabet corresponds to the Greek ἀγράμματος, or he who understands nothing about writing and reading. In a comedy of Caecilius Statius (c. 170 BC), a barbarian is addressed as one without writing or law, just as the Greeks had it: ‘barbare indomitis cum moribus inlitterate, inlex’ (‘barbarian with untamed manners, illiterate, lawless’).1 In Cato’s Origines, the Ligurians are described as inliterati, who

1 Comicorum

fragmenta, in Scaenicae Romanorum poesis fragmenta, ed. O. Ribbeck, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1871–3), II, 44, 59 f.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus know nothing of their origins ‘mendacesque sunt et vera minus meminere’ (‘and are liars and less mindful of the truth’).2 From the Augustan era and through the first Christian century, there is clear evidence for a plain, unpretentious definition that demanded nothing more from the litteratus than that he could read and write. While this basic meaning was retained the longest in practical and technical literature, poets and philosophers were already making higher claims for a litteratus. Columella’s book on economics (c. 60 CE)3 says that an illiteratus can certainly administer a property, but only if he has a good memory – in that case, memory supplants the ability to write and makes it dispensable. In medical treatises reading exercises are prescribed for certain ailments of the eyes if the patient is litteratus; an illitteratus, who cannot read, must be handled differently.4 Also, when Vitruvius (c. 25 BC) demands of architects ut litteratus sit (‘that he be literate’),5 he means only that one should be capable of writing, in order to help his memory through notes. Vitruvius’s architect should understand not only drawing and geometry, but also history (historias complures noverit, ‘he should know several history books’), listen to philosophers with attention, know music, medicine and law, and pursue astrology and observation of the sky. He should be widely educated, though all this is not yet included in the word litteratus. And Vitruvius says expressly that the architect does not need to be a grammaticus, but must not be agrammatos (= illiteratus), just as he does not need to be a ‘musicus, sed non amusos’ (‘not a musician, but not unskilled in music’).6 Already in Vitruvius’s time, not everyone who could read and write aspired to be litteratus in the sense of an advanced literary-intellectual level and claim to education – only those educated to the highest degree. At the end of the second century before Christ, the satirist C. Lucilius, from Scipio

2 Cato,

Origines ii.1, in Praeter librum de re rustica, quae extant, ed. H. Jordan (Leipzig, 1860), p. 9. 3 Columella, De re rustica I.viii.4, ed. V. Lundström, Uppsala edn, 8 parts (Leipzig, Gothenburg and Uppsala, 1897–1968), II, 39. Columella otherwise often speaks of the rusticus illiteratus without any disdain. 4 Caelius Aurelianus, De morbis acutis et chronicis III.ii.38, ed. J. C. Amman (Amsterdam, 1722), p. 443: ‘lectionis exercitium, si fuerit litteratus aegrotans’. [‘The exercise of reading aloud, if the patient is educated’; Caelius Aurelianus, On acute diseases and On chronic diseases, trans. I. E. Drabkin (Chicago, 1950), p. 735.] Additamenta in (Pseudo-) Theodorus Priscianus, Euporiston libri III, cum physicorum fragmento et additamentis Pseudo-Theodoreis, ed. V. Rose (Leipzig, 1894), p. 284, line 6: ‘si autem illitteratus fuerit …’; p. 327, line 17: ‘si autem litteratus non fuerit …’ 5 Vitruvius, De architectura I.i.3, ed. V. Rose (Leipzig, 1899), p. 3. I.i.3. On this, ibid., I.i.4: ‘litteras architectum scire oportet, uti commentariis memoriam firmiorem efficere possit’. [‘An architect should understand letters so that he may strengthen his own memory’; Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, trans. I. D. Rowland (Cambridge, 1999), p. 22.] 6 Ibid., I.i.13.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) the Younger’s circle of friends, believed that one could appropriately call inlitteratus atque idiota anyone who caused offence through outdated words – and hence was inadequately educated.7 Suetonius mentions in his writing on grammarians8 that Cicero’s younger contemporary Cornelius Nepos wrote on his own authority on the distinction between the litteratus and the eruditus, spheres already approaching one another at the time. As Suetonius adds, citing M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus († AD 8), litterati would generally (vulgo) refer to those who could say or write something carefully and precisely, but especially (proprie) the interpretes poetarum (interpreters of poets), who were called grammatici by the Greeks, and also litteratores by Romans. Suetonius

7 Lucilius, Carminum reliquiae, ed. F. Marx, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1904–5), II, 45, no. xxvi, 33,

line 649: ‘quid ni et tu idem inlitteratum me atque idiotam diceres, siquod verbum inusitatum aut zetematium offenderem’. [‘Why not? Besides, you again would say I was un-lettered and a common fellow, if I had hit upon some unusual word or a petty problem’; Lucilius, The Twelve Tables, in Remains of Old Latin, trans. E. H. Warmington, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA 1935–40), III, 217.] Obviously Lucilius had insulted someone as an inlitteratus atque idiota and was justifying himself. 8 Suetonius, De grammaticis iv, in Quae supersunt omnia, ed. C. L. Roth (Leipzig, 1886), pp. 258 f: ‘Appellatio grammaticorum Graeca consuetudine invaluit; sed initio litterati vocabantur. Cornelius quoque Nepos libello quo distinguit litteratum ab erudito, litteratos quidem vulgo appellari ait eos, qui aliquid diligenter et acute scienterque possint aut dicere aut scribere, ceterum proprie sic appellandos poetarum interpretes, qui a Graecis grammatici nominentur. Eosdem litteratores vocitatos Messala Corvinus … ostendit … Sunt qui litteratum a litteratore distinguant, ut Graeci grammaticum a grammatista, et illum quidem absolute, hunc mediocriter doctum existiment. Quorum opinionem Orbilius etiam exemplis confirmat; namque apud maiores, ait, cum familia alicuius venalis produceretur, non temere quem litteratum in titulo, sed litteratorem inscribi solitum esse quasi non perfectum litteris, sed imbutum.’ [‘The term grammaticus became prevalent through Greek influence, but at first such men were called litterati. Cornelius Nepos, too, in a little book in which he explains the difference between litteratus and eruditus says that the former is commonly applied to those who can speak or write on any subject accurately, cleverly and with authority; but that it should strictly be used of interpreters of the poets, whom the Greeks call grammatici. That these were also called litteratores is shown by Messala Corvinus in one of his letters … Some however make a distinction between litteratus and litterator, as the Greeks do between grammaticus and grammatista, using the former of a master of his subject, the latter of one moderately proficient. Orbilius too supports this view by examples, saying: In the days of our forefathers, when anyone’s slaves were offered for sale, it was not usual except in special cases to advertise any one of them as litteratus but rather as litterator, implying that he had a smattering of letters, but was not a finished scholar’; On Grammarians, in Suetonius, trans J. C. Rolfe, 2 vols. (London, 1914), II, 401–5.] Also Vitruvius, De architectura I.i.17, says of himself that he ‘non uti summus philosophus nec rhetor disertus nec grammaticus summis rationibus artis exercitatus, sed ut architectus is litteris imbutus haec nisus sum scribere’; ed. Rose, pp. 9 f. [‘For I have striven to write them not as a great philosopher or an eloquent orator, nor as a grammarian trained in the finer points of his art, but as an architect who has dipped into literature’; trans. Rowland, p. 24.]

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Litteratus–Illitteratus continues, noting that usage was inconsistent: many (such as Orbelius) call the moderately educated litterator, and only the completely educated person litteratus; it would be deemed careless to put a slave up for sale as a litteratus if he were not perfectus litteris, sed imbutus (not ‘perfect in letters, but somewhat instructed’), thus only a litterator.9 The change in meaning from litteratus was already being observed and discussed by the Romans; Seneca cites it as an example of words often used in an improper, not original sense: one would no longer call a person illitteratus who was totally uneducated, ‘non ex toto rudem, sed ad litteras altiores non perductum’ (‘not totally uncultivated, but not brought to higher learning’), as when one says that he runs around naked when he is only poorly clothed.10 The model for this elevated language usage above all others was Cicero, to whom the scientia litterarum (knowledge of letters) meant a great deal more than just reading and writing. To him, nothing was more beautiful than the otium litteratum, leisure for the litterae, the path to knowledge of nature and of all things.11 Whomever he calls litteratus must already be very well-read and educated.12 ‘Homines litterati et historici’ (‘men learned and versed in history’)

9 Martianus

Capella iii.229, ed. A. Dick (Stuttgart, 1925), pp. 84 f., still has Grammatica say: ‘assertor nostri nunc litteratus dicitur, litterator antea vocabatur’. [‘Nowadays my advocate is called Litteratus, who was formerly called Litterator’; Martianus Capella, trans. Stahl, II, 67.] They describe themselves as in four parts (iii.231, p. 86): ‘litterae sunt, quas doceo, litteratura ipsa quae doceo, litteratus quem docuero, litterate quod perite tractaverit quem informo’. [‘Letters are what I teach, literature is I who teach, the man of letters is the person whom I have taught, and literary style is the skill of a person whom I form’; trans. Stahl, II, 68.] 10 Seneca, De beneficiis V.xiii.3; Opera quae supersunt, ed. A. Gercke, F. Haase, O. Hense and C. Hosius, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1898–1907), I.2, 136.[Moral Essays, trans. J. W. Basore, 3 vols. (Cambridge MA, 1928–35), III, 329.] 11 Tusculanae disputationes V.xxxv.105: ‘Quid est enim dulcius otio litterato? iis dico litteris, quibus infinitam rerum atque naturae et in hoc ipso mundo caelum terras maria cognoscimus’ [‘For what is more delightful than leisure devoted to literature? That literature I mean which gives us the knowledge of the infinite greatness of nature, and, in this actual world of ours, of the sky, the lands, the seas’. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA, 1927), p. 531.] 12 Brutus xxi.81 on A. Albinus ‘qui graece scripsit historiam… et litteratus et disertus fuit’. [‘Aulus Albinus, the writer of a history in Greek … was not only a man of letters’; Cicero, Brutus. Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge MA, 1939), p. 75.] See also Pro M. Aemilio Scauro oratio xxiii, on L. Aelius as a homo litteratus. De officiis I.xxxvii.133 on the Catuli: ‘erant litterati, sed et alii: hi autem optime lingua latina uti putabantur’ [‘they were men of culture, it is true; and so were others; but the Catuli were looked upon as the perfect masters of the Latin tongue’; On Duties, trans. W. Miller (Cambridge MA, 1913), pp. 135–7.] N. Stang, ‘Philosophia, philosophus bei cicero’, Symbolae Osloensis 11 (1932), 80 remarks that Cicero never called a philosopher litteratus, but doctus. With Cicero it is only with servi litterati that the word achieves its old, simple meaning: slaves who write. See Brutus xxii.87; In Verrem I.xxxvi.92. Cf. Orbilius in Suetonius, p. 72 above and note 8. Pliny, Epistulae VII.xxvii.12: ‘Libertus … non illiteratus’ [‘a freedman … a

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) belong together, because book readers ex annalium vetustate (‘from ancient histories’) experience more about history than the rest of the people choosing ‘ex sermone hominum recenti’ (‘from the recent talk of men’).13 Cicero praises the orator Cotta as ‘eruditissimus et graecis litteris et latinis antiquitatisque nostrae … scriptorumque veterum literate peritus’ (‘most accomplished in Greek and Latin letters and skilled learnedly in both our ancient past and old writers’).14 He can say that someone speaks very good Latin litteratiusque quam ceteri (‘in a more educated way than others’).15 As noted earlier, litterate loqui meant in the Middle Ages to speak in Latin, but here it is to speak in an educated manner; litterate dicta16 are well-formed pronunciations, ‘nec inlitterata nec insulsa’ (‘neither uneducated nor tasteless’).17 Hence the word was also capable of scaling, for one could now be learned in highly varied measure and grade, non illitteratus,18 satis litteratus19 or litteratissimus (‘not unlearned, moderately learned, very learned’). An example would be someone who could immediately say, ‘This verse is from Plautus, that one not’, thanks to his consuetudo legendi (custom of reading) – as when Caesar shrewdly determined what Cicero had and had not written.20 In the

man of some education’; Letters and Panegyricus, trans. B. Radice, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA, 1969); I, 547.] 13 Pro L. Murena vii.16, directed against Murena’s accusor L. Lucinius, whose ‘nobilitas … tametsi summa est, tamen hominibus litteratis et historicis est notior, populo vero et suffragatoribus obscurior’. [‘your nobility is second to none, it is better known to men of letters and antiquarians and less familiar to the people and the voters’; In Catilinam 1–4, Pro Murena, Pro Sulla, Pro Flacco, trans. C. Macdonald (Cambridge MA, 1976), p. 203.] 14 Brutus lvi.205. Cf. xxi.81 on N. Fabius Pictor: ‘et iuris et litterarum et antiquitatis bene peritus’. [‘a man learned in law, in letters, and in our history’); trans. Hendrickson and Hubbell, p. 75.] 15 Brutus xxviii.108. 16 De oratore II.lxii.253: belle et litterate dicta. [‘said cleverly and learnedly’; Cicero, On the Orator: Books 1–2, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge MA, 1942), p. 387.] Cf. De haruspicum responsis viii.17: litterate respondissem. [‘I should have answered to the letter of his question’; Cicero, Pro Archia. Post Reditum in Senatu. Post Reditum ad Quirites. De Domo Sua. De Haruspicum Responsis. Pro Plancio, trans. N. H. Watts (Cambridge MA, 1923), p. 337]. In Pisonem xxv.61: ‘litterate et scite perscriptae rationes’. [‘in so acute and scholarly fashion are they made out’; Cicero, Pro Milone. In Pisonem. Pro Scauro. Pro Fonteio. Pro Rabirio Postumo. Pro Marcello. Pro Ligario. Pro Rege Deiotaro, trans. N. H. Watts (Cambridge MA, 1931), p. 215.] 17 Fam. IX.xvi.4. 18 De oratore II.vi.25 on Laelius Decumus, ‘quem cognovimus virum bonum et non illitteratum’. [‘we also knew for an excellent man of some learning’, trans. Hendrickson and Hubbell, p. 217.] 19 De officiis III.xiv.58: Canius ‘nec infacetus et satis litteratus’. [‘a man of considerable wit and literary culture’; trans. Miller, p. 327.] 20 Fam. IX.xvi.4. Cf. De oratore III.xi.43 on Q. Valerius Soranus as litteratissimum togatorum omnium. [‘the most erudite littérateur of all who have the Roman citizenship’; trans. Hendrickson and Hubbell, p. 35.]

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Litteratus–Illitteratus captatio benevolentiae (rhetorical ‘fishing for good will’) of his plea for the poet Archia, Cicero actually flatters his audience as a concursus hominum litteratissimorum (‘assembly of most learned men’).21 He can extend Zeno’s fallacy ad absurdum, in jest at least, concluding ‘quod litteratum est, id est melius quam quod non est litteratum; nihil autem mundo melius; litteratus igitur est mundus’ (‘what is learned is better than what is not learned; nothing however is better than the world; the world is therefore learned’).22 Such elevation of litteratus meant that illitteratus included not only the Analphabet but, as Seneca put it,23 everyone who does not belong to the altiores litterae. Pliny the Younger (a contemporary of Tacitus, who appears not to have used these concepts)24 paradoxically complains that he had written many litteras inlitteratissimas – official letters without any literary charm or claim.25 And Horace places his inliterati nervi (‘unlearned virile member’) in witty contrast with the libelli stoici (‘slim volumes of the Stoics’) that lie scattered beneath the silken pillows of a lady.26 Mostly, however, the illitteratus is spoken of negatively. Cicero distinguishes before a court the testes imprudentes, illitterati (‘imprudent, unlearned witnesses’) and leves (‘unreliable’) from the boni, docti (‘good,’ ‘learned’) and prudentes (‘modest’).27 Phaedrus, the poet of fables and a freedman of Augustus, closes a prologue with almost literary arrogance: inlitteratum plausum nec desidero (‘I do not desire the applause of the unlearned’).28 In his Institutiones (2, 21, 16), Quintilian speaks of the litigator

21 Pro

Archia poeta ii.3: Cicero asks, ‘ut me pro summo poeta atque eruditissimo homine dicentem hoc concursu hominum litteratissimorum, hac vestra humanitate … patiamini de studiis humanitatis ac litterarum paulo loqui liberius et in eius modi persona, quae propter otium ac studium minime in iudiciis periculisque tractata est, uti prope novo quodam et inusitato genere dicendi’. [‘Speaking as I am on behalf of a distinguished poet and a consummate scholar, before a cultivated audience, an enlightened jury, and the praetor whom we see occupying the tribunal, to enlarge somewhat upon enlightened and cultivated pursuits, and to employ what is perhaps a novel and unconventional line of defence to suit the character of one whose studious seclusion has made him a stranger to the anxious perils of the courts’; trans. Watts, p. 9.] 22 De natura deorum III.ix.23. 23 See above note 10. Seneca deals in the Quaestiones naturales IV.xiii.1 with the objection whether the knowledge of weather is ‘ineptiae, quibus litteratior est quisque, non melior’ (or: ‘quibus quisquam nec litteratior fit nec melior’). [‘these trivialities by which any person is made more cultured, not more virtuous?’; Natural Questions, trans. T. H. Corcoran, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA, 1971–72), II, 63.] 24 In the Lexicon Taciteum, ed. A. Gerber and A. Greef (Leipzig, 1903) there is no entry for litteratus, illitteratus or idiota. 25 Pliny Ep. I.x.9; ed. M. Schuster (Leipzig, 1933), p. 15. 26 Horace, Epodes viii, lines 15 ff. 27 Pro L. Flacco 9. Cf. also De natura deorum II, 74: ‘homo sine arte, sine litteris’. [‘an uncultivated, illiterate person’; Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods. Academics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1933), p. 195.] 28 Phaedrus, Fables, Book 4, Prologue v.20. Though accepted by most editions, this

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) rusticus inlitteratusque (‘rustic and unlearned litigator’) in opposition to the orator, who better knows how to present his case before a court. And around 200 CE, Minucius Felix, the Christian apologist of Roman education, went to considerable lengths to counter the indignant objections of his philosophical friends that inlitterati, pauperes and inperiti were disputing celestial matters.29 Literary depth can be measured to some extent by such documentation, in terms of how much learning was expected for the rank of litteratus. But the word itself – and this could be symptomatic – was not sufficiently popular or regularly used in late-antique writing30 to serve as a litmus test charting the rise and decline of educational history. The historians of the imperial period from Tacitus and Suetonius to the Scriptores historiae Augustae (Writers of the Augustan History) seek to measure the level of education, the literary interests and capacities of each emperor but, surprisingly, they either entirely renounce the concepts of litteratus and illitteratus, or carefully avoid them, as if each were too extreme. How one instead wrote around and varied it is best seen in the late, brief Epitome de Caesaribus (Booklet concerning the Emperors) (c. 400):31 Augustus was liberalibus studiis … incumbens (‘devoted to liberal studies’), and not a day passed without him reading, writing and declaiming (1, 17); regarding Tiberius, ‘inerat ei scientia litterarum multa’ (‘much knowledge of letters was in him’) (4, 4); and the following emperors are litteris culti (‘cultivated in letters’) (8, 6), Trajan ‘parcae scientiae moderateque eloquens’ (‘with little knowledge and moderately eloquent’) (13, 3), Hadrian ‘Graecis litteris impensius eruditis’ (‘considerably erudite in Greek letters’) (14, 2), Marcus Aurelius ‘philosophiae studens litterarumque Graecarum peritissimus’ (‘a student of philosophy and most expert in Greek letters’) (16, 7), Septimius Severus ‘latinis litteris sufficenter instructus, Graecis sermonibus eruditus, Punica eloquentia promptior’ (‘sufficiently instructed in Latin letters, learned in speaking Greek, more at ease with Punic eloquence’) (20, 8). Then follows a century without such epithets, up to the moment that Maximinus Daia, nephew of Galerius, is called litteratorum cultor (‘cultivator of letters’) (40, 18). Licinius, in contrast, is infestus litteris (‘hostile to letters’) (41, 8), while Constantine could do much and did: ‘nutrire artes bonas, praecipue studia litterarum, legere ipse [sic], scribere, meditari …’ (‘he nourished the good arts, especially literary studies, he read

reading is not entirely certain. The conjecture offered by L. Herrmann, Phèdre et ses fables (Leiden, 1950), p. 302 – In litterarum plausum ire desidero, with the translation ‘C’est l’applaudissement des lettrés (as if it were litteratorum) que je désire avoir’ – is not acceptable. [‘It is the applause of the litterati that I want’; Fables: Babrius and Phaedrus, trans. B. E. Perry (Cambridge MA, 1965), p. 301.] 29 Minucius Felix, Octavius xvi.5; CSEL 2 (1867), p. 20. 30 It is also indicative that in translation of the Acts of the Apostles 4. 13, the illitterati of the Itala (for ἀγράμματοι) is replaced by Jerome with sine litteris, although elsewhere he speaks of the Apostles as piscatores et illitterati. Commentaria in Evangelium s. Matthei to 4. 19, PL 26, 34. See p. 78 below and note 37. 31 Ed. F. Pichlmayr in his edition of Sextus Aurelius Victor, Liber de Caesaribus (Leipzig, 1911), pp. 133–76.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus himself, wrote and meditated’) (41, 14). In Julian comes the pinnacle of ‘litterarum ac negotiorum ingens scientia, aequaverat philosophos et Graecorum sapientissimos’ (‘a huge knowledge of literature and practical affairs, he equalled the philosophers even the wisest of the Greeks’) (43, 5). And then it drops again: Jovian is litterarum studiosus (‘a student of letters’) (44, 3), and Gratian only ‘litteris haud mediocriter institutus’ (‘not a little educated in letters’) (47, 4); Theodosius the Great, however, ‘litteris, si nimium perfectos contemplemur, mediocriter doctus’ (‘not very learned in letters, if we were to have in mind the too perfect’) (48, 11). However, these references are unquestionably mere highlights that reveal no continuous curve of education and no fixed educational standards. The life of Hadrian in the Scriptores historiae Augustae asserts that the emperor was so concerned about his later reputation that he wrote descriptions of his life and had them published under the names of his liberti litterati (‘learned freedmen’)32 – men whom he considered not only capable of writing, but as having attained some respectable literary reputation. It was said of Emperor Alexander Severus (222–235)33 – whether already by the third or fourth, or not until the fifth century may remain unresolved here – that in matters of law and the state he drew only on doctos et disertos (‘the learned and skilful in speaking’) for advice. In military matters he additionally consulted those experts in war, ‘omnes litteratos et maxime eos, qui historiam norant’ (‘all the learned and especially those who knew history’), to ask them how earlier rulers, earlier Romans or other people had acted in similar situations. These litterati are not scholars (docti) such as jurists, but men of great erudition and public acclaim who knew literature and history. Christian authors of around 400 handled the concept of litterati in much the same way. Sulpicius Severus, who had made the rich educational tradition of Roman schooling his own in Gaul, declared in the foreword to his chronicle why he used other secular historians (historici mundiales) alongside and to supplement the Bible: ‘ut et imperitos docerem et litteratos convicerem’ (‘in order that I might teach the ignorant and convince the learned’).34 For the litterati, the widely read, citations known to them from older historical works were convincing documentation, while for those with little historical knowledge they were materials rich in learning. But Sulpicius anticipated the latter among his readers, so he calls them imperiti – he does not call them illitterati as one would expect in contrast to the litterati. To him, not every person capable of reading is already a litteratus, since that always requires a knowledge of literature. This is even clearer in Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin, read everywhere in the Middle Ages. Having intimately known and esteemed the saint as his friend and student, Sulpicius Severus praised his gravitas (‘gravity’) 32 Scriptores

historiae Augustae, ed. E. Hohl, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1927), I, 17: Vita Hadriani xvi.1 – by Aelius Spartianus? 33 Ibid., I, 263: Vita Alexandri Severi xvi.3 – by Aelius Lampridius? 34 Chronica i.4, ed. C. Halm, CSEL 1 (1866), p. 3.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) and dignitas (‘dignity’) in word and speech, his sharpness in reading the Scriptures and understanding the Bible, his rich knowledge (scientia) – yet all of this was insignificant compared to Martin’s moral and religious virtutes. It was astounding that he possessed these qualities even as a homo illiteratus.35 For an inlitteratus was still anyone whose high spiritual capacity and gift might be praised in the same breath as a man who could read very well and, according to Sulpicius’s representation, one who did so often, reading and praying at every opportunity.36 At the same time, it could also designate a man who had grown up as a warrior, not as school-educated and literate as Sulpicius himself. Thus was the bar already set high for distinguishing litterati and illiterati in Gaul in 400. Hence could Jerome also contrast true Christian knowledge with the saeculi litteratis (‘the learned of this world’),37 and Augustine might assure the litterati that they would find all the rhetorical figures of the grammarians in ‘our authors’, in the biblical scriptures.38 Indeed, he knows that if they become Christians, they will need more urgings than the illitterati to practise Christian modesty and are not to despise those who prefer avoiding mistakes of morals over those of words.39 Evidently the litterati often seemed to him, as well as to his contemporaries, as highly but falsely educated people. 35 Vita

S. Martini xxv.8; ibid., p. 135. xxvi.3; p. 136: ‘Numquam hora ulla momentumque praeteriit, quo non aut orationi incumberet aut insisteret lectioni, quamquam etiam inter legendum aut si quid aliud forte agebat, numquam animum ab oratione laxabat’. [‘For never did any hour or moment pass in which he was not deep in prayer or busy with reading, although, even when reading or perhaps doing something else, his heart never wandered away from prayer’; Sulpicius Severus: The Complete Works, trans. R. J. Goodrich (New York, 2015), p. 53.] Among his monks the practice of a craft (ars) was permitted to the scriptores only in their younger years; Vita S. Martini x.6; ed. Halm, p. 120. 37 Commentary on Galatians II Prol.; PL 26, 428. See Apologia adversus libros Rufini i.30, PL 23, 442: ‘tu qui in me parvam criminaris scientiam et videris tibi litteratulus atque Rabbi’. [‘I summon you, who accuse me for my scanty knowledge, and who think yourself a litérateur and a Rabbi’; Jerome, Apology Against Rufinus, trans. W. H. Freemantle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, 14 vols. (Buffalo and Oxford, 1890–1900), III, 499. I have never seen the word litteratulus anywhere else. 38 De doctrina Christiana III.xxix.40, ed. H. J. Vogels, Florilegium Patristicum 24 (Bonn, 1930), p. 62. [1978 reprint: CC 32 (1962), p. 100; CSEL 80 (1963), p. 103.] 39 De catechizandis rudibus ix.2, ed. G. Krüger, 3rd edn, Sammlung ausgewählter kirchenund dogmengeschichtlicher Quellenschriften I. 4 (Tübingen, 1934), p. 15. [1978 reprint: CC 46 (1969), p. 135.] [On the Catechicising of the Uninstructed, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, 14 vols. (Buffalo and Oxford, 1886–90), III, 291]. Also Lactantius, Institutiones Divinae vi.21 found that homines litterati had the hardest time coming to the faith: ‘adsueti enim dulcibus et politis sive orationibus sive carminibus, divinarum literarum simplicem communemque sermonem pro sordido aspernantur’; CSEL 19 (Vienna, 1890), p. 562. [‘Accustomed as they are to oratory and poetry that is sweet and refined, they treat the simple, common language of divine literature as low quality, and they despise it’; Lactantius: Divine Institutes, trans. A. Bowen and P. Garnsey (Liverpool, 2003), p. 377.] 36 Ibid.,

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Litteratus–Illitteratus

III In the next century this changed, in the homeland of Latin education (Gaul and Italy), and only partially as a result of penetration by Germanic peoples, fundamentally without writing, into the old cultural and literary lands of the Mediterranean region. It should be remembered1 that at least since the fourth century the still somewhat unified written and school-Latin of literature was no longer identical with the increasingly distinct conversational language of ‘Romania’, of the Romance lands and its various classes. No one spoke any more as one wrote; no one wrote as one spoke. At the same time, those who learned to write in schools had to work with the Latin writing-and-literature language according to ‘classic’ rules from textbooks and grammars, acquiring a language of schools and education that was no longer the mother tongue. Linguistic development toward the Romance languages was already underway in late antiquity, (even in Italy itself) from the literary tradition whose language had to be mastered in school to become a litteratus. Both of them together – the written Latin standardised by the classic model and the writing and reading learned thereby – constituted grammatica: the first of the seven artes liberales, the foundation and necessary beginning of all other disciplines. Grammatice or literate loqui has since distinguished an educated class of writers and readers from the illitterati, those who cannot master and do not use written Latin and who were doubtless a great majority in declining antiquity, even in the old cultural heartland and among Christians. Bishop Caesarius of Arles († 542) fulminates in his sermons2 against the lazy excuse that one cannot read and hence cannot know and obey the commandments of God; one can hear them and memorise them, he warns, as they – including peasants and women – still learn and sing so many heathen, devilish, shameful songs (‘carmina diabolica, amatoria et turpia’); why not the Confession of Faith and the Our Father and some Psalms? And he points to a tempting example: he knows many merchants who cannot read and write (litteras non noverint), but they hire mercenarios litteratos, hired writers, and since these writers have their accounts written down, they make enormous profits. Why should those not knowing how to write only do so for the sake of earthly profit? Why not earn eternal profit by hiring someone and paying them to read out the Holy Scripture? The southern Gallic bishop has to assume illiterates among his audience, peasants and merchants; he cannot expect reading ability, only listening, or at best professional readers, the mercenarii litterati. 1 See

on the following the important essay by Ferdinand Lot, to which insufficient attention has been paid by historians and scholars of romance languages and literature: ‘A quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler latin?’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Bulletin Du Cange) 6 (1931), 97–159. 2 PL 39, 2325; ed. G. Morin, CC 103 (1953), 31 f., 41 f.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Circumstances differed little in Italy. Benedict of Nursia, who had studied as a youth in Rome but separated himself from all worldly wisdom, ‘scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus’ (‘ignorant of knowledge and uneducated in wisdom’),3 expects the admission of monks in his monastery who cannot write. According to his Rule (c. 58) the novice should write his oath with his own hand or, si non scit litteras (‘if he does not know his letters’), have it written by another and marked with his own sign before placing it with his own hand on the altar. That he then must learn to read and write in the monastery is not specifically required in Benedict’s Rule, as it was in the Rule of Pachomius translated by Jerome into Latin about two centuries earlier and known to Benedict.4 For Benedict’s monks, who prayed the divine service together in song and were directed more to work than study for the sake of avoiding idleness, the ability to write did not seem imperative – so long as they knew the Psalter and divine office by heart. In his explanation of the Rule around 775, Paul the Deacon5 distinguishes monks who could be educated to read and recite the Psalms from those who were not regarded as capable. Only in the later reforms of Benedictine monasticism were the illitterati or idiotae distinguished from the actual monks as conversi or lay brothers.6 The Benedictines were not originally and according to their founder’s will the reading and writing, learned monks par excellence which they became from the Carolingian period. At the beginning there was no small number of illitterati among the monks (whom Bede expected even in Anglo-Saxon houses7), not only the handful of Ostrogoths who were received into Monte Cassino, according to Gregory I’s Life of Benedict.8 In contrast, Benedict’s contemporary Cassiodorus made his Calabrian estate of Vivarium near Squillace into an educational monastery after his retirement from Ostrogothic state service. The educational programme that he developed for his monks became the standard format for medieval 3 Gregory

I, Vita Benedicti, Prologue, PL 66, 126; ed. U. Moricca, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia 57 (1924): ‘Romae liberalibus litterarum studiis traditus fuerat; … despectis itaque litterarum studiis …’. [‘Who sent him to Rome for a liberal education … turned his back on literary studies’; Gregory the Great, Dialogues, trans. O. J. Zimmerman (Washington, 2002), pp. 55–6.] Cf. S. Brechter, ‘St. Benedikt und die Antike’, in Benedictus, der Vater des Abendlandes, 547–1947 (Munich, 1947), pp. 139 ff. 4 PL 23, 82 c. 139 f.: ‘… et omnino nullus erit in monasterio, qui non discat litteras’ (‘and there will be no-one at all in the monastery who should not learn litterae’). 5 Florilegium Casinense, in Bibliotheca Casinensis, 5 vols. (Monte Cassino, 1873–80), IV, 138: ‘qui non potest legere’ (‘who cannot read’), should pray. 6 A. Mettler, ‘Laienmönche, Laienbrüder, Conversen, besonders bei den Hirsauern’, Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte 41 (1935), 201–53 (217 ff.); E. Hoffmann, Das Konverseninstitut des Zisterzienserordens, Freiburger Historische Studien 1 (Fribourg, 1905), pp. 13 f. 7 See p. 61 above, at note 19. 8 Gregory I, Dialogues ii.6: ‘Gothus quidam pauper spiritu’ (‘a certain Goth, poor in spirit’); PL 66, 144; ed. U. Moricca, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia 57 (1924), p. 89.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus monastic learning, including extensive references to secular material which he thought necessary for correct understanding of the Bible.9 Cassiodorus also specifically emphasised that intelligence and knowledge did not rest on littera alone. Through his own will, God can bestow complete wisdom on each person, including non-readers, the ‘agrammatus: non tantum litterati, sed etiam qui litteras nesciunt, accipiunt a Deo sapientiam’ (‘illiterate: not only the learned, but also those who do not know their letters receive wisdom from God’).10 For Cassiodorus, as for Caesarius of Arles and unlike Sulpicius Severus, litteratus meant anyone who could read. However, for Cassiodorus (just as for the friend and biographer of Martin of Tours), this is no longer an all-inclusive measure for the spiritual life: even the illitteratus can have wisdom from God, just as even a non-reader can be a full-fledged monk according to the Benedictine Rule. The distinction is not yet the medieval division between litterati and illitterati and between clerics or monks and laymen, but neither is it any longer the ancient division between the literarily educated and the less read. As already recognised by the litteratus Sulpicius, this border had been erased when Christian religious valuation according to the measure of God’s wisdom became more important and essential than book-learning. At the same time, there was also the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great; Cassiodorus had led his chancery and composed and gathered his state letters, and the king was twice described in a near-contemporary Ravennan historical work as inliterattus. That deserves closer scrutiny. Despite much scholarly puzzling, there is no agreement yet about whether Theodoric should be termed illiterate or only unlearned, ‘lacking a learned full education’,11 or whether inlitteratus is intended here in the same sense both times, or used by various authors with varying significance.12 First it is said of him: ‘Dum inlitteratus esset, tantae sapientiae fuit, ut aliqua, 9 Cf.

H. Löwe, ‘Cassiodor’, Romanische Forschungen 60 (1947), 420 ff., esp. 436 ff. divinarum litterarum xxviii, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937), p. 69: ‘non in solis litteris positam esse prudentiam, sed perfectam sapientiam dare Deum unicuique proult vult, … cum multi agrammati (= illitterati) ad verum intellectum perveniant rectamque fidem percipiant caelitus inspiratam’. [‘For if the knowledge of good things were only in letters, those who do not know letters obviously would not have righteous wisdom. But since many illiterate men come to true knowledge and perceive the right faith by heavenly inspiration’; Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul, trans. J. W. Halporn (Liverpool, 2004), pp. 159–60.] The sentence cited in the text above is present as a statement in the margin of the 8th century Bamberg ‘Codex archetypus’. 11 W. Enßlin, ‘Rex Theodericus inlitteratus?’, Historisches Jahrbuch 60 (1940), 393; W. Enßlin, Theoderich der Grosse (Munich, 1947), pp. 25 f. 12 R. Cessi, ‘Theodericus Inlitteratus’, in Miscellanea di studi critici in onore di Vicenzo Crescini (Cividale, 1927), pp. 221–36, and in his edition of the Anonymus Valesianus – see next note. 10 Institutiones

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) quae locutus est, in vulgo usque nunc pro sententia habeantur’ (‘although he was inlitteratus, he was of such great wisdom that, still nowadays, some of his sayings are treated as maxims amongst the people’).13 The Lombard King Liutprand was later characterised by Paul the Deacon at the end of his Lombard History: ‘litterarum quidem ignarus, sed philosophis aequandus’ (‘ignorant indeed of letters but comparable to philosophers’), and Frederick Barbarossa appeared to Bishop Sichard of Cremona as ‘illitteratus, sed morali scientia doctus’ (‘illiterate but learned in moral philosophy’). Similarly, Theodoric is here called illiterate but wise, certainly not a disparagement. Viewed from the medieval perspective, the distinction is credible: the king can be famous as a wise man, even as a philosopher. For example, Theodoric’s grandson and successor Athalaric speaks with Cassiodorus’ words of a purpuratus philosophus (‘a philosopher clad in purple’),14 even though he cannot read and write. An authority on the Middle Ages such as Wolfram von den Steinen takes this characteristic of Theodoric at its word: ‘He had not learned to write, but he knew the Greek way from his youthful years in Byzantium and the Roman way from continual involvement. He did not find the spirit of Antiquity through books, but through his open eye.’15 Philologists and ancient historians, in contrast, perceiving such a royal supporter of education and culture as Theodoric (who ruled Italy with an imperial commission and with Roman help) cannot imagine him as an illiterate and thus cleverly seek to prove that inlitteratus cannot mean ‘ignorant of writing and reading’. At the age of eight, Theodoric came to the imperial court in Byzantium as an Ostrogothic hostage and remained there for a decade. The boy earned the

13 Anonymus

Valesianus, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH Auct. Ant. 9 (1892), p. 322, p. 61; ed. R. Cessi, in L. A. Muratori, Scriptores rerum Italicarum, 2nd series, 24.4 (1913), p. 16, line 19. See p. 82 above on Liutprand and Barbarossa. 14 Athalaric to Cassiodorus, Variae ix.24: ‘nam cum esset publica cura vacuatus, sententias prudentium a tuis fabulis exigebat, ut factis propriis se aequaret antiquis; stellarum cursus, maris sinus, fontium miracula rimator acutissimus inquirebat [sic], ut rerum naturis diligentius perscrutatis quidam purpuratus videretur esse philosophus’; MGH Auct. Ant. 12 (1894), p. 290, line 19. [‘For, when free from public business, he asked you to recount the opinions of the wise, so that he might compare his own deeds with those of antiquity. The courses of the stars, the gulfs of the sea, the marvels of springs were investigated by this shrewd enquirer, so that, by diligent scrutiny of the natural world, he might seem a kind of purple-clad philosopher’; The Variae of Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator: Being Documents of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy, trans. S. J. B. Barnish (Liverpool, 1992), pp. 125–6.] On the sapientia of the Goths and the philosophiae eruditio of earlier Gothic kings, certainly not more capable of reading, cf. Jordanes, Getica xxxix 39 f., MGH Auct. Ant. 5.1 (1882), p. 64. 15 W. von den Steinen, Theoderich und Chlodwig, Philosophie und Geschichte 46 (Tübingen, 1933), p. 14; also F. Schneider, Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter (Munich, 1926), p. 87: ‘der König-Analphabet’ (the illiterate king).

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Litteratus–Illitteratus imperial grace, Jordanes writes in his Gothic History:16 ‘Greece had raised him in the lap of culture, suspecting his future’, extolled the Gallic Bishop Ennodius of Pavia in his bombastic panegyric of 506/7;17 and Greek chroniclers asserted that, raised and educated in the imperial court, he had visited the best teachers in Byzantium.18 How could he not have learned to write then? ‘The entire corpus of classical school instruction was experienced by this Germanic’,19 noted Theodor Birt, ‘and when the prince matured into adulthood, he was a bearer of antiquity, becoming a man of the finest education.’ Wilhelm Capelle also holds that to be certain and ‘fully recognised by serious researchers’;20 he adds that ‘Theodoric even read Homer by himself’. Others are more cautious. ‘If Theodoric did not enjoy any higher schooling’, Ludwig Schmidt writes,21 it was libellous to suggest that he ‘was totally without ability to write when he was king in Italy’; rather, the designation of inlitteratus in Anonymus Valesianus meant only ‘the lack of scholarly education provided him by the grammar schools’. The latest editor of this work, Roberto Cessi, wanted the word to be understood similarly, ‘che al re mancava una cultura letteraria che derivasse da uno studio più o meno sistematico’ (‘that the king lacked a culture of letters derived from a more or less systematic course of study’), but absolutely not as unable to write – for a ruler so famously wise as Theodoric, that seemed to Cessi laughably unbelievable.22 16 Jordanes,

Getica cclxxi, MGH Auct. Ant. 5.1(1882), p. 128, line 6. Jordanes before his conversio like his grandfather was notarius with a prince of the Alani, quamvis agramatus (ibid., cclxvi; p. 126, line 24), probably then not yet able to write. 17 CSEL 6 (1882), p. 264, line 13: ‘educavit te in gremio civilitatis Graecia praesaga futuri’. 18 Joannes Malalas, Chronographia, ed. L. Dindorf, Corpus scriptorum historiae byzantinae 28 (Bonn, 1831), p. 383, line 6: ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει ἀνατραφεὶς καὶ ἀναγνούς (‘(having been) brought up [or educated] in Constantinople and having read’; if ‘having read’ means ‘having studied’, the phrase could be translated: ‘brought up and educated in Constantinople’). Theophanes, Chronographia ed. C. de Boor (Leipzig, 1883), p. 131, line 2: ‘κατὰ γὰρ τὸ Βυξάντιον ὁμηρεύσας ποτὲ τοῖς ἀρίστοις τῶν διδασκάλων ἐποίτησεν’ (‘for having once been a hostage in Byzantium he went to the best of teachers’). 19 T. Birt, Charakterbilder Spätroms, 5th edn (Leipzig, 1930), p. 412 and n. 29. 20 W. Capelle, Die Germanen der Völkerwanderung, Kröners Taschenausgabe 147, (Stuttgart, 1940), p. 353, which refers to A. Nagl, PRE II, 5.2 (1934), col. 1748. Nagl writes, ‘in any case he (Theodoric) did not have a high education – when he obtained his knowledge of languages, he was unable to write’. 21 L. Schmidt, Die Ostgermanen, in Geschichte der deutschen Stämme bis zum Ausgang der Völkerwanderung, 2 vols. (Munich, 1934–8), I, 273. Earlier on Schmidt believed in Theodoric’s ‘Barbarian non-education’; see Historisches Jahrbuch 47 (1927), 727 ff. Cf. Enßlin, Theoderich der Grosse, pp. 24 f. 22 Cessi, ‘Theodericus inlitteratus’, pp. 230 ff. Since Cessi regarded writing as an indispensable ‘mezzo primo della vita intellettuale’ (‘primary means of the intellectual life’), he could not imagine wisdom without writing, and so he attempted to reduce the value of Anonymus Valesianus or to explain it away. W. Stach (Jahresbericht für deutsche Geschichte 3 (1927), 197 f. and ‘Die geschichtliche

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) The same Anonymus Valesianus claims that King Theodoric was inlitteratus and so intellectually slow that in ten years of his rule he was unable even once himself to form the four letters of the usual chancery remark legi (‘I have read’) under his edicts and instead used a gold stencil.23 There is no doubt that the Ostrogothic king was here marked as an illiterate who had not learned to write; whether he could read is in no way proven by legi added by stencil to conform to chancery usage.24 It is indisputable that Theodoric is less amiably characterised than before as the illiterate but wise king; whether this indicates division of the Anonymus Valesianus between two different authors remains in question. At this time, inlitteratus always meant being unlettered, ignorant of writing – it is dubious, frankly impermissible, to use the term in another sense.25

Bedeutung der westgotischen Reichsgründgung’, HV 30 (1935), 417–45) found Cessi’s argument convincing. I find it captious and shaped by prejudice; Enßlin was not aware of it. 23 Anonymus Valesianus, ed. Mommsen, p. 326; ed. Cessi, p. 19: ‘Igitur rex Theodoricus inlitteratus erat et sic obruto sensu, ut in decem annos regni sui quattuor litteras subscriptionis edicti sui discere nullatenus potuisset. De qua re laminam auream iussit interrasilem fieri quattuor litteras “legi” habentem; unde si subscribere voluisset, posita lamina super chartam, per eam pennam ducebat ut subscriptio eius tantum videratur’ (‘King Theodoric was therefore illiterate and so thick that, during the ten years of his reign, he was in no way able to learn the four letters written below his edicts. Concerning this matter, he ordered a thin gold stencil to be made containing the letters “legi” (I have read); if therefore he wished to sign, he placed the stencil over the charter and drew his pen over it so that only his signature was seen’). T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, 2nd edn, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1892–9), III, 268, assessed the conjecture that obtuso senso implied ‘stupid’; he believed that the sentence applied to Emperor Justin was erroneously applied to Theodoric. 24 So thought Birt, Charakterbilder Spätroms, pp. 495 f.: ‘That is the best witness: he had read. But … he wanted to give the legi in fine script, and writing with a free hand was uncomfortable to him. With the use of a stencil the legend of an illiterate was born.’ H. Gelzer agreed, ‘Sechs Urkunden des Georgsklosters Zografu’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 12 (1903), 500, as did E. Stein, De la disparition de l’ Empire d’Occident à la mort de Justinien (476–565), in his Histoire du Bas-Empire, 2 vols. in 3 (Paris, 1949–59), II, 11. K. Hampe, Herrschergestalten der deutschen Mittelalters (Heidelberg, 1945), p. 66, believed Theodoric had made the signing of the documents easier for himself ‘through the use of a stencil, which did not yet mark a Germanic prince raised in Byzantium as an illiterate’; in later editions (6th edn, 1955, p. 16) he added: ‘an intrinsically unlikely assumption, that more recently has been been separated from its sources’ (by Cessi?). 25 See above, pp. 79 f. Boëthius as well uses inlitteratus only to translate ἀγράμματος for inarticulate sounds such as animal sounds: inlitterati soni, vox inlitterata; In librum Aristotelis πεϱὶ έρμηνείας commentarii, ed. C. Meiser, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1877–80), I, 50 and II, 60. Similarly Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae i.1, ed. M. Hertz in H. Keil, Grammatici latini, 8 vols. (Leipzig, 1855–80), II, 5 f. The Cicero citation adduced by Cessi, ‘Theodericus inlitteratus’, p. 232, and others similar to it prove nothing about the meaning of inlitteratus in the sixth century. In his ‘Rex Theodericus inlitteratus?’, pp. 391 ff. and Theoderich der Grosse, p. 26, Enßlin – who does not use Cessi’s essay

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Litteratus–Illitteratus The stencil story is also told of the Eastern Roman-Byzantine Emperor Justin I, Theodoric’s contemporary and Justinian’s uncle and predecessor. Since Procopius of Caesarea expressly describes him as illiterate, and the chronicler Malalas also casts him as ἀγράμματος, he was genuinely illitteratus in the fullest, indisputable sense;26 he was a warrior of Illyrian origins, who had earned his way to commander of the imperial bodyguard. After the death of Emperor Anastasius he was elected successor and still had not learned to write in the near-decade of his rule (10 July 518 to 1 August 527). Yet he had carefully seen to the education of his nephew Justinian even in the literary arts, though the boy was the son of a peasant and herdsman. What the Valesian Anonymous reports about Theodoric is also true for Justin: that in decem annos regni sui (‘in ten years of his reign’ – whom he elsewhere credits with thirty-three years of rule) he never learned to sign his edicts without a stencil.27 There is the obvious suspicion (albeit perhaps untrue) that the stencil anecdote was transferred from Justin to Theodoric to brand him as an illiterate. But was that a malicious libel?28 The parallels to Emperor Justin still show that, even in Constantinople, a warrior long in imperial military service who did not know how to read or write, even after long residence in the capital city, could achieve the throne anyway and could reign with capable,

and edition and does not attribute the Anonymus Valesianus to different authors – provides on each occasion a different interpretation of inlitteratus. 26 Procopius, Anecdota (Historia arcana) vi, Opera, ed. J. Henry, 3 vols. in 4 (Leipzig, 1905–13), III.1, 41 ff.; Johannes Malalas, Chronographia, ed. Dindorf, p. 410, line 8; (Oxford, 1691), p. 131. Cessi, ‘Theodericus Inlitteratus’, p. 230, regards this – for both Justin and Theodoric – as ‘cosa troppo ridicola per esser creduta’ (‘too ridiculous to be believed’), while Birt, Charakterbilder Spätroms, believes Procopius but not the Valesian Anonymous; also Enßlin, Theoderich de Grosse, p. 305. Cessi puts out of court the acceptance of the Valesian Anonymous’s literary dependence on Byzantine sources which is found in Hodgkin, Enßlin and others. But – how complicatedly coincidental this would have to be: the same anecdotes, embodying the same malicious misinterpretation of a new chancery procedure, being manufactured twice! 27 Anonymus Valesianus § 59, ed. Mommsen, MGH Auct. Ant. 9 (1892), p. 322; ed. Cessi p. 16 (c. 14). 28 Enßlin, Theoderich der Grosse, p. 26 thinks this. In ‘Rex Theodericus inlitteratus?’, p. 396, he holds it as ‘finally proven’ that Theodoric could read and write because of his signature in the Roman Synodal acts of 501. MGH Auct. Ant. 12 (1894), pp. 402, line 12, 422, line 13: ‘alia manu: orate pro nobis domini ac venerabiles patres’ (‘in another hand: Lord and venerable fathers, pray for us’). Hodgkin also referred to this, Italy and Her Invaders, III, 451. Stein (Historie du Bas-Empire, II, 792) regards this as a preuve directe that Theodoric learned to write after ten years of rule – that is the way Stein interprets the Valesian Anonymous. But Thompson (Literacy, p. 13) had already rightly described the notion that Theodoric wrote these words himself as ‘pure hypothesis’. They are formulaic; cf. Chlothar’s edict to the bishops in 511, MG. Capit. 1, p. 2.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) educated advisors such as Justinian. Such was even more the case with a Germanic king serving as imperial governor in Italy, where – for decades under Odoacer and Ricimer – they were used to nothing else. Odoacar had his documents signed by others,29 just as Theodoric used a stencil. Had he been able to read and write it would have been surprising and noteworthy to contemporaries, since many other Germanic kings of his time, and even the Byzantine Emperor Justin, could not; it would hardly have remained unremarked in the many observations about Theodoric or in his own state acts. One thus needs more clear and valid evidence to refute the double assertion of Anonymus Valesianus that Theodoric was illiteratus. Instead, it is fully confirmed by Procopios of Caesarea’s unequivocal testimony in his history of the Gothic Wars, in which he participated as secretary of the Byzantine commander Belisarius. He tells us that Theodoric’s daughter Amalasuntha had her eight-year-old son Athalaric, who entered her guardianship as his grandfather’s successor but died eight years later, educated in the Roman manner and for that purpose placed him in a Roman school with three old Goths handpicked for the purpose. The Goths were very displeased: they wanted the future king to be educated in the traditional manner, without writing, so that he did not learn to fear the elderly teacher’s stick. According to them, Theodoric’s own wishes were similar; he had created a vast realm without knowing anything about γράμματα, litterae. For that reason and in order that her son might become a proper king in their manner, Amalasuntha had to release her son’s Roman teacher and allow her son to grow up among his Gothic contemporaries.30 Procopios then describes the negative consequences of this traditional Gothic education, but had no evident reason to suggest an explanation to the Goths or Theodoric or to ‘exaggerate’ their ‘lack of education’. Rather, he was the first to attempt to explain how the Goths and their king (one might say the Germans in general and the medieval nobility still) thought of writing: writing and book learning is not the concern of warriors, of the nobility or

29 Schmidt,

Ostgermanen, p. 317. Bella Gothica I.ii.16, Opera, ed. Haury II, 10 ff. In his Theodorich der Grosse, p. 358 and ‘Rex Theodoricus inlitteratus?’, pp. 392 f., Enßlin regards it as a ‘gross exaggeration’ to hold that Theodoric did not know the disciplines, higher education or even the letters from hearing them (καίπερ γραμμάτων οὐδέ ὅσον ἀκοὴν ἔχων). Cessi, ‘Rex Theodericus inlitteratus?’, p. 235: ‘non vi si parla dell’ elementare istruzione dei fanciulli, ma delle scuole di γραμματιστοῦ’ (‘one is not talking here of the elementary instruction of little children, but schools of grammarians’); similarly Schmidt, Ostgermanen, p. 273. But the very first school visit of the boy Athalaric provided the occasion of this protest! Entirely puzzlingly, A. Schenk von Stauffenberg, Das Imperium und die Völkerwanderung (München, 1947), p. 138: ‘However, what if that had been a mask of Theodoric, … a sovereign form of irony, of a very urbane and also very kingly form of irony?’

30 Procopius,

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Litteratus–Illitteratus of the ruler, despite all due respect to the indispensable art of writing left to others – first the Romans and later to clerics and monks. All evidence indicates that this was also Theodoric’s attitude, whose entire order of state rested on the notion that his Goths and Germans alone carried the sword, and that the Romans alone carried the pen for his state administration and cultural projects. His grandson and successor, Athalaric, who was not allowed to go to school, issued a warning to the Roman Senate through Cassiodorus in 533 not to reduce the stipends of teachers in the scholae liberalium litterarum (‘schools of liberal letters’), since grammatics – origin and foundation of all litterae, Cassiodorus calls them elsewhere – are the particularly obligatory privilege of the Romans; ‘hac (grammatica) non utuntur barbari reges’ (‘barbarian kings do not use this [grammar]’). Is that any different from saying that the Gothic and Germanic kings make no use of school- and writing-Latin, the written language, and with it writing altogether, that they are illiterate, even if they can understand and use casual Latin? ‘Grammatics, which from the splendid reading of the Ancients can be of use to us with advice’, remained with the Romans as legales domini (legal lords), while ‘arma et reliqua gentes habent’ (‘the peoples have arms and the rest’). 31 It is understandable that Amalasuntha wanted to have her son taught by Roman teachers: she herself also had an ‘invaluable knowledge of litterae’.32 In the Ostrogothic royal house, as later with the medieval nobility, such was regarded as proper and commendable for women. Her daughter Mataswintha was also educated in literature, and Theodoric’s niece Amalaberga, who married the Thuringian king Herminfrid, was recommended not only for being virtuous and pretty, but also litteris docta33 – probably the first reading person in Thuringia, where this almost unknown art must have excited awesome amazement. For men, in contrast 31 Variae

IX.21.iv; MGH Auct. Ant. 12 (1894), p. 286. XI.1.vi–vii; p. 328: ‘Atticae facundiae claritate diserta est, Romani eloquii pompa resplendet, nativi sermonis ubertate gloriatur. Iungitur his rebus quasi diadema eximium inpretiabilis notitia litterarum, per quam, dum veterum prudentia discitur, regalis dignitas semper augetur’. [‘She is fluent in the splendour of Greek oratory; she shines in the glory of Roman eloquence; the flow of her ancestral speech brings her glory; she surpasses all in their own languages, and is equally wonderful in each … To this is added, as it were a glorious diadem, the priceless knowledge of literature, through which she learns the wisdom of the ancients, and the royal dignity’; trans. Barnish, p. 146.] Nothing comparable was ever said of Theodoric. 33 Variae IV.1.2; p. 114: ‘Habebit felix Thoringia, quod nutrivit Italia, litteris doctam, moribus eruditam, decoram non solum genere quantum et feminea dignitate, ut minus patria vestra istius resplendeat moribus quam suis triumphis’. [‘Fortunate Thoringia will possess what Italy has reared, a woman learned in letters, schooled in moral character, glorious not only for her lineage, but equally for her feminine 32 Ibid.,

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) (even for kings), this was not the case; in fact, reading could only harm them: one who had sat on a school bench would never become a fearless warrior. Theodoric’s nephew Theodahad, Amalasuntha’s husband, provided a cautionary example: educated in the Roman style and interested in philosophy, but unwarlike and cowardly,34 he failed disastrously as a king. In 535, at the outbreak of war with Byzantium, Cassiodorus praises him in a rhetorical message of the Senate to Justinian by letting the goddess Roma say: ‘habui multos reges, sed neminem huiusmodi litteratum, habui prudentes viros, sed nullum sic doctrina et pietate pollentem’ (‘I had many kings, but no one educated in this way; I had prudent men, but none so strong in learning and piety’);35 he was correct that no king in Italy had ever been litteratus in this way, including Theodoric. And the same held true for the subsequent Lombard kings up to the eighth century: none was ever termed litteratus, and Liutprand († 744) was explicitly called litterarum ignarus (‘ignorant of letters’). In contrast, Bishop Nicetas of Trier could write to King Alboin’s († 572) wife, the Frankish king’s daughter Chlodoswintha, that she should ‘et bene legas et bene illi frequenter exponere studeas’ (‘both read well and apply herself well to frequently explaining it to him’), namely his letter, to win Alboin for the Catholic confession.36 And Queen Theodelinda, daughter of Duke Garibald of Bavaria, who married the Lombard king Authari in 589, and after his death in 590 married his successor Agilulf, was literate enough to correspond with Pope Gregory I.37 In other Eastern-German royal foundations on Roman provincial soil, the same pattern held. The Vandal kings of North Africa in the times of Theodoric and Cassiodorus were no longer as foreign to Latin and literature as Geiseric, who needed an interpreter in negotiations with Catholic bishops.38 After his son and successor Huneric married the Roman emperor’s daughter Eudokia, whose son Hilderic came to power only after his cousins (523–530), Roman-Byzantine influences became strong enough

dignity. So your country will be famous for her character, no less than for its victories’; trans. Barnish, p. 74.] 34 Procopius, De bello Italico adversus Gothos gesto I.iii.1, ed. Haury, II, 15; Cassiodorus, Variae X.3.iv–v, p. 299, speaks of his ‘eruditio litterarum … etiam ecclesiasticis est litteris eruditus’. [‘Literary learning … also learned in ecclesiastical letters’; ed. Barnish, p. 131.] 35 Variae XI.13.4; p. 342, line 18. 36 MGH Epp. 3 (1892), p. 122. 37 Gregory I, Registrum iv.4 and 33, MGH Epp. 1 (1891), pp. 236 and 268 f.; ix.67, MGH Epp. 2 (1899), p. 87; and especially xiv.12, MGH Epp. 2, p. 431, on Theodelinda’s writings. 38 Victor of Vita, Historia Persecutionis Africae provinciae i.18, MGH Auct. Ant. 3, p. 5, line 21. Cf. L. Schmidt, Geschichte der Vandalen, 2nd edn (Munich, 1942), pp. 189 ff.; R. Heuberger, ‘Vandalische Reichskanzlei und Königsurkunden’, MIÖG, Supplement 11 (1929), 80 f.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus that many Vandals attended lectures of grammarians along with Romans.39 Yet Bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe († 533), whose grandfather had to flee Carthage before the approaching Vandals and who himself was banished by them to Sardinia not long after, could speak from knowledge – if perhaps exaggerated out of resentment – ‘These barbarians are so hostile to writing that they drag anyone to torture who is simply able to write his own name’.40 The Visigoths in Spain attained stronger and more lasting contact with literary culture;41 but the Latin-writing and versifying King Sisebut (612–620), the friend of Isidore of Seville, was an isolated exception among them as well. For these originally illiterate Germanic warrior peoples who dynamically burst into the cultural region of antiquity, the concept litteratus now meant being able to read and write – in other words, it meant knowing Latin. And for a long time the Western cultural world was bilingual. Everything written was and remained Latin, no longer as a mother tongue but learned only in school. Meanwhile, the Germanic languages with their own heritage of poetry, saga and law (as well as the emerging Romance languages) existed only outside writing – in Italy it lasted the longest, into the thirteenth century.42 A century and a half before Theodoric, Wulfila attempted to write in the Goth’s own language – at least the Bible and liturgy and occasionally charters, even in Theodoric’s time43 – but the effort was subsequently regarded as inconsequential; and with the use of such texts in Arian liturgical service of the Goths, Vandals, Lombards, it died. The palimpsests with Latin superimposed on Gothic texts symbolically illustrate how Latin concealed and displaced the German. When the Franks finally converted, not to the Arianism of the Ostrogoths and Theodoric, but to the Athanasian, CatholicRoman confession, they shared the divine service in Latin Church language with the Roman population of Gaul. Therewith they absorbed the entire rich heritage of ancient and patristic writings in Latin, which they were required to learn if becoming a cleric or a monk. Otherwise, one hardly needed to read and write at all, but could simply listen and pray, learning the Confession, the Our Father and some psalms by heart.

39 Dracontius,

Carmina Profana i.14, MGH Auct. Ant. 14 (1905), p. 132. Opera, ed. R. Helm (Leipzig, 1898), p. 9. Cf. Helm, ‘Der Bischof Fulgentius und der Mythograph’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 54 (1899), 125. 41 Cf. P. Kirn, ‘Zum Problem der Kontinuitat zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter’, Archiv für Urkundenforschung 10 (1928), 130. 42 Cf. K. Vossler, ‘Wie erklärt sich der späte Beginn der Vulgarliteratur in Italien?’, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturgeschichte n.s. 15 (1903), 21–32. 43 H. F. Massmann, Die gothischen Urkunden von Neapel und Arezzo (Munich, 1837). Also in W. Streitberg, Die gotische Bibel, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Heidelberg, 1919–28), I, 479. Cf. F. Wrede, Über die Sprache der Ostgoten in Italien (Strasbourg, 1891), pp. 138 f. 40 Fulgentius,

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970)

IV The Frankish Merovingian kings regarded themselves as different from the Ostrogothic kings and empire builders in several respects. Already by the fifth century, the Franks had long stood on Roman provincial soil in close contact with the Roman state and cultural tradition – a legacy which they adopted and applied, along with ecclesiastical organisation and education, for the foundation of their realm. Chlodwig’s father Childeric († 481) had his seal ring, found with his grave treasure in Tournai, carved with the Latin words Childerici regis (‘of King Childeric’). Like the founder himself, he is correctly seen as knowing Latin. Whether they were also able to read and write Latin is hard to discern. Chlodwig’s son Childebert († 558) is supposed to have mastered the foreign language perfectly, and banned heathen songs and usages.1 The youngest grandson of Chlodwig, Chilperic (who was murdered in 584 and whose descendants alone continued the dynasty) was celebrated by his Ravennan-educated court poet Venantius Fortunatus for his advanced education; indeed, he wrote a text on the Trinity as well as religious poetry on the model of Sedulius, of which a hymn to Medardus survives.2 According to Gregory of Tours, who hated the king as the Nero and Herod of his own time, Chilperic’s Trinitarian ideas were perverse and his verse doggerel, but he was nonetheless educated and active in literature, as were many Frankish court officials and noble laity of this time as well.3 In addition, Gregory of Tours says that to supplement the Latin alphabet, King Childeric created four new letters to complement the Latin alphabet, signs for the long-o (omega), for ae, th (the Germanic thorn) and w. Further, he ordered that boys across the Frankish realm should be instructed accordingly and that old books were to have the letters in question inserted. 1 MGH

Capit. reg. Fr. 1 (1883), pp. 1 f.; E. Gamillscheg, Romania Germanica, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1934–6), I, 286. Cf. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum vi.24, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, 2nd edn, MGH SS rer. Merov. 1, 2nd edn (1951), p. 291: ‘diligenti cura nutritus, ut regum istorum mos est’ (‘brought up with care and diligence as is the custom with those kings’). 2 Gregory of Tours, Historia v.44, ed. Krusch and Levison, pp. 252 f. MedardusHymnus, ed. P. von Winterfeld, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 46 (1904), 73 ff.; also MGH Poetae 4.2–3 (1923), pp. 455 ff., and C. Blume, Analecta hymnica medii aevi 51 (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 243 ff. On Chilperic’s education, cf. Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina, epistolae et expositiones ix.1, lines 91 ff., MGH Auct. Ant. 4.1 (1881), p. 203. 3 On the mayor of the palace Gogo († 591), see Gregory of Tours, Historia v.46 and vi.1, ed. Krusch and Levison, pp. 256 and 265 f. Asteriolus and Secundinus in Theudebert’s court I: Historia, iii.33 (pp. 128 f.). Parthenius, Historia, iii. 36 (p. 131). On Sigibert III’s referendary, Bonitus, see his life in MGH Scr. rer. Merov. 6 (1913), p. 120, etc. Cf. H. Pirenne, ‘De l’état de l’instruction des laïques à l’époque mérovingienne’, Revue Bénedictine 46 (1934), 165 ff.; K. F. Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel in spätantiken Gallien (Tübingen, 1948), pp. 106 ff.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus The fact that this evidence has remained unconfirmed by other testimony or illuminating report has long puzzled scholars. Recently, Bruno Krusch thoroughly investigated the tradition of these new signs in the manuscripts of Gregory’s History of the Franks,4 arguing that it was merely a light-hearted game or trick of the king, ‘crazy but remarkable’. The fact that Suetonius says that the Emperor Claudius (c. 41) introduced three new letters was not known at the Merovingian court, but, rather, Quintilian’s thoughts in his Institutiones, used as a textbook (I, 4, 7 ff.), as to whether Latin was not lacking some indispensable symbols for sounds, v along with u, k along with q, j along with i and so on. That King Chilperic wanted to supplement Latin with signs for sounds in the Germanic languages unknown to the classical language, such as w and th, also ae – for which different signs were actually introduced into Anglo-Saxon a century and a half later – cannot be doubted, despite Gregory’s lack of understanding. That can only mean that non-Latin, Germanic-Frankish words were to be spelled out reproducing sounds for which the Latin alphabet did not suffice.5 In old books only proper names had to be corrected, at best, and in all events the vernacular glosses of national laws written in Latin. How much further King Chilperic wished to go in making Frankish writeable unfortunately cannot be determined from Gregory’s brief, dismissive comments. Yet even if it had no discernible effect, the early attempt of this literarily minded king merits respect; unwilling to allow Latin script and the Germanic-Frankish language to continue ever divided and disconnected (along with its literary and vernacular heritage) he instead wished to enable writing in the mother tongue. The greatest success was had by the Anglo-Saxons. Although they learned the art of writing only after their Christianisation through Latin, they very soon thereafter were using it for translation into Anglo-Saxon (having added several letters), and to draft charters and laws, annals and works of poetry such as the Song of Beowulf.6 For the Anglo-Saxons, and in contrast to the 4 B.

Krusch, ‘Die neuen Buchstaben König Chilperichs I.’, HV 27 (1932), 744–57.

5 Thus for the first time M. Tangl in the Reallexikon der Germananischen Altertumskunde,

4 vols. (Strasbourg, 1911–19), I, 397. Despite ridicule – with reason – from Krusch, ‘Buchstaben König Chilperichs’, pp. 756 f.) he was followed by S. Hellmann, in his translation of Gregory, 4th edn, in Geschichtschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit, 96 parts (Leipzig, 1884–1929), IX.1, 89, and by R. Buchner in the bilingual edition, Ausgewälte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters. Freiherr vom Stein-Gedächtnis-Ausgabe, in progress (Darmstadt, 1955–), I, 365. Cf. also G. Baesecke, Vor- und Frühgeschichte des Deutschen Schriftums, 2 vols (Halle, 1950), II, 25; B. Bischoff, in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß, ed. Stammler, I, 414. 6 On the following, cf. Baesecke, Vor- u. Frühgeschichte des Deutschen Schriftums, I, 143 ff.; M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900, 2nd edn (Ithaca and London, 1957); W. L. Renwick and H. Orton, The Beginnings of English Literature (London, 1939); C. W. Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry (London, 1943); D. Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (Harmondsworth, 1952), pp. 189 ff.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) southern Romance lands, the long tradition of written Latin was not an impenetrable and closed literary ‘superstructure’; in the latter, litterati might perceive the Latin-derived vernacular as a degenerated version of the pristine original written language. But Anglo-Saxon was alien and distinct enough that one could write it without concern that it would spoil the Latin learned from ancient texts of good quality. Bede, for example, composed the Creed and the Our Father for the idiotae who understood solely their Anglo-Saxon mother tongue,7 but at the end of his life he also wanted to translate the Gospel of John8 for them. On his deathbed, he recited Anglo-Saxon verses between Latin prayers, ‘ut erat doctus in nostris carminibus’ (‘as he was learned in our verses’).9 In his Ecclesiastical History of the Anglo-Saxons (iv.22), he relates how the layman Caedmon became a Christian poet who took his Anglo-Saxon Bible poems to the doctores, whom he thanked for the material and said they could then copy down. The Ecclesiastical History itself, which Bede dedicated to King Ceowulf of Northumbria, ‘ad legendum ac probandum … ad transcribendum ac plenius ex tempore meditandum’ (‘for reading and approval, for transcribing and meditating on more fully with time’), was translated into Anglo-Saxon a century and a half later, along with the history of Orosius, by King Alfred the Great.10 Nowhere else would anything like that happen until the thirteenth century. Alfred’s initiative presumed readers among the idiotae, the non-Latinists, the least of readers for them. The rich, manifold tradition of Anglo-Saxon texts from the seventh to the tenth centuries is witness to this unusually early reception of the vernacular into script. Indeed, the life of Alfred the Great († 899) by his writing teacher Asser, written in 893, most clearly permits us to recognise the peculiarity as well as the difficulties of reading and writing in two languages. Alfred’s mother, Osburh, the wife of King Aethelwulf of Wessex, daughter of his head of household Oslac, showed her children a book with Saxon poems, which she was apparently able to read, and promised to give it to the one who would be first to learn the poem by heart. Her youngest son, Alfred (born 848), further enchanted by a beautiful initial in the book, took it from his mother’s hands, ran with it to his teacher, had the poem read out until he could recite it and 7 See

above p. 61 and note 19.

8 Directly after Bede’s death in 735, his pupil Cuthbert wrote: ‘a capite sancti evangelii

Johannis usque ad … (John 6. 9) in nostram linguam ad utilitatem ecclesiae Dei convertit’; Baedae opera historica, ed. Plummer, I, 162. [‘The gospel of St John, which he was turning into our mother tongue, from the beginning as far as …’ (from John 1. 1 to 6. 9); ‘Letter of Cuthbert to Cuthwin’, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 579–89, at 583.] 9 Ed. Plummer, I, 161. 10 Bede translation: ed. J. Smith (Cambridge, 1722); Orosius translation: ed. H. Sweet (London, 1859).

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Litteratus–Illitteratus received the book.11 Soon he also procured a book with Hours, Psalms and prayers and kept it with him day and night orationis gratia (‘for the sake of prayer’). Nevertheless, Asser writes (c. 22) that he remained illitteratus until his twelfth year, or even longer. Asser could only mean by this that from then on Alfred could at least read Anglo-Saxon. For Asser served the king as reader until much later, in 887, when he helped the now almost forty-year-old king for the first time to begin to read for himself (that is, to read Latin) and to translate.12 Until then, among all his obligations as ruler, military emergencies and tormenting illnesses, he had material ceaselessly read to him and translated in every free hour, retaining much by memory, particularly carmina Saxonica (Saxon poems).13 He often complained of it as the hardest loss in his life, that in his youthful learning years, when he had the time, his deepest wish to learn the artes liberales remained unfulfilled, because at the time there were no good reading masters (lectores) in all of Wessex.14 Alfred wanted to save his own and other children from this privation. Thus he had his youngest son, Aethelweard, along with almost all noble and many non-noble children of the land, read Latin and Saxon in the school of a good teacher before they were ready for hunting and other skills of the nobility.15 His two eldest sons, who grew up at the court, had 11 Asser,

De rebus gestis Alfredi xxiii f., ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), pp. 20 f. lxxxvii f., pp. 73 ff.: ‘Eodem quoque anno (887) … divino instinctu legere et interpretari simul uno eodemque die primitus inchoavit’ [‘It was also in this year … through divine inspiration he began to read [Latin] and to translate at the same time, all on one and the same day’; Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 99.] Then Asser tells ‘causam huius tardae inchoationis’ (‘the reason for this late start’). Cf. lxxvii, p. 63, on Alfred’s reader, through whom he ‘pene omnium librorum notitiam habebat, quamvis per se ipsum aliquid adhuc de libris intelligere non posset. Nam enim adhuc aliquid legere inceperat’ [‘he acquired some acquaintance with almost all books, even though he could not at this point understand anything in the books by himself; for he had not yet begun to read anthing’; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, p. 91]. This certainly means Latin books. 13 Ibid., lxxvi, p. 59: ‘Saxonicos libros recitare [sic] et maxime carmina Saxonica memoriter discere aliis imperare et salus assidue pro viribus studiossime non desinebat’. [‘Reading aloud from books in English and above all learning English poems by heart; issuing orders to his fellows: all these things he did himself with great application to the best of his abilities’; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, p. 91.] 14 Ibid., xxiv, p. 21. Also in the preface to his translation of Gregory I’s Cura pastoralis, Alfred complains that there were only a few in England who could translate their Book of Hours into English or read aloud a Latin letter in English; King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. H. Sweet, Early English Text Society (vol. 2 is Original Series 50), 2 vols. (London, 1871–2), I, 3. 15 Asser, lxxv, p. 58: ‘Aethelweard, omnibus iunior, ludis literariae disciplinae … cum omnibus pene totius regionis nobilibus infantibus et etiam multis ignobilibus sub diligenti magistrorum cura traditus est. In qua schola utriusque linguae libri, 12 Ibid.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) to learn the Psalms and Saxon books, particularly Saxon poetry, and use books, probably therefore also reading Saxon, but not Latin.16 Further, King Alfred demanded that those who who served in the judicial courts be able to read in order to know the laws thoroughly; they were almost all illitterati, but preferred the trouble of learning the difficult art over that of losing their jurisdiction. Whoever was too old or incapable would have a son or a relative learn to read, or one of his people, free or unfree, and have this person zealously read out loud from Anglo-Saxon books.17 How Latinae scilicet et Saxonicae, assidue legebantur, scriptioni quoque vacabant, ita ut antequam aptas humanis artibus vires haberent, venatoriae scilicet et ceteris artibus, quae nobilibus conveniunt, in liberalibus artibus studiosi et ingeniosi viderentur’. This also characterises noble education. [‘Æthelweard, the youngest of all, as a result of divine wisdom and the remarkable foresight of the king, was given over to training in reading and writing under the attentive care of teachers, in company with all the nobly born children of virtually the entire area, and a good many of lesser birth as well. In this school books in both languages – that is to say, in Latin and English – were carefully read; they also devoted themselves to writing, to such an extent that, even before they had the requisite strength for manly skills (hunting that is, and other skills appropriate to noblemen), they were to be devoted and intelligent students of the liberal arts’; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, p. 90.] 16 Ibid., pp. 58 f.: ‘Nec etiam illi sine liberali disciplina inter cetera praesentis vitae studia, quae nobilibus conveniunt, otiose et incuriose vivere permittuntur; nam et psalmos et Saxonicos libros et maxime Saxonica carmina studiose didicere, et frequentissime libris utuntur. [‘Nor, amid the other pursuits of this present life which are appropriate to the nobility, are those two allowed to live idly and indifferently, with no liberal education, for they have attentively learned the Psalms, and books in English, and especially English poems, and they very frequently make use of books’; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, pp. 90–1.] Cf. lxxvi, p. 60: Filios quoque eorum, qui in regali familia nutriebantur, non minus propriis diligens, omnibus bonis moribus instituere et literis imbuere … non desinebat’. [‘Nor … did he cease from personally giving, by day and night, instruction in all virtuous behaviour and tutelage in literacy to their sons, who were being brought up in the royal household’; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, p. 91.] In the preface to his translation of the Cura pastoralis, of which every bishopric received a copy, King Alfred desired that the children of all free persons with the means should at least learn English and Latin if they so wished. 17 Asser cvi, p. 94: ‘Comites et praepositi ad aequitatis discendae studium totis viribus se vertere nitebantur, ita ut mirum in modum illiterati ab infantia comites pene omnes, praepositi ac ministri literatoriae arti studerent, malentes insuetam disciplinam quam laboriose discere quam potestatum ministeria dimittere. Sed si aliquis litteralibus studiis aut pro senio vel etiam pro nimia inusitati ingenii tarditate proficere non valeret, suum si haberet filium aut etiam aliquem propinquum suum vel etiam, si aliter non habeat, suum proprium hominem liberum vel servum, quem ad lectionem longe ante promoverat, libros ante se die nocteque, quandocunque unquam ullam haberet licentiam, Saxonicos imperabat recitare. Et suspirantes nimium intima mente dolebant eo quod in iuventute sua talibus studiis non studuerant, felices arbtrantes huius temporis iuvenes, qui liberalibus artibus feliciter erudiri poterant, se vero infelices existimantes, qui nec hoc in iuventute didicerant nec etiam in senectute, quamvis inhianter desiderarent, poterant discere’.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus effective or lasting these efforts were remains an open question, but at any rate it reveals how determined they were to bring the difficult art of reading and writing to the laity, as well as the benefit of vernacular poetry and law. These efforts were consolidated in King Alfred’s love of books and his late-satiated hunger for reading (he who among the Anglo-Saxon kings had hardly a precursor or successor),18 conditions being better among the Anglo-Saxons after their Christianisation than elsewhere. Through AngloSaxon missionaries these impulses also influenced the Frankish realm from the eighth century on.

V Much attention and discussion has been devoted to Henri Pirenne’s thesis that in the realm of the Merovingians many more laymen, court officials and, above all, merchants were capable of writing and reading (even if they wrote casual Latin in a rapid cursive), while it was only in the Carolingian period under Anglo-Saxon influence – after the intervention of Islam in the southern Mediterranean lands blocked the importation of papyrus – that Latin was improved and then developed into a scholars’ language. Thus did writing and reading become restricted to clerics and monks alone, who now wrote slowly and cleanly on expensive, rare parchment.1 19

[‘As a result nearly all the ealdorman and reeves and thegns (who were illiterate from childhood) applied themselves in an amazing way to learning how to read, preferring rather to learn this unfamiliar discipline (no matter how laboriously) than to relinquish their offices of power. But if one of them – either because of his age or because of the unresponsive nature of his unpracticed intelligence – was unable to make progress in learning to read, the king commanded the man’s son (if he had one) or some relative of his, or even (if he had no one else) a man of his own – whether freeman or slave – whom he had caused to be taught to read long before, to read out books in English to him by day and night, or whenever he had the opportunity. Sighing greatly from the bottom of their hearts, these men regretted that they had not applied themselves to such pursuits in their youth and considered the youth of the present day to be fortunate; who had the luck to be instructed in the liberal arts, but counted themselves unfortunate because they had not learned such things in their youth nor even in their old age, even though they ardently wished that they had been able to do so’; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, p. 110.] 18 V. H. Galbraith, ‘The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings’, Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935), pp. 201 ff. 1 H. Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne, 2nd edn (Paris, 1937); German translation by P. E. Hübinger, Geburt des Abendlandes, 2nd edn (Nijmegen, 1942), esp. pp. 129 ff. and 277 ff. See on this Pirenne’s earlier works: ‘Le Commerce de Papyrus dans la Gaule Mérovingienne’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris, 1928), pp. 178–91; ‘L’instruction des marchands au Moyen-âge’, Annales d’hist. écon. et soc. 1 (1929), 13–28; ‘De l’état de l’instruction des laïques à l’époque mérovingienne’, Revue Bénedictine 46 (1934), 165–77.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) But this thesis not only oversimplifies circumstances, it fundamentally fails to capture the essentials. On the one hand, there is evidence of illiterate merchants precisely in southern Gaul in the sixth century and a shortage of papyrus in northern Gaul; on the other hand, under the first Carolingians and up to the ninth century, there were still more lay authors (even in Germany) than in the seventh, a period short on literacy long before the expansion of Islam. Pirenne neither notes the early separation of written Latin from spoken language in the Romance lands, nor the attempt to receive the vernacular into writing, which Anglo-Saxons succeed in accomplishing without excluding the laity from literacy. Linguistic conditions in Germany and in non-Romanised Austrasia were similar in many ways to those in England, modified only by the combination of state and church in Gaul. The Anglo-Saxon mission in the eastern Frankish realm strengthened and encouraged many already tangible beginnings and possibilities. That the earliest Carolingian charters (first preserved original from 753) were written in unmistakably better Latin than the last Merovingian documents (last preserved original from 717) was explained by Theodor Sickel: the Merovingian chancery personnel came from Gaul and Roman-influenced Neustria, while those of the Carolingians stemmed from German Austrasia. ‘Since these did not speak a Romance language as a mother-tongue, they were naturally unlikely to mix written Latin with the spoken Romance vernacular.’ There were, however, hardly any laymen literate in Latin on Germanic soil and ‘so the chancery became an office entirely staffed by clerics’.2 The Carolingian Mayors of the Palace, and even King Pippin, were illiterate, as were their Austrasian lay aristocratic predecessors. A brother of Charles Martel, Pippin’s uncle Childebrand, had the Chronicle of Fredegar continued as a sort of Carolingian house chronicle until 751, and his son Nibelung supplemented it until the reign of Pippin, to 754;3 whether these two Carolingian counts could write is uncertain. Einhard famously said (c. 25) of Charlemagne that he could speak Latin almost like his Frankish mother tongue, had learned to understand a little Greek and that even as an old man he tried to learn to write, keeping a slate under his pillow at night to get his fingers accustomed to the letters – yet with little success, Einhard freely admits, and he was in a position to know. As Alfred the Great did later, Charlemagne tried to spare his children such belated endeavours by having them instructed in the studia liberalia early, before his sons took up riding and hunting in the Frankish style and his daughters learned spinning. Probably no later Carolingians were entirely ignorant of writing and Latin from childhood on. 20

21

2 Thus

Kirn, ‘Zum Problem der Kontinuität’, pp. 133 f., who erroneously names J. Ficker instead of T. Sickel, ‘Lehre von den Urkunden der ersten Karolinger’, Acta regum et imperatorum Karolinorum, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1867), I, 152 f. Cf. H. Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1915), I, 338 f. 3 MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2 (1885), p. 182.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus But, according to Charlemagne, writing should not to be restricted to Latin. ‘Inchoavit et grammaticam patrii sermonis’ (‘he began a grammar also of his forefathers’ tongue’), Einhard says rather laconically.4 Grammatica was the discipline of regulated written speech, Latin; grammatice loqui meant to speak Latin, and grammatica often meant Latin specifically. No grammatica of other languages yet existed; they did not have letters, grammata, litterae, but only sounds which one might occasionally render into the Latin alphabet in annotations on Latin glosses as today is done for dialects. As Charlemagne certainly did not intend to commission a linguistics textbook, creating a ‘Grammar of the mother tongue’ meant nothing less than transforming the GermanicFrankish conversational language into a regulated written language – one that could be rendered into script and ‘capable of a literature’, as was only Latin outside of England. Then even those with no Latin, even idiotae who spoke only one language, would no longer remain illiterati. Moreover, instead of being transmitted solely through Latin translation, the vernacular tradition in poetry and law would enter script such as the Waltharius or the Leges barbarorum (Laws of the barbarians). Without doubt, this was Charlemagne’s desire and goal. Einhard relates in the same chapter 29 of his biography that Charlemagne not only wanted the previously unwritten people’s laws recorded, but also songs of royal deeds and wars – the old ‘barbara carmina (scripsit memoriae mandavit)’ (‘barbarian poems [he commanded should be written down so that they would be remembered]’). And that required a grammatica patrii sermonis. However, we cannot know the extent to which it may have actually developed.5 Possibly reflecting such interests is the fact that part of the Hildebrandslied was written down around 800 by two monks on the blank front and reverse side of a Latin theological manuscript in Fulda, where Einhard taught; alternatively, the text could have been a product of AngloSaxon models and inspiration, given the prevalence of its written signs at Fulda. 22

23

4 Vita

Karoli xxix; ed. Holder-Egger, p. 33. This seldom correctly evaluated sentence can best be explained by the strong remark of Otfrid of Weissenburg in his Latin dedication of his Frankish verse to Archbishop Liutbert of Mainz, Otfrids Evangelienbuch, ed. O. Erdmann, 3rd edn (Tübingen, 1957), pp. 5, 58 ff.: ‘Huius enim linguae barbaries ut est inculta et indisciplinabilis atque insueta capi regulari freno grammaticae artis, sic etiam in multis dictis scriptio est propter literarum aut congeriem aut incognitam sonoritatem difficilis’ (‘Just as the barbarity of this language is uncouth and cannot be disciplined, and is unaccustomed to being restrained by the guiding bridle of the art of grammar, so also the writing down of much that is said is difficult because of either the accumulation of letters or their unknown sounds’). 5 F. von der Leyen, Das Heldenliederbuch Karls des Grossen: Bestand, Gehalt, Wirkung (Munich, 1954), attempts to determine carefully what could have been written down at that time.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) What is certain is that Anglo-Saxons from Boniface to Alcuin and his students powerfully advanced the dual agenda of good Latin and vernacular writing.6 Yet their influence after the death of Charlemagne was dampened and ultimately dissolved in the court of Louis the Pious. Although Benedict of Aniane and other Aquitanians were of the same West-Gothic origin as Benedict7 and Helisachar, they knew nothing from their own experience about vernacular writing like that of the Anglo-Saxons. Since Louis the Pious grew up amidst such sentiments in his Aquitainian kingdom, it is understandable that he rejected the poetica carmina gentilia (‘poetic verses of his people’), wishing neither to read nor hear nor have presented these songs learned in his youth.8 There is no evidence that he actually had the collection of barbara carmina gathered by Charlemagne destroyed, but he did leave it neglected and continued none of his father’s activity on the grammatica patrii sermonis. Recently scholars have wondered whether he was the Ludovicus piissimus Augustus (‘Louis the most Pious Augustus’) associated with commissioning the poet of the Heliand, or whether it was Louis the German, often titled Emperor and Augustus,9 to whom Otfrid of Weissenburg dedicated his Frankish Gospel poem. In an Augustine manuscript given to Ludwig the German by the archbishop of Salzburg, the Muspilli poem is written in an unsteady hand, perhaps that of a layman. 24

25

26

27

6 Cf.

Baesecke, Vor- und Frühgeschichte d. dt. Schrifttums II, 136 ff., and passim; H. Oppel, ‘Der Einfluß der englischen Literatur auf die deutsche’, in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß, ed. Stammler, III, pp. 47 ff. 7 On Benedict of Aniane, the son of a West-Gothic count in Septimania, the Vita S. Odonis i.23 (PL 133, 53) says: ‘cum esset laicus et pereginis studiis eruditus, deserens ea, unde superbire solet humana fragilitas, totum se dedit beatorum patrum regulis et institutionibus’. [‘As a layman he was learned in unusual studies, but growing up all these things in which human weakness is accustomed to take pride, he devoted himself entirely to the rules and institutions of the holy fathers’; Life of St. Odo of Cluny, trans. G. Sitwell (New York, 1958), p. 26.] Only then did he become a monk. 8 Thegan, Vita Hludovici imperatoris xix, MGH SS 2 (1829), p. 595: ‘Poetica carmina gentilia, quae in iuventute didicerat, respuit nec legere nec audire nec docere voluit’. [‘He despised the pagan songs that he had learned as a youth, and he wished neither to read nor to hear nor to learn them’; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: The Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer, trans. T. F. X. Noble (University Park PA, 2009), pp. 202–3.] G. Kurth, Historie poétique des Mérovingiens (Paris, 1893), pp. 55 f., and A. Kleinclausz, L’empire Carolingien (Paris, 1902), p. 325, did not want to see these as Germanic heroic songs, but rather ancient classics. Thompson (Literacy, p. 30) agrees with them. But in this chapter Thegan had Einhard’s biography at hand, and he contrasted Charles’s interest in the ‘barbara et antiquissima carmina’ with Louis’s rejection of the poetica carmina gentilia; it is certain that the same things are meant. Alcuin (Ep. 124, MGH Epp. 4 (1895), p. 183, line 22) also warns against carmina gentilium as priests’ dinner-table reading, referring here to the Anglo-Saxon Song of Ingeld. 9 Thus R. Drögereit, Werden und der Heliand (Essen, 1951), pp. 94 and 106 f. Doubt about this is expressed by W. Foerste, ‘Richard Drögereit, Werden und der Heliand’, Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch 75 (1953), p. 145.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus Through the transfer of biblical and ecclesiastical material into Frankish or Saxon poetry, the gap between the Latin text and unwritten vernacular language was bridged. Similarly, as people wrote down old vernacular poetry, the mother tongue became writeable, readable, and hence elevated next to Latin into the ranks of ‘bookworthy’ texts. Thus is Emperor Louis (whether the Pious or the German) praised and thanked in the Latin prologue to the Heliand (probably by Walafrid Strabo) for making Holy Scripture available to all the Germanspeaking peoples of his realm rather than leaving it only for the litterati atque eruditi (‘learned and erudite’), those knowing Latin.10 Yet it was still readable only by those knowing Latin, upon whose vocalised reading or presentation the others depended – insofar as they were not interested in advancing a ‘grammatics of the mother tongue’ to make the laity as capable of reading as the clergy. Unlike Alfred the Great’s era in England, it appears that no one in the Frankish realm after Charlemagne was much concerned with the matter. To be sure, there were still many laymen in the ninth century significantly engaged with texts, including Charlemagne’s son-in-law Angilbert and his son Nithart; but they all only wrote Latin for the litterati. There was Hrabanus Maurus, more interested than other contemporaries in Germanic languages – even in runes11 – and his student Walafrid Strabo, who composed not only rhetorically and academically in the cloister and at the court. Yet both of them stood close to Frankish and Saxon Bible poets, although they themselves wrote only Latin. Just as Walafrid could not tolerate the statue of Theodoric erected by Charlemagne in front of his Aachen palace because it was a monument to a heretic,12 so Otfrid of Weissenburg, who had studied with Hrabanus in Fulda, wanted to erase and replace the ‘offensive songs of the laity’13 with his Gospel-poems. 28

29

30

31

10 Heliand,

ed. E. Sievers (Halle, 1878), pp. 3 f.: ‘Nam cum divinorum librorum solummodo literati atque eruditi prius notitiam haberent, eius studio … actum (= actum) est nuper, et cunctus populus suae ditioni subditus Theudisca loquens lingua eiusdem divinae lectionis nihilominus notionem acceperit … quatenus non solum literatis, verum etiam illiteratis sacra divinorum lectio panderetur’ (‘For, since previously only the learned and the erudite were acquainted with Scripture, action was recently taken through his zeal, so that every people subject to his rule and speaking the German language should nevertheless gain acquaintance with the texts of Scripture … so that the text of Scripture might be thrown open not only to the learned but also to the illiterate’). On this Praefatio cf. G. Baesecke, ‘Die Karlische Renaissance und das deutsche Schrifttum’, DVLG 23 (1949), 209; W. Krogmann, ‘Die Praefatio in librum antiquum lingua saxonica conscriptum’, Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch 69–70 (1943–7; appeared 1948), pp. 141 ff.; text, pp. 151 f. 11 Hrabanus, De inventione linguarum, PL 112, 1581 f. Cf. Walafrid, Libellus de exordiis vii, ed. A. Knöpfler, 2nd edn (Munich, 1899) – also ed. A. Boretius and F. Krause, MGH Capit. reg. Fr. 2, p. 481 – on the sermo theutiscus of the Goths and their influence on the language of the Church. 12 Walafrid, De imagine Tetrici, MGH Poetae 2, pp. 370 ff. 13 Otfrids Evangelienbuch, ed. Erdmann, p. 4, dedication to the Mainz Archbishop: ‘laicorum cantus obscenus, ludus saecularium vocum, … sonus inutilium rerum’ (‘the offensive songs of the laity, secular banter … the sound of useless things’).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Such motivation was influential for a long time, and lay language, along with lay poetry, was once again forced out of writing because lay readers had not been won over by it. The Latin-reading monastic and clerical litterati parted ways with the illiterate laymen and idiotae, who knew only the mother tongue and read nothing at all. In literary terms, the Carolingian kings of the ninth century are regarded as not entirely uneducated; the West-Frankish Charles the Bald (840–877) is in fact described as rex atque theologus (‘king and theologian’)14 in litteris quasi philosophus (‘almost a philosopher in learning’),15 and his brother Louis the German as ‘sapientissimus rex in omnibus bene eruditus’ (‘a most wise king well learned in everything’).16 But dedications in learned works do not prove that he read them or that he could have done so – indeed, many dedications contain specific mention of lecturers17 who, if the ruler actually had the leisure for such activity, were also certainly translators. None of them was active in literature, and even their documents were no longer signed by name like the Merovingians’, but rather with a monogram completed with a final stroke. And the East Frankish Carolingians had no court school or academy as in Charlemagne’s time. In the period of Carolingian trouble and decline under relentless attack by Normans, Saracens and Hungarians, all literary activity withdrew into the cloister and the cathedral schools of episcopal sees, settings from which the laity remain excluded. It was at this moment that the situation which would come to seem normal and typical for the high medieval centuries was 32

33

34

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14 Johannes

Scottus Eriugena, Carmina iv.2, line 11, MGH Poetae 3, p. 545. de imperatoria potestate (c. 950), MGH SS 3, p. 722, line 4. 16 Hrabanus, PL 112, 1091: Dedication of the commentary on the Song of Songs. 17 Hrabanus, De universo, PL 111, 9, to Louis the German: ‘coram vobis relegi illud faciatis et … cum vestris sagacissimis lectoribus … emendare curetis’ (‘I have read again that you have this done in your presence and … with your wisest lecturers … take care to make emendations’). Similar in the accompanying letter to his Daniel commentary, MGH Epp. 5, p. 468, line 33: ‘quod opusculum tibi … ad legendum et probandum direxi; … si quid autem aliter per te vel eos, quos tecum habes peritissimos lectores positum repereris, ignoscas …’ (‘which little work … I have arranged for you to read and inspect; … forgive me, if, however, you find something stated otherwise by yourself or those most learned lecturers whom you have with you’). Ezekiel commentary, PL 110, 495 to Emperor Lothar: ‘simul cum vestris eruditis doctoribus examinantes’(‘examining with your learned teachers’). Lothar’s responses (PL 110, 495) at least show his interest. Cf. the Jeremiah commentary, PL 111, 795; Homiliae, PL 110, 135; ‘ut haberetis, quod in praesentia vestra … horis competentibus legeretur’ (‘so that you may have it that, at suitable times, it may be read in your presence’). Similarly, in Hrabanus’s dedication to the Song of Songs commentary, PL 112, 1089, vobis ad legendum is to be understood as reading out loud. Hrabanus never establishes expressly that the king reads on his own. Hrabanus also sent one of his writings to Margrave Eberhard of Friuli, the son-in-law of Louis the Pious, who at his death in 864 left many books, ut … coram vobis legere faciatis (‘so that you may have it read in your presence’); PL 112, 1554. 15 Libellus

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Litteratus–Illitteratus completed and took on fixed form: as outlined above, that is, only clerics and monks are litterati with at least a minimum level of knowledge of writing and Latin; the laity up to the highest nobility, often including the king, are mostly illitterati, with their own scriptless traditions and educational norms, capable of reading only in exceptional cases – most likely among noble ladies. Henceforth litteratus would be used more frequently, becoming nearly synonymous with cleric as illitteratus became equivalent to layman and idiota. No clearer confirmation may be found than the changing gloss of the verses of Revelation 1. 3: ‘Beatus qui legit et audit verba prophetiae huius’ (‘blessed be he who reads and hears the words of this prophecy’). Bede explains it thus: ‘Ideo doctores et auditores beati sunt’ (‘thus the teachers and the hearers are blessed’);18 in the late-Carolingian commentary of Haimo, Alcuin also depicts the doctores as readers, the others as hearers.19 The glossa ordinaria (no longer thought to have been composed in the Carolingian period as was earlier assumed, but instead in the early twelfth-century school of Anselm of Laon) equates readers with the litterati, and hearers with the laici et addiscentes (‘laity and learners’).20 In other glosses from the same school the readers are simply the clerici, the hearers designated as laici.21 In his explication of Revelation (before 1150), Richard of St Victor still places both traditions next to one another: ‘“qui legit” designat litteratos sive doctores, … “qui audit” exprimit laicos sive auditores’ (‘“who reads” denotes the learned or teachers…“who hears” describes laymen and hearers’),22 while in the mid-thirteenth century the North German minorite Alexander den Vers comments: ‘“Beatus, qui 36

37

38

39

40

18 PL

93, 124. Pseudo-Primasius (sixth century) is already similar, PL 68, 797: ‘Dicendo “qui legit et qui audiunt” personam doctorum et discentium demonstravit’ (‘By saying, “he who reads and those who hear”, he has indicated the part played by the learned and by the learners’). 19 Alcuin, PL 100, 1092, relying on the Pseudo-Primasius: ‘doctorum personam et audientium demonstravit’ (‘By saying, “he who reads and those who hear”, he has indicated the part played by the learned and by the learners’). Haimo, PL 117, 942: ‘doctores, qui legunt et aliis exponunt, auditores qui audiunt et retinent’ (‘the learned who read and explain to others; hearers who hear and retain’). 20 Biblia sacra cum glossa ordinaria, 6 vols. (Antwerp, 1617), VI, 1457: ‘Beatus qui legit ut literati et qui audit ut laici et addiscentes’ (‘Happy is he who reads like the learned and he who hears like laymen and learners’). Also remarkable is the commentary of the Gregorian Bruno of Segni (soon after 1079), PL 165, 608: ‘Beatus non solum qui legit verba prophetiae huius, quod quidem paucorum est, veram etiam et qui audit, quod pene omnibus datum est’ (‘Happy is not only he who reads the words of this prophecy, which indeed belongs to a few, but also he who hears, which is given to almost all’). Cf. Rupert of Deutz c. 1115, PL 169, 830: ‘Beatum illum veraciter dicens, qui ea, quae hic scripta sunt … audiens aut, si letteras novit, legens observaverit’ (‘Saying truly that he is happy who hears those things which are witten here or, if he knows his letters, learns and takes heed’). 21 PL 162, 1502. On these Laon glossa commentaries, see W. Kamlah, Apokalypse und Geschichtstheologie, Eberings Historische Studien 285 (Berlin, 1935), pp. 34 f. 22 PL 196, 695.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) legit”, ut litterati vel clerici, “et qui audit”, ut laici’ (‘“blessed he who reads”, as the learned or clerics, “and who hears” as laymen’); however, he believes he must explain the concept of the laity as ‘homo nullius sacri ordinis nullaque liberali arte instructus’ (‘a man not in holy orders and educated in no liberal art’).23 Since Bible commentaries tend to depend on one another, and their conceptions of readers and hearers change in keeping with the times, one can thereby establish approximate dates. 41

VI From the tenth century on, clerici litterati and laici illitterati were all the talk, formed almost officially into a conjunction of opposites from which any variation would be surprising – if a cleric (or monk) were not litteratus, for example, or a layman not illitteratus. At the election of the German king in 1125 an eye-witness1 describes how the Saxon duke Lothar and margrave Leopold of Austria asked to withdraw from the election; with a sidelong glance at his clerical colleagues, he finds it most noteworthy that God through the pious modesty of lay princes – laicorum scilicet illiteratorum (‘of the laity, namely of the illiterate’), who were not seeking higher positions – shamed the self-seeking arrogance of the clerics, clericorum et literatorum (‘of the clerics and the literate’). In this regard, who can or cannot read is irrelevant; to underline the contrast with clergy, however, the monastic author automatically and summarily classified laymen in general, and specifically the most important princes of the realm and candidates for the throne, as illitterati – and without disdain. On the contrary, the designation here further enhances the lustre of their supposed modesty. It is proper for the cleric to be a litteratus, and it could even be described as his prima virtus (first virtue).2 Among laymen, on the other hand – even a king – it would be remarkable if he could read a 42

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23 Alexander

Minorita, Expositio in Apocalypsim, ed. A. Wachtel, MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 1 (1955), p. 11. 1 Narratio de electione Lotharii, MGH SS 12 (1856), p. 510, line 33. On the author – monk or abbot of Göttweig? – see H. Kalbfuß, ‘Zur Entstehung der Narratio de electione Lotharii’, MIÖG 31 (1910), 538 ff. 2 Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum iii.7, ed. Bretholz, p. 168, on a candidate for the bishopric of Prague in 1098: ‘non ambitiosus, non elatus et, que prima est in clerico virtus, adprime litteratus’. [‘Not ambitious, not haughty, and – what is the primary virtue in a cleric – he is especially learned’; Cosmas of Prague, The Chronicle of the Czechs, trans. L. Wolverton, (Washington DC, 2009), p. 189.] Cf. Cosmas, Chronica ii.22, ed. Bretholz, p. 114. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dial. mirac. ix.26, ed. Strange, II, 183: ‘Gloria vite sacerdotalis in duobus precipue consistit: … debet enim castus esse et litteratus’; but the question: ‘numquid omnes sacerdotes illitterati repellendi sunt a Domino?’ is answered negatively. [‘The glory of a priest’s life lies chiefly in two things…he ought to be both chaste and learned…Are all ignorant priests to be rejected by the Lord?’; Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott

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Litteratus–Illitteratus letter directed to him, as did Emperor Henry IV,3 or Henry I of England,4 or the Saxon Count Palatine Frederick († 1088); the latter had learned so much in Fulda ‘ut epistolas transmissas per se legeret et intelligeret’ (‘that he could read by himself and understand letters sent to him’).5 And yet it is said in Bruno’s Book of the Saxon War6 that Henry IV had sent the same count palatine with a Uriah-letter to the grand prince of Kiev with the direction to imprison or kill the messenger, but under no circumstance to allow him to return. On the journey, Frederick discovered and unsealed the letter, but he did not read it himself: ‘clericum suum, quid illae litterae vellent, exponere sibi praecipit; clericus legit et exponit’ (‘he ordered his cleric to explain to him what those letters wanted; the cleric read and explained them’), upon which the count palatine burned the letter and continued undisturbed on his mission. So the story goes. In the same vein, the miles (knight) Ruodlieb has to have a letter from his mother read out by the sciolus (‘clerk’) who bears it,7 and Ulrich of Lichtenstein in Frauendienst c. 1250 frankly describes how little he grasped of letters from esteemed ladies if his clerk did not read them to him.8 In most cases it was not expected that a noble layman could read a letter himself.9 Gregory VII warned 44

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and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols. (London, 1929), II, 128–9.] Caesarius recounts tales of many illiterate clerics and monks, e.g. iv.79 (I, 247), vii.55 (II, 6) and passim. 3 Ebo, Vita Ottonis Episcopi Bambergensis i.6, ed. Jaffé, Bibl. rer. Germ. V, 594: ‘Erat enim imperator litteris usque adeo imbutus, ut cartas a quibuslibet sibi directas per semet ipsum legere et intelligere praevaleret’ (‘For the emperor was sufficiently instructed in letters for him to be perfectly able to read by himself and understand documents sent to him by anyone’). Expanded in Herbord’s Dialogus de vita Ottonis iii.34 (1158/9, ibid., pp. 827 f.): Nam adeo litteratus erat imperator, ut per se breves legeret et faceret (For the emperor was sufficiently literate for him to read and produce summaries by himself). 4 Ordericus Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica xi.9, ed. Le Prevost, 5 vols. (Paris, 1838–55), IV, 195: ‘Litteratus vero rex epistolas legit’. [‘The king, who was literate, read the letter’; The Ecclesiastical History of Orderc Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1969–80), VI, 51]. 5 Chronicon Gozense (written after 1157), MGH SS 10 (1852), p. 148, line 10, with fertur inserted. 6 Brunos Buch vom Sachsenkrieg xiii, ed. H.-E. Lohmann, MGH Dt. MA. 2 (1937), p. 21. Cf. against this the Rolandslied of Konrad the priest v. 2111 ff.: ‘Dô prach der chuninc Marssile / des keiseres insigle, / selbe er den brief las, / wande er wole gelêret was’ (‘The King Marssile broke the emperor’s insignia, and read the letter himself because he was well educated’). 7 Ruodlieb v.226 ff., ed. F. Seiler (Halle, 1882), p. 234; ed. K. Langosch (Berlin, 1956), p. 128. 8 Ulrich von Lichtenstein, ed. K. Lachmann (Berlin, 1841), p. 60. Cf. Grundmann, ‘Women and Literature’, p. 43 above. 9 The monks of St Gallen had an important letter to Otto I delivered by his son, ‘et a patre sigillum recludere jussus … perlecta epistola Otto (II) eam patri et matri fidus interpres Saxonice reponens insinuavit’ (‘and having been ordered by his father to open the seal … Otto (II) having read the letter gave it back to his father and mother as a faithful interpreter in Saxon’). See Ekkehart IV, Casus sancti Galli cxxx, ed. G.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) a pious Count Albert (of Kalw?) and his wife against simoniac priests in 1074, ‘whatever they might tell you, qui inlitterati estis’ (‘you who are illiterate’); the pope placed his trust precisely in the loyal faith of these illitterati, ‘laymen and women’.10 A few years earlier Berengar of Tours wished to instruct the count of Anjou on some matters of faith in person, since he could not do so in writing – the count was not a litteratus. But since the count perhaps had a litteratus with him who could render audible what was written for the eye, Berengar sent him four pages full of citations from Augustine.11 After all that, the world-chronicler Ekkehard of Aura’s assertion is surprising that David the Scot, one of the viri litterati that Henry V took with him on his expedition to Rome, depicted the events of 1111 on Henry’s behalf in such a simple style that it would be understandable even to lay readers and lesser scholars.12 So, could he expect lay readers? Was he thinking particularly of Henry V himself or other laymen in his court?13 Little is known about the literary education of the last Salian, other than the fact that he, like his father, enjoyed having ‘clericos maximos et maxime literatos around’ (‘the greatest and most learned clerics’),14 in order to talk with them about their knowledge 51

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Meyer von Knonau, Mittheilungen zur vaterländischen Geschichte St Gallen 15–16 (St Gallen, 1877), pp. 418 ff. 10 Register of Gregory VII, ii.11, ed. E. Caspar, MG Epp. Sel. 2.1 (1920), pp. 142 f. On the other hand, Gregory (Register ix.35, p. 626), provides some bishops with information on Count Robert of Flanders, ‘quia virum litteratum eum audivimus’ – they learned this at the Curia! [‘For we have heard that he is a literate man’; The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085, trans. H. E. J. Cowdrey (Oxford, 2002), p. 439.] 11 Briefsammlungen aus der Zeit Heinrichs IV, MGH Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 5 (1950), p. 137, no. 83: ‘(vobis) verbo satisfacerem, scripto non possum, quia litteratus (=litterati?) non estis. Sed quia tamen forsitan aliquis aderit litteratus, quem de scripto meo audiatis, scribere interim aliquid volui’ (‘I could satisfy (you) with words, with writing I cannot, because you are not literate. But because, perchance, there may be present some learned man whom you may hear concerning what I have written, writing again could be undertaken’). 12 MGH SS 6 (1844), p. 243: ‘stilo tam facili, qui pene nichil a communi loquela differat, … consulens in hoc etiam lectoribus laicis vel aliis minus doctis, quorum haec intellectus capere possit’. [‘in so simple a style that it hardly differs from the common speech considering in this even what the intellect of lay readers or others less learned could grasp’; Chronicles of the Investiture Contest: Frutolf of Michelsberg and his Continuators, trans. T. J. H. McCarthy (Manchester, 2013), p. 212.] 13 Thus Thompson, Literacy, p. 90. Cf. the dedication of version C of the Chronicle that was not written by Ekkehard of Aura, but perhaps by David the Scot himself (see I. Schmale-Ott, DA 12 (1956), 362 ff.) MGH SS 6, p. 9: ‘chronicum opus … utinam non indignum ne dicam oculis imperatoris, set saltim minimis lectoribus tua curiae’; however, these lectores could also be clerics. [‘that is not unworthy – I do not say for the eyes of an emperor – but at least for the lowliest readers of your court’; trans. McCarthy, pp. 187–218 (187).] 14 MGH SS 6 (1844), p. 239 (version C): ‘More patris sui clericos et maxime literatos adherere sibi voluit hosque honorifice tractans nunc psalmis, nunc lectione vel collatione sive scripturarum ac liberalium artium inquisitione [sic] secum familiarius

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Litteratus–Illitteratus of books. He also wanted to take litterati as well as armati (armed men) to Italy, since he knew that the Roman Empire had ruled not only with weapons, but also with wisdom.15 For such wisdom and the accounting of deeds, the litterati were there, to read out their historical works to him and other laymen; in simple Latin, he could perhaps even understand them himself. Reading for oneself among the laity, however, would be hard to imagine at this time. Around 1190 the prolific Welsh writer Gerald of Wales wrote his Expugnatio Hibernica (Conquest of Ireland) in a smooth, light style for the laity and parum literati (‘those with a little learning’),16 and dedicated it to the English king – first Henry II, then John Lackland. But he was not happy with the reception. As a result, he dedicated his Itinerarium Kambriae (Journey through Wales) to the archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, rather than to the ‘principibus parum literatis et multum occupatis’ (‘princes with little learning and much to do ‘) who did not read or honour his writings.17 In the letter to Richard Lionheart accompanying his Historia Hibernica (History of Ireland) he openly complained that the knowledge of letters was most lacking in rulership: ‘non enim desunt litterae, sed principes litterati’ (‘for letters are not lacking, but learned princes’).18 The aging Gerald (no longer hoping for mundane glory and compensation) wrote to John Lackland that his Latin works had neither been understood nor rewarded, ‘quia principes minus literati’ (‘because princes are less learned’). His friend, Walter Map, could boast far more success among readers with French than Gerald with his much fuller Latin texts, 56

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occupavit’. [‘Like his father, he wished to have clerks at his side, particularly those who were learned. He treated them honourably and spent his time amicably among them, sometimes in singing psalms, sometimes in reading or conversation or in discussion of the scriptures or the liberal arts’; trans. McCarthy, p. 205.] 15 MGH SS 6 (1844), p. 243: ‘Providerat autem rex … sciens Romanam rempublicam olim non tantum armis quantum sapientia gubernari consuetam se non solum armatis, sed etiam litteratis viris necessario muniri paratis scilicet ad rationem omni poscenti reddendam’. [‘But the king, who in foresight was second to none among the kings of the world, knowing that the Roman republic was formerly accustomed to being governed not so much by arms as by wisdom, provided himself with the necessary protection not only of armed men but also of educated men, so that he would be ready to respond to all the matters demanded of him’, trans. McCarthy, p. 211.] 16 Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. J. F. Dimock, in Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock and G. F. Warner, 8 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1861–91), V, 207 f.: ‘Sciat autem in primis (lector), quod laicis haec et parum literatis edita principibus plano facilique stilo solam desiderant ad intelligentiam explanari’. [‘But he must understand first of all that this has been written for the benefit of laymen and of princes who are but little skilled in reading. It is therefore written in a plain and easy style, and needs to be made simple, with the sole purpose of being understood’; Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), p. 3.] 17 Itinerarium Kambriae, ed. Dimock, Opera, VI, 7. 18 Ep. 15, ed. J. S. Brewer, Opera, I, 242.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) because there were as yet hardly any princely patrons for reading.19 Gerald did not like translator-readers; he preferred having his work translated into French by someone who knew the language and writing, so that it would receive a better audience. On similar grounds Hugh of Fleury dedicated his Historia ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History) of 1135 to the educated Latinist Countess Adela of Blois, a daughter of Henry I of England and one not among the ‘illitteratis principibus, quibus ars litteratoria spretui est’ (‘unlearned princes for whom literary art is contemptible’).20 More generally and indeed brusquely, the Archpoet expected no understanding for his verse and his struggles as a 60

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to the second edition of the Expugnatio Hibernica, Opera, V, 410 ff: ‘Quoniam res gesta per interpretem non adeo sapit aut animo sedet sicut proprio et idiomate noto prolata, alicui, si placet, lingua simul et literis erudito ad transferendum in Gallicum ocius non otiosus liber hic noster committatur, qui forte fructum laboris sui, quoniam intelligi poterit, assequetur, quem nos quidem minus intellecti, quia principes minus literati, hactenus obtinere non valuimus’. Walter Map often said to him: ‘Vos scripta dedistis et nos uerba. Et quanquam scripta vestra longe laudabiliora sint et longaeviora quam dicta nostra, quia tamen haec aperta, communi quippe idiomate prolata, illa vero, quia Latina, paucioribus evidentia, nos de dictis nostris fructum aliquem reportavimus, vos autem de scriptis egregiis, principibus literatis nimirum et largis obsoletis olim et ab orbe sublatis, dignam minime retributionem consequi potuistis’. [‘Considering also that annals of events, heard through an interpreter, are not so well understood and do not fix themselves in the mind so firmly as when they are published in the vernacular tongue, it would be well, if such be your pleasure, that some man of learning who is also skilled in the French language be employed to translate the work of mine, which has cost me much labour, into French; and then, as it would be better understood, I might reap the fruits of my toil which hitherto, under illiterate princes, have been lost because there were few who could understand my works.’ … [Walter Map said to him] ‘You have employed writing; I speech. But though your writings are far better, and much more likely to be handed down to future ages than my discourses, yet, as all the world could understand what I said, speaking as I did in the vulgar tongue, while your works, being written in Latin, are understood by only a very few persons, I have reaped some advantage from my sermons; but you addressing yourself to princes, who were, doubtless, both learned and liberal, but are now out of date, and have passed from the world, have not been able to secure any sort of reward for your excellent works, which so richly merited it’; The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, trans. T. Forester and T. Wright (London, 1894), p. 177]. 20 MGH SS 9 (1851), p. 353, lines 41 f. He turned to the countess, ‘quoniam estis litteris erudita, quod est gentilitium sive civilitas magna’ (‘because you are learned in letters which is nobility or great urbanity’). Cf. see p. 349, lines 3 f.: ‘Ecce habetis, quod otiabunda legatis’ (‘Behold, you have it that you may read at leisure’). Baldric of Dol wrote poetry for Adela of Blois, PL 166, 1602: ‘scit vacare libris, … inest illi dictandi copia’ (‘she knows how to give herself to books … she has a facility for composition’). She corresponded with Hildebert of Lavardin and with Ivo of Chartres; see PL 171, 144 ff. and 162, 15 and passim.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus poet: ‘Conqueror in carmina / viris litteratis. / ea, que sunt vatis’ (‘I lament in poems, for learned men, the poet’s lot’).21 The laity is without literature. There has never been a shortage of complaints regarding this situation, nor of appeals to end it. More common than any other complaint was that the lay nobility talked law without being able to read it. ‘Comes enim illitteratus ac barbarus nescit vera a falsis discernere et adeo fallitur’ (‘the unlearned and barbarous count does not know how to tell the true from the false and is thus deceived’): this accusation of Bonizo of Sutri (after 1060) was perhaps derived from an earlier description brushed up with an example from history: though barbarians struck the Roman Empire with the sword, Roman law still remained unknown to their judges, ‘illitterati ac barbari judices’ (‘unlearned and barbarian judges’).22 Even prior to this in Germany, the elderly Count Udalrich von Ebersberg († 1028) groused that no one learned to read the laws of the kings anymore in these bad times as they had in his youth – as a result, law and order had declined, and those who do not commit evil must suffer evil; the bitter count is glad not to have the grandchildren for which he once had longed.23 Most notably for legal education, Wipo also advised his former ward Henry III to issue an imperial law in Germany requiring each prosperous person to have his children taught to read. Moreover, each was to establish a law book as had once existed in old Rome and still existed in 62

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Langosch, Politische Dichtung um Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa (Berlin, 1943), p. 114; Langosch, Hymnen und Vagantenlieder (Basel, 1954), p. 244, addressed to Rainald of Dassel. The same rough division in the Carmina Burana no. 101, ed. J. A. Schmeller (Breslau, 1894), p. 179: ‘Litteratos convocat / decus virginale, / laicorum execrat / pectus bestiale’. [‘The beauteous band of maidens summons the men of letters, and curses the uncivilized herd of laymen’; Love Lyrics from the Carmina Burana, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993), p. 163.] 22 Bonizo, Liber de vita christiana vii.16, ed. F. Perels, Texte zur Geschichte des römischen und kanonischen Rechts im Mittelalter 1 (unique) (Berlin, 1930), pp. 242 f. Also: MGH Leges 4 (1868), p. 664; W. Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 5th edn, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1877–95), I, 894; and in the Pantheon of Gottfried of Viterbo, MGH SS 22 (1872), p. 304. 23 Chronicon Ebersbergense, written under Abbot Williram von Ebersberg (1048–85), MGH SS 20 (1868), p. 14. His description of the troubles of the times is remarkable: ‘Cum Romani terrarum orbi imperarent, ita moderamine legum scripto regebatur, ut nulli impune cederet factum, quod lex vetuerat. Postquam vero Germanum regnum a Romanis recesserat, Sigipertus et Theodoricus ac deinde Carolus iura dictabant, quae si quis potens ac nobilis legere nesciret, ignominiosus videbatur, sicut in me coevisque meis, qui iura didicimus, apparet. Moderni vero filios suos neglegunt iura docere’ (‘When the Romans held sway over the world, it was so ruled by the written government of the laws, that nothing which the law forbade was allowed to anyone without punishment. But after the German kingdom had withdrawn from the Romans, Sigisbert and Theodoric and then Charles wrote laws which if any powerful and noble man did not know how to read, he seemed disgraced, as is clear to me and my generation who learned the laws. But the men of these days neglect to teach their sons the laws’). He, too, idealises the time of his youth in old age.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Italy (he was thinking of their secular law schools), as only Germans held learning to be pointless or contemptible for anyone not becoming a cleric.22 But Wipo’s good advice changed nothing. A hundred years later, Wibald of Stablo complained that little forensic fluency was to be found in Germany. In the secular court the laici illitterati speak law – sometimes naturally gifted, but as Germans rarely trained in oration – while canon law is laconically administered in formulas by viris litterarum doctissimis (‘men most trained in letters’).23 Such complaints continue into the late Middle Ages and escalate only with the new knowledge of Roman law, reception of which then triggers new complaints. In his Regula juris (Rule of law) of 1476, the Alsatian jurist and chancellor of the University of Basel, Peter of Andlau, showed understanding that, according to German practice in secular courts, layci illitterati believed they were judging fairly according to reason and natural insight – but when they acquitted or condemned in disagreement with the ius commune (common law), it strikes him as guilty ignorance.24 By contrast, in his 1484 Registrum sophologicum (Register of Aphorisms), Arnold Heymerick (the Xanten deacon from Kleve) invoked the now proverbial illitterata laicorum prudentia (‘unlearned prudence of the laity’) to address the juristic vir litteratus who is often corrected by illitterati.25 But complaints about the illiterate lay nobility were not limited to Germany. How little effect the strivings of Alfred the Great bore after the Norman conquest and the Angevin period is betrayed by the gossipy man of court 65

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v.190 ff., Die Werke Wipos, ed. H. Bresslau, 3rd edn, MGH SRG in usum scholarum 61 (1915), p. 80: ‘Tunc fac edictum per terram Teutonicorum / Quilibet ut dives sibi natos instruat omnes / Litterulis legemque suam persuadeat illis … Solis Teutonicis vacuum vel turpe videtur / ut doceant aliquem, nisi clericus accipiatur’ (‘Then make an edict through the land of the Germans / Let every rich person instruct all this sons / And with that literacy may he make his law persuasive … Only to the Germans does it seem idle and shameful / to teach anyone, unless he is to be received as a cleric’). Earlier (v.160 ff.) Wipo praises the Empress Gisela: ‘Haec operam dederat, quod rex (Henry III) in lege studebat. / Illa sibi libros persuaserat esse legendos’ (‘She took pains that the king (Henry III) should study law. / She persuaded him that books were to be read’). 23 Wibald, Ep. 167, Bibl. rer. Germ., I, 284. Soon after the murder of Count Charles the Good of Flanders in 1127 the Liège cleric Galbert praised his fortunate government, under which many illitterati were interviewed before the court without being hindered by the ‘disciplinati et docti’ (‘the educated and learned’); Passio Karoli comitis i, MGH SS 12, p. 562. [Cf. translation in Galbert of Bruges, Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders (New Haven CT, 2013), p. 6.] 24 J. Hürbin, ‘Eine Ergänzung der “Libellus de Cesarea monarchia” Peters von Andlau’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abtheilung 16 (1895), 41–62, at 59. Cf. De imperio Romano ii.11, ibid., 13 (1892), 192. See Grundmann, ‘Women and Literature’, above pp. 40–4, on the German nobility’s disdain for litterae. 25 Die Schriften des Arnold Heymerick, ed. F. W. Oediger, Publikationen der Gesellschaft für Rheinische Geschichtskunde 49 (Bonn, 1939), pp. 161 f.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus and the world, Walter Map, during the reign of Henry II – whom he praised as ‘litteratus ad omnem decentiam et utilitatem’ (‘he had skill of letters as far as was fitting or practically useful’).26 According to Map, however, the nobles find it beneath their dignity or are too lazy to teach their children to read as specified by law for free persons – hence the name artes liberales. Instead, the unfree, servants and peasants are permitted to educate their low-born offspring in arts they do not deserve, thus becoming not better but richer – and the smarter, the more decadent. For knowledge is power, ‘artes enim gladii sunt potentum’ (‘arts are the swords of the powerful’).27 In his social arrogance and suspicion, Walter Map already sensed and feared that new groups of readers could become dangerous to the non-reading nobility. The sharpest criticism was a proverb beloved both in England and France in the twelfth century: ‘rex illitteratus asinus coronatus’ (‘an unlearned king is a crowned ass’).28 In keeping with that proverb, how many medieval rulers were crowned donkeys! Henry I apparently loved using it in his youth, even 69

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Map, De nugis curialium v.4 [correction: v.6], ed. M. R. James, Anecdota Oxoniensia, Medieval and Modern Series 14 (Oxford, 1914), p. 237; [translation from James edn., rev. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), p. 477]. Gerald of Wales also calls Henry II ‘princeps elegantissimus et, quod in his temporibus conspicuum est, literis eruditus’ (‘a most elegant prince and, what is conspicuous in these times, learned in letters’), Opera I, 46 and V, 303; similarly V, 405. 27 Map, De nugis i.10, ed. James, p. 7: ‘Generosi parcium nostrarum aut dedignantur aut pigri sunt applicare litteris liberos suos, cum solis liberis de iure liceat artes addiscere, nam et inde liberales dicuntur. Servi vero, quos vocamus rusticos, suos ignominiosos et degeneres in artibus eis indebitis enutrire contendunt, non ut exeant a viciis, set ut habundent diviciis, qui quanto fiunt periciores, tanto perniciores. Artes enim gladii sunt potentum, qui pro modis utencium variantur. Nam in manu benigni principis pacifici sunt, in manu tiranni mortiferi. Redimunt suos a dominis sui (= suis?) [servi, in the revised 1986 edn], cupiditas utrinque militat et vincit, cum libertas libertatis addicitur hosti’ – that is, with litterae and artes, power and freedom fall into the dangerous hands of the enemies of freedom. [‘It is because the gentry of our land are too proud or too lazy to put their children to learning, whereas of right only free men are allowed to learn the arts, which for that very reason are called “liberal”. The villeins on the other hand (or rustics as we call them) vie with each other in bringing up their ignoble and degenerate offspring to those arts which are forbidden to them; not that they may shed vices, but that they may garner riches; and the more skill they attain, the more ill they do. The arts are as the swords of mighty men: their force varies with the method of him who holds them: in the hand of a merciful prince they bring peace, in that of a tyrant, death. The villein redeems his son from the lord, and on each side covetousness fights, and wins when freedom is conferred on freedom’s foe’; trans. James, 1983 edn, pp. 13–15.] Cf. (i.31, ed. James, pp. 60 f.) Map’s judgement on the Waldensians: ‘homines idiotas, illitteratos … Humillimo nunc incipiunt modo, quod pedem inferre nequeunt, quos si admiserimus expellemur’. [‘simple, illiterate men … They are now beginning in a very humble guise, because they cannot get their foot in; but if we let them in, we shall be turned out’; revised 1983 edn, pp. 125, 127.] 28 Cf. Kirn, ‘Die mittelalterliche Staatsverwaltung als geistesgeschichtliches Problem’, 524 f.; Galbraith, ‘Literacy’, pp. 213 f.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) within hearing of his illiterate father, as William of Malmesbury reports around 1125.29 Some decades later, an edition of the Chronicle of the Counts of Anjou claims that Count Fulk the Good (942–960) penned these words to the French king, who had mocked the Latin-educated count for taking part in choir service with the canons at Tours.30 On the other hand, John of Salisbury claims to recall a letter from the German king to the French king urging him to have his children taught, adding eleganter, as John puts it, ‘quia rex illitteratus est quasi asinus coronatus’.31 It is difficult to imagine the first two Hohenstaufer writing to Louis VII of France in such a self-critical manner. Obviously this pointed statement was placed by turn into this mouth and that one: Gerald of Wales had already cited it in the ‘Writings of the Ancients’32 and it soon also went into the much-read encyclopedias.33 Often a king sine litteris was compared less rudely, and 72

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regum Anglorum v.390, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 90 (London, 1887–9), II, 467; Gesta regum Anglorum iv.320, II, 374. William II, eldest brother and predecessor of Henry I, was described as ‘illitteratus homo: non erat ei tantum studii vel otii, ut litteras unquam audiret’. [‘But he never had either the interest nor the leisure to pay any attention to literature’; The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998–99), I, 567.] 30 Chroniques des Comtes d’Anjou, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin, Collection de Textes 48 (Paris, 1913), p. 140. According to the introduction, pp. xxxvii f., this was inserted by Breton d’Amboise after 1155. 31 John of Salisbury, Policraticus iv.6, ed. C. C. I. Webb, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1909), I, 254: the prince should know the lex Dei and read every day. ‘Hoc utique sine difficultate illitteratus non faciet. Unde et in litteris, quas regem Romanorum ad Francorum regem transmisisse recolo, quibus hortabatur, ut liberos suos liberalibus disciplinis institui procuraret, hoc inter cetera eleganter adiecit, quia rex illitteratus est quasi asinus coronatus. Si tamen ex dispensione ob egregiae virtutis meritum principem contingat esse illitteratum, eundem agi litteratorum consiliis, ut ei res recte procedat, necesse est’. [‘But plainly he will hardly be able to do this if he is illiterate. Wherefore in the letter which I remember the king of the Romans (Conrad III) sent to the king of the Franks (Louis VII), urging him to have his children educated in liberal studies, he added tastefully to his other arguments that an illiterate king is like an ass who wears a crown. If, nevertheless, out of consideration for other distinguished virtues, it should chance that the prince is illiterate, it is needful that he take counsel of men of letters if his affairs are to prosper rightly’; The Statesman’s Book of John of Salisbury, trans. J. Dickinson (New York, 1927), p. 28.] The Policraticus was completed in 1159. 32 De principis instructione, Praef, Opera VIII, 5: ‘Proinde et in veterum scriptis principes illitterati tanquam asini censentur coronati’. [‘Similarly, “unlettered rulers” are are also considered “crowned donkeys” in the books of the ancients’; Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler, ed and trans. R. Bartlett (Oxford, 2018), p. 37.] See ibid., p. 42: ‘Historiarum itaque lectio vetustorum litterato non mediocriter principi confert’. [‘Therefore the reading of old histories is very useful to a lettered ruler’; trans. Bartlett, p. 145]. 33 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale xxx.122 (Douais, 1624), p. 1227. Dialogus creaturarum xxv, Die beiden ältesten lateinischen Fabelbücher des Mittelalters, ed. T. Graesse, Bibl. lit. Ver. Stuttgart 148, p. 166. Kirn (‘Die mittelalterliche Staatsverwaltung

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Litteratus–Illitteratus more poetically, with a ship without a rudder or a bird without wings.34 But this criticism was not limited to the king alone. Every prince not ennobled by the litteralis scientia appeared to the Praemonstratensian abbot Philipp of Harvengt to be degenerate, peasant-like, even beast-like.35 And, as written to the educated count of the Champagne, he held it to be ‘asslike stupidity’ when a nobleman knew only the vernacular and no Latin.36 The count’s secretary, Nicholas (previously secretary to Bernard of Clairvaux), was able to pass on an allegedly old saying even more crude and broad, equating the difference between litterati and laity with that between human and beast.37 Thus Latin reading ability was expected for the ruling laity, and the laici illitterati – particularly the rex illitteratus – came into disrepute. At the same time, literacy became part of the intellectual movement currently called the ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’; therein did the concept of litteratus receive a new, elevated importance. ‘I hold with those’, wrote John of Salisbury as spokesman for this movement, ‘who believe that a man cannot become a litteratus without reading the auctores’.38 For him, the term did not indicate every person who could read and write, but only those who knew the literary tradition of ancient and Christian classics. And his demands were high, insisting that it was not the copia litterarum (‘the abundance of things 77

78

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als geistesgeschichtliches Problem’, 524 f.) refers to variants of the saying in Salimbene, MGH SS 32 (1905–13), p. 122: ‘prelatus enim sine scientia est sicut asinus coronatus’ (‘for a prelate without knowledge is like a crowned donkey’). And with Cardinal Filastre: ‘rex vel prelatus indoctus [est asinus coronatus]’ (‘an unlearned king or prelate is a crowned donkey’); H. van der Hardt, Magnum Oecumenicum Constantiniense Concilium, 7 vols. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1696–1742), II, col. 228. 34 Peter of Blois, Epistola 67, PL 207, 211. 35 Philip of Harvengt († 1183), Epistola 16 to Count Philipp of Flanders (after 1168), PL 203, 149: ‘princeps, quem non nobilitat scientia litteralis, non parum degenerans si quasi rusticanus et quodammodo bestialis’ (‘a prince whom the knowledge of letters does not ennoble is not a little degenerate as if like a rustic and somehow bestial’), cited as the statement of a Count Ayulf, who died on crusade, whose parents ‘a puero fecerunt litteratum’ (‘made him learned from boyhood’). 36 Epistola 17 to Count Henry I of Champagne (1152–81), whom he encouraged to read Latin and to honor litterati, PL 205, 154: ‘Recte ergo viro nobili litterarum placet nobilis officina, cuius exercitio cuditur salutaris morum, scientiae, fidei disciplina, ita ut si cuilibet vulgares linguae praesto sint caeterae, non Latina, ipsius pace dixerim, hebetudo eum teneat asinina’ (‘The noble formation of letters rightly, therefore, pleases a noble man, by the exercise of which wholesome morals, knowledge and the discipline of the faith are forged, so that if the other vulgar tongues are at hand for anyone, and not Latin, I would say peace to him, may ass-like dullness possess him’). 37 PL 196, 1651: ‘Vetus enim proverbium est et ore veterum celebrata sententia: Quantum a belluis homines, tantum distant a laicis litterati’ (‘For there is an old proverb and saying celebrated in the mouths of the ancients: As far as men are distant from beasts, so the learned are from laymen’). On Nicholas see C. H. Talbot, Revue Bénédictine 64 (1954), 83 ff.; J. Leclercq, Revue Bénédictine 66 (1956), 269 ff. 38 John of Salisbury, Policraticus vii.9, ed. Webb, II, 123.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) read’) that made one wise, but also the enlightening, creative, enlivening gratia virtutum (‘grace of the virtues’): ‘Poetas, historicos, oratores, mathematicos probabilis mathematicae quis ambigit esse legendos, maxime cum sine his viri esse nequeant vel non soleant litterati, qui enim istorum ignari sunt, illitterati dicuntur, etsi litteras noverint’ (‘he who doubts that poets, historians, orators and mathematicians of provable mathematics are to be read, especially since, without these, men cannot be or are not accustomed to be learned, for those who are ignorant of them are called illiterate even if they know their letters’).37 Over a thousand years later, this invokes nearly verbatim the standards of Cicero and Seneca, who are constantly cited by John of Salisbury; and he, in turn, refers to Catullus, Varro and Ovid as litteratissimus38 for this claim: whoever disrespects grammatics cannot be litteratus.39 Grammatics is not only learning a language and understanding Latin, but also the intellectual content of this prima ars – thus litteratus is not only being able to write and know Latin, as expected of every cleric and some laity, but implies ‘educated’ in a special sense, specifically ‘educated in the classics’ in ancient tradition. Once again, as with Cicero, the term is nuanced with comparison. In John’s judgement, optimi litterati include both Bernard of Clairvaux and his opponent Gilbert de la Porrée, whom Otto of Freising praised as a vir litteratissimus.40 John’s countryman and close friend Peter of Blois compared from personal knowledge the English King Henry II with King William II of Sicily, whom he taught for a year: the former was longe litterarior (‘far more learned’), entertaining himself every day with the litteratissimi (‘the most learned’) at his court; King William, by contrast, put aside the books as soon as his teacher was gone and devoted himself to the otium palatinum (‘leisure activities of the palace’).41 Another Englishman, Gervase of Tilbury, called Emperor Henry VI literatis ipse literatior (‘more learned than any men of learning’),42 and Innocent III was justly called 82

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37 Ibid.,

II, 126. ibid., II, 129. Ovid, Metalogicon, ed. C. C. I. Webb (Oxford, 1929); [not found here at Ovid’s single appearance, as Naso, p. 147, line 16]. 39 Metalogicon i.24, ed. Webb, p. 88 [correction: 58]. 40 John of Salisbury, Historia pontificalis c. 12, ed. R. L. Poole (Oxford, 1927), p. 27; ed. M. Chibnall, Nelson’s Medieval Texts (London, 1956), p. 26. Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici i.61, ed. Waitz and Simson, p. 87. Rahewin says (ibid., iv.14, p. 252), that before his death in Morimond, Otto of Freising gave his work to ‘litteratis et religiosis viris’ (‘learned and religious men’) to assess whether his judgement of Gilbert was offensive. 41 Peter of Blois, Epistola 66 to Archbishop Walter of Palermo, PL 207, 198. 42 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia ii.19, MGH SS 27 (1885), p. 380, line 42; trans. Banks and Binns, p. 463. According to Guibert of Nogent, on the other side was Pope Paschalis II (De vita sua iii.4, ed. Bourgin, p. 141) ‘minus quam suo competeret officio literatus’. [‘His education, in fact, was not equal to his office’; Monodies; and, On the relics of saints: The Autobiography and a Manifesto of a French monk from the time of the Crusades, trans. J. McAlhany and J. Rubenstein (London, 2011), p. 115.] 38 Varro:

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Litteratus–Illitteratus vir litteratissimus by a contemporary.43 Otto of Freising, influenced as a young student in France by that educational movement, said of Abelard, de litterato efficitur litteratior (‘from being a learned person he is made more learned’).44 He prized France generally as the land of many viri litterati.45 By bestowing equal praise on some German bishops, he stressed their special qualifications for embassies to Byzantium or Rome,46 since the representatives of the Romans to Barbarossa were also litterati.47 Yet such is by no means a quality of all Latin readers. How broadly the concept could expand from this simple definition is perhaps most strikingly revealed by a comment of the Franciscan chronicler Salimbene about Pope Innocent III. It was his practice when preaching to hold a book before himself; his chaplains asked him why he did that as a ‘homo sapiens et litteratus’ (‘man wise and educated’), and he answered, to provide them an example – otherwise they would disregard and forget their reading.48 Litteratus here is precisely in the sense and measure of ‘educated’, that a person does not need a book to preach – as many demanding audiences today expect a ‘lecture’ to be presented extemporaneously. Innocent III was sufficiently litteratus that he could have done so, but he was wise and modest enough (a model and consolation for the rest of us) not to do without a manuscript, as if the litteratus should not detach himself so utterly from the littera. 88

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VII Nearly simultaneous to the growing role of education for the litteratus developed an entirely different, almost inverted valuation of the litteratus and 43 Caesarius

of Heisterbach, Dial. mirac. vi.29, ed. Strange, I, 381. of Freising, Gesta i.49, ed. Waitz and Simson, p. 69. In the Chronicle of the monastery of Morigny it is said that ‘pene de tota Latinitate viri litterati’ (‘learned men from virtually all the Latin world’) streamed together to Abelard’s school; MGH SS 26 (1882), p. 41, line 8; Translation of the Chronicle of the Abbey of Morigny, France, c. 1100–1150, trans. R. Cusimano (Lewiston NY, 2003), p. 113. And the French bishops complained to Innocent II about Abelard’s effect, because even outside the schools theological disputing was being done ‘nec a litteratis aut provectis tantum, sed a pueris et simplicibus’ (‘not just by learned and advanced men, but by boys and simple people’); PL 182, 540. When Héloïse finds Abelard’s songs so beautiful ‘ut etiam illitteratos melodiae dulcedo tui non sineret immemores esse’, she means that even those who did not understand Latin were charmed by the melody – a proof that Abelard composed Latin songs; PL 178, 185; ed. J. T. Muckle, Mediaeval Studies 15 (1953), p. 72. [‘The beauty of the melody ensured that even the unlettered did not forget you’; The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, ed. D. Luscombe (Oxford, 2013), p. 137.] 45 Otto of Freising, Gesta i.48, ed. Waitz and Simson, p. 68. 46 Ibid., i.34, p. 37: Bishop Embrich of Würzburg; ii.4, p. 105: Archbishop Hillin of Trier and Bishop Eberhard of Bamberg. 47 Ibid., i.29, p. 135. 48 Salimbene, Cronica, MGH SS 32 (1905–13), p. 31, lines 38 ff. 44 Otto

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) the illitteratus: that emergent within the new orders and sects of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century religious movement, from Bernard of Clairvaux through Valdes to Francis. Bernard had often defended himself against the accusation that he disdained litterae, studium and the scientia litterarum. He castigated the destructive excesses of self-centred profane thinking and dialectic, but maintained1 that he knew full well how much the Church needed its litterati to teach the simple and to oppose heretics, often accused by him of being sine litteris and idiotae2 – a double-edged argument, as will soon be evident. Other Cistercians were already speaking disparagingly of the ‘useless ones’, that nihil salvantes litterae (‘learning contributing nothing to salvation’).3 As evident in its foundation history,4 the Cistercian Order was proud that so many clerici litterati et nobiles and powerful noble laity entered Cîteaux with Bernard. But, elsewhere in the twelfth-century monastic literature, the question often arose as to whether the litterati were really the best people, the best monks and Christians; whether the unlearned and uneducated would enter heaven more easily, or whether the vacare litteris (‘the leisure to devote oneself to learning’) was compatible with a truly religious life.5 Since the heretics of this period were often accused by their Catholic opponents of being illitterati and idiotae and therefore incapable of understanding the Holy Scriptures and their correct interpretation, the opportunity to turn the tables was close at hand: such had been the very charges levelled at Peter and John by the High Priests and the Scribes in the Acts of the

1 Bernard

of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica xxxvi.2, PL 183, 967. Cf. ibid., xxxvii.2, col. 971. Bernard recommended the young John of Salisbury to the archbishop of Canterbury because he had good evidence that ‘non minus vita quam litteratura promeruerit’ (‘he was deserving no less for his life than for his learning’); Ep. 361, PL 182, 562. 2 Bernard, Sermo 65 and 66, PL 183, 1093 f. and passim. 3 Helinand of Froidmont, Sermo 15, PL 212, 603: Quid … aliud conferre possunt nihil salvantes litterae … nisi tamen aliquando ad insaniam ducere? (‘What … else can non-salvific litterae provide … other than sometimes leading one to madness?’). Cf. A. Koperska, Die Stellung der religiösen Orden zu den Profanwissenschaften im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, dissertation (Fribourg, 1914), pp. 57 f. 4 Exordium parvum, ed. P. Guignard, Les monuments primitifs de la règle cistercienne (Dijon, 1878), p. 74. See now Analecta Cisterciensia 6 (1950), pp. 6 ff. According to J. A. Lefèvre, ‘Le vrai récit primitif des origines de Cîteaux est-il l’Exordium Parvum?’, Le Moyen-Age 61 (1955), 79 ff. and 329 ff., this text came into being only in 1151. The – according to his opinion – original Exordium 1119 spoke only of the entry of Bernard and his companions in Cîteaux: then came ‘tam clerici quam laici et ipsi secundum seculum nobiles atque potentes’ (clergy as much as laity and those noble in the eyes of the world and the powerful); MPL 160, 391. The Exordium Magnum of Abbot Conrad of Eberbach († 1227) speaks of ‘nobilibus litteratis et potentibus in seculo viris’ (nobles and men powerful in the world); PL 185, 1012. The relation of these texts to one another needs further clarification. 5 Cf. also Jean Leclercq, L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu (Paris, 1957), especially pp. 195 ff.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus Apostles (4. 13)! To follow and imitate the Apostles was the highest goal, the driving motivation, of the religious movement that produced heretical sects such as the Cathars and Waldensians, as well as new orders, especially the Franciscans.6 In his Testament, Francis wrote humbly about the beginnings of his brotherhood, but also admonished: ‘Et eramus ydiotae et subditi omnibus’ (‘and we were uneducated and subject to all’), and in a letter to the friars minor gathered for a chapter meeting, he confessed that he often did not keep the Rule, because he was careless or ill, ‘sive quia ignorans et ydiota’ (‘or because he was ignorant and uneducated’).7 ‘Simple’ he was and wanted to be; he consciously distinguished himself and his own order from the theologians and scholars, as highly as he did honour them. James of Vitry, who saw him in 1216, portrayed him as a ‘virum simplicem et illiteratum’ (‘simple and illiterate man’), and the first Franciscans as ‘simplices et pauperes homines’ (‘simple and poor men’), although many educated, even learned, men were among them from the beginning.8 When Francis preached in Bologna in 1222, the eye-witness Thomas of Spalato reports, many litterati of that university town marvelled not a little at the words of this homo ydiota.9 The first biographer of Francis, Thomas of Celano, relates how Brother Philip, one of the saint’s first companions, understood and explicated Scripture without having to learn it first, ‘illorum imitator effectus … quos idiotas et sine litteris fore Judeorum principes causabantur’ (‘made an imitator of those whom the princes of the Jews pretended were uneducated and illiterate’).10 Thus is the model clear through which the concept of litteratus was inverted. The origins and consequences of this sensibility toward Scripture become clearer with the Lyon merchant Valdes, who set out on the same path of apostolic revival a generation before Francis, but came into conflict with and then separated from the Church. When the first Waldensians sought papal approval for their apostolic life and work, the arrogant Walter Map, who had interrogated them at the Lateran Council of 1179, called them homines ydiotas, illitteratos.11 The Cistercian Geoffrey of Auxerre, once a secretary to Bernard

6 Cf.

Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, and his ‘Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der religiösen Bewegungen im Mittelalter’, AKG 37 (1955), 129 ff. [See Religious Movements, pp. 220 ff.] 7 H. Boehmer, Analekten zur Geschichte des Franziscus von Assisi, 2nd edn, Sammlung ausgewählter kirchen- und dogmengeschichtlicher Quellenschriften n.s. 4 (Tübingen, 1930), pp. 25 and 41. 8 Ibid., pp. 71 and 67. Further sources for the designation of saints as illitteratus and idiota in Hilarin Felder, Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Studien im Franziskanerorden (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1904), pp. 61 f. 9 MGH SS 29 (1892), p. 580. 10 Thomas of Celano, Vita prima s. Francisci I.x.25, Analecta Franciscana 10, p. 22. 11 Map, De nugis curialium i.31, ed. James, p. 60. [revised 1986 edn, pp. 124–7; see section vi above, n. 29.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) of Clairvaux, more carefully termed them ‘aut penitus aut pene sine litteris’ (‘either wholly or somewhat without letters’),12 and the Dominican Stephen of Bourbon, who later told the origins of the Waldensians from well-sourced information, also calls them idiotae et litterati; Valdes himself, he calls non multum litteratus (‘not very learned’).13 He tells how this wealthy merchant – who according to another story experienced an inner conversion after hearing a moving performance of the Alexius legend by a minstrel in French14 – had two priests translate the Gospels and other biblical and patristic books, not only orally but in writing, in order to read them often, to memorise them and to preach about them. So: he could read but not understand Latin, and he had a French Bible and patristic texts written down at his own cost. Was he then still illiteratus? The concept was not directly applicable here. When the bishop of Metz told the pope that there were many laymen and women – doubtless Waldensians – holding conventicles in which they read French translations of the Gospels, the Pauline Letters, the Psalter, Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job (Morals on the Book of Job) and other writings, preaching to one another, Innocent III responded by asking what sort of people they were to translate the Holy Scripture and to teach from it: neither should be possible without the scientia litterarum.15 The pope also found the desire to understand and act in keeping with Holy Scripture not as meriting censure but praise. Yet the depths of the Holy Scripture were barely fathomed by the intelligent and learned, not to mention the simplices et illitterati, and he decisively rejected the contempt shown to simple priests by the sectarians, who believed they knew better from their own books. But Innocent III, who soon would receive many Waldensian groups back into the Church and who ten years later would permit the young Minorite community to preach, had already shown these Metz laymen and women – who were being condemned by the bishop as stiffnecked heretics – remarkable tolerance and quizzical interest, as if previous distinctions between litterati and illitterati, between preachers and the laity and even between orthodox and heretics, were no longer applicable. In fact there arose here – as in courtly poetry at the same time16 – a new

12 From

the commentary of Godfrey of Auxerre on Revelation (after 1181), in J. Leclercq, Analecta monastica 2 (Studia Anselmiana 31, 1953), p. 195. 13 A. Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologes tirées du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon (Paris, 1877), pp. 291 f. Cf. p. 407 on Francis: homo valde parum litteratus (‘a man of very little learning’). 14 Chronicon universale Anonymi Laudunensis, for 1173, MGH SS 26 (1882), p. 447; ed. A. Cartellieri and W. Stechele (Leipzig, 1909), pp. 20 f. 15 Innocent III, Reg. ii, 141 and 142, PL 214, 695 ff., especially 699. On this as well, Reg. ii.235, PL 214, 793 ff. Cf. Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 97 ff. [Religious Movements, pp. 40–4.] 16 On this point see Grundmann, ‘Women and Literature’, pp. 30–55 above. R. Bezzola, ‘Der französisch-englische Kulturkreis und die Erneuerung der europäischen Literatur im 12. Jh.’, Zeitshrift für romanische Philologie 62 (1942), 1–18. The second

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Litteratus–Illitteratus kind of literature: paradoxically speaking, it was a ‘literature for illiterates’, for readers who did not understand Latin but still wanted to hear the biblical tradition, theological discussions and edifying contemplations in their mother tongue; moreover, they wanted such not only from preachers but to read it for and to themselves. Much of this vernacular religious literature did not survive the thirteenth century17 because it was heretical, or at least suspected of heresy and thus banned and burned (as were the translations used in Metz). Despite the polemic of many heretics against the litterati, whose knowledge derived only from parchment, not from God,18 a considerable number of books were written in these circles,19 finding dangerously many readers; Strasbourg heretics at the start of the fourteenth century even asserted that many of them could produce better books if all Catholic volumes were destroyed.20 By no means did the new style of readers and writers include only heretics, however. In particular, many orthodox pious women similarly forged ahead into writing without mastering or learning the written Latin language, as volume of Bezzola’s Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident (Paris, 1944), which is to treat the twelfth century, has not yet appeared. [1978 reprint: vols. 2–3 published Paris, 1960, 1963.] 17 On the following, see Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 439 ff.: ‘The rise of religious writings in the vernacular’; Grundmann, ‘Die geschichtliche Grundlagen der Deutschen Mystik’, DVLG 12 (1934), 400 ff. [Grundmann, Religious Movements, 192 ff.] 18 Cf. the Compilatio de novo spiritu (Döllinger, Beiträge II, 402. C. Schmidt, ‘Actenstücke besonders zur Geschichte der Waldenser’, Zeitshrift für die historische Theologie 22 (1852), 249, §21: ‘Boni homines non debent viris literatis revelare bonitatem suam et gratiam, quam habent, quia nesciunt literati, quid sit, nec cognoverunt nisi per pellem vitulinam, ipsi vero per experientiam divinam, quam sugere se dicunt de dulcedine divina’ (‘Good men should not reveal to learned men their goodness and grace which they have, because the learned do not know what it is, and have only learnt from the skin of calves, but the former through experience of God, which they say that they suck from divine sweetness’). Cf. Albert the Great’s report of the same heretics in the Swabian Ries around 1270/3 (Döllinger, II, 396): ‘non debent quaeri consilium a viris litteratis sive de devotione sive de aliis’ (‘they should not seek counsel from learned men whether concerning devotion or other things’). Often phrased similarly in hearings of heretics. 19 Ruysbroeck, Gerson, Johannes Nider, Trithemius and others as well as many trial proceedings mention heretical texts written in French and German. Also in Paris in 1210: ‘libri theologici scripti in Romano’ (‘theological books written in Roman [= romance vernacular]’); [1978 reprint: H. Denifle and E. Chatelain, Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, 6 vols. (Paris, 1887–9), I, 70.] In 1369 Charles IV forbade all laity the reading of ‘libri vulgares de sacra scriptura’ (books written in the vernacular concerning Sacred Scripture); [1978 reprint: J. Mosheim, De beghardis et Beguinabus (Leipzig, 1790), p. 370.] A collection of such evidence would be informative. 20 Episcopal edict of 13/8/1317, UB Straßburg, II, 311, line 22: ‘Item dicunt, aliquos ex eis posse meliores libros reparare omnibus libris catholice fidei, si fuerint destructi’ (‘Again, they say that some from amongst them could procure again better books than all the books of the Catholic faith, if they were destroyed’).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Hildegard of Bingen had already attempted with great effort. She was sought out by a French Cistercian, who visited the seventy-four-year-old in 1172 and was amazed that as a laica et illitterata she still – marvellous and unheard-of! – ‘dictated’21 Latin books. She clearly complained about her poor knowledge of Latin and only was able to write down her visions and letters with the help of others, but no one taught her the ‘litteras in Teutonica lingua, quas nescio’ (‘German tongue’s letters which I do not know’).22 A century later Mechthild of Magdeburg also said, ‘des latines kan ich nit … wa ich der schrift ungeleret bin’23 (‘I do not know Latin, I am unlearned in reading Scripture’) – or, in Latin, 21 Chronicle

of (falsely so-called) William Godellus, MGH SS 26, p. 198: ‘Vidi in Alemannie partibus feminam provecte etatis, virginem, cui tantam gratiam contulit divina virtus, ut, cum ipsa laica et illitterata sit, mirabiliter tamen ab hoc mundo rapiatur frequencius et in summis discat non solum quod postea in imis dicat, sed pocius, quod satis mirabile est et inauditum, etiam scribendo Latine dictet et dictando libros catholice doctrine conficiat; … libros etiam eius vidi et legi, quos ipsa, ut dixi, illitterata Latine dictavit’ (‘I saw in a part of Germany a woman of advanced age, a virgin, on whom divine virtue had conferred so much grace that, although she is a lay and unlearned woman, she is, however, very frequently taken from this world and learns on high not only what she afterwards says below, but rather, which is quite wonderful and unheard of, she even dictates writing in Latin and in dictating produces books of Catholic doctrine … I have also seen and read her books which she, as I said, an unlearned woman dictated in Latin’). Roughly the same passage appears later in Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale xxvii.83 (Douai, 1624), p. 1125; Vincent’s version is quoted in PL 197, 73. According to Alberic of Troisfontaines (MGH SS 23 (1874), p. 834) and the Stader Annals (MGH SS 16 (1859), p. 330), Hildegard only learned to read the Psalter more nobilium puellarum (‘in the way of noble girls’). 22 Ep. 29 to Bernard 1146/7, PL 197, 190: ‘Scio enim in textu interiorem intelligentiam expositionis psalterii et evangelii et aliorum voluminum, que monstrantur mihi de hac visione, que tangit pectus meum et animam sicut flamma comburens, docens me hec profunda expositionis, sed tamen non docet me litteras in teutonica lingua, quas nescio, sed tantum scio in simplicitate legere, non in abscisione textus … quia homo sum indocta de ulla magistratione cum exteriori materia, sed intus in anima mea sum docta’. [‘Through this vision which touches my heart and soul like a burning flame, teaching me profundities of meaning, I have an inward understanding of the Psalter, the Gospels, and other volumes. Nevertheless, I do not receive this knowledge in German. Indeed, I have no formal training at all, for I know how to read only on the most elementary level, certainly with no deep analysis. But please give me your opinion in this matter, because I am untaught and untrained in exterior material, but am only taught inwardly, in my spirit’; The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, 3 vols., trans. J. L. Baird and R. K. Ehrman (Oxford, 1994–2004, I, 28).] Cf. M. Schrader and A. Führkötter, Die Echtheit des Schrifttums der hl. Hildegard von Bingen (Cologne, 1956), pp. 104 ff. On Hildegard’s knowledge of Latin, ibid. pp. 180 ff., and H. Liebeschütz, Das allegorische Weltbild der hl. Hildegard von Bingen (Leipzig, 1930), pp. 159 ff. There should be a comparative investigation of the ability of visionaries (such as Hildegard, Elizabeth of Schönau, Mechthild and Gertrud of Helfta through to Birgitta of Schönau and Catharine of Siena) to read and write, and their relationships to literary helpers. 23 Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechthild von Magdeburg ii.3 and iii.1, ed. G. Morel

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Litteratus–Illitteratus illitterata sum (‘I am illiterate’). But her visions in the Fließende Licht der Gottheit (Flowing Light of the Godhead) were written by her or others in German (only later translated into Latin), as the visions of Sister Hadewich had previously been. Dominican pastors helped the beguine Mechthild, as they soon would many other women who joined the mendicants or placed themselves under their protection, to write down and register their own religious experiences and ideas. So arose the manifold writings of German mysticism – much of it comparable to that in other lands and other languages – for a new readership that one could still call ‘illiterate’ and which was not yet ‘literate’ in the old sense, no longer knowing Latin, neither cleric nor monk nor actually laity. The old differences and equivalences were no longer determined by the various classes and various languages, no longer stemming from the Latin book tradition of literate clergy on the one hand, and the spoken, sung tradition for listening laity on the other. Barriers between the two were breached, as the living language became suitable for writing and books, and the laity (or at least many lay groups) became able and willing to read and write on their own – in their mother tongue. The formative participation of reading women ensured that this change did not remain limited to the realm of the courtly and knightly society and the new religious communities.24 It took root similarly, if for other reasons, in the new urban citizenry (from which both Valdes and Francis had come and which they most strongly influenced); merchants no longer handled their long-range enterprises themselves on the road, but began handling them at home from counting house and office, first painstakingly in Latin during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and later more easily in their own language. Closely following Henri Pirenne, Fritz Rörig25 sees this ‘encroachment of the

(Regensburg, 1869), pp. 30 and 56. Also vii.21, p. 237: ‘ich selber ungeleret bin’ (‘I myself am unlearned’). Mechthild never says whether she read and could write German. Cf. J. Ancelet-Hustache, Mechtilde de Magdebourg (Paris, 1926), pp. 17 f.; G. Lüers, Die Sprache der deutschen Mystik des Mittelalters im Werke der Mechthild von Magdeburg (Munich, 1926), pp. 33 ff. 24 On the special preconditions for the rise of German writing among the Teutonic Knights, see H. Grundmann, ‘Deutsches Schrifttum im Deutschen Orden’, Altpreußische Forschungen 18 (1941), 21–49. See the comment (39 ff.) on the the Order’s Rule’s reference to the fact that ‘plerique laicorum litterati sunt’ (‘many of the lay are litterati’), and on the different reality of the illitterati fratres – to whom it was even forbidden as knights of the Order to litteras discere (to learn litterae), but who nevertheless from the fourteenth century were learning to read and write German. 25 F. Rörig, ‘Mittelalter und Schriftlichkeit’, Die Welt als Geschichte 13 (1953), 28–49, a posthumously published academy lecture of 1946. Cf. Rörig’s Hansische Beiträge zur deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Schriften der Baltischen Kommission für Geschichte 9 (Wrocław, 1928), pp. 218 ff.; p. 174 on the oldest preserved Lübeck merchant’s booklet of 1330/6, in Latin. H. Pirenne, ‘L’instruction des marchands au moyenâge’, Annales d’hist. écon. et soc. 1 (1929), 13–28; Pirenne, Les villes du moyen-âge

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) merchant into the writing monopoly of the clergy’ as the decisive step from the ‘limited ability to write’ of the ‘real Middle Ages’ to the modern development of ‘general literacy’, in which the bourgeois upper class of the great cities are the ‘harbingers of the victory of lay literacy’. It is beyond dispute that the merchant bourgeoisie in Flanders from the twelfth century, in Germany from the thirteenth century and in Italy and southern France even earlier, made the art of writing usefully their own. Rich merchants took clerics (‘clerks’!) at first into their service, often having them educate their children, until they later had built special schools. In this respect, these bourgeois laymen claimed a large share of writing, which benefitted urban administration and made clerics gradually extraneous. In fact, it is still surprising how long the Latin written language was retained after its monopoly had been broken. Merchants’ books and trade documents, urban charters, council books and chronicles were written in Italy into the thirteenth century, in Germany still until the end of the fourteenth century, mostly in Latin,26 and urban schools remained Latin schools until that point. Only in the fifteenth century did new-model schools arise in many German towns, in which the students wrote and read German and learned to make accounts without having to learn Latin.27 Often scorned as Winkelschulen [schools in city ‘nooks and crannies’], they had to overcome considerable clerical opposition; even Luther still railed against them. But the practical need for such German writing schools grew unstoppably, promoted by printing, while the translation of the Bible made the knowledge of Latin completely unnecessary for many. In the middle of the sixteenth century an anonymous ‘school reformer’ urged that one should follow the model of German merchants, according to which children should first learn vernacular reading and writing in German schools and then foreign languages out of the country; thereafter they could finally learn the grammatica, Latin, in fourteen days instead of three years.i The proposal is a late, radical resolution of a development that emerged slowly, almost unnoticed in the towns, stemming more from practical needs than from any conscious pursuit of a new goal. Convincing documentation of a specifically bourgeois concept and goal in (Brussels, 1927), pp. 201 ff. Cf. now E. Ennen, ‘Stadt und Schule in ihrem wechselheitigen Verhältnis vornehmlich im Mittelalter’, Rheinische Viertelsjahrblätter 22 (1957), 56 ff. 26 Cf. F. Merkel, Das Aufkommen der deutschen Sprache in städtischen Kanzleien des ausgehenden Mittelalters, Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 45 (Leipzig, 1930), pp. 10 ff. and 55 ff. 27 Some preliminary references in Grundmann, ‘Deutsches Schrifttum im Deutschen Orden’, 47 f. In Italy this started earlier. According to Giovanni Villani († 1348), about 8,000–10,000 children lived among about 80,000 Florentines, and only 550–600 learned grammatica (Latin) e loica (logic) in four large schools. Chronicon xi.93, Muratori, Scriptores rerum Italicarum 13 (Milan, 1728), col. 827.

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Litteratus–Illitteratus education has not yet been found in the late Middle Ages, nor any new use of the concepts of litteratus and illitteratus. However, the use of script for mercantile business and urban administration was not ‘pioneering’, as Rörig thought, since there had not been a ‘writing monopoly’ of the clergy and of Latin since the twelfth century. As a consequence, the application and significance of the litteratus educational concept became more fragmentary over time and less characteristic of specific intellectual structures or movements. That it appears sometimes in conventional terms and at others in quite singular contexts will be clarified here with a few examples. The Franciscan chronicler John of Winterthur sometime after 1340 tells of two viri litterati et religiosi (‘learned and religious men’) walking in the forest and singing Latin hymns; as a result, a thief waiting for them in hiding was converted.28 In the story, the litterati are Franciscan brothers, and the Psalm melodies Latin. But the same chronicler calls Albert II of Austria litteratus as well and King Robert of Naples litteratissimus, and there is talk of a disputation with Sarracenis litteratis (‘learned Saracens’) – although whether this is still a matter of knowing Latin is debatable. Levold of Northof, the learned Liège canon and chronicler of the counts of the Mark [county in lower Rhine-Westphalia], somewhat later recommends to the count (whom he had also served as a teacher) that his sons should be educated, ‘nam magnus est defectus in principe vel magnate nescire litteras’ (‘for it is a great failing in a prince or magnate not to know his letters’).29 Yet, when speaking of Count Adolf I’s sons, he says that the eldest was a capable and brave knight who fell in a tournament, while the other three were litterati. That is, they were clergy; one even became bishop of Münster. And Count Adolf’s brother was a Cistercian in Morimond in his old age, nam et litteratus erat (‘for he was also learned’) – as if that destined him to the cloister or clergy. It was an entirely different matter with Marsilio of Padua. On the one hand, he insisted that the General Council as the universal assembly of the Church ought to allow lay participation. In particular, it should accommodate non-priestly ‘literati et in lege divina periti’ (‘learned and experts in divine law’), which means theologically and canonistically educated non-clerics. On the other hand, he complained that, due to the removal of electors, incompetents have entered ecclesiastical office, ‘divinarum literarum ignari, idiotae et indisciplinati’ (‘ignorant of divine learning, uneducated and undisciplined’). And finally he remarks that ‘tam literati quam illiterati’ (‘the learned as much as the unlearned’) are received in the clergy and in many religious 28 John

of Winterthur, Die Chronik des Minderbruders, ed. F. Baethgen, MGH SS n.s. 3 (1924), p. 70. On Duke Albrecht, p. 84; on King Robert p. 195; on Sarraceni literati (literate Saracens), p. 230. 29 Levold von Northof, Chronica comitum de Marka, ed. F. Zschaeck, MGH SS n.s. 6 (1929), p. 98. On the sons of Adolf I, p. 34; on his brother p. 20; cf. p. 113.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) congregations – as he describes it, such people are not simply divided by language between clerics and laymen!30 Paradoxically and with bitter irony, Petrarch31 compares his own virtus illitterata (unlearned virtue) to the litterata ignorantia (learned ignorance) of those Venetian ‘friends’ who have deeply offended him with the remark that he is a good man sine litteris (without learning); they consider themselves superior to him with their Aristotelian-Averroist science, while he contrasts them to his own Christian faith, calling himself ‘illitteratus prorsus et idiota’ (‘utterly unlearned and uneducated’). The comment is not inflected with Christian humility like that of Francis, but with ironic disdain. Petrarch’s contempt was here directed at the ignorant who supposedly call him that because, according to their judgement, no one could be a literatus who was not heretically unhealthy, shameless and insolent. That sounds rather like the distorted Literate concept of the nineteenth century. Petrarch, however, is only using it ironically; when he calls his opponents litteratissimi homines, he refers in injured pride to his own ‘bibliotheca … non illitterata quidem, quamvis illitterati hominis’ (‘not indeed an unlearned library, although belonging to an unlearned man’), and at the end of this polemic he leaves no doubt that he feels himself envied for his fame as a homo litteratus. The term does not seem to him at all devalued, but at most ambiguous and misused. Finally, Nicholas of Cusa makes a poor idiota, a Roman artisan, the partner and even teacher of a wealthy orator and philosopher in conversations on wisdom, the nature of the spirit and on tests with the scale.32 The idiota, who knows nothing of book-wisdom and authorities, nonetheless comes 30 Marsilio

of Padua, Defensor pacis II.xx.13, ed. R. Scholz, MGH Fontes iuris antiqui (1932), p. 400. Cf. II.xxi.15, p. 419 on viri literati and collegia literatorum (colleges of the literate), with state, not ecclesiastical (teaching) offices. On idiotae in Church offices, II.xxiv.2, p. 453; II.xxiv.10, pp. 457 f.; II.viii.9, p. 229. 31 Petrarch, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (written 1367), ed. L. M. Capelli (Paris, 1906), pp. 21 f.; with abbreviations, ed. P. G. Ricci in Francesco Petrarca, Prose, La Letteratura Italiana, Storia e Testi 7 (Milan, 1955), pp. 710 ff. Capelli, pp. 29 f., on literata ignorantia and on veri sapientes et sobrie literati;[ (‘learned ignorance’, ‘the truly wise and men of sober learning’; On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, in Francesco Petrarch, Invectives, trans. D. Marsh (Cambridge MA, 2003), p. 26]. Capelli, p. 76, on his library (see trans. Marsh, p. 329). Capelli, p. 80: ‘iam nemo igitur literatus horum iudicio esse potest nisi sit idem hereticus et insanus superque omnia importunus et procax’ [‘no one is a man of learning unless he is also a heretic and a madman, and above all aggressively perverse’; trans. Marsh, p. 337]. Capelli, p. 82: ‘Dolent forsitan, imo dolent utique apud doctos, apud quos michi, verene an falso, literati hominis partum nomen audiunt, se nec literatos esse nec cognitos’ [‘They are perhaps grieved; no, they are certainly grieved that in learned circles they appear unlettered, while I appear to be a man of letters, whether rightly or wrongly’; trans. Marsh, p. 341.] 32 Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de Sapientia, de Mente, de Staticis Experimentis, ed. L. Baur Opera omnia, 20 vols. (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1932–2006), V, esp. 3 ff. and 45 ff.;

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Litteratus–Illitteratus closer to wisdom through his own questioning thought than do the litterati philosophi. He is superior to the litteratus in wisdom ‘who calls out on the street’, because he does not feed at the bookshelf like a horse in a manger, but lives by the natural nutrition of his spirit; and he is also humbler than the prideful scholars, because he remains Socratically aware of his ignorance. This philosophical inversion of the concept had been prepared and enabled by the long-observed transformation of meaning, but it was not its ‘result’; it did not determine further usage of language, which put the old words, as it were, to new and ever more particular use once they were no longer needed to distinguish Latinate clergy from letter-less laity. How useless these distinctions had become by the end of the Middle Ages, on the brink of a new era, is particularly evident in the series of princely university founders in Germany. Elector Rupert I of the Palatinate, founder of the Heidelberg University, was still an illiterate layman like many of his contemporaries. At the age of seventy he wrote in 1379 to the French King Charles V that he was not able to respond at once to the king’s letter with questions about the schism before consulting with his prelates, theologians and jurists, since he understood only his mother tongue, ‘simplex laicus sumus et litteras ignoramus’ (‘we are a simple layman and do not know letters’);33 he obviously was not ashamed that he could neither read nor write nor did he know Latin. The first Württemberg duke, Eberhard im Bart, born in 1445 and founder of Tübingen University, learned to read and write as a child; yet his teacher Vergenhans, called Nauclerus and well-taught in the classics, himself relates34 that he was hindered in ‘making him a Latin’. It was sufficient litterati philosophi p. 47. Cf. E. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 10 (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 52 ff. 33 Deutsche Reichstagsakten, Ältere Reihe, in progress (Munich and elsewhere, 1867–), I, 263, no. 149. Cf. G. Ritter, Die Heidelberger Universität im Mittelalter (1386–1508) (Heidelberg, 1936), p. 39. 34 Nauclerus, Memorabilium omnis aetatis … chronici commentarii (Tübingen, 1516), fol. 301a: ‘puer indolis eximiae, cui ego primas literas tradens prohibitus sum, ne eum latinum facerem, satis esse dicentibus [in printed version: ducentibus; these are the tutors who raised the boy orphaned at five], si vernaculam linguam legere didicisset et scribere; quod ille vir tulit molestissime … et licet literarum latinarum esset penitus ignarus, literatorum tamen hominum conversatione delectabatur plurimum, quos, ut erat ingenio promptus, iugiter et de industria disputantes fecit. Et si quid notatu dignum audivit, perpetuo retinuit; memoria enim admirabili pollebat … Libros etiam vernacula lingua conscriptos omnes quesivit ac avidissime perlegit; multa ad haec preclara opera in linguam teutonicam verti e latino curavit’ (‘a boy of extraordinary natural ability, to whom I was prevented from teaching his first letters, lest I make him a Latin, for they [i.e. the tutors who raised the orphaned boy of five] said that it sufficed, if he learned to read and write in the vernacular tongue. And this he much resented when he was a man. And although he was deeply ignorant of Latin letters, he took the greatest delight in the conversation of learned men whom, as he naturally possessed a ready intellectual ability, he made dispute continually and energetically. And if he heard something worthy of note, he remembered it forever; for he had an

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) that he could read and write in his mother tongue, which then appeared to him an onerous restriction – he would prefer to be a litteratus in the full old sense. The founder of the University of Wittenberg, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, could say of himself (as a pupil of the prince-school in Grimma) that he was ‘versed in Latin’;35 but he made little use of it, had everything translated and could hardly be called a litteratus. And Landgrave Philip of Hesse, the founder of the University of Marburg, was an avid writer of letters from his youth on, but when Zwingli wrote him in Latin, he replied that he understood only German.36 According to medieval concepts he was thus an idiota, and yet no one would have called him illitteratus. The words had lost their old meaning, since one no longer read and wrote only Latin; since one could also skillfully read and write in the mother tongue; and since there existed a grammatica patrii sermonis (‘grammar of his forefathers’ tongue’), as Charlemagne had sought. The long path to this goal has been traced here through the guiding thread of one word’s history through the centuries. In this context, of course, one can speak only of the symptoms of change in educational forms and expectations, not the causes of those changes reflected in the shifting meaning of words. What can be observed in these symptoms requires clarification from, and grounding in, manifold changing social and national conditions, ideational forces and cultural efforts. Their motivations and effects can be investigated only by paying attention to the evidence requiring understanding and explanation – without preconception and through the testimonies of the past.

admirably good memory. He also sought out all the books written in the vernacular tongue and read them through most avidly. In addition, he had many celebrated works translated from Latin into the German tongue’). See F. Ernst, Eberhard im Bart (Stuttgart, 1933), p. 11, who without any source accepts that Eberhard as a second son was originally destined to be a priest; if so, he would have taken Latin right away. 35 Deutsche Reichstagsakten, Jüngere Reihe, in progress (Gotha and elsewhere, 1893- ), I, 567, no. 229, letter of 18 April 1519 to Spalatin, concerning a Latin text of the papal legate: ‘Und als wir ein Lateiner sein, so lassen wir uns beduncken, daz die werbung nach daz antragen nit fast formlich; doch begern wir, ir wellet solchs verteutschen und uns uberschicken’ (‘Since I am versed in Latin, I have concluded that the document was not entirely correct in form, so that I desire that you should translate it into German and send it back to me’). See P. Kirn, Friedrich der Weise und die Kirche (Leipzig, 1926), pp. 8 f., with references to the language knowledge of other contemporary princes. 36 Zwingli to Landgrave Philip, 7, 5, 1529, in Sämtliche Werke, in progress, Corpus Reformatorum 98- (Leipzig, 1904–), X, 118, no. 840, with note 4. Cf. the letter of 14 July 1529, ibid., X, 209, no. 876, with the apology that he began in Latin because ‘Helvetica lingua paulo alienior est a vestra’ (‘The Swiss language is a bit too different from your [German to be easily understood]’).

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Litteratus–Illitteratus

Note i [Grundmann provided no reference for this, though he had supplied one in his ‘Deutsches Schrifttum im deutschen Orden’, 49 n. 127: K. Sudhoff, ‘Gedanken eines unbekannten Anhängers des Theophrastus Paracelsus aus der Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts über deutsche Jügenderziehung’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für deutsche Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte 5 (1995), 87–8. ]

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4 Heresy Interrogationsin the Late Middle Ages as a Source-Critical Problem* By Herbert Grundmann

I Inquisitors’ Questions (Interrogatoria) The first papal inquisitor in northern France during the 1240s was the Dominican Robert le Petit.1 Known as le Bougre, he earned a villainous reputation for having forced many innocent people into compromising confessions in order to convict them of heresy and condemn them to death by fire.2 As complaints mounted, he was recalled by Pope Gregory IX and actually imprisoned by his religious order. The chronicler of the Senones cloister in the Vosges in the bishopric of Toul, the Benedictine Richer, recounted a particularly astonishing story.3 Robert was very learned and eloquent, second to none in Paris, but – it was said – thought about and desired fame excessively. Using diabolical means, he prepared a document (cartula) that he only had to place upon one’s head to cause that person helplessly to declare everything the inquisitor wanted to hear. One day, during his sermon, he saw a beautiful

* Original

publication in: Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 21 (1965), 519–75. 1 C. H. Haskins, ‘Robert le Bougre and the Beginnings of the Inquisition in Northern France’, American Historical Review 7 (1901/02), 437–57 and 631–52; revised in his Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Oxford, 1929), pp. 193–244. 2 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols. (London, 1872–83), V, 247, and also in MGH SS 28 (1888), p. 326: ‘Dicebatur … infinitos infatuasse et infatuatos innocuos incendio tradidisse’ (‘it was said … that he had made a fool of countless people and had consigned the fooled innocents to the flames’); see also Paris, Chronica majora, 146 ff. (Luard, III, 520) and 411: ‘cuius imposturas melius est silere quam explicare’ (‘about whose deceptions it is better to remain silent than to explain’). 3 Richeri Gesta Senoniensis Ecclesiae iv.18, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 25 (1880), pp. 307 ff. See also M. E. David, ‘Richer, religieux de l’ordre de Saint-Benoȋt’, Histoire Littéraire de la France 19 (Paris, 1895), 79–82; Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, 6th edn, II, 399.

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Heresy Interrogations woman, and he asked her to come to him after the sermon. Expecting that he wanted to hear her confession, she went to him alone; but he pressed her with flattery and threatened that if she would not yield to his desire, he would convict her of heresy and have her burned. But she remained determined. The next day he displayed her to the public, laying his hand on her head and asking her whether she belonged to the heretical sect. She agreed and rejected his second question, which was whether she wished to return to the Catholic faith, declaring she would rather die than renounce the sect. And so Robert could say, ‘You have heard how this woman confesses to her shame’, and arrested her. All marvelled at this, for they had never heard the like from her. Her son, however, a gifted young cleric, asked everywhere how to save his mother from a heretic’s death. A sympathetic friend, who knew the Dominican well, advised: ‘When your mother is publicly heard again tomorrow, step up next to her, and when Master Robert lays his hand on her head, grab his hand – you are certainly stronger than he is – and take away the cartula you find under the hand; hold onto it and ask Master Robert to ask his mother again about her faith.’ So it happened, and as the cleric took the cartula from the hand, his mother knew nothing more of what had been asked before, or said. When questioned again, she swore before all listening that she had never heard those words, nor Robert’s questions about her faith, and that she did not even know what heresy was. At this, the son showed everyone the cartula through which the Dominican cheated and killed whomever he wished by diabolical means. Hearing and seeing this, the crowd wanted to kill him, but the clergy prevented it and threw him into a stone dungeon forever. Since he had sent his own father, mother and many others into the flames (whether guilty or not),4 hiding his own evil, God declared this sentence over him so that he might still convert others from evil in this life. In fact, Robert later found refuge in the St Victor house in Paris or another monastery. Similar accounts of popular hostility to heresy hearings are frequent, as had occurred a bit earlier against Konrad of Marburg, the first papal inquisitor in Germany;5 such attitudes derived not from sympathy for or advocacy on behalf of heretics but, rather, from distrust towards inquisitors who declared innocents to be heretics. Such is the case in Goethe’s Egmont (act 4, scene 1). After Alba’s entry into Brussels, Vansen the clerk declares to 4 Other

sources record that Robert’s parents were heretics, and that he himself supposedly lived among Cathars in Milan (hence his nickname le Bougre) before he became a Dominican, like Peter Martyr, Rainer Sacconi and others. See Haskins, Studies, pp. 211 ff. 5 Erfurter Dominikaner-Annalen zu 1234, ed. O. Holder-Egger, Monumenta Erphefurtensia, MGH SRG 42 (1899), p. 85: ‘plerisque per Teutoniam prelatis ac clericis seu etiam laicis magistri Cunradi visitandi hereticos seu examinandi forma displicuerat’ (‘to many of the prelates and clerics throughout Germany, and even laity, Master Conrad’s manner of punishing or examining heretics was displeasing’). Similar in Chronica regia Colonensis, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SRG 18 (1880), 264, for the year 1233.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) his unconcerned fellow citizens: ‘I have seen a protocol written out where the Commissioner … an honourable devil, would be condemned as a rascal’. And to the ‘Bird-brain’ – who objects, ‘What then do they want to find out, if one is innocent?’ – Vansen testifies to the truth from his own experience, ‘Whenever nothing can be learned outside, it is learned inside’. And he describes in detail such entrapping interrogation practices, capable of forcing answers even without a magic cartula. Charles Homer Haskins, however, remarked of the magical account about Robert le Bougre (Studies in Mediaeval Culture, p. 226), ‘If we substitute hypnotic suggestion for the cartula, there is nothing impossible in the story’. Hypnosis and suggestion instead of magical diabolical art: can a psychological interpretation better explain why and how confessions of heresy were similarly wrung from many unsuspecting people? Or could the cartula itself, when approached and understood from a contemporary perspective, point to how protocolled statements in hearings originated, and how they are to be interpreted – not only by the distrusting and sceptical, but also by critical research? In a letter to Pope Gregory XI in 1375, the city council of Cologne bitterly complained that a Dominican inquisitor was questioning poor, simple, illiterate lay people of both sexes. Considered orthodox by their pastors, these people had long lived in the city as good Christians – yet the inquisitor posed such difficult, almost insoluble questions of faith that even a great theologian would not be able to answer them without much thought and leafing through books.6 We will consider shortly what those questions, so often presented to people like those in Cologne, actually were. How dubious must, or could, 6 Quellen

zur Geschichte der Stadt Köln, ed. L. Ennen and G. Eckertz, 6 vols. (Cologne, 1860/3–79), V, 88–90, no. 82: ‘Et revera, sanctissime pater, dictus inquisitor adeo difficiles et indissolubiles predictis pauperibus hominibus laycis et omnino illiteratis proponit questiones fidiales [sic?], quod sine magna deliberatione et librorum revolutione vix magnus theologus posset sibi dare solutionem; super quibus utique, ut credimus, meri layci et illiterati omnino examinari non deberent; sed eis sufficere videretur scire articulos fidei prout laicis incumbit’ (‘And indeed, Most Holy Father, this inquisitor proposes to the poor lay individuals mentioned above and to those who are wholly illiterate, questions of faith that are so difficult and insoluble that a great theologian would scarcely be able to give him an answer without great deliberation and without searching in books; on these matters, we believe that those who are mere laity and wholly illiterate should certainly not be examined; but let it suffice for them to know the articles of faith just as is incumbent upon the laity’). The Pope should advise his inquisitor to cease this ‘vexatio dictorum pauperum, ne in civitate nostra eis talibus bonis christianis remanentibus vel in fide notorie non errantibus (ed: curantibus) contra eos procedere attemptet’ (‘vexation of the abovementioned poor, lest he attempt to proceed in our city against those remaining good Christians or those who are known not to err in their faith [ed.: known to take care]’). Doubtless it was beguines and beghards, often suspected of heresy here as elsewhere, who were being heard by the papal inquisitor John of Boland OP. See J. Asen, ‘Die Beginen in Köln’, Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 111 (1927), 107 ff.

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Heresy Interrogations have been the responses in the protocols of those being interrogated, and what can really be derived from them about their ‘heresy’? In any case, one must consider these sources of danger and error if wishing to evaluate interrogation records as historical sources, no matter how officially they are witnessed by notarial documents. In fact, a formulary for questioning (interrogatorium) was the basis of every heresy hearing; not designed anew for every case, it was often drawn from material gleaned from earlier hearings or inquisitorial handbooks.7 For, in most cases, one wanted less to discover the actual thoughts of individual heretics than to confirm their agreement with already condemned heresies, to determine their membership in an already known sect – as then a verdict could be rendered clearly and simply. With organised sects such as the Cathars and Waldensians, characterised by strikingly distinct teachings spread by itinerant preachers, this procedure was relatively simple and uncomplicated; the nuances of heretical thought did not concern inquisitors. The protocolled statements hence repeated themselves monotonously with few variations and, even when no formularies survived, could be reconstructed with relative ease. At the time of the rise of the inquisition, one knew well enough what questions to pose and what answers to expect. All such formularies were in any case stated in Latin and then translated point by point into the language of the interrogated person (who seldom knew Latin) for their response. The answers were then protocolled back into Latin – a Strasbourg Waldensian hearing around 1400 was the first registered in German.8 The ‘translation problem’ thus shifted back and forth through both question and answer, and we will consider shortly how powerfully the Latin wording of the question framed the Latin form of the answer. The more personal and peculiar a heretical opinion was, however, the more difficult it was to grasp with this procedure. In heresy trials against scholars such as Abelard and Gilbert de la Porée, later Meister Eckhart or Ockham, or Jan Hus and Johann von Wesel, a great deal of effort was expended to gather damning evidence from their own writings;9 but even then the examined person often disputed whether they had really written, meant or preached

7 P.

Flade, Das römische Inquisitionsverfahren in Deutschland bis zu den Hexenprozessen, Studien zur Geschichte der Theologie und der Kirche 9, no. 1 (Leipzig, 1902), pp. 71–4, gathers together examples of ‘articles of interrogation’ (interrogatoria). 8 T. W. Röhrich, ‘Die Winkeler in Straßburg samt den Verhöracten um 1400’, in Mitteilungen aus der Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche des Elsasses (Paris, 1855), I, 38–77; on this P. Flade, ‘Deutsches Inquisitionsverfahren um 1400’, ZKG 22 (1901), 232–53. [New edition: Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser von Straßburg (1400–1401), ed. G. Modestin, MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 22 (Hanover, 2007. See on this G. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt. Der Prozess gegen die Straßburger Waldenser von 1400, MGH Studien und Texte 41 (Hanover, 2007).] 9 Cf. for example J. Koch, ‘Über Philosophische und Theologische Irrtumslisten von 1270–1329’, in Mélanges Mandonnet, 2 vols., Bibliothèque Thomiste 14 (Paris, 1930), II, 305–29.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) the words being held against them. Meister Eckhart, for example, decisively stated in his justification that they were misunderstandings from ill-will or crass ignorance, from ruditas or imbecillitas intellectus.10 How, then, were lesseducated souls to make themselves understood in an oral hearing? To what extent were their answers (to stereotyped questions formulated elsewhere and then protocolled in Latin) to be taken seriously as reflective of what they thought and meant? Yet once one experiences how interrogated people spoke in exceptional cases, without the pressure of questions and sometimes even in their own writings, it is striking how surprisingly different they sound from protocolled expressions before an inquisitorial court. A newly available case of this sort is briefly explained below, as an example for assessing the testimonial and evidentiary value of other trial records.

II Paris 1310: Marguerite Porete, Her Trial and Her Book On the Sunday after Ascension 1310, with the counsel and agreement of the bishop of Paris and in the presence of many clerics and lay people, a beguine from Hainault named Marguerite Porete was condemned as an obstinate heretic. The next day, she was burned. The notarial document of 31 May was discovered in the papers of Guillaume de Nogaret,11 with the verdict of the papal inquisitor in regno Francie, the Dominican Guillaume de Paris (who was also involved in developing the trial against the Templars).12 From the affidavit of [9 May]i by five canonists of the Paris University, one learns that at least five years earlier Bishop Guido II of Cambrai (1296–1306 † 22 10 Eine

lateinische Rechtfertigungsschrift des Meister Eckhart, ed. A. Daniels, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 23, 5 (Münster, 1923), 4 ff., 8. 34 and often; also in G. Théry, ‘Édition critique des pièces relatives au procès d’Eckhart, contenues dans le Ms. 33b de la Bibliothèque de Soest’, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Âge 1 (1926/27), 187 ff., 191, 208 and passim. 11 Lea, History, II, 575–8, was the first to publish from these acts (Paris Arch. Nat. J 428) the notarial instrument of 31 May with the verdict of the inquisitor and the affidavit of the canonists of 30 May; C.-V. Langlois, ‘Margarite Porete’, Revue Historique 54 (1894), 295–9, referring to the origin of these acts from the Nogaret papers, the affidavit of the theologians of 11 April 1309 (with Easter as New Year, ‘stile de France’ = 1310); both of these and the chroniclers’ evidence also in Fredericq 1, 155–60, nos. 164 ff. and 2, 63–5, nos. 37–9. In addition, see especially S. Axters, Geschiedenis van de Vroomheid in de Nederlanden, 4 vols. (Antwerp, 1950–60), II, 169–78. 12 H. Finke, Papsttum und Untergang des Templerordens, 2 vols., Vorreformationsgeschichtliche Forschungen 4–5 (Münster, 1907), I, 148 ff.; Le dossier de l’Affaire des Templiers, ed. G. Lizerand, Les classiques de l’histoire de France au moyen âge 2 (Paris, 1923), pp. 20–2. See F. Lajard in Histoire littéraire de la France 27 (Paris, 1877), 140–52. William of Paris was confessor to King Philip IV the Fair.

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Heresy Interrogations January) had condemned as heretical and burned a book by this beguine in Valenciennes. He had excommunicated her with the written warning that if she continued to spread the erroneous teachings contained in the book either in writing or by word of mouth, she would be relaxed to the secular arm for punishment – that is, to be burned. Nevertheless, after the death of Bishop Guido – as she confessed to his successor Philip of Marigny (1306–09, then archbishop of Sens) as well as the inquisitor of Lorraine – she not only brought her condemned book to the attention of Bishop John of Châlons-surMarne (1284–1313) but also to ‘simple people’, beghards and others ‘as if it were good and allowed’ (sicut bonum et licitum).13 In autumn 1308 she was finally arrested by the Paris inquisitor, but denied him all testimony in hearings for almost a year and a half, also refusing to provide the oaths and requests for absolution for which she was often urged. The inquisitor could then only present excerpts from her book to a commission of twenty-one Paris theologians. Members of regular and secular clergy alike, they held an assembly for advice and certification on 11 April 1310 in the Mathurin Church and unanimously declared the book, from which they received the inquisitor’s excerpts, as heretical. It was to be destroyed. Their affidavit recorded only two of the at least fifteen offensive theses, the first being: ‘Quod anima adnichilata dat licenciam virtutibus nec est amplius in earum servitute’ (‘That the annihilated soul gives licence to virtues and is no longer in servitude to them’), and the fifteenth: ‘Quod talis anima non curat de consolacionibus Dei nec de donis eius nec debet curare nec potest, quia tota intenta est circa Deum, et sic impediretur eius intentio circa Deum’ (‘That such a soul does not worry about the consolations of God nor about His gifts, nor should or can it care, because it has been entirely focused on God and thus its focus on God would then be hindered’). Instead of citing these two sources, a well-informed contemporary – a monk of Saint-Denis who continued William of Nangis’s chronicle after the latter’s death14 – chose differently. The passage he selected from the condemned book of the ‘pseudomulier de Hannonia nomine Margaretha dicta Porrette’ (‘pseudo- [false] woman of Hainault named Marguerite, called Porete’), or from excerpts thereof reviewed by the theologians, was : ‘Quod anima annihilata in amore conditoris sine reprehensione conscientiae vel remorsu potest et debet naturae quidquid appetit et disiderat concedere’ (‘That the soul annihilated in the Creator’s love can and should concede to

13 In

the preface of her book, Axters, Geschiedenis, p. 171, Marguerite herself says that she gave it to read to a Franciscan, John of Querayne, a Cistercian cantor of Villers Abbey in Brabant and to the Paris theologian Godfrey of Fontaines († c. 1306), who were said to praise it with the qualification that it was difficult and comprehensible to few. 14 Chronique latine de Guillaume de Nangis avec les continuations, ed. H. Géraud, 2 vols. (Paris, 1843), I, 379 ff.; also in Bouquet, Recueil XX, 601.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Nature all that it desires without reproach of conscience or remorse’). The chronicler remarked in addition: ‘quod manifeste sonat in haeresim’ (‘which clearly sounds like heresy’). It certainly sounded more suspiciously like the antinomian-libertinist heresy15 than the sentences cited in the theologians’ affidavit; one might wonder why they did not better support their condemning judgment by moving in the direction indicated by the chronicler of Saint-Denis. Yet a Petrus de Sancto Dyonisio (Peter of Saint-Denis) belonged to that theological commission (as, incidentally, did the famous exegete Nicholas of Lyra); if he were not himself the chronicler, he could easily have informed the man who was about the fate of Marguerite Porete. For, in addition to the brief account of the public burning of this stubbornly silent, obdurate heretic by the provost of Paris on the day after the inquisition judgment, the chronicler added: ‘Multa tamen in suo exitu penitencie signa ostendit nobilia pariter et devota, per que multorum viscera ad conpatiendum et pie ac etiam lacrimabiliter fuisse commota testati sunt oculi, qui viderunt’ (‘Nevertheless, on her death, as revealed to the witnesses’s eyes, she displayed many noble and devout signs of repentance, by which the hearts of many were piously and tearfully moved to compassion’).16 A later chronicler of Liège (before 1400) even asserts that the ‘beghine en clergrie … que ons nom Margarite-port’ (‘beguine in clergy … who had the name Margarite-Port’), died in the true Catholic faith. In the course of translating Holy Scripture, she made many errors on articles of faith and the sacrament of the altar, for which reason she was condemned by learned theologians; God had given her grace.17 This is only a late, unclear echo of the troubling impression that the beguine’s heretical death obviously made on involved contemporaries; the surprise is that, aside from the acts of the trial, only one anonymous chronicler reports on it. But Marguerite Porete’s book has recently been recovered, first in an English translation from the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the

15 Both

Langlois, ‘Margarite Porete’, 296, and E. Underhill (see below, note 18), p. 350, also Axters, Geschiedenis, p. 174, recall here the mystical quietism of Madame Guyon (1648–1717). 16 See Langlois, ‘Margarite Porete’, 197 ff, on Guiart de Cressonsacq (diocese of Beauvais), the strange spokesman for the beguines and other adherentes Christo. He held himself to be the apocalyptical Angel of Philadelphia, called by God to reassure His people, ‘et Parisius etiam se exposuit pro Marguerita dicta Porrete’ (‘and at Paris he showed himself in favour of Marguerite, called Porete’). Although her inquisitor tried and condemned him as well, he abjured and saved himself. William of Nangis’s continuator (as in note 14 above) also mentions Guiart. 17 Jean de Preis dit d’Outremeuse, Ly Myreur des Histors, ed. S. Bormans, 7 vols. (Brussels, 1864–87), VI, 141 ff., derived from the Grandes Chroniques de France, ed. J. Viard, 10 vols. (Paris, 1920–53), VIII, 273; both in Fredericq II, 64–5, nos. 38–9.

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Heresy Interrogations fifteenth century.18 The translator, probably a Carthusian, names himself only in code, with the initials of his first and second name, M. N., and the authoress is not named, remaining anonymous, as in the French original, titled ‘Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour’.19 In fact, several Italian and Latin translations from the fifteenth century have surfaced, for a total of thirteen manuscripts in four different languages (only German and Flemish versions have not yet surfaced). Since no one remembered the authoress and her condemnation any longer, her book – which was to be destroyed in 1310 – continued to be extensively loved in mystical circles and among Carthusians. Now as then, one can read it again in its original language and in the context where first the bishop of Cambrai, then the theologians, canonists and the inquisition in Paris damned it as heresy. The sentences for which the condemnation was justified are actually found in this book,20 including the sentence cited by the 18 E.

Underhill, ‘The Mirror of Simple Souls’, Fortnightly Review 95, n.s. 89 (1911), 345–54; modern English edition C. Kirchberger, The Mirror of Simple Souls by an Unknown French Mystic of the XIIIth century, Orchard Books 15 (London, 1927). On this now Sister M. Doiron OSF, ‘The Middle English Translation of Le Mirouer des Simples Ames’, in L. Reypens-Album (Studien en tekstuitgaven van Ons geestelijk erf 16, (Antwerp, 1964), 131–52. She is preparing an edition of the translation. [1978 reprint: Marguerite Porete, ‘The Mirror of Simple Souls, A Middle English Translation’, Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 5 (1968), 241–382.] 19 Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desire d’amour; edizione provvisoria del MS Chantilly, Condé F. XIV 26 – ancien 986, ed. R. Guarnieri (Rome, 1961); the final edition is supposed to appear in Archivo italiano per la storia della pietà. [1976 reprint: This appeared as Romana Guarnieri, Il movimento del Libero Spirito. Testi e documenti, II: Il ‘Miroir des Simples Ames’ di Margherita Porete, Archivo italiano per la storia della pietà 4 (1965), 501–635. See on that H. Grundmann, DA 22 (1966), 318. In the following, reference is given within < > to the page and line of this edition.] On other manuscripts and translations, see Doiron, ‘Middle English Translation of Le Mirouer’, 132, and Axters, Geschiedenis, pp. 171 and 178. On this see also Jean Dagens, ‘Le “Miroir des Simples Âmes” et Marguerite de Navarre’, in La Mystique Rhénane. Colloque de Strasbourg 1961 Mai 16–19 (Paris, 1963), 281–9, which may be traced in the poems of the queen of Navarre (1492–1549), sister of King François I of France, indicating influences of Marguerite Porete. 20 Guarnieri, 16 c. 6 : ‘Vertuz, je prens congé de vous a tousjours, … je estoie adonc serve de vous, on en suis delivree’ (‘Virtues, I take leave of you forever, … I once was a slave to you but am now freed’), a Leitmotiv of this book, often expressed and explained. On the 15th excerpted sentence (see above) ibid., p. 33 c. 26 : ‘l’Ame prent en Amour, sans vouloir nulz de ses dons, que l’en appelle consolacions, qui l’Ame confortent par sentement de doulceur d’oraison; … car qui vouldroit les confors de Dieu par sentement de consolacion, ilz empecheroient l’emprise de Fine Amour’ (‘the Soul takes [such meditation] in Love, without wishing for any of Love’s gifts, called consolations, which comfort the Soul through feeling the sweetness of prayer … for if anyone were to want God’s comforts through feeling consolation, they would impede Perfect Love from taking hold’).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) chronicler of Saint-Denis.21 The English translator believed he had to insert orthodox explanations so that these and other sentences would not be misunderstood as heretical.22 But even Marguerite Porete herself was concerned about objections and misunderstandings: ‘Amis, que dirent beguines et gens de religion, Quant ilz orront l’excellence de vostre divine chançon? Beguines dient que je erre, prestres, clers et prescheurs, Augustins et carmes et les freres mineurs, Pource que j’escri de l’estre de l’affinee Amour’ (‘Dear, what will the beguines say and religious people when they hear the excellence of your divine song? Beguines say that I err, priests, clergy and Preachers, Austin Friars and Carmelites and the Friars Minor, because of what I write about the being of perfect Love’).23 She sought to deal with such objections and misunderstandings through ever-newer explanations of her bold words, pour mieulx d’entendre, for she knew that there were ‘pluseurs doubles mots y a, qui sont fors a entendre (‘there are many double words which are difficult to understand’). Often she asks Raison or Vérité in dialogues what the soul or love, l’ame enfranchie or franches ames think and say of themselves. As literature, it is also an astounding book, full of passages such as internal dialogues to clarify and justify consciously bold, unusual thoughts – in this, it most closely resembles the ‘flowing light’ of the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg, who had already had to defend herself against suspicion of heresy. Much research remains to be done on piety and mysticism around 1300, but also (when at last complete critical editions exist) on vernacular writing. Before it was known who wrote the book and the reason for which she was burned with it, many wanted to attribute this ‘Pearl of Mysticism’ to 21 Guarnieri,

18 c. 9 : ‘laquelle Ame ne desire ne ne desprise pouvreté ne tribulation ne messe ne sermon, ne jeune ne oraison, et donne a Nature tout ce qu’il luy fault, sans remors de conscience’ (‘which soul neither desires nor despises poverty or tribulation, mass or sermon, fasting or prayer, and gives to Nature all that it requires without remorse of conscience’); (similarly p. 24 c. 13 ; only the continuation was not cited in the Paris trial nor by the chronicler: ‘mais telle nature est si bien ordonnee par transformacion de unité d’Amour, a laquelle la voulenté de ceste Ame est conjoincte, que la nature ne demande chose qui soit deffendue’ (‘but such nature [of the Soul] is so well ordered through transformation in the unity of Love, to which the will of this Soul is conjoined, that it demands nothing that is forbidden’). And later (p. 27 ff. c. 17 [p. 537/19 ff.], also p. 30 c. 21, and elsewhere) she frequently explained what it meant: ‘que cestes Ames donnent a Nature ce qu’elle demande’ (‘That these souls give to Nature that which she demands’), and ‘pour les simples entendemens des aultres creatures, que ilz ne malentendissent a leur domage’ (‘due to the simple understanding of other creatures that they might not misunderstand to their harm’). 22 Doiron, ‘Middle English Translation of Le Mirouer’, 140–7. Whether these fifteen additions of the translator correspond to the (at least) fifteen excerpted sentences of the inquisitors still needs investigation. 23 Guarnieri, p. 98 ; this poem was excluded from the English translation, see Doiron (as in note 19 above), pp. 137 ff.; see also Guarnieri, p. 25, , and elsewhere.

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Heresy Interrogations the canonised Dominican Margaret of Hungary († 1270) or a Franciscan friar in Naples. Once the authoress was known,24 the question arose whether her condemnation as heretic should be reconsidered. That is not to be dealt with here, as it falls outside the competence of a historian. However, there is still useful material here for the critical assessment of heretical trials. The Paris trial against Marguerite Porete of 1308/10 and the new knowledge of her book, condemned a few years earlier in Valenciennes, is interesting not simply as an isolated individual case, nor is it just methodologically instructive. Ideas similar to those in her book were soon elsewhere accused of heresy and condemned for another century and a half, particularly when they surfaced in German-speaking areas and the Netherlands. Even more frequently were vernacular books mentioned, condemned and burned,25 works that have unfortunately never been found again. In most cases, one has only the acts of hearings and trials upon which to rely, or even just the declaration of judgment and brief reports of chroniclers. It is all the more important to investigate these highly varied, disparate sources in a comparative manner – to gain insight into one from others, to clearly distinguish their commonalities and differences, and to comprehend both without inquisitorial prejudice. We shall not further discuss here the difficult, still-unresolved question regarding the extent to which Meister Eckhart came into contact with ideas condemned as heretical in his time or was suspected for good reason to have shared them. He began his second period of teaching in Paris a year after Marguerite Porete’s condemnation, and for two years he lived in the same Dominican monastery as the inquisitor, William of Paris – after his written verdict, when all transcriptions of the beguine’s condemned book were to be delivered to him or the Paris Dominican prior, on pain of excommunication by the Feast of Peter and Paul (29 June 1310).26 Eckhart, who had certainly heard of the previous year’s trial, could have become acquainted with this book then, if not earlier, while Marguerite Porete could hardly have known Eckhart’s writings or heard him preach before 1305. Even if one does not accept that he was ‘influenced’ or at least impressed by her or

24 Guarnieri had already identified her in 1946, in the Osservatore Romano 141 (16 June).

On the search for the author, see Axters, Geschiedenis, p. 171. Underhill (‘Mirror of Simple Souls’, 345): ‘it adds a new star to the galaxy of the mystics’. Doiron (‘Middle English Translation of Le Mirouer’, 134): ‘the justice of Margaret Porete’s condemnation as a heretic will have to be reconsidered’. 25 See pp. 159–61 below. 26 Fredericq I, 159: ‘universis et singulis habentibus dictum librum precipientes districte et sub pena excommunicationis, quod infra instans festum apostolorum Petri et Pauli nobis priori fratrum predicatorum Parisius, nostro commissario, sine fraude reddere teneatur’ (‘strictly commanding to any and all who have the named book, under penalty of excommunication, that he is obligated to turn it in without deceit to our delegate, the prior of the Dominican Order in Paris, no later than the approaching feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul’).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) her book, there is a remarkable similarity between many of her expressions and his – not only in the later, often unreliably transmitted texts of Eckhart’s sermons, but also specifically in his ‘Book of Divine Consolation’, which he himself undoubtedly wrote in German for the Habsburg Agnes. Eckhart penned it either shortly after the murder of her father, King Albrecht I (1 May 1308) – before his last Paris residency,27 and exactly in the period of the Paris trial against Marguerite Porete – or soon after his return from Paris, in Strasbourg.28 During his Strasbourg period (before he went to Cologne, at the earliest in 1322), he certainly did not remain unaffected by the trials against the beghards and beguines there, although some doubt and dispute this.

III Vienne 1311 and Strasbourg 1317: Erroneous teachings of German Beghards and Beguines A year after the condemnation of Marguerite Porete – although without any discernable connection – Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne in September 1311 banned the entire community of beguines as irregular. The particular issue was that many beguines of unwholesome spirit (‘quasi perductae in mentis insaniam’) were debating the Trinity, the nature of God and other questions of faith and sacraments, and spreading opinions contrary to the faith.29 The pope and council also expressly condemned eight erroneous teachings of beghards and beguines in regno Alemanniae, ennumerated in the bull Ad nostrum.30 The general ban on the beguines 27 See,

among others, G. Théry, ‘“Le Benedictus Deus” of Meister Eckhardt’, in Mélanges J. de Ghellinck, 2 vols. (Gembloux, 1951), II, 905–35. The best edition of the Liber Benedictus, which contains the sermon ‘Von den edlen Menschen’, from Das Buch der Göttlichen Tröstung, is that of J. Quint, in Meister Eckhart, Die deutschen Werke, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1936–63), V; earlier by P. Strauch, 2nd edn, Lietzmanns Kleine Texte 5 (Berlin, 1922). The first article of the Cologne complaint against Eckhart was drawn from the Liber Benedictus. 28 See J. Koch, ‘Kritische Studien zum Leben Meister Eckhardts, 1. Teil: Von den Anfängen bis zum Straßburger Aufenhalt einschließlich’, Archivum Fratum Praedicatorum 29 (1959), 46–8. As Koch wrote to me on 8 July 1961, it only slowly dawned upon him that in all likelihood it was in 1311/13 that Eckhart was informed about the trial and book of Marguerite Porete. 29 Cum de quibusdam (mulieribus beguinabus vulgariter nuncupatis), Clementines c. 1 de religiosis domibus III, 11 (Friedberg, II, 1169); also in Fredericq I, 167 ff, no. 171. Cf. E. Müller, Das Konzil von Vienne 1311–1312, Vorreformationsgeschichtliche Forschungen 12 (Münster, 1934), pp. 577 ff. [See now both Latin text and translation in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. Tanner 2 vols. (London and Washington, 1990), I, 374.] 30 C. 3 De haereticis v.3 (Friedberg II, 1183 ff.); Fredericq I, 168 ff, no. 172. The articles are also in H. Denzinger and O. Rahner, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 31st edn (Freiburg, 1957), pp. 220 ff. [Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, I, 383–4.]

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Heresy Interrogations could not be carried out or maintained, since John XXII had already recalled it in 1318 and restricted it to accommodate orthodox beguines;31 at the same time, however, he did include Clement’s two beguine-related bulls (neither of which had been published earlier)32 in the Corpus iuris canonici with the Clementines. Despite its narrowing by John XXII, the ban on beguines created endless confusion and conflict from that point on. And, for the next century and a half, the bull Ad nostrum provided a legal foundation for condemning certain already formulated heretical teachings, utilised as a sort of checklist (interrogatorium) for investigation in a hearing – one might almost say as a cartula laid on or before all suspect beghards and beguines to elicit from them the expressions already formulated therein. Without doubt these were the ‘difficult questions of faith’ that aroused the protest of the Cologne city council in 1375.33 Strangely, however, no concrete occasion or inquisitorial foundation for the papal condemnation of these heretical teachings was known prior to the Council of Vienne in 1311. To be sure, suspicion about the orthodoxy of beghards and beguines had frequently been expressed before: already in 1274, Guibert of Tournai’s Franciscan reform proposal for the Second Lyon Council34 warned that unlearned beguines, in their longing for subtle and novel things, would come to dubious, erroneous, heretical and soon dangerous ideas through reading and shared discussion of Bible translations – if this malady were not nipped in the bud. At the same time Albertus Magnus testified about statements of heretics (also women, but not called 31 Ratio

recta non patitur (ut innocentes ad paria cum nocentibus iudicentur) of 13 August 1318, Extrav. lib. III tit. 9 (Friedberg, II, 1279 ff.); Fredericq II, 72 ff. no. 44; renewed by Benedict XII on 19 Jan. 1336. 32 In his Vita Johannis XXII, John of St. Victor says (Vitae paparum Avenionensium, ed. S. Baluze and G. Mollat, 4 vols. (Paris, 1914–22), I, 120): ‘Cum papa Clemens in concilio Viennensi aliqua suspensa reliquisset, donec ad studia generalia sub bulla mitterentur, sperans (ut credo) quod ad limam iterum devenirent, Johannes XXII papa hoc anno (1317) sub bulla publicari fecit; pro quo Beguinae specialiter sunt turbatae, quoniam sine omni distinctione status beguinagii condempnatur’ (‘While Pope Clement at the Council of Vienne had left some matters suspended until they should be sent in a bull to the studium generale, hoping, as I believe, that they would be revised again, Pope John XXII had them published in a bull in 1317; for this reason the Beguines in particular were agitated, because the beguine status was condemned without any distinction’). The Chronicle of St Peter in Erfurt asserts that Clement V ‘in extremis positus lacrimabiliter deplorat, … quod ordo Templariorum et Beginarum ab eo destructus fuisset’ (‘at the end of his life tearfully lamented that the order of the Templars and beguines had been destroyed by him’), Monumenta Erphesfurtensia, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG 42 (1899), pp. 346 ff.; in German in the continuation of the Sächsische Weltchronik, ibid. p. 478. 33 See p. 128 above, and the text in note 6. 34 Collectio de scandalis ecclesiae, ed. A. Stroick, AFH 24 (1931), 61 ff.; concerning the author, AFH 23 (1930), 15 ff. and 273 ff. Cf. Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 337 ff., where the author is mistakenly named Simon rather than Guibert of Tournai.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) beguines here) in the Swabian Ries,35 whose condemned propositions sound comparable in spirit and attitude to those of 1311, although they do not agree word for word. Synodal decrees in Trier 1277,36 in Eichstätt after 1280,37 in Cologne 1307,38 in Mainz 131039 and again in Trier40 were directed against itinerant beghards and beguines who preached without permission and spread erroneous doctrine among the people. In Colmar and Basel in 1290 some beguines and beghards were also cited for heresy.41 However, when their erroneous teachings were described in greater detail (as in Cologne in 1307) they did not match the articles condemned by Clement V; at the most, they shared a desire to become sinless, just, perfect and Godlike through the special piety of beggar-poverty. Only six years after the Council of Vienne, in which the Strasbourg Bishop John of Dürbheim (1306–1328) participated,42 he commissioned an inquisition in August 1317. The inquisition took place in Strasbourg – where Meister Eckhart taught and often preached in nuns’ convents and beguine communities – and targeted ‘false Christians’ of both sexes, including those in orders as well as the married, who had been denounced by ‘viri litterati et sapientes, religiosi et saeculares’ (‘literate and wise men, religious and secular’). Common people called them beghards and Schwestronen43 (‘sisters’), 35 Albert’s

Determinatio was first published in W. Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1874–93), I, 461–9. See on this H. Haupt, ‘Beitrage zur Geschichte der Sekte vom freien Geiste und das Beghardentums’, ZKG 7 (1885), 556 ff. There is an improved edition in Documenta Ecclesiastica Christianae Perfectionis Studium Spectantia, ed. J. de Guibert (Rome, 1931), pp. 116–25. It is forthcoming in the edition of the Passauer Anonymous being prepared for the MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters. [This has not appeared; but see A. Patschovsky, Der Passauer Anonymus. Ein Sammelwerk über Ketzer, Juden, Antichrist aus der Mitte des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Schriften der MGH 22 (Stuttgart, 1968).] See Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 402 ff. [Religious Movements, pp. 170 ff.] and Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 45 ff. 36 Hartzheim, Conc. Germ., III, 531; J. J. Blattau, Statuta synodalia, ordinationes et mandata archidiocesis Trevirensis, 9 vols. (Trier, 1844–52), I, 22. Cf. Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 434 ff. [Religious Movements, pp. 170 ff., 184 ff.] 37 Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 393 ff.; Pastoralblatt des Bistums Eichstätt 32 (1885), 74. 38 Hartzheim, Conc. Germ. IV, 100 ff.; Fredericq I, 150 ff.; see Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 434 ff. [Religious Movements, pp. 170ff.] 39 Hartzheim, Conc. Germ IV, 200 ff.; Mansi XXIII, 998 c. 4; K. J. Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, 2nd edn, 6 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau and Augsburg, 1864–87), VI, 62 n. 4. 40 Mansi XXV, 261, nos. 50 ff. 41 Annales Colmarienses, MGH SS 17 (1861), p. 217. 42 [Previously Bishop of Eichstätt, Chancellor of Albrecht I.] N. Rosenkränzer, Bischof Johann I. von Straßburg, genannt von Dürbheim, dissertation (Trier, 1881), pp. 35 ff.; Müller, Das Konzil von Vienne, p. 77; UB Straßburg, ed. W. Wiegand (Straßburg, 1886), II, 244, no. 294. 43 ‘Aliqui falsi christiani … sub nomine cuiusdam ficte et presumpte religionis, quos vulgus Begehardos et swestrones, “Brot durch got” nominat, ipsi vero et ipse de

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Heresy Interrogations or named them after their beggars’ cry of ‘Brot durch Gott’ (‘Bread for God’s sake’); they themselves supposedly called themselves ‘Kinder oder Brüder und Schwester der Sekte des freien Geistes und freiwilliger Armut’ (‘Children or brothers and sisters of the sect of the Free Spirit and voluntary Poverty’). It was the first time this specific and infrequently used name ‘Sect of Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit’ appeared. On 13 August 1317 the Strasbourg bishop listed the questions asked by his inquisitors in twenty-eight sentences and organised them by topic: contra divinitatem, contra Christum, contra ecclesiam, contra sacramenta, contra infernum et regna celorum, contra evangelia, contra sanctos viros (‘against divinity, against Christ, against the Church, against the sacraments, against hell and the kingdom of heaven, against the Gospel, against saintly men’). In slightly different order, perhaps following the interrogation protocol, most of these sentences (and more as well) appear in a frequently copied record as ‘articuli et errores, qui inventi sunt in inquisitione facta per dominum Johannem Argentinensem episcopum esse inter illos, qui sunt de secta Beghardorum, et inter eos, qui eis adherent et eos fovent’ (‘articles and errors which were discovered, in the inquisition conducted by the lord bishop John of Strasbourg, to exist among those who are of the sect of the beghards, and among those who support and follow them’).44 Although the bishop’s condemnation of these heretics invoked only the 1310 Mainz synodal statute against beghards, the end of this list refers to the Council of Vienne’s general ban on beguines.45 However, it does not refer to the eight

secta liberi spiritus et voluntarie paupertatis pueros seu fratres vel sorores vocant’ (‘Some false Christians … under the name of a certain fictitious and presumed piety, which the vulgar call Beghards and sisters, “Bread for God”, they truly call themselves children or brothers and sisters of the sect of the free spirit and voluntary poverty’); the decree of the Strasbourg bishop from J. L. Mosheim, De Beghardis et Beguinabus commentarius (Leipzig, 1790), pp. 255–61, in UB Straßburg, II, 309–13 no. 358. The fourteenth/fifteenth-century manuscript used by Mosheim and owned by Flacius Illyricus, which had since gone missing, was found in Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf. 311 Helmst. fols. 107a–108b; it has been used to improve the text here. For the reference I thank A. Patschovsky, who is working on the Anonymous of Passau; [see note 35 above, and M. Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik. Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 216–17.] 44 C. Schmidt, ‘Actenstücke besonders zur Geschichte der Waldenser’, Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie 22 (1852), 247–8, from the Strasbourg MS B 174 of 1404; erroneously stated in Döllinger, Beiträge, II, 389–91, as being from Clm 14959 (15th century St Emmeram). The following ‘nove hereses de novo spiritu’ belong originally to Albertus Magnus’s report on heresy in the Swabian Ries (as in note 35 above). However, they were perhaps used and expanded in Strasbourg in 1317. 45 Schmidt, ‘Actenstücke besonders zur Geschichte der Waldenser’, p. 248; Döllinger, Beiträge, II, 291: ‘Item habent congregationes et conventicula et modos singulares loquendi, quas, que et quos prohibuit sancta mater ecclesia tam Romana in generali quam Maguntina de consilio omnium suffraganeorum in speciali, exprimendo et signando singulariter sectam istam’ (‘Again, they have congregations and conventicles and singular ways of speaking, each of which the holy mother

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) heretical propositions of the bull Ad nostrum, despite the list’s general correspondence to the Strasbourg statements. Here the designation ‘beguines’ is avoided, certainly on purpose, through the use of the puzzling Schwestrones; the bishop even expressly states that beginae honestae saeculares (‘honest secular beguines’) as well as Franciscan tertiaries and the familiares of other approved orders should not be affected by his verdict.46 Shortly afterward he and other German bishops asked the curia how the Vienne Council’s ban on the beguines, since published in the Clementines, was intended and should be obeyed. John XXII’s response was more placatory than decisive, and the beguine matter remained confusingly unclear throughout the fourteenth century. The eight heretical articles contained in the bull Ad nostrum became widely known after entering the Corpus iuris canonici and would be used in the following period as a formulary for trying similar heretics, but were obviously not applied in Strasbourg in 1317.47 While the detailed Strasbourg articles often church has prohibited, both in general at Rome and in particular at the council of all suffragans in Mainz, describing and specifically distinguishing this sect’). This could of course relate to the conclusion of the bull Ad nostrum: ‘Nonnulla etiam alia sub simulata quadam sanctitatis specie dicunt, faciunt et committunt, quae oculos divinae maiestatis offendunt et grave in se continent periculum animarum’ (‘Even some others, under a certain pretense of sanctity, speak, make, and do things which offend the eyes of the divine majesty and contain in themselves a grave danger for souls’). 46 The bishop excommunicated the heretics he had enquired into, while inviting their return to the Church, and the return of all their followers and helpers, as well as the users of their ‘scripta, cantilenae aut doctrinae’ (‘writings, songs, and doctrines’). This was with an express reservation: ‘salvis nichilominus aliis sententiis atque penis in tales per sedem apostolicam promulgatis’ ‘not infringing, however, any other sentences and penalties promulgated against such people by the Apostolic See’). That also speaks of no knowledge of the bull Ad nostrum, which he [1976 reprint: correction – John XXII] published only on 28 October 1317 with the Clementines. See M. Bihl, ‘De Tertio Ordine S. Francisci in Provincia Germaniae Superioris sive Argentinesi syntagma’, AFH 14 (1921), 125 ff. On his fluctuating attitude toward the Beguines afterward, see H. Haupt, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sekte vom freien Geiste und des Beghardentums’, ZKG 7 (1885), 521 ff. He wrote on 26 March [1976 reprint: in the source – June] to the bishop of Metz [1976 reprint: Worms] 1318 that he had relinquished unteachable heretics to be burned; UB Straßburg, II, 332, n. 2. 47 To my knowledge they were first used in 1332 in the hearing of the Schweidnitz Beguines (Capuciatae moniales) by the Inquisitor John of Schwenkenfeld OP; Examen testium super vita et moribus Beguinarum per inquisitorem heretice pravitatis in Sweydnitz anno 1332 factum, ed. B. Ulanowski, Scriptores rerum Polonicarum 13, part 3 (Kraków, 1889), pp. 239–55, esp. p. 247. [See now the edition and studies in Proces beginek świdnickich w 1332 roku. Studia historyczne i edycja łacińsko-polska, ed. P. Kras, T. Gałuska and A. Poznański (Lublin, 2018)]. Then, after 1335, they were used in the hearing of the brothers Albert and John of Brünn by the Prague Inquisitor Gallus of Neuhaus OP (see note 51 below), and thereafter more frequently. Already in 1320 the cathedral chapter of Speyer complained that their bishop had carried out no

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Heresy Interrogations correspond with it in content, they never agree in wording. So we have here one criterion for determining the extent to which comparable heretical statements may have been independently formulated (as in Strasbourg) – whether linked via shared sectarian doctrine or related by similar mindsets on the one hand, or actually generated by the inquisitors’ pre-formulated questions from the Clementine schema on the other. These two approaches can be even more clearly distinguished when an interrogator not only employs the eight questions of the bull Ad nostrum, but also uses responses from other earlier inquisition records in order to log a pattern of heretical responses. Such cases indicate what painstaking care is necessary to analyse hearing protocols and their ‘templates’ effectively, to assess each on its own terms, to distinguish between more or less formulaic repetitions – and thus to remove the cartula held before the interrogated and hear them speak with their own words.

IV Eichstätt 1381: The hearing of Konrad Kannler compared with the Erfurt hearing of Johannes Hartmann, 1367 On Saturday, 26 January 1381, a layman by the name of Konrad Kannler was examined – not by a papal inquisitor, however, but before the Eichstätt canon Master Eberhard of Freyenhausen. Commissioned by the elderly Bishop Radno (1295–1383), previously cathedral provost and Lord High Steward of Wildburgstetten, the hearing took place in the home (curia et stuba) of the

inquisitions on the basis of the bull Ad nostrum; A. Hilgard, Urkunden zur Geschichte der Stadt Speyer (Strasbourg, 1885), p. 268, no. 334. The Clementine articles were enjoined at the Regensburg provincial synod of 1377; Monumenta Boica, XV, 612, c. 31 De haereticis. Chroniclers often refer to the articuli nephandi of the bull Ad Nostrum. Examples include: Gesta archiepiscoporum Magdeburgensium, MGH SS 14 (1883), p. 441; Chronik des Franciscaner Lesemeisters Detmar, entry for 1368, ed. O. [correction: F. H.] Grautoff, Die Lübeckischen Chroniken in niederdeutscher Sprache, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1829–30), I, 290; K. Koppmann, Chroniken der deutschen Städte 19 (Leipzig, 1884), XIX, 539. L. A. Muratori, Antiquitates Italicae medii aevi, 6 vols. (Milan, 1738–42), V, col. 152, mentions a manuscript in the Ambrosian library containing a Tractatus super octo erroribus Begardorum et Beghinarum in Clementinis constitutionibus damnatis, which the Augustinian Hermit Gerard of Siena († 1336), when he was a Paris baccalareus – he was a master of theology in 1330 – sent to Lupold of Bebenburg. See D. A. Perini, Bibliographia Augustiniana, 4 vols. (Florence, 1929–38), III, 187–9. Around 1398 the Mainz cathedral pastor and inquisitor John Wasmod of Homburg also wrote attacks against beguines, because they were suspected of the errors of the bull Ad nostrum; ‘si heretici comprobari … non possunt, tamen heresim sapere et vestigia sequi non abhorrent’ (‘if they cannot be proven as heretics … they are however not averse to knowing the heresy and following its tracks’). See A. Schmidt, ‘Tractatus contra hereticos Beckardos, Lulhardos et Swestriones des Wasmud von Homburg’, Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 14 (1962), 380 ff., also 350 and 360.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) canon Ulrich of Leonrod with seven other witnesses. A preliminary investigation could not have been held, since the object of the hearing admitted that he had confessed and taken communion (after not having done so for years) in order to protect himself from suspicion of heresy. The strategy did not work, and his statements in the first hearing fully confirmed suspicions. At that point he stridently denied the revocation, declaring that all he had said was from the Holy Spirit, which he could and must never disavow, even if heaven and earth wept bloody tears and he were ground to dust or enfeebled. Indeed he rose to the point of blasphemy: if he were a heretic and his words false, so God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and as a result ‘all of us’ (says the protocol) and the entire clergy were heretical. Yet eight days later, in a second hearing in the presence of others, including secular witnesses, he recanted his earlier statement – he now saw all of his previous ideas as being inspired, not by the Holy Spirit, but by an evil spirit that desired to ruin him, body and soul. He insisted that he did not speak from fear of death but out of better insight, ad cor reversus. Then, on 20 February he was again absolved by the bishop in his palace before many witnesses and swore that he would fulfil any penance imposed upon him, ‘tam in corpore quam in rebus’ (‘as much in his body as in his goods’). Of what the penance consisted is not indicated in the notarial instrument, which otherwise quite thoroughly protocols the two hearings. It survives in transcription within a collected manuscript of the Comital Schönborn Library at Pommersfelden (Cod. 158 [2708] fols. 70r–72v). Hermann Haupt published from it in 1882.48 Haupt calls this heretic a beghard, although he is never so termed in the protocol for this hearing nor elsewhere, and there is no mention of any sect to which he could have belonged; everything he says belies membership in any religious or heretic society. Yet he answers positively to the first question of his inquisitor, as to whether he is ‘free in the spirit’, a ‘free man in the spirit’ (liber spiritu). And to the second question of what constituted this freedom, he answered (not entirely in his own words, as will be seen): when all pangs of conscience completely cease and the person becomes entirely sinless (impeccabilis). With this it becomes clear to the inquisitor into which category of heretic this man of Eichstätt falls, and now he also knows what else he must ask him. He presents to him, one after the other, the eight articles condemned seventy years earlier by Pope Clement V, in the bull Ad nostrum, as the erroneous teachings of an abominabilis secta of German beghards and beguines. Kannler actually appears to confess to each of these articles. At the very least, his statements – which he doubtless made in German – in the Latin protocol of the hearing often agree literally with the text of the bull. Once these correspondences – which were also noted by Haupt in his publication of the notarial

48 H.

Haupt, ‘Ein Beghardenprozeß in Eichstätt in 1381’, ZKG 5 (1882), 487–98; corrected text, pp. 163–8 below.

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Heresy Interrogations instrument – are clearly identified, then on this basis one can more clearly differentiate: what was, so to speak, put into the mouth of the interrogated man, or where he confined himself to words he took from the papal bull, or where he deviated from it and said something of his own. However, one cannot conclude that any words and sentences not taken from the Clementines were simply Kannler’s own formulation in Latin translation – a fact which Haupt could not yet know. Just five years later Wilhelm Wattenbach49 published another notarial instrument from a similar heresy hearing in Erfurt on 26 December 1367, a good thirteen years before the trial in Eichstätt. In the Erfurt palace of the archbishop of Mainz and also in the presence of many witnesses, the papal inquisitor Walter Kerlinger (a Dominican, and professor of theology from an Erfurt patrician family) interviewed a certain beghard. This was one Johannes Hartmann from the Thüringian village of Oßmannstedt on the Ilm (west of Apolda); the beghard was also called Johannes Spinner – probably due to his profession, as was probably also the case with Konrad Kannler. Expressly described as quidam beghardus, he was also examined in accordance with the question-schema of Clement’s bull Ad nostrum. His own statements – and not just the inquisitor’s questions – in part agree word for word with the text of that bull. This is why there is no immediate need to be surprised that the two heretics, who certainly did not know each another, apparently spoke with largely same words – were it not, however, for this often also happening where their statements did not follow the wording of the bull. Closer comparison indicates without any doubt that they are not only related to each through the formulation of their words from the bull Ad nostrum: they are also directly interdependent, one on the other. What this means is this. The older Erfurt protocol must have been known in Eichstätt, and used not just as a model for the notarial instrument but also for the questioning of Konrad Kannler and the Latin formulation of his statements. Thus did he often (though not always) appear to be providing almost word for word the same answers to the same questions as those given by Johann Hartmann in Erfurt. That is all the more remarkable because Kannler expressly and frequently stated (even after his reconciliation) that he had not been brought into heresy by anyone else. Rather, nine years before – hence 1372, when Johannes Hartmann had been dead for three years – the Holy Spirit had directly inspired him. Later he would say it was an evil spirit. Kannler also provided assurance that he had never attempted to persuade another person to share his beliefs, since no one could be instructed who had not been directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Yet Kannler allegedly spoke often in the hearing using the same words as the beghard Hartmann, a man certainly unknown to him and burned to death thirteen years earlier.

49 W.

Wattenbach, ‘Über die Secte der Brüder vom freien Geiste’, SB Berlin 2 (Berlin, 1887), 538–43.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) At other times, however, he provided answers variously at odds with the protocol, and without being asked he added much that Hartmann did not say. And Hartmann’s statements in turn were certainly not all repeated by, or attributed to, Kannler. Such divergences reveal precisely how the protocols recorded the two hearings. Despite their correspondences and dependence on set forms, the records also permitted the differences and peculiarities of each to be discerned, so that they could be seen as really quite different: Kannler recanted, Hartmann did not. That they apparently described much in the same way is still not direct proof of a common sectarian doctrine; the explanation of this overlap is the knowledge and use of the Erfurt protocols by the Eichstätt inquisitor and his notary. This provides a warning. Without further evidence, one should not see all variations from the inquisitors’ questionschemas – in this case, the text of the Clementines – as ‘original’, spontaneous and personal responses of the persons being questioned. It is always possible for the inquisitor to be using an additional schema. Knowledge of the Erfurt protocols, which can be reliably ascertained by textual comparison with the Eichstätt trial, is also explicable through the manuscript tradition. Wattenbach found the Erfurt notarial instrument of 1367 in two paper manuscripts of small (quarto) format, books not only for reading but for practical use, and both written only after the Eichstätt trial. The one from the Augsburg Benedictine monastery of Saints Ulrich and Afra50 contains, among highly varied alphabetically ordered material, a heresiological compilation (Pseudo-Reinerius or Anonymous of Passau) that was widely disseminated in various forms. It was often supplemented – in this case through the inclusion at the beginning of an incomplete version of the Erfurt protocol. The same text, albeit with gaps at the end, is in the other manuscript from the Greifswald Church library of St Nicholas (Cod. XXIII E 100 fols. 109–111), in an expanded edition of the Dominican Nicholas Eymeric’s Directorium inquisitionis (1376) by the Kraków inquisitor Peter Cantor – an inquisition manual from which Wattenbach extracted additional texts and made them known.51 A third, somewhat older transcription of the Erfurt protocol with a complete but error-filled text was discovered by

50 Now

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm 4386; see Catalogus codicum Latinorum bibliothecae regiae Monacensis (Munich, 1871), I, part 2, 156; Wattenbach, ‘Secte der Brüder vom freien Geiste’, 518–22, with a few texts. The Erfurt hearing is printed just from this manuscript (and with rather a lot of errors) in Döllinger, Beiträge, II, 384–9. 51 This includes the confessions of the brothers Johann and Albert of Brünn before the Prague inquisitor (from 1335) Gallus of Neuhaus with the final remark: ‘Hic nota errores in Clementinis c. de h(aereticis)’ (‘These are errors in the Clementines, chapter On heretics’); Wattenbach, ‘Secte der Brüder vom freien Geiste’, 529–37. On this, H. Haupt, ‘Zwei Traktate gegen Beginen und Begarden’, ZKG 12 (1891), 86. On the ms., see Wattenbach, ‘Über das Handbuch eines Inquisitors in der Kirchenbibliothek St. Nicolai in Greifswald’, Abh. Berlin 4 (Berlin, 1888), 1–28.

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Heresy Interrogations Ernst Werner52 in the library of the Prague cathedral chapter (I XL/2 fols. 134v to 137v); the text here is a draft for notarial instruments, contained in a collection of chancery formulary books. Thus the Erfurt protocol of 1367 was quickly absorbed into compilations put together for inquisitors and notaries, and in this way it also became known to the Eichstätt inquisitor Eberhard of Freyenhausen. Eberhard may have been all the more ready to follow it in the questioning of Konrad Kannler and the protocolling of his statements since the Dominican Walter Kerlinger († 1373) had become famous as a papal inquisitor. In Eichstätt they made do with an episcopal inquisitor, one who could do worse than use Kerlinger’s hearings protocol as a model.53 This connection is evident in the introductory formalities of the notarial instrument: in one formulary everything distinguishing Eichstätt from Erfurt is stated, first the names of those involved, the place and date of the hearing. After the initial question that was not posed to the Erfurt Beghard but positively answered by Kannler, si fuerit liber spiritu (‘if he was a free spirit’ or ‘free in spirit’), he then answers the question of what this freedom of the spirit consisted, following the protocol almost precisely with the same words as Johannes Hartmann in Erfurt. The one said: ‘cum penitus cesset omnis remorsus conscientie et quod homo redditur (penitus follows in the Greifswald ms.) impeccabilis’ (‘when every torment of the conscience ceases completely, that the man is held sinless’), then the other supposedly responds: ‘cum penitus cesset omnis remorsus consciencie et redditur homo penitus impeccabilis’ (‘when every torment of the conscience ceases completely and the man is held completely sinless’). Both had already used words from the bull Ad nostrum (Art. 1: ‘quod redditur penitus impeccabilis’ [‘which renders him utterly impeccable’]), which was certainly less familiar to them than to the inquisitors. Then follows in both protocols a question about the first article of Clement’s bull, with only the first word cited: the answers, however, do not totally agree either with the text of the bull or with one another. This deviation is all the more remarkable because it was deliberate – the record was entered differently in Eichstätt than in the Erfurt model, because Kannler clearly said

52 M.

Erbstösser and E. Werner, ‘Ideologische Probleme des mittelalterlichen Plebejertums. Die freigeistige Ketzerei und ihre sozialen Würzeln’, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte 7 (Berlin, 1960), 106–30; there is an edition of the text, with variants of other manuscripts and a translation at 136–53. On the Prague ms., see A. Patera and A. Podlaha, Soupis Rukopisů Knihovny Metrpolitní Kapitoly Pražské, 2 vols. (1910–22), II, 157 ff. no. 1145; F. Palacky, ‘Über Formelbücher, zunächst in Bezug auf böhmische Geschichte’, Abh. Prag, s.5, 5 (Prague, 1848), II, 4–7. The main part of this ms. was written in 1384, with additions until at least 1393. 53 Werner remarks on the Erfurt protocol, ‘The statements contain so much that is original and varying from the Clementines that it could not be a matter of transcribing older sources’; ‘Ideologische Probleme’, 110. For the Eichstätt Protocol, that would be a premature conclusion. For the Erfurt text, no other ‘templates’ are known to me and probably none exists.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) something differing from Hartmann. Both heretics asserted with almost the same words that in the highest degree of perfection they were (or could be) absolutely one with God, God one with them, and they repeated that one was then sinless, without the pangs of conscience. Only Hartmann restricted that to a condition of the highest contemplation, in that he ‘in the beginning’ was ‘in the abyss of divinity’,54 while here Kannler added that even the Holy Virgin and other saints could not distinguish between God and himself – Hartmann said that at a later point in his hearing.55 Thus were two sentences answering the first Clementine question bound into one in the Eichstätt protocol.56 Can Kannler’s German statements be plausibly reconstructed from such a Latin mosaic in the Erfurt protocol? 54 Werner,

‘Ideologische Probleme’, 138: ‘in summo gradu perfectionis, quem ipse in principio habuit’ (‘in the highest state of perfection, which he had in the beginning’); ibid., p. 142: ‘in tali gradu perfectionis sicut ipse primo fuit … in quo ipse primo stetit’ (‘in such a state of perfection as he was at first … in which he first stood’). 55 Ibid., 142, on Article 4: ‘et dixit consequenter, quod nec angeli nec Maria possent discernere inter deum et ipsum propter perfectam unionem ipsorum in tali perfectione. Et dixit, quod in tali contemplatione sua transformatus in deitatem ita cum deo unum efficitur et deus cum eo, quod nec Maria nec angeli possent discernere inter deum et ipsum propter perfectam unionem ipsorum’ (‘and he consequently said that neither angels nor Mary were able to discern between God and himself due to their perfect union in such perfection. And he said that in such contemplation as his, he was transformed into a deity such that he became one with God and God with him, such that neither Mary nor the angels could discern between God and him because of their perfect union’); the second sentence is missing in the Greifswald MS. Kannler says (see below, p. 167): ‘nec beata virgo seu alii sancti potuerint facere aliquam distinctionem inter deum et ipsum’ (‘nor could the Blessed Virgin nor all the saints make any distinction between God and himself’). 56 To clarify the rather complicated interrelationship of the texts on the first article, they are displayed here in columns side by side. Col. 1: 1311: ‘Primo videlicet, quod homo in vita presenti tantum et talem perfectionis gradum potest acquirere, quod redditur penitus impeccabilis et amplius in gratia proficere non valebit; nam (ut dicitur) si quis semper posset proficere, posset aliquis Christo perfectior inveniri’. (‘First, that man in this life can attain so great and such a state of perfection, that he is held entirely sinless and can advance no further in grace; for (as is said), if one were always able to advance, he could be found more perfect than Christ’)

Col. 2: 1367 ‘… interrogatus de primo articulo … quando ipse stetit in tali contemplatione, de qua prius dictum est, videlicet in summo gradu perfectionis, quam ipse in principio habuit, quando in abysso divinitatis fuit, an sit aliqua differentia tunc inter deum et se, respondit, quod in tali perfectione et summo gradu unus est cum deo et deus cum eo unus absque omni distinctione, et dixit, quod in hoc consistat vera libertas spiritus, sic quod cessat omnis remorsus et homo talis redditur impeccabilis. – Interrogatus an homo in vita presenti, qui stat in tali contemplatione, amplius posset proficere respondit, quod sic stans in libertate amplius proficere non potest, et quod talis homo tantam et talem perfectionis gradum acquirit, quod redditur penitus impeccabilis’. (‘Questioned about the first article … when he stands in such contemplation, about which was spoken earlier, obviously in the highest state of perfection which he had in the beginning, when he was in the abyss of divinity, whether there is any difference then between God and him, he responded that in such perfection and in the highest state, he is one with God and God is one with him, far from any distinction, and he said that in this consists true freedom of the spirit, thus that every torment ceases and such a man is held sinless. – Questioned whether a man in the present life, who stands in such contemplation is able to advance further, he responded that standing thus in freedom, he cannot advance more fully and that such a man acquires so great and such a state of perfection, that he is rendered entirely sinless’)

Col. 3: 1381 ‘Deinde respondit de primo articulo … dicit quod fuerit in tali ac tanto gradu perfectionis, quod ulterius in gracia non potuerit proficere, quia fuerit impeccabilis et unus cum deo et deus unus cum eo nec fuerit aliqua differencia seu distinctio inter deum et ipsum, nec beata virgo …’ (‘Then he responds regarding the first article … he says that he was in such and so great a state of perfection that he could not advance further in grace because he was sinless and one with God and God was one with him nor was there any difference nor distinction between God and him, nor could the Blessed Virgin …’) (see above, note 55)

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Heresy Interrogations The variety of statements is clearer in responses to the next question: whether one who has achieved this degree of perfection no longer has to fast and pray, because then all sensualitas57 has so fully been subjected to the spirit and reason that one can provide the body whatever one wishes. In the Erfurt protocol the affirmative answer comes closer to the text of the bull than the Eichstätt protocol, which instead poses an additional question: whether such perfection comes from one’s own quality or only from God’s grace. Kannler answers in a surprisingly decisive manner: only from God’s grace, for even the angels and saints do not have such grace from perfection! Johannes Hartmann would certainly not have responded in that manner. The word gratia does not appear in his hearing; already in the first question (see above, note 56) he does not deny the possibility of ‘ulterius in gratia proficere’ (as put by Kannler and the Clementine article), but only of amplius proficere. The contrast prompts us to listen for such nuances. Here the Eichstätt inquisitor appears to have sensed that it was not quite correct to use the formulary of his models (the Clement bull and the Erfurt protocol) against the accused. In his additional question, therefore, he immediately offered a chance to approach ecclesiastical orthodoxy and the doctrine of grace, and Kannler took it – not only to save himself, but certainly also from honourably pious conviction, as will be shown in other statements. Regarding the third article, both initially answer with language from the bull: whoever is in that degree of perfection and in the spirit of freedom was no longer subject to any human obedience or ecclesiastical obligation. In the bull Ad nostrum the foundation of this heretical teaching was the saying of Paul in 2 Corinthians 3. 17: ‘quia (ut asserunt) “ubi spiritus domini, ibi libertas”’ (‘because, as they claim, “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”’). From Kannler, who certainly must have been asked, the protocol recorded something less literally biblical, a layman’s alteration of Paul’s words in keeping with his own perception: ‘alegavit ad hoc dictum Pauli, quod filii viventes spiritu non sunt sub aliquo precepto legis, quia sunt liberi et soluti’ (‘He alleged according to Paul’s saying, that the children living in the spirit are not under any precepts of law, because they are free and released’). Hartmann said nothing of the sort, never calling on Paul, but instead arrogantly declared himself truly free as king and lord of all creatures: everything was his to use as he saw fit, and the liberated person could kill anyone who wished to hinder him and take what was his, even if it were the

57 Instead

of sensualitas Haupt twice read spiritualis, which corresponds to the Clementines and the Erfurt hearing; ‘Ein Beghardenprozeß in Eichstätt in 1381’, 494. This word does not appear anywhere in the text, so it is certainly not ‘the magic word of his elevation … like radical Franciscan zealots’, as K. Burdach has it, Der Dichter des Ackermann aus Böhmen und seine Zeit, in his Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation, 11 vols. (Berlin, 1912–34), III.2, 133.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) emperor (if he himself were not ‘free in the spirit’); he could do whatever pleased (delectat) him, wherever his nature drove him, even if the entire land went to ruin. It sounds like bluster, as do many of Hartmann’s later statements as well. Nothing of the sort is heard from Konrad Kannler, although his inquisitor evidently questioned him in that direction on the basis of the Erfurt protocols. Even he felt challenged by the question as to whether he could kill without sin – even in the thousands – anyone who tried to prevent him from doing what pleased him (in quo delectabatur). Significantly, however, he added that should it displease God, he would avoid it. Without the urging of the inquisitor’s question, he surely would not have thought of this radical, reckless, almost bloodthirsty outcome of spirit-freedom: a consequence which he immediately restricted through humble subordination to God’s will, and ultimately would not really allow to happen, but of which he theoretically, hypothetically approved. Similar responses are regularly repeated. The subsequent question is answered affirmatively by both, again using the words of the bull: whoever stands in that grade of perfection and in the spirit of freedom can achieve ultimate happiness in this life as in heaven. Hartmann added: except for the mortality of the body (‘si solummodo mortalitas non esset corporis’). Kannler restricts this statement differently, again bringing himself close to Paul’s words of the teaching of the Church: this happiness cannot be achieved in essence (essentialiter) here below, but only ‘as a reflection in a mirror, not face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13. 12). Is that still the same heresy that was condemned in Erfurt and at the Council of Vienne? The Erfurt heretic had also declared that such a ‘free person in the spirit’ was as happy as Peter or Mary in heaven, and he responded affirmatively to the question whether he had been united with God without mediation (sine medio quocunque). ‘Transformed’ into divinity, as it was in the beginning, he could be ‘in unitate divine essentie et trinitate personarum’, both God-theFather and God-the-Son and the Holy Spirit, quidquid vult, not distinguishable even by Mary and the angels (these words were similarly used earlier by the Eichstätt protocol, see note 55 above). And so he called God’s son his brother in divinity, related to him (‘et ex hoc dixit, quod filius in divinis esset frater suus et sic sibi attineret’). The Eichstätt inquisitor thus believed he had to pose a corresponding question, but he received a less extravagant answer: Kannler called himself Christ’s brother from grace and explained that what God was from nature, he was through grace. Once again he came close to the grace doctrine of the Church, and was at least less misguided and vulnerable than was Johannes Hartmann. The fifth article gave him an opportunity to strengthen this positive impression. The formulation of Clement’s bull – that every intellectualis natura (‘intellectual nature’) is itself holy by nature, and the soul does not need the lumen gloriae (‘light of glory’) to be raised to the vision of God and to enjoy it 148

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Heresy Interrogations in blessedness58 – was not only embraced by Johannes Hartmann, but even exceeded through his speculation about the ‘nobility of the spirit’ (nobilitas spiritus). For Hartmann, that ‘nobility of the spirit’ which flowed out of the Godhead and back into it essentially (essentialiter) was one with God in true blessedness without distinction; there was no multiplicity set between the free in spirit and the divine; and where this essential light is, God, all the created light is only darkness and darkening. Konrad Kannler, to whom this proposition (or at least the text of the bull) was apparently presented, said precisely the opposite: if the anima rationalis (‘rational soul’) has a blessedness, it is from God and not from itself; it needs the lumen gloriae to be raised to God. That a person essentialiter could not achieve such blessedness, he had already said earlier in opposition to Hartmann. When queried according to the sixth article of the bull Ad nostrum, Kannler repeated its text, mostly word for word: only non-perfect persons need to practise acts of virtue, while the perfect and free in the spirit licentiat a se virtutes; he no longer needs them, Kannler added, since he was sinless. Marguerite Porete had been condemned for this sentence: ‘anima adnichilata dat licentiam virtutibus’ (see above); yet he knows from her, and especially from Meister Eckhart, that this ‘departing the virtues’ was in no way meant as a licence for immorality and indecency. Instead, it was a surmounting of the simple moral of commands and thou-shalt-nots through enlightenment to a will-less, essential well-being of the ‘good person’, the ‘beautiful soul’ – or whatever it might be later named. The peril of misusing such ideas appears at its most crass with the Erfurt beghard Johannes Hartmann. He used these inquisitorial questions for broad visions of what ein frey geist (‘a free spirit’) – this and a few other words were registered at Erfurt in German – could allow himself, if nature drove him to it, and whether it was sexual intercourse with his actual sister or his own mother, wherever it was, even on the altar, free from law or commandment, for only grossi homines were under den gesetzzen (‘under the law’; he probably said grop liute, of whom Meister Eckhart also spoke). He paints this picture with gusto, full of contempt for women, who were only created for the use of men of the free spirit and yet who, through such intercourse, would be restored to virginity. It is the worst part of his testimony. And he added, on being asked, that Christ had become a free spirit only after crucifixion on Kar’frei’tag (Good Friday), which is why he called it that. Mary never did – otherwise she would not have complained to her son. Konrad Kannler would never have said anything of the sort if his inquisitor had not encountered Hartmann’s answers to the seventh article of Clement’s 58 On

the special importance of the problem of the visio beatifica for the fourteenth century, see G. Hoffmann, Der Streit über die selige Schau Gottes 1331–38 (Münster, 1917).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) bull.59 He had rather quickly approved when he was asked whether sexual intercourse even in holy places, in the church or on the altar, even with his own mother or sister, could be no sin for one free in the spirit. Kannler could not out of principle deny it, but he added in an almost touching manner that God would not allow something like that to happen with persons so perfect and free in the spirit. And what Hartmann had said about female chastity and virginity – despite or even through actions with one who was liber spiritu – was turned by Kannler, upon being questioned, in a quite different direction. A virgin would then only lose her virginitas quoad carnem (‘virginity in the flesh’) but God would overlook it for the sake of the one free in the spirit. Against the background of Hartmann’s shameless expressions, Kannler (whose inquisitor suspected him of similar beliefs) seems rather timid and good-natured, although he could not deny his antinomian convictions. The final question from the Clementines was whether one should rise in honour during the elevation of the monstrance in the mass, as if a perfected person would only be disturbed and distracted from his pure, high contemplation. It was for heretics of this sort always a troublesome touchstone of their attitude, by which they stood out and could be recognised.60 Yet there is still 59 ‘Septimo,

quod mulieris osculum, cum ad hoc natura non inclinet, est mortale peccatum, actus autem carnalis, cum ad hoc natura inclinet, peccatum non est, maxime cum tentatur exercens. To which Johannes Hartmann said: ‘quod actus carnalis, ad quem natura hominem inclinat, tali in spiritu libero non est peccatum; sed aliqui amplexantur et osculantur mulieres propter hoc solum quod conversatio eorum sit communis cum hominibus aliis et ne dicatur de eis proprie, quod ipsi sint ‘gozen’ [gods? Saints? in the Greifswald MS: gabhardi = beghardi?] et nescirent conversari cum hominibus’; (‘Seventh, that to kiss a woman is a mortal sin, since nature does not incline one to this; since nature does however incline one to the carnal act, this is not a sin, especially when the person doing it is tempted.’ To which Johannes Hartmann said ‘that the carnal act to which nature inclines a person in such a free spirit is not a sin, but some women are embraced and kissed for this reason alone, that their behaviour is shared with other men, and lest it be said of them that they are gozen and that they do not know how to behave with men’); ed. Werner, ‘Ideologische Probleme’, 146 ff. 60 There were already distinctive statements in the Swabian Ries or in Strasbourg in 1317 (see the editions cited in note 44 above): ‘dicunt se elevari cum corpore domini in missa, nec surgunt nec flectunt genua ob reverentiam dei, quando elevatur vel portatur, nisi tantum propter homines, ne scandalizentur’ (‘they say that they are elevated with the body of the Lord in Mass, nor do they rise nor bend their knees in reverence of God when they are lifted up or carried, except only on account of men, so that they are not scandalised’). John of Brünn says: ‘videre elevationem, hoc pertinet ad illos simulatores sanctitatis, qui volunt apparere coram hominibus que [sic] relinquunt interiora’ (‘to see the elevation, this pertains to those pretenders of sanctity who wish to appear among people who [?]leave interior things’); Wattenbach, ‘Secte der Brüder vom freien Geiste’, 531. [The last phrase is untranslatable. Perhaps: ‘wish to appear among others as men who leave interior (perhaps mistake for exterior) things’.] And his brother Albert says: ‘in elevatione corporis Christi homo non rapitur (ms.: capitur) ad superiora; … nec debent videre corpus

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Heresy Interrogations a considerable difference in attitude when, for example, Hartmann not only repeats the words of the bull, disputing that ecclesiastical rules are binding for the free in spirit, but also declares that the perfectly free might receive sacraments as something external, chiefly for ‘enjoyment’ (‘nisi … vellet se “verlustigen”’); if it pleased him more, he could find God in playing chess as well in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Or when Kannler almost apologetically suggests that a perfected man has so sunk into the highest contemplation of divine wisdom, precisely from inspiration of the spirit, that he cannot be distracted and thus does not need to show the Body of Christ reverence by rising when it is elevated. In any case, he adds, the free in spirit and perfected should absolutely not be required to take the Last Supper or other sacraments; but that sounds as if he were again forced by a new question from the Erfurt formula to this conclusion, one that also (as he later confessed) corresponded to his own conduct over the years. Some further questions were obviously only posed because the inquisitor found them in the Erfurt protocol. Johannes Hartmann had said there that had he not been baptised, and the fact were not known, he would not care about it (non curaret) except at the most to ‘enjoy’ himself; and if a heathen were in such a freedom of the spirit, he would not need baptism. The last of these was also approved by Kannler with nearly the same words; as justification, however, he added that the unbaptised heathen would not be subject to the commands of the Church and would not need its sacraments. That not only baptised Christians, but also heathens, Jews and Saracens could all attain spiritual freedom and perfection was an idea not infrequently heard in these heretical circles, not easily reconciled with Kannler’s later eschatological thoughts about his own future duty. In contrast to Hartmann, Kannler emphatically declared immediately upon being asked that he would not and could not deny convictions that the spirit gave him, even to avoid death. On the other hand, Hartmann had almost cynically said that one in the freedom of the spirit could deny and abjure everything without sin so long as danger to life was threatened; he could mislead the accusor and inquisitor and still be speaking the truth, not for a moment, but eternal truth ex fundamento libertatis. Yes, he brazenly said directly to his inquisitor’s face, he should be thankful for having revealed his enlightenment, which only the truly free could find in themselves and

Christi, ubi hoc facere possunt sine scandalo hominum, quia vere credunt, quod omnis liber spiritu ita bene potest (ms.: possunt) habere in cordibus suis corpus Christi sicut sacerdotes in manibus suis’ (in the elevation of the body of Christ, a person is not taken up to the heavens; … nor ought they to look at the body of Christ when they can do this without causing scandal among people, because they believe it to be true that every free spirit is able to hold the body of Christ in their hearts just as priests do in their hands’); Wattenbach, ‘Secte der Brüder vom freien Geiste’, 536. Similar formulations appear often.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) which was worth more than all the gold in the tower of the Erfurt council. Preachers preach from books and forget what they are teaching through the study of parchment.61 In contrast, whoever sees in the deepest depth of the divine fundament, only he can speak it in full truth. Kannler is in any case convinced (and the protocol of his hearing has him saying similar, almost identical words as the other) that only the free ‘in spirit ex fundo, quia sic in se invenit’, from the self-experienced revelation of the spirit, can express such things. Like Hartmann, he also insists that he does not speak in this way from confusion of the spirit, weakness of the head or body, or from fear. Duty-bound, inquisitors offered both men this way out for those of unsound mind, but the effort was in vain.62 Hartmann had even boasted that in the nine years that he had stood in such freedom, he never had any physical illness, was never weak or sick and had never taken any medicine; and when he was asked why he was so pale, he denied that it came from any illness, and offered no other explanation. Kannler simply confimed that he had answered all the inquisitor’s questions sana mente, systematically and thoughtfully; only later in his renunciation did he concede that he perhaps had been overcome by the inspiration of an evil spirit through his soul’s inattention or stupidity (ex ebitudine mentis). But then he still insisted, afterwards as before, that others had seduced him to it (Hartmann appears never to have been asked about this), and he swore again that it was only the experience in the choir of the Willibald cathedral nine years before that had brought him there, when he suddenly fell into ecstasy during prayer (‘positus fuerit in extasim nesciens an in corpore vel extra corpus’) and believed he heard the word of God: ‘Friend, all of your sins are forgiven because of your contrition’; from then on he was no longer obligated to confession, communion or other sacraments, but was free in spirit and sinless. At that point, and still during his first hearing, it seemed to him that it came ‘from the inspiration of the holy spirit’ (ex instinctu spiritus sancti). Afterward 61 Here

the tradition of the text of the Erfurt protocol is not uniform. It is at its best in the corrected form given by Wattenbach, ‘Secte der Brüder vom freien Geiste’, 542: ‘praedicatores predicant et docent ex libris et studio pellium obliviscuntur eorum que docent’. The version in Werner, ‘Ideologische Probleme’, 150 (=Prague ms.? like Clm 4386), lacks que docent at the end. As is often the case, Werner’s German is completely incorrect: ‘Die Prediger lehren und predigen aus Büchern und vergessen das Studium ihrer Häute’ [sic]. Disrespect for the clerical knowledge of books, of viri literati, compared to their own inspiration, is frequent among such heretics. In Strasbourg in 1317 it is said of the litterati: ‘nec cognoverunt nisi per pellem vitulinam, ipsi vero sugunt ex deitate’ (‘they do not know unless through calf-skin [parchment], but they imbibe it from the deity’); see note 44 above. Albert of Brünn says: ‘beghardus studuit suam doctrinam in libro trinitatis, sed sacerdos in pellibus vitulorum’ (‘the beghard studies his doctrine in the book of the Trinity, but the priest studies his from calf-skins’); see note 52 above. Similar formulations appear often. 62 Cf. Werner, ‘Ideologische Probleme’, 110.

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Heresy Interrogations he allowed himself to be taught and converted by the inquisitor, turned inward (ad cor reversus); he now believed that the experience came ‘from the influence of an evil spirit’ (ex instictu maligni spiritus). He only ‘renounced’ what he had previously believed and asserted, holding it as error and wishing to believe in the doctrine of the Church. That did not negate his earlier confessions, which are all the more believable since they were not formulated according to the model of the Erfurt protocols, nor do they markedly deviate from them. For that reason one may take as reliably recorded the further astounding statements that the inquisitor elicited, or allowed, from him at the close of his first hearing, without being able to continue with the papal bull of 1311 or the Erfurt protocol of 1367. For they provided no place for the question of whether Kannler believed that there were Testaments in addition to the Old and the New. Only now, at this point, were his most peculiar ideas introduced and permitted to surface, after he had been taken through the Clementine articles with schematic thoroughness. That this layman in fact believed in more than two Testaments had nothing directly to do with the Clementine articles and the heresy they condemned. He was not speaking of the ‘Eternal Gospel’ of a coming era of the Spirit, as did the Franciscan Spirituals of the thirteenth century following Joachim of Fiore. Rather, he named himself a second Adam, destined by God, when he had been so free in the spirit as he already had been for nine years – he could not yet have been very old – to be sent into the world with the divine commission to preach, ‘habens potestatem super universum mundum evangelisandi’, also to perform Signs, that is, to work miracles, and perform all the deeds of Christ. To this degree he would be the Antichrist – this word he certainly had in its German form of endekrist (as already found in Freidank [thirteenth-century German poet]), endkrist (as in Sebastian Brant [German humanist, d. 1521]), both transformed in popular etymology. For he expressly declared that Antichrist was not to be taken in the evil sense ‘wie wir es zu verstehen pflegen’ (‘as we understand it’) the protocol says. Instead, with him begins the third age of mankind – Adam the first, Christ the second – that would continue after the Last Judgment in the earthly paradise, reproducing as before63 until, according to Christ’s will, God would take these people up to heaven. At the end of his first hearing Kannler claimed that since he was formed according to the image of the guiltless lamb, he had to preside over the Last Judgment – an event which he expected at the entry of the third human race into the earthly paradise.

63 Johannes

Hartmann had also said, characteristically: ‘aliqui hoc tenerent, quod in futura vita fiat permixtio maris et femine sicut in presenti, quod si non esset, tunc homines libentius vellent in ista vita cum uxoribus suis manere quam ad futuram vitam anhelare’ (‘some would believe this, that in the future life there will be a mixing of the sexes just as in the present; that if this were not the case, then men would wish to remain in this life with their wives rather than to pant for the future life’); ed. Werner, ‘Ideologische Probleme’, 146.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) These were strange ideas that the Eichstätt inquisitorial court unfortunately did not pursue further. Much therein was reminiscent of ideas heard elsewhere, earlier or later – of the new Adam or Adam’s return, of a third status of the history of salvation, of the Antichrist who would usher it in (otherwise always feared as Christendom’s worst enemy) and of the earthly paradise or chiliastic expectations. Yet nowhere is it so strangely mixed up as here, where a layman heard it from no other person, but only through inspiration in the Eichstätt cathedral around 1372. Can one summarily and generally take it as a common sectarian doctrine of the ‘Brothers and Sisters of the free spirit’, which nowhere else came so clearly into the daylight and is witnessed? Is it at all permitted to see in Kannler ‘a particularly significant leader of this sect’?64 In so doing, one falls victim to inquisitors’ thinking or is constrained by those professionally obligated to search out already condemned heresies, to gather them under a general, familiar denominator, ever ready to believe or attribute to each new suspect what they have already heard or read from others. For they knew (and we recognise) from their acts and manuals more about the assumed continuous ‘sect tradition’ than from what is learned from or witnessed by such heretics themselves. Inquisitors always posed the same questions, ideally expecting and recording the same answers and remaining vigilant to what else the interrogated answered or might otherwise have to say. It was then up to the inquisitor and his notary how much was gathered and accepted in the protocol. For historical understanding, what is special or peculiar in a statement is as worthy of attention as that which remains ever the same or is similarly repeated, and may not be simply dissolved therein as if it were also a piece of ‘sectarian doctrine’. Rather, it is precisely our comparison of two hearings, at which the same questions were asked and much the same answers recorded word for word, that reveals how different these two heretics were and how differently they thought. Where they acquired their unmistakably related ideas, even they often did not know, so that they could be subjectively honest in attributing it to the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit – ‘which, to put it mildly, rests on gross self-deception’ says Herman Haupt. On the other hand, the almost formulaic conformity of their recorded answers to the same questions would mislead anyone who views them as deeply branded ‘articles of belief’ of a sect, promoted by propaganda, of which these heretics never speak as much as do their inquisitors and chroniclers (and hence later historians). If one looks and listens more closely, all the known hearings of this type from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century seem more like expressions of a related religious sensibility (related to orthodox mysticism); the interrogated react similarly to the same questions, but are themselves quite

64 Thus

Burdach, Dichter des Ackermann aus Böhmen, p. 133; similarly Haupt, ‘Ein Beghardenprozeß in Eichstätt’, 489 ff.

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Heresy Interrogations varied in their personal characteristics or situational conditions and able to connect themselves here and there with different ideas. Instead of searching further for a ‘sect’ and subordinating it to a common doctrine, one must first take heed – without inquisitorial prejudice, and without even the moral revulsion justified in individual cases – of these symptoms of thought incompatible with Church doctrine concerning God, the Spirit, the soul and the human being, which surface remarkably often in these centuries especially in Germany, and presage coming spiritual–mental changes.

V Mainz 1458: Statements of the ‘Lollard’ Henne Becker Herman Haupt also wished to see in Kannler’s last statements about his role as the ‘End-Christ’ for the third human race not only ‘personal obsessive grandiosity’ but the ‘influence of the sect of the free spirit’.65 He did not know of a later beghard hearing in Mainz in 1458 that could have better grounded this opinion, since it likewise speaks of a third testament for the age of the Holy Spirit and is in other ways comparable to Kannler’s interrogation. Haupt only recalls that already in Paris in 1210 the so-called Amalricians appear; like others, he regards them as ‘fore-runners of Beghardism’ who combined the ‘teachings of the three ages’ (that is, Joachim of Fiore’s expectation of a third Age of the Holy Spirit) with a pantheistic spiritualism that renounced the ecclesiastical and moral norms for a ‘spirit-filled’ perfection.66 But thereafter, the expectation and influence of Joachite ideas is not to be found in heretics of similar temper and ‘free spirit’, either before or after 1300 – with the exception of Konrad Kannler and then the so-called Homines intelligentiae in Brussels, where Pierre d’Ailly as bishop of Cambrai had them investigated in 1410/1.67 However, their most informed spokesman, the Carmelite William of Hildernissem, denied ever having listened to or having believed such ideas.68 Almost a half-century later, the beghard (or, as they also said in those days, ‘Lollard’69) Henne Becker, from a village near Aachen,70 was tried and burned. 65 Haupt,

‘Ein Beghardenprozeß in Eichstätt in 1381’, 492, citing A. Judt, Histoire du panthéisme populaire au moyen âge et au seizième siècle (Paris, 1875); the doctrine of three ages cited by Judt, p. 50, cannot be found among the Clementine articles. 66 Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen pp. 355 ff., esp. pp. 370 ff. [Religious Movements, pp. 153 ff., esp. pp. 158 ff.] 67 A thorough hearing protocol is in Fredericq I, 267–79, no. 249. 68 Ibid., 267 ff.; see L. Willems Az, ‘De Ketter Willem van Hildernissem en diens Verhouding tot Bloemardinne’, in Mélanges Paul Fredericq (Brussels, 1904), pp. 259–66. 69 Cf. D. Kurze, ‘Die festländischen Lollarden’, AKG 47 (1965), 48–76, especially 62 ff. 70 It was G. Ritter who first discovered the Articuli confessi per Johannem Iolhardum in Moguncia a. d. 1458, in a Palatine MS of the Vatican Library, Cod. Pal. lat. 870,

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) He asserted that the New Testament was temporary, like the Old, no longer valid or obligatory for the perfect sub statu spiritus, whose inner voice (interior instinctus) was their ‘Eternal Testament’. The other was a Testament of Death, since the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3. 6), while this is the Testament of Life with which those down below begin what will endure forever in Heaven: the ministerium gloriae (2 Corinthians 3. 9), the free Jerusalem above, of which Paul spoke (Galatians 4. 26), the true Catholic Church que est sursum. Meanwhile, the earthly Church of Christianity, of which Henne Becker no longer felt himself a member, was itself heretical, since it excluded Jews, heathens and heretics as unbelievers. Much here and elsewhere is reminiscent of Johannes Kannler seventyseven years before, but without dependence upon the wording of his hearing protocol. Becker’s statements were not even recorded in a notarial instrument. The Koblenz Dominican Heinrich Kalteisen, titular bishop of Drontheim, who heard these ‘Lollards’ in Mainz as a papal inquisitor, gathered their statements ‘non secundum ordinem confessionis, sed sententiae’, not according to the confession but rather grouped by subjects (as the Strasbourg bishop of 1317, see above, but independently): ‘Prima materia de spiritu sancto, secunda materia de novo testamento; tertia materia de Christo’ (‘Firstly matters regarding the holy spirit, secondly matters regarding the New Testament, thirdly matters regarding Christ’), and so on. He then organised them into several corollaria (corollaries). In addition, Kalteisen had composed his own refutation of this erroneous doctrine,71 having engaged very deeply with it. fols. 144v–154, in the midst of the protocol of a Heidelberg artists’ disputation on beghards of 1458; ‘Zur Geschichte des häretischen Pantheismus in Deutschland im 15. Jahrhundert’, ZKG 43 (1924), 150–9. There is another copy, with many differences, divided into 8 instead of 9 materiae, in a manuscript from the papers of the inquisitor Heinrich Kalteisen OP that is now in the Staatsarchiv Koblenz, Abteilung 701 no. 176, fols. 2r–3v; see text below. Without knowing Ritter’s article, F. Hermann made use of Würzburg documents about negotiations between the archbishop and the city council concerning the Mainz location of Becker’s arrest; ‘Die letzte Ketzerverbrennung in Mainz (28. Okt. 1458)’, in Beiträge zur Kunst und Geschichte des Mainzer Lebensraumes (Festschrift für E. Neeb) (Mainz, 1936), pp. 105–10. Cf. also E. G. Neumann, Rheinisches Beginen- und Begardenwesen, Mainzer Abhandlungen zur mittleren und neueren Geschichte 4 (Meisenheim am Glan, 1960), pp. 159 f.: ‘Perceptions that indicate the sect of the free spirit, … Waldensian elements, … further intellectual connections that indicate misunderstood concepts of one Joachim of Fiore [sic]’. 71 Cut into two parts for binding, this text survives in two manuscripts from the Kalteisen papers, Staats-Archiv Koblenz, Abt. 701, no. 176, fols. 1r–13r, and (divided in the middle of a sentence) no. 230, fols. 55r–59r. After the ‘Articuli confessi per lolhardum Henne Becker non secundum ordinem confessionis, sed sententiae’, fol. 3v, this follows: ‘Pro condempnacione predictorum adduco Clementinam de haereticis Ad nostrum, ubi papa Clemens in concilio generali quinque articulos condempnat, quos tunc reperit inter Lolhardos et Beginas’. Of the eight articles of the bull, three were not cited (4, 5 and 7), which the inquisitor thought did not apply

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Heresy Interrogations He also made the bull Ad nostrum the basis of the hearing, using at least five of its eight articles, yet his formulation of Becker’s statements never adhered as closely to their texts as did the Erfurt and Eichstätt protocols. Kalteisen appears not to have known the latter, nor was it found in his extensive papers.72 Thus are the many correspondences even more remarkable. Like Kannler and no less believably, sixteen years earlier (on 26 May 1442, the Saturday after Pentecost) while praying in the Mainz church of Saints Peter and Paul, he was painfully struck by a dreadful sound from the heights of the church. In this sound, which ‘pressed’ him agonizingly, he believed he was receiving the Holy Spirit as had no person before or after him, the spirit of truth promised in the Gospel of John (16. 13). And since that time he was often ‘transported in his inner self’ (‘raptus in suo homine interiori’)73 against which he could do nothing. Previously he had obeyed the commandments of the Church in all matters, but after that he could and must no longer do it; before he acted according to human will ‘et fuit sui ipsius’ (‘and was of his own self’),74 but after his inspiration he was dominated by the ‘spirit in his interior person’. This spirit did not command him to take communion or to rise with the elevation of the Eucharist in reverence, to confess, to fast, to to this case (as also Wasmod of Homburg, Schmidt, ‘Tractatus contra hereticos Beckardos’, 580). Then on fols. 4 ff. follow his extensive, citation-filled Collecta archiepiscopi Nydrosiensis contra errores lolhardi Henne Becker, … Scriptum Mogunciae 1458 mensis Octobris 20. 72 There are many autograph entries in these eight volumes, now in the StaatsArchiv Koblenz, and a careful look through them might well be profitable. See E. Dronke, ‘Über die Gymnasial-Bibliothek und einige in derselben aufbewahrte Handschriften’, Gymnasial-Programm (Koblenz, 1832), pp. 18–32; F. W. E. Roth, ‘Heinrich Kalteisen OP’, Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 11 (1894), 320–3; F. W. E. Roth, ‘Mitteilungen aus lateinischen Handschriften zu Darmstadt, Mainz, Coblenz und Frankfurt a. M’, Romanische Forschungen 6 (1891), 434. 73 See also the beghard Hermann Kuchener, who was heard by the Würzburg bishop in Nuremberg [1976 reprint: correction – Würzburg] on 15 July 1342. Hermann, who was living in Würzburg at the time and claimed to have earlier been a priest in Nuremberg, confessed that at 20 years of age he had been ‘raptus in divinitatem; … in tantam spiritus abstractionem raptus, … quod omnino nichil oravit usque ad dimidium annum’ etc. (‘transported into divinity … transported into such an abstraction of spirit … that he did not pray at all for up to half a year); Monumenta Boica XL, 417, no. 189. 74 The text in Ritter, ‘Zur Geschichte des häretischen Pantheismus in Deutschland im 15. Jahrhundert’, 153, is corrected here according to the Koblenz MS.: ‘Antequam illum spiritum sic ceperat, obedivit ordinacioni s. matris ecclesie in omnibus quia [instead of: Et ex] tunc egit secundum humanan voluntatem et fuit sui ipsius. Sed post receptionem spiritus prefatam … extunc non fuit sui ipsius, sed gubernabatur [instead of: gubernabitur] per spiritum in interiori homine’ (‘Before he had thus taken that spirit, he obeyed the ordinance of the holy mother church in all things because then he acted according to human will and was of his own self. But after the previously stated reception of the spirit … from then he was not of his own self but was governed by the spirit in his inner person’).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) pray like those who were still within the Church, those not yet perfect. He, however, felt himself renewed (regeneratus) by the Holy Spirit in his internal person, which the external person had to obey, rather than Church command or worldly powers; for no one could obey two lords, his spirit and the Church. There is no express use of the ‘free’ spirit, of the ‘spirit of freedom’ or ‘freedom of the spirit’ here; the words liber and libertas do not appear at all, whereas we find them nineteen times in the Kannler protocol. Regarding immoral consequences of these convictions, there is also nothing to hear – other than Becker’s general assertion that what would be sin for other persons was no sin for him, ‘si faceret ex eodem instinctu interioris sui hominis et sui spiritus’ (‘if he acted from the same inspiration of his inner self and his spirit’). The inquisitor, who probably asked him about this, seems not to have insisted as had been the case with the Erfurt and Eichstätt trials. But, like Kannler, Becker believed that he had been united with God, that he had become God per gratiam, holier not only than Maria but also than Christ secundum humanitatem, already blessed in this life secundum interiorem hominem and already having attained the Beatific Vision like other saints. Is one to conclude from such similarities between Kannler and many others that the ‘sect of the brothers of the free spirit’ accordingly survived into the fifteenth century?75 Neither Henne Becker nor his inquisitor spoke of a sect; and if the latter had ever been asked whether another seduced him into heresy, he would have denied it – as did Kannler in his own time, since he too believed he had been suddenly inspired. It was a belief he maintained all the way to his death at the stake. The learned inquisitor Heinrich Kalteisen evidently went to a great deal of trouble to register Becker’s oft-repeated thoughts about the ‘inner person’ that the outer person must obey, to draw it out of him through questioning, to protocol it – and to oppose it. Becker’s statement of this concept of the interior homo appears fifteen times in his description, often also interior instinctus (Kannler spoke of an instinctus spiritus sancti), and the word interior (not once in the Kannler protocol) over twenty times.76 In this division from everything external, apart from the inspired ‘inner person’ ruled by the spirit, Kalteisen saw the ‘foundation’ of this heresy, a poison that this heretic – ‘quasi omnium simul heresiarcharum supremus’ – brewed together from all previous heresies, without drawing as they did on rationes humanae or at least on apparent authorities. He twisted certain authorities to his own

75 Thus

Ritter, ibid., 152; cf. Neumann, Rheinisches Beginen- und Begardenwesen, pp. 159f. 76 With Johannes Hartmann (ed. Werner, ‘Ideologische Probleme’, 148) contemplatio interior only once, which was disturbed by occupation cum exterioribus quovismodo. That, however, corresponds to an addition to the bull Ad nostrum article 8 (for example the MS Fribourg, Franziskaner Cod. 95 fol. 16v): ‘dum est in interiori contemplatione’ (‘while he was in interior contemplation’).

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Heresy Interrogations purposes, against the opinions of all saints and the Holy Spirit – and he actually quotes many biblical passages, particularly from the Pauline Letters and the Gospel of John, on which Henne Becker also relied in his stubborn interpretation. Kalteisen, however, could not conceive that this unlearned layman could have thought it all up himself. Naturally he did not take it for inspiration, nor for sectarian teaching that Becker had heard from others, but he assumed – as he wrote to the Mainz Archbishop Dietrich of Erbach77 – that ‘German books’ must have corrupted this layman. Probably in this case he was on the right track. Becker mentioned that he had written a book himself,78 and a Mainz chronicler even asserted that he ‘was burned with all his books’.79 In any case, he could also write and read, at least in German, although the inquisitor called him a laycus indoctus (‘an unlearned lay person’). If Kalteisen had at least cited something from the burned book as he criticised Becker’s erroneous teachings, or if it could be located like Marguerite Porete’s book (burned in 1310), then perhaps his thoughts about the ‘inner person’ in his own German words would sound very different than the Latin version of his hearing statements – as with Marguerite Porete, whose book he actually could have known. Exceptionally, one may learn the chapter headings of such beghard books,80 and gain from them an 77 This

letter is in the Kalteisen ms. of the Staats-Archiv Koblenz, no. 176 fol. 1v; it was also used by Hermann in his ‘Die letzte Ketzerverbrennung in Mainz’; text below. 78 ‘postea scripsit librum quendam, ex quo motus est orare officium’ (‘he later wrote a book, from which he was inspired to pray the office’). As we shall see below, he did not pray for long. 79 Chronicon Moguntinum, ed. C. Hegel, Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte 18.1 (Munich, 1882), p. 249, showing the wrong year of 1478 instead of 1458, for which the day of 20 October works: ‘conbustus fuit Bruderhenn becker lolhardus ut pessimus hereticus cum omnibus libris suis’ (‘Brother Henne Becker the Lollard was burned as the worst heretic along with all his books’). See on this Hermann, ‘Die letzte Ketzerverbrennung in Mainz’, 105. 80 W. Preger, Beiträge zur Geschichte der religiösen Bewegung in den Niederlanden in der 2. Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts, Abh. Munich 21, 1 (Munich, 1894), 62 ff., printed from a Brussels parchment manuscript of 1450 ‘quosdam articulos erroneos contentos in duobus libellis compertis apud quendam begardum reclusum circa Renum’ (‘certain erroneous articles contained in two little books discovered with a certain begard near the Rhine’), which the Cologne master Heymerich de Campo denounced. This was H. van den Welde, † 1460, from 1444 professor in Louvain – an ‘Albertist’ and a friend of Cusanus. On the manuscript, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, Cod. 11571–75, see J. van den Gheyn, Catalogue des MSS de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique 3 (Brussels, 1903), 327, no. 2177). These libelli, whose sequence of chapters was preserved incidentally, were probably in German: De deo, De procesionibus divinis, De identitate dei et hominis, De gratia et virtutibus, merito et demerito, De perfectis hominibus, De beatitudine (On God, On the Divine Processions, On the Identity of God and Man, On Grace and the Virtues, Merit and Demerit, On Perfected Men, On Blessedness’). From each chapter several titles, or the leading sentences of particular sections, are noted. On this point, see Preger, Beiträge, 22–4.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) impression of the connected thought processes: protocols of interrogation, by contrast, act like negative images, highlighting only the heretical ‘differences of doctrine’. For us, the literary tradition of the inquisitors is richly preserved and eagerly studied, while the vernacular literature of those condemned as heretics was largely burned with them or lost, only emerging by chance, and not always recognisable like that of Marguerite Porete. That it was present and active is only sporadically, but not uncommonly, witnessed. As early as 1274 the Franciscan Guibert of Tournai warned the Second Lyon Council against the disturbing effect of ‘interpretata scipturarum mysteria et in communi idiomate gallicata’ (‘secret interpretations of scripture in the common Gallic language’), which were greedily read and discussed by beguines.81 In 1317 the bishop of Strasbourg forbad the use of scripta (‘writings’) and cantilenae (‘sayings’) of heretics he had condemned.82 A beghard burned in Cologne in 1327, Walter of Holland, who understood little Latin and no French, wrote and distributed several books in sermone Theutonico (‘German speech’).83 Ruysbroeck campaigned in Brussels against a woman by the name of Bloemardinne, who, tanquam divinitus inspirata (‘as though divinely inspired’), wrote much about the spirit of freedom and seraphic love,84 and Gerson did the same around 1400 against an ‘almost unbelievably subtle’ book of a beguine, Marie of Valenciennes85 (where Marguerite Porete’s book was also burned). In 1369 Emperor Charles IV ordered the censoring and destruction of all vernacular writings that were suspected of heresy, were circulating ‘inter personas laicas et pene laicas’ (‘among laypeople and the semireligious’) and being destructively passed among beguines and beghards.86 And in 1376 Pope Gregory XI demanded that inquisitors in Germany confiscate and ban libri vulgares (‘vulgar books’)

81 See

note 34 above. Straßburg, II, 312. 83 From J. Trithemius, Annales Hirsaugienses, 2 vols. (St Gall, 1690), II, 155, under 1322; in Fredericq I, 172 ff., no. 177. Cf. Annales Agrippinenses, MGH SS 16, pp. 737–1336. 84 Henricus de Pomerio, De originibus monasterii Viridisvallis in Brabantia, Analecta Bollandiana IV (1885), 286; Fredericq I, 18, no. 189. There is a much-discussed identification of Bloemardinne with Sister Hadewijch, whose Flemish letters and visions are well known; Brieven, ed. J. van Mierlo, Leuvense studiën en tekstuitgaven 13, 1–2 (Antwerp, 1947); De Visionen van Hadewych, ed. J. van Mierlo (Louvain, 1924–25). This is very questionable, as is also her influence on the Brussels Homines intelligentiae around 1410, who supposedly sang a ‘carmen quoddam profanum in Teutonico’ (‘a certain profane song in German’) against her inquisitor on the street; Fredericq, I, 267, no. 248. 85 From Jean Gerson, Tractatus de distinctione verarum visionum a falsis, Opera, 3 vols. (Basel, 1489), I, 19; in Fredericq, I, 188, no. 116. 86 Dat. Lucca 17 June 1369, Böhmer, Reg. Imp.8, A. Huber, Ergänzungsband 1, no. 7287; text from J. L. von Mosheim, De Beghardis et Beguinabus commentarius (Leipzig, 1790), pp. 368–75; in Fredericq, I, 215 ff., no. 212. 82 UB

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Heresy Interrogations read by all too many laypeople, or having them read to them, and finally stop illicit lay preaching from such texts.87 The series of such witnesses and traces can be extended to Henne Becker’s book, burned in Mainz in 1458,88 and the books found in a beghard shelter, against which the Cologne Master Heymerich van de Velde (de Campo) wrote a treatise.89 Nothing of that appears to have survived, and there is little hope that this prohibited, scorched literature will be substantially more complete in the future than today. Yet one must reckon with this unknown factor if one wishes to understand the ‘heresies’ of the late Middle Ages from their own motivations and connections, without allowing the inquisitors who demolished this literature to impose their one-sided image and, so to speak, to lay down their own cartula. Familiar with tradition since the Church Fathers, they knew so many sect names and sect teachings from their manuals and acts that they were officially inclined to subsume therein every heresy encountered – or to mark it as a new ‘sect’ of a similar type, even where there was no ‘heresiarch’90 and no trace of a sectarian organisation. Modern research has all too long buttressed these misconceptions that there had to be a ‘sect’ that, through the propaganda of their ‘teaching’, again and again lured individuals – and sometimes many people – into alienation from Church orthodoxy. Within traditional antiheretical categories, it was hard to recognise and manage the fact that there might have been self-willed, brooding loners estranged from the doctrine of the Church out of elevated or perhaps condescending piety, from religious drive for perfection or from peculiar reading of biblical words; that, along with independently thinking scholars, there were those who withdrew from an all too routine, often alienating Church cult and could then deem themselves ‘inspired’, called to something special. And, as cases resembling one another accumulated, this difficulty became particularly vexing. Personal contacts no doubt worked to spread ideas, as often enough witnessed, particularly through reading vernacular books among those of similar orientation. In the early thirteenth century, one had already noted an inclination to special piety and esoteric ideas among beguine and beghard

87 Dat.

Rom. 2 Dec. 1377; text from Mosheim, De Beghardis, pp. 401 ff.; in Fredericq, I, 137 ff., no. 225. 88 G. L. Kriegk asserts that a Frankfurt beghard was prosecuted because of a heretical writing; Deutsches Bürgerthum im Mittelalter mit besonderer Beziehung auf Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt, 1868), p. 129. But as documentation for this he cites only an order of the Mainz archbishop to the council, that ‘eynen Lolhartbruder genant Bosehans, welcher verlumet ist etlicher ketzerlicher artickel’ be put in prison; p. 537, note 110. 89 See note 80 above. 90 Bernard of Clairvaux had already found that confusing and disturbing in the new heretics of his own time (PL 183, 1094 ff.). So also did Wasmod of Homburg, who cited Bernard’s words in regard to the beguines and beghards of the fourteenth century; Schmidt, ‘Tractatus contra hereticos Beckardos’, 356.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) circles, so difficult to fit into ecclesiastical-monastic orders. Their disturbing extremes nailed down a papal bull at the Council of Vienne as if there were a morally noxious ‘Sect’ of beghards and beguines, ‘Brothers and sisters of the free spirit’ as they were called in Strasbourg in 1317. After that inquisitors believed they could discover adherents, members or even leaders of this ‘Sect’, whose supposed teaching tradition they knew in advance, based on their hearings. In keeping with their witnesses, they believed in the existence of this evil ‘Sect’; but if one listens more carefully, the answers of those interviewed were often so varied and peculiar that they could not be subsumed under the common denomination of a ‘sectarian doctrine’. This despite all their agreements, which stemmed at least in part from the uniform questioning pattern. If such heretics independently believed in immediate ‘inspiration’, then the unmistakable harmony and connection between them most likely came from the vernacular materials they wrote, or read or heard read. But this heretical literature was largely destroyed by the inquisitors, while the inquisitorial literature survived in abundance. One can see the relationship between them by comparing the rediscovered book of Marguerite Porete to the acts of her trial. What was condemned as heresy in Paris in 1310 does exist in this book – what else remains permits the historian, once aware thereof, to evaluate it differently than did the judges of heresy themselves. Correspondingly, one must concede to the inquisitors of Konrad Kannler, or Henne Becker or other heretics of their ilk, that they dutifully recorded the deviations from the faith of the Church and fidelity to heretical principles, going to considerable lengths so as to register carefully differences between statements. With close comparison, the acts of hearings are thus more believable, more reliable in what they wished and were able to say. At the same time, however, the attitudes and methods with which the accused were questioned become all the more evident, as do the criteria according to which they were judged and the systems with which they were protocolled. The historian, with all respect and understanding for the office, cannot permit this way of seeing – the form of questioning and judging which needs only decide between orthodoxy and heresy – to intrude if he wishes to understand the intellectual and religious life of that time in its variety of views, in its tensions and contradictions, and hence in its symptoms and causes of change. Then he is no longer constrained by the traditional inquisitorial categories of heresy and sect history: he must raise them above what the inquisitors, in their own ways, verified as reliable, and must try to see it with his own eyes, calling on the remnants and clues of heretical writings for help. Only in this way can the history of heresy become a source of conclusive intellectual history, in which the inquisitor and heretic, the orthodox and the erring or the seeker are both equally involved, not as opponents, but as partners of an intellectual world. The inquisitors, too, can become more comprehensible to us, providing the most indispensable, productive witnesses to that both for which and against which they worked. 162

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Heresy Interrogations

Comments on the Edition As an example, the Eichstätt protocol of Konrad Kannler’s hearing is edited here as a diplomatist would a charter, marking in small print what was copied from the earlier document. Correspondingly, what exists already word for word in both the Erfurt protocol of Johannes Hartmann that E. Warner last edited (see note 49 above) will be printed in small type. Further correspondences in both protocols with the bull Ad nostrum, the questioning procedure of both hearings, will be printed in small cursive type. Only the actual words of the (unnamed) Eichstätt notary or – in Latin translation – the interviewed Konrad Kannler are in ordinary type. As a counter-example, statements follow that were gathered by Inquisitor Heinrich Kalteisen from the interrogation of Henne Becker in Mainz in 1458, who was also questioned according to the articles of the bull Ad nostrum; Becker’s testimony began with an experience of inspiration during prayer in a church quite similar to Kannler, otherwise also agreeing extensively with him. But, since his statements were not registered according to the model, his own stance and way of thinking – and their many variations from Kannler – are discernible, as he had also expressed them in a book unfortunately burned with him. Last of all, the inquisitor’s letter accompanying his extensive refutation of the heresy, which unfortunately does not deal with Becker’s book, should show finally how important an intelligent contemporary deemed this way of thought, which he viewed as extremely dangerous: he does not support his case by using the typical definition of an already-condemned sect teaching; and yet he does not emerge without borrowing from older antiheretical polemic. It will require even more comparative analyses of similar witnesses before one will come to know the late-medieval heretics branded as the repellent ‘Sect of the brothers and sisters of the free spirit’ better than did first the inquisitors and then the historians of sectarian history – before one may understand their symptomatic meaning for the intellectual, psychological, religious (one might even say ideological) conversions that took place beneath the pre-eminent and long-standing edifice of Church faith.

VI Texts 1. Notarial Instrument on the hearing of Konrad Kannler in Eichstätt 1381 Pommersfelden Cod. 158 (2708), fols. 70v–72r = P ed. H. Haupt, ZKG 5 (1882), 494–8 = H cursive = Clement V’s bull Ad nostrum 1311/1317 small type = Erfurt hearing of J. Hartmann 1367, ed. E. Warner, ‘Ideologische Probleme’, 136–53 (see note 52 above)

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) domini millesimoa tricentesimo LXXX primo indicione quarta in die beati Policarpi martiris videlicet VII kalendas Februarii in civitate Eystettensi ac in curia et stuba domini Ulrici de Leonrad canonici Eystettensis hora terciar[um] coram honorabili magistro Eberhardo de Freyenhausen canonico Eystettensi inquisitore heretice pravitatis per reverendissimum in Christo patrem et dominum Rabonem episcopum Eystettensem in diocesi Eystettensi deputato et in mei notarii publici et testium infrascriptorum presencia constitutusb Conradus Cannler laicus Eystettensis, qui prius prestitit corporale iuramentum de dicenda veritate et interrogatus primo, si fuerit liber spiritu dicit, quod sic. Interrogatus, in quo consistatc libertas spiritus, respondit: cum penitus cesset omnis remorsus consciencie et redditur homo penitus impeccabilis. Deinde respondit de primo articulo in Clementis de hereticis ‘Ad nostrum’, qui incipit: quod homo in vita presenti etc., dicit, quod fuerit in tali ac tanto gradu perfectionis, quod ulterius in gracia non potuerit proficere,d quia fuerit inpeccabilis et unus cum deo et deus unus cum eo nec fuerit aliqua differencia seu distinccio inter deum est ipsum nec beata virgo seu alii sancti potuerinte facere aliquam distinctionem inter deum et ipsum.91 Item interrogatus de secundo articulo in Clementinis qui incipit: quod ieiunare etc. respondit, quod crediderit, quod non oportueritf eum ieiunare vel orare, sed si sensualitasg delectabatur comedere, poterat hoc facere absque omni peccato, quia postquam gradum perfeccionis acquisiverit, non tenebatur nec ieiunare nec orare, quia tunc sensualitasg ita fuerit perfecteg1 spiritui et racioni subiecta, quod poterat concedere corpori quidquid placet et in quo delectabatur. Item interrogatus an huiusmodi perfeccionem habuerit ex suis meritis vel solum ex gracia dei, dicit, quod tantummodo ex gracia dei, quia omnes angeli et omnes sancti non possent mereri talem graciam perfeccionis, in qua ipse fuerit, sed solum ex gracia divina. Item interrogatus de tercio articulo in Clementinis, qui incipit: quod illi, qui sunt etc. respondit, quod existentes in predicto gradu perfeccionis et spiritu libertatis non sunt subiecti humane obediencie nec ad aliqua precepta92 ecclesie obligantur. Alegavit ad hoc dictum Pauli,93 quod filii viventes spiritu non sunt sub aliquo precepto legis, quia sunt liberi et soluti. Item eciam respondit, quod, si aliquis inhibuisset eum facere, in quo delectabatur, talem hominem poterat interficere, eciam mille homines sine peccato, quia, si deo displicuisset, eum precavisset.94 Item interrogatus de quartoh articulo, qui incipit: quod homo ita potest etc. respondit, quod stans in predicto gradui perfeccionis et spiritu libertatis, spiritualiter ita possit apprehendere finalem beatitudinem secundum omnem gradum perfeccionis in presenti sicut habebitur in vita beata, sed essencialiter huiusmodi beatitudinem non potuerit apprehendere, sed tantum enigmate et speculo, sed non ad faciem.95 Anno

91 See

Erfurt hearing (ed. Werner, 142) to Art. 4; see above p. 146 note 55. the Erfurt hearing follows vel statura (or statuta et precepta). 93 Not word for word; see p. 147 above. 94 See p. 148 above. 95 1 Corinthians 13. 12. 92 In

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Heresy Interrogations Item dicit eciam, quod existens in tali gradu perfeccionis et spiritu libertatis ita indistincte et indifferenter est unus cum deo et deus unus cum eo, quod nuncupat se fratrem Christi per graciam et, quo deus est per naturam, hoc ipse foret et esse posset per graciam,et nominat se fratrem Christi, ut prefertur. Item interrogatus de quinto articulo, qui incipit: quelibetj intellectualis natura etc. respondit, quod anima racionalis, si quam habeat beatitudinem, eam habeat a deo et non a se ipsa et quod eciam indigeat lumine glorie eam elevante ad deum. Item respondit super sexto articulo, qui incipit: quod se exercere in actibus virtutum etc. respondit, quod existens in gradu perfeccionis et spiritu libertatis non indigeat, quod se exerceat in actibus virtutum, cum iam attigeret gradum perfeccionis et spiritum libertatis et sit inpeccabilis, sed se exercere in actibus virtutum sit hominum nondum perfectorum et quod homo perfectus licenciatk a se virtutes per hunc modum, cum non indigeat eis. Item interrogatus de septimo articulo, qui incipit, quod mulierisl osculum etc. respondit, quod, si natura inclinat hominem perfectum et liberum spiritu ad actum venereum exercendum et si exercet, non peccat. Dicit eciam, quod, si perfectus et liber spiritu coiret cum virgine, virgo solum amitteret virginitatem quoadm carnem, sed deus indulgeret et remitteret ei per huiusmodi liberum spiritu, qui huiusmodi actum cum ea perfecisset. Dicit eciam, quod non peccaret cum matre et sorore, si huiusmodi actum cum ea exerceret, si natura inclinaret, sed tamen non credit, quod deus hoc permitti fieretn a tam perfectis et spiritu liberis. Item dicit, quod eciam, cum adeptus fuerit gradum perfeccionis ut supra et spiritum libertatis quod natura inclinaveriteum ad actuso venereos et eciam eos exercuerit, sed in hoc non peccaverit, quia fuerit inpeccabilis, eciam si perfecisset in loco sacro sicut in ecclesia vel in altari. Item super octavo articulo, qui incipit: quod in elevacionep corporis Christi etc. respondit, quod taliter perfectus ut supra et existens in spiritus libertateq si ex induccione spiritus esset in summa contemplacione divine essencie, quamdiu spiritus in huiusmodi actibus contemplacionis vellet permanere, non deberet se divertere ad alium actum, et si medio tempore elevaretur ibi corpus Christi, non deberet sibi assurgere nec reverenciam exhibere. Dicit eciam quod talis liber spiritu et perfectus non tenetur ad perceptionem eukaristie nec aliorum sacramentorum. Item dicit eciam, quod, si paganus nondum baptisatus haberet spiritum libertatis et gradum perfeccionis, quod tunc non indigeret de baptismo, cum tales non subiaceant mandatis ecclesie nec indigeant de sacramentis. Item dicit, quod omnes premissas responsiones non fecerit ex demencia mentis vel debilitate capitis seu infirmitate corporis nec causa timoris, sed ex proposito et deliberacione et ex sana mente et dicit, quod talia protuleritr ex fundo, quia sic in se invenit ex revelacione spiritus et quod solum iste valeat talia exprimere, qui sit expertus et sit liber spiritu et habeat gradum perfeccionis, ut supra. Item dicit, quod talia negare non debet nec posset eciam propter evitandam mortem. Item interrogatus, an aliquis induxerit eum ad credendum predicta, dicit, 165

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) quod non, sed omnia premissa habeat ex instinctu spiritus sancti; et dicit, quod a novem annis citra fuerit constitutus in Choro S. Willibaldi in ecclesia Eystettensi et ibi in devocione sua existens positus fuerit in extasim nesciens an in corpore vel extra corpus et ibidem receperit divinum responsum: Amice, sint tibi dimissa omnia peccata tua propter contricionem per te habitams et quod de cetero non esset astrictus ad confitendum nec ad sacramentum eukaristie nec ad alia quecunque sacramenta recipere, sed liber spiritu et inpeccabilis. Item interrogatus an aliost de predictis articulis instruxerit, dicit quod non, quia nullus possitu instrui, nisi detur sibi a spiritu sancto. Item interrogatus, an credat plura testamenta quam vetus et novum testamentum, respondit, quod sic, et dicitv, quod epse sit secundus Adam et a deo constitutus, quod, postquam compleverit triginta annos a tempore sue perfeccionis et ab eo tempore, quo sibi fuit datus liber spiritus, de quo sintw bene novem anni, tunc sit missus a deo in universum mundum et habens potestatem super universum mundum ewangelisandi, signa faciendi et omnia opera faciendi, que Christus fecit, et quod ipse sit Antichristus nec Antichistus sit in malo recipiendus, quamvis nos solemus in malo interpretari. Et dicit, quod secundus Adam, sit principium tercie generacionis hominum post extremum iudicium habitancium in paradiso terrestri usque ad voluntatem et tunc deus rapiat eos in celum et quod in paradiso protunc fiat generaciones hominum sicutx pronunc fiant ex seminis propagacione. Presentes supradictis interrogationibus et responsionibusy magister Eberhardus inquisitor, Ulricus de Leonrod, magister Conradus Gleichen, magister Rabanus Custos, Waltherus Schubel, Petrus officialis, magister Ulricus Reblin et Nicolaus capellanus S. Pauli et Walbramus plebanus. Item interrogatus, an a predictis articulis et punctis, ut superius continentur, velit desistere et eis abrenunciare, respondit, quod omnia predicta expresserit et dixerit ex instinctu et informacione spiritus sancti, hiis velit eciam satisfacere et non velit averti per informaciones hominum, eciam si celum et terra deberent fundere lacrimas seu guttas sanguineas, eciam si deberet declinari vel in pulverem cremari corpus suum proprium seu enervari. Item iterum dicit, quod siz ipse sit hereticus et dicta sua essent falsa, tunc pater, filius et spiritus sanctus sintaa heretici et ex consequenti nos omnes et totus cleris esset hereticus. Item dicit, quod ipse sit tante sanctitatis sicut Christus et habeat spiritum sine mensura sicut Christus et sanctitas beati Pauli, in comparacione ad sanctitatem suam sit equa una gutta maris. Item dicit, quod sit sanctior beate virginis Marie. Item dicit, quod in die conversionis S. Pauli fuerit confessus et perceperit sacramentum corporis Christi non ex aliqua causa quacumque nisi ad abolendum infamiam contra eum exortam de heretica pravitate. 166

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Heresy Interrogations Item dicit, quod, quia sit formatus secundum imaginem innocentis agni, ideo oportet eum presidere extremo iudiciobb. Presentibus supradictis testibus excepto Custodi, domino priorecc et decane Conrado Geisenfelder profess[ore]dd Johanne Plamlocher, Lienhardo Pickel, Heinrico Pidinger, Conrado oblaico, Conrado Zappee. Item anno quo supra, feria post purificacionem beate virginis gloriose, comparuit predictus Conradus Kannler coram prenominato domino Eberhardo inquisitore et denuo requisitus et interrogatus, an a predictis erroribus suis vellet desistere vel in eisdem permanere, respondit, quod libenter vellet stare informacioni et declaracioni predicti domini inquisitoris et ab erroribus suis desistere et credere id, quod tenet et docet sancta mater ecclesia. Item interrogatus, an hoc faciat solum ex timore, respondit, quod, si eciam sibi nullum immineret periculum corporis vel rerum, adhucff vellet desistere ab erroribus suis predictis, quia, licet alias crediderit, quod huiusmodi dicta sua processerint ex instinctu spiritus sancti, tamen pronunc ad cor reversus credit ill processisse ex instincto maligni spiritus et eciam ex ebitudine mentis; et ut credit, malignus spiritus ea sibi persuasit propter condempnacionem corporis et anime. Item iterato interrogatus, an predictos errores habuerit ex informacione alicuius persone seu aliquarum personarum, dicit sub iuramento quod non, sed ex revelacione sibi facta in choro sancti Willibaldi, ut supra prescribitur. Item, post hecgg iuramento per eum corporaliterhh prestito abiuravit errores et articulos supradictos et sic per dominum inquisitorem predictum receptus est ad graciam et absolutus a sentenciis excommunicacionis, qua heretici ipso facto sunt ligati, et unioni sancte matris ecclesie est restitutus presentibus Conrado decano, Ulrico Scalii, Ulrico de Leonrod, Petro officiali, Walthero, Conrado Gleichen, Burchardo Marschalko, Conrado oblaico et Nicolao capellano S. Pauli. Deinde prestitit eciam corporale iuramentum se velle adimplere penitenciam sibi iniunctam veljj in poster[is]kk iniungendam ecclesiasticam et temporalem in corpore et rebus absque vara, presentibus testis etc. Item anno quo supra X kalendas Marcii hora nona in castro montis sancti Willibaldi coram dicto domino reverendo episcopo constitutusll dictusmm Conradus Kannler publice recognovit se velle subire gracie seu penitencie sibi per dictum episcopum iniungende tam in corpore quam rebus et eandem penitenciam velle adimplere, presentibus Heinrico de Westerstetten, Betzon de …nn, Walthero Schubel, Eberhardo de Freyenhausen, Burckhardo de Pleinfelt iudice, dicto Kempnaten, dicto Rokobpp et dicto Kandlein civibus etc. a) b) c)

millesimo missing in H constituti P consistit H 167

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) d)

perficere H potuerunt P f) potuerit P g) spiritualitis H [1976 reprint: g1 perfecta P] h) quarta P i) statu H j) quilibet P k) licenceat P l) mulieres P m) quo ad PH n) liceret H o) actos PH p) elevationem H q) spiritu libertatis P r) pretulerit H s) habitat’ P; habitatam (?) H t) alias P u) posset H v) et dicit missing in H w) fuit H x) sicud PH y) et resp. missing in H z) si missing in P aa) sunt H bb) after this about seven-line gap in P cc) corrected from priori in P; missing in H dd) profess’ (professis?) then punctuation stroke in P; comma before professore in H ee) The rest of P fol. 72r empty (at least 20 lines) ff) aduc PH gg) hoc H hh) corporali H ii) Scał. P; Stal H jj) vel missing in PH kk) posterum H ll) constituto P mm) dicto P nn) gap P e)

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2. Articuli confessi per lolhardum Henne Becker non secundum ordinem confessionis, sed sentencie Staats-Archiv Koblenz Abt. 701 Cod. 176 fols. 2r–3v = K (Marginalia of the MS will be set in parentheses) G. Ritter, ZKG 43 (1924), 153–59 from Cod. Vat. Pal. Lat. 870 fols. 154v–157r. = R Title: Articuli confessi per Johannem lolhardum in Moguncia anno domini 1458 mense Augusto et Septembri. Although the text of each article concludes with ‘Here follows the first (or second, or third etc) corollary’, all these corollaries are lacking here.

(Prima materia de spiritu sancto)a Inprimis fundat omniab dicta sua in hoc, quodc lapsis annis circiter XVI in ultima die, ut putat, festivitatis penthecostenc, dum staret inclinatus in ecclesia sancti Petri etd Pauli Maguncie, audivit in summitate ecclesie sonitum, qui descendit super eum. Et in illo sonitu recepit spiritum sanctum. Et ille spiritus sanctus pressit eum adeo, quod magnum dolorem sensit interius. Et quode postea sepius raptus sit in suof interiori homine. Exg eodem spiritu fassus estg, quodh ita eum sepeh detinet et commovet, quod nec reclinare nec surgere potest, nisi spiritus ille eum permittat. Item confessus est, quodi credit nullum hominem ante eum taliter spiritum sanctum recipisse nec post eum recepturum, sicut ipse eum recepit. (Sequitur corrollarium primum) Ex istoj fundamento fassus est, quod antequam illum spiritum sic receperat, obedivit ordinacionik sancte matris ecclesie in omnibus, quial tunc egit secundum humanam voluntatem et fuit sui ipsius. Sed post receptionem spiritus prefatamm extunc non potuit nec tenebatur obedire ecclesie inn quibuscumque statutis. Racionem addidit duplicem, prima quiao non potuit obedire duobus, scilicet spiritui suop et ecclesie; et iterum quodq extunc non fuit sui ipsius, sed gubernabaturr per spiritum in interiori homine. (Secundum correlarium) Ex eodem fundamento confessus est eum non adorasse sacramentum eukaristie in eius elevacione in missa. Racio sua est, quia non recordaturs, quod spiritus suus umquam sibi inspiraveratt hoc sacramentum fuisse adorandum. Unde fassus est, quod non solum ipsum nonu adoravit, sed eciam sepius in ecclesia kathedrali et in ecclesia sancte Clare et in aliis multis ecclesiis, dum sacrumv sacramentum elevabatur, ipse cum pedew trusit contra sacramentum et linguam eiecit exx ore et similes multas abusiones commissit; sed not fecity hoc ipse, sed spiritus per eum hoc fecit. Item interrogatus, cur non sumeret sacramentum, respondit, quod

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) scriptum est in ewangelio: Qui manducat hunc cibum, non morietur in eternum,96 et nichilominus omnes moriuntur, eciamz qui hoc sacramentum sumunt. Sed additaa se hoc dixisse simplici mente et non adidissebb, quod propterea non sumeretcc. (Tertium correlarium) Exdd eodem fundamento fassus est se in XVI annis nondd confessum nec communicatum nec teneri ad illa, sicud necee ad ieiunia ecclesie. Posteaff addidit, quod illi, qui suntgg sub ecclesia, tenetur confiteri, non illi, qui non sunt sub illa. Similiter illi, qui sunt sub ecclesia, tenentur confiteri, non illi, qui non sunt sub illa. Similiter illi, qui nondum sunt in perfeccione, tenentur, sed ipse et alii perfecti non tenentur ad similia. (Quartum correlarium) hhEx eodem fundamento fatetur se plus teneri ad credendum spiritui, qui eum regitii, quam cuicumque doctrine, que predicatur in ecclesiis publicejj. (Quintum correlarium) Ex eodem fundamento fatetur se non tenere ad obediendumkk potestati seculari utpotell mandatis imperatoris, principum neque burgemeistrorummm, semper fundans se non teneri obedire duobus: spirituinn et homini, cuiuscumque status existat. (Sextum correlarium) ooEx eodem fundamento dixit se non teneri ad observanciam mandatorum dei. Racio quia illapp mandata dei, que in scripturis sacris continentur, sunt mandata mortis; sed tenetur solummodoqq obedire mandatis vite, que appellat inspirationem sui spiritus in interiori homine. Additrr se nescire, quid sit ille instinctus, nec exterior homoss sciat, sed solus homo interior, et nichilominustt debet obedire interiori. uuIn speciali interrogatus anne teneatur honorare patrem et matrem eis succurendo in necessitatibus eorum, respondit quod non, licetvv hoc deus precepit fiendum, nisi ad hoc a suo spiritu intrinsecus impelleretur, Secunda materia de novo testamento.ww Et non solum mandatis dei, sed eciamxx dicit se non esse obligatum scripturis novi testamenti, quod non vocamus ewangelium Christi et epistolas sanctorum apostolorum. Racio: quiayy illud testamentum sitzz, de quo ait sanctus apostolus:97 littera occidit, spiritus autem vivificat. Addidit, quod prefata ewangelia et epistole non sint testamentum eternum, quia sint peritura et non

96 John 97 2

6. 59 (hunc panem). Corinthians 3. 6.

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Heresy Interrogations perpetua, ideo est testamentum mortis. Sed illud testamentum eternum est interior instinctus sui spiritus, concludens se non teneria obedire testemento mortis, sed vite, ut supra dictum est. (Correlarium primum) Ex eodem fundamento fatetur se non obligari ad abstinenciam a carnibus feriis sextis; ymmo die veneris sancta comederetb carnes si apponerentur ei, quia si tunc non comederet, peccaret contra ewangelium, quod iubet comedere, quecumque apponuntur.98 (Secundum correlarium) Ex eodem fundamento confessus est, si emisisset quecumque vota deo aut sanctis, non obligaretur ad servandumc ea, nisi spiritus suus illud sibi suggereret (Tercium correlarium) Ex eodem fundamento fatetur nec se nec alios homines obligari ad oracionem vocalem, sed quodd qui vult, potest orare vocaliter, qui non vult, potest obmittere. In cuius signum interim quod ipse se ipsum non habuit, aliquando nichil oravit; postea scripsit librum quendam, ex quo motus est orare officium; tandem in captivitate positus dicit se aliquando unae die plus orasse quam prius in octo annis feceratf. (Correlarium quartum) Ex eodem asserit, quod illa, que sunt aliis hominibus peccata, non essent sibi peccata, si faceret eademg ex instinctu interioris sui hominis et sui spiritus procedere. (Terciah materia de Christo) Primo tenet, quod Christi humanitas non est adoranda ab omnibus christianis, licet deitatii unita. Racio eius est, quiaj distinguit duplicem hominum statum: aliqui sunt, qui adhuc subsunt sancte ecclesie, et illi tenentur adorare Christum secundum eius humanitatem propter preceptum ecclesie, cui obedire tenentur; alia pars hominum est sub statu spiritus, sicut ipse est, et illi nonk tenentur adorare illam humanitatem, sed solum deuml in nuda deitate. (Correlarium primum) Secundo quodm ex eodem fundamento ipse in XVIn annis non adoravit humanitatem Christi nec suam passionem veneratus est, quiao postergavit toto illo tempore omnem oracionem et omnep christianitatis exercicium.

98 Luke

10. 8.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) (Correlarium secundum) Tercio addidit, quod toto illo tempore non solumq non adoravit Christi humanitatem, sedr nec eius deitatem, prout est in sacramento. Quarto credits, quod ipse propter unionem, qua cum deo unitus estt, sit sanctior Christo ea sanctitate, qua Christus sanctus est secundum humanitatem. Racio, quia ipse factus est deus per gratiam, illeu est deus per naturam; et Christus est minor patre secundum eius humanitatemv, igitur ipse estw maior et sanctior Christo secundum eius humanitatem. Quinto quodx mors Christi non est hominis regeneracio, sed hec regeneracio est ipse spiritus sanctus, quia regeneracio in vitam eternam non sit facta per mortem Christi, sedy per spiritum sanctum, qui venturus est in mundum. Subdit, quod per mortem Christi oportet nos salvari, sed illa non est ipsa regeneracio ad salutem ut supraz. (Quarta materia de spiritu sancto)aa Imprimis asserit, quod spiritus sanctus sit mater Christi secundum regeneracionem. Secundo quod ipse ante XVI annosbb recepit spiritum sanctum, ut putat die ultima festivitatem penthecosten in ecclesia sancti Pauli in specie sonitus terribilis, quem audivit in superioribus ecclesie. Et quia se prius disposuit, stabat inclinatus, et ille sonitus descendit in eum et spiritus sanctuscc cum illo sonitu replevit eum sicut sanctos apostolos; sed intravit in eum cum dolore interiori et exteriori gravi pressuradd. (Correlarium primum) Tercio quod expost secutus est instinctum illius spiritus, itaee quod dicit cum apostolo: Vivo ego, iam non ego, vivit vero in me Christus.99 (Secundum correlarium) Quarto quod nullus ante eum recepit spiritum sanctum sicut ipse, nec postea aliquis eum recepturus sit. (Tercium corellarium) Quinto quod ipse certus est, quodff spiritus, qui eum inspirat, est spiritus sanctus ex eo, quod venit ingg eum cum prefatis dolore interiori et pressura exteriori, et eciam quia sepe expost raptus est in interiori homine. Sexto quod spiritus missushh apostolis fuit spiritus timoris et servitutisii, sed ille spiritus, quem ipse recepitjj, est spiritus veritatis, de quo ait dominus in ewangelio Johannis: Quando venerit spiritus veritatis, quem ego mittam vobis a patre, ille docebit vos omnem veritatem.100

99 Galatians 100 John

2. 20. 16. 13.

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Heresy Interrogations (Quintakk materia de deo absolute) Tenet inprimis, quod homo potest effici per graciam illud, quod est deus per naturam, probans per illud Johannisll, ubi ait salvator: Oro, pater, ut ipsi sint unum, nobiscum, sicut unummm sumus.101 (Secundum correlarium) Secundo quia ipse deus estnn, deo sit unitus et deus factus per unionem sui hominis interioris, quod ipse sit cum deo adorandus ut deus, non separatim, sed ipse cum beatissima trinitate, ita quod, dum adoramus patrem et filium et spiritum sanctum, debemus simul cum hoc adorare ipsum. [R alone: Tercio quod prelati ecclesie nec ipsa possunt hominibus peccata dimittere nec indulgencias dare. – Quarta quod ipse est deus, potest facere que deus.] (Sextaoo materia de beatissima virgine Maria) De beatissima virgine dei genetrice asserit inprimis, quod aliquis homo possitpp mereri a deo tantam graciam, quod ipse efficiatur sanctior beatissima dei genetrice. Probat per illud ewangeliiqq, ubi mater filiorum Zebedei, scilicet sanctorum Johannis et Jacobi, rogavit, ut sederent illi duo filii eius unus ad dexteram, alius ad sinistram Christi, et respondit dominusrr: Hoc non est meum dare vobis, sed quibus paratum est a patre meo.102 Secundo asserit, quod ipse tenet cordess, quod ipse sit ille homo, qui sit sanctior ipsa beatissima dei genitrice. (Septimatt materia de interiori et exteriori homine) Materia septima est, quoduu ipse fatetur interiorem hominem esse racionem interiorem. Eit circa hoc asserit, quod ex quo se spiritui dedit, non habet amplius propriam voluntatem. Item quod habetvv interiorem memoriam, que pertinet ad interiorem hominem, sedww non est sibi plenexx nota. (Primum correlarium) Secundo asserit, quod homo exterior est, quod ipse audit, dormit, sedet et similiayy. Et circa hoc asserit, quod homo exterior tenetur obedirezz interiori. (Secundum correlarium) Tercio quod homo suus interior est ille, qui per spiritum sanctum regitura, et idem spiritusb tenet hominem exteriorem itac, quod non potest aliquid facere quam ille spiritus cum homine interiori cupit.

101 John

17. 21. 20. 23.

102 Matthew

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) (Tercium correlarium) Quarto quod ipse secundum hominem interiorem sit iam in illa superiori Jherusalem, de qua dicit sanctus apostolus Paulus: Que sursum est, mater nostra Jherusalem libera est.103 (Quartum correlarium) Quinto quod quiad ipse est ine illa celesti Jherusalem, ubi Christus ac alii beati sunt, quod eciam iam ipse sit beatus secundum interiorem hominem. (Quintum correlarium) Sexto quod sicut Christum et beatosf adoramus, ut orent pro nobis, ita et debemus ipsum adorare, quia ipse sit iam unus ex illis. (Sextum correlarium) Septimo quod quia ipse iamg est unus ex beatis ita, quodh videat deum secundum interiorem hominem, sicuti et alii beati vident eum. (Circa octavamj materiam, que est de ecclesia) Circa octavam materiam, que est de ecclesia, fatetur primok, quod est duplex ecclesia: una que est sursum, et illa estl vera ecclesia katholica. Alia que est infra, quam nos vocamus ecclesiam seu christianitatem. Asserit igiturm primo, quod ipse non est de ecclesia, que est in hoc mundo, quam nos sic appellamus, sed est de illa superiori. Secundo quod total ecclesia inferior est dampnata et heretica, quia non credit, quodn ipse credit. Tercio ipse non tenet illos pro hereticis, quos ista ecclesia tenet pro hereticis sicut ipsum et sibi similes. Quarto quod ipse ideo non sit de inferiori ecclesia, quia illa tenet iudeos, paganos et hereticos esse incredulos, ipse vero non tenet eos incredulos neque dampnandos. Racio sua est, quia ipse tenet, quod omnes illi baptizati sunt baptismo sancti spiritus velo saltem baptizabuntur. Quinto dicit, quod ipse non tenet illud baptisma, quod nos tenemus, quiap illud non sit de necessitate salutis, sed sufficit baptismaq flaminis ad salutem. Follows in K: Pro condempnacione predictorum adduco Clementinam De hereticis Ad nostrum, ubi papa Clemens cum concilio generali quinque articulos condempnat, quos tunc reperit inter Lolhardos et Beginas. Primus est … (here follow articles 1–3, 6 and 8, then four folios of Kalteisen’s polemic against the heresy, Contra articulos prefatos.) Follows in R: Anno domini 1458 die vicesima mensis octobris examinatus est per dominum Johannes Kaldissum heretice pravitatis inquisitorem quidam lolhardus nomine Johannes Becker natus de quadam villa prope

103 Galatians

4. 26.

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Heresy Interrogations Aquisgranum ad duo miliaria. Et in Maguncia de heresi convictus, quam usque in finem pertinaciter tenuit et defendit, ideoque velud hereticus combustus est ibidem in quodam loco, qui dicitur spelunca hereticorum, vulgariter dy keczergrub. Et tenuit articulos omnes et singulos prescriptos seu suprasignatos sine revocacione. – Finis anno 67 (this surely relates to the transcript). a)

Prima … sancto missing in R instead of omnia: intentionem et in R c) instead of quod …penthecosten: videlicet quod a. d. 1442 ultima die ante octavas pentecostes R d) Petri et missing in R e) quod missing in K f) sui K g) Item de eo spir. dicit R h) quod eum sepius ita R i) conf. est quod missing in R j) Item ex illo R k) ordinacione K l) instead of quia: Et ex R m) pref. missing in R n) in missing in R o) instead of prima quia: quod R p) sui K q) quod missing in K r) gubernabitur R s) quod non concordatur R t) inspiraret R u) non missing in K v) sacrum missing in R w) cum pede missing in R x) et R y) facit R z) eciam missing in R aa) addidit R bb) dixisse R cc) follows neque sumpsisset R dd) instead of Ex … non: iam 13 annis non fore R ee) instead of sicud nec: sed neque R ff) instead of Postea: Et postquam R gg) follows after in ecclesia vel R hh) title: Secunda materia de observacione mandatorum dei R ii) regerit R b)

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) jj) follows

de preceptis dei. Item quod non tenetur credere sermonibus dei vel predicatoribus. Item R kk) obedienciam R ll) ut puta R mm) burgimagistrorum R nn) follows scilicet R oo) title: Quod non tenetur ad observanciam mandatorum dei. Item … R pp) quod ille R qq) solum R rr) addidit R ss) follows hoc R tt) follows exterior homo R uu) title: An honore patrem et matrem? Item … R vv) sicut deus hoc preceperat fiendum before respondit R ww) Secunda … missing in R, later placement of Materia tertia: de novo testamento xx) follows nec R yy) quod R zz) follows id R a) b) c) d) e) f)

g) h) i) j) k)

teneri missing in R comedere R observandum R quod missing in R uno R Here R inserts (somewhat repetitive): ‘Materia tertia: de novo testamento. Post hoc interrogatus de novo testamento respondit, quod ipse non tenet illud esse novum testamentum, quod scriptum est in libris [continentibus] ewangelia et epistolas apostolorum, quod illa non sunt perpetua, sed habent finem. Et sunt, de quibus apostolus dicit: Littera occidit, spiritus autem vivificat. Ideoque vocat novum testamentum mortis; sed ipse tenet novum testamentum esse in interiori homine, ymmo in interiorem hominem, quod illud est perpetuum, quod habet hic inchoationem et in celis perpetuam dominacionem, et vocatur ab apostolo ministerium glorie (2 Corinthians 3. 9). Insuper concludit, quod ipse non tenetur obedire testamento mortis, sed solum testamento vite supradicto. Et breviter asserit ex eodem, quod interim, quod a spiritu rectus est et in spiritu vixit, abiecit a se omnem christianitatis vitam acsi fuisset equus aut bestia, de hoc laudans deum, nec unquam hoc penituit eum.’ ex eodem inst. K Quarta R deitate R quod R non missing in K 176

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Heresy Interrogations l)

follows without medio R quod missing in R n) 13 R o) quod R p) et omne missing in R q) non solum missing in R r) sicud R s) credidit R t) qua unitus est omni deo R u) follows qui K v) sec. humanitatem naturam K w) sit R x) quod missing in R y) sed … sanctum missing in R z) sal. et cetera ut supra dictum est R aa) Quinta materia R bb) annis K cc) sanctus lacking in R dd) pressione R ee) ita missing in R ff) follows ipse R gg) in missing in K hh) sanctus R ii) et serv. missing in R jj) accepit R kk) Sexta R ll) prob. illud per Johannem R mm) una K nn) deus est missing in R oo) Septima R pp) potest R qq) ewangelium K rr) dom. missing in R ss) corde missing in K tt) Octava R uu) instead of Materia … quod: Item R vv) habet missing in R ww) sed missing in R xx) plena R yy) instead of sedetet sim.: et cetera R zz) follows homini R a) regeneratur R b) idem spir. missing in R c) ita missing in R m)

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) d) e) f) g) h) i) j) k) l) m) n) o) p) q)

quia missing in R est in missing in K sanctos R iam missing in R instead of ita quod: quia R sic R Nona mat, de eccl. R instead of Circa … primo: Primo fatetur R et illa est missing in R ipse R; follows in K que R velle K quod R baptismus R

3. Letter of the Inquisitor Heinrich Kalteisen O.P., Bishop of Drontheim, to Archbishop Dietrich of Mainz, 20 October 1458 Staats-Archiv Koblenz, Abteilung 701, Codex 176, fol. 1v. Reverendissimo in Christo patri et domino domino Theodorico archiepiscopo Maguntino ac sacri imperii principi electori etc. Henricus dei et apostolice sedis gracia archiepiscopus Nydrosiensis ac pravitatis heretice inquisitor, fidem katholicam corde credere atque corpore defensare. Quia placuit colendissime dominationi vestre me vocare ad inquisicionis negotium, contra quendam lolhardum Henne Becker nominatum feci diligenciam presentibus prelatis, doctoribus, etiam secularibus plurimis eum examinando. Qui repertus est confessus previo iuramento de confitenda veritate ad interroganda nulla adiuncta tortura vi aut metu subscriptos articulos, quos tamen, quia laycus indoctus est, per se fingere non potuisset, nisi heresiarcharum antiquorum erroribus per libros theutonicos seductus fuisset. Qui104in hoc ab antiquis hereticis differt, illi racionibus humanis et auctoritatibus 104 Here Kalteisen uses the prologue of the Cistercian Alan of Lille († 1202) to his De fide

catholica contra haereticos sui temporis. He wrote to Count William VIII of Montpellier on the Cathars: ‘qui in hoc ab antiquis haereticis differunt, quod illi humanis rationibus fidem nostram expugnare conati sunt, isti vero nulla ratione humana vel divina freti ad voluntatem et voluptatem suam monstruosa confingunt. Olim vero diversi haeretici diversis temporibus diversa dogmata et adversa somniasse leguntur, … nostris temporibus novi haeretici, imo veteres et inveterati, veterantes dogmata ex diversis haeresibus unam generalem haeresim compingunt et quasi ex diversis idolis unum idolum, ex diversis monstris unum monstrum et quasi

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Heresy Interrogations apparentiam causantibus innixi sunt, iste vero utrisque carens contra omnium sanctorum intencionem quasdam auctoritates ad suum sensum, non spiritus sancti intellectum, retorquet. Excedit autem priscos hereticos, quia illi diversis temporibus et diversis modis diversas hereses sompniarunt, hic autem quasi omnium simul heresiarcharum supremus omnes eorum hereses in unam generalem heresim compinxit et quasi ex diversis ydolis unum commune ydolum, ex diversis convenenatis herbis unum commune toxicum confecit. Idcirco ego, suos errores confutare ac veram fidem elucidare volens, collegi et fidei documenta comportavi, quibus suorum heresum falsitas panditur. Mitto igitur vestre graciosissime dominacioni presens opusculum ad corrigendum et emendandum, eciam ad legendum contra tedium, ut senciat vestra prudencia, quam iuste sit contra eum late sentencia condempnacionis, ut eius deleatur de mentibus fidelium memoria. Sic enim proceres105 fecerunt gentilium, qui humanam venerantes gloriam generose diversa monstrorum genera deleverunt, ut Hercules Antheum, Theseus Minothaurum, Iason thaurum ignivomum, Meleager inestimabilem aprum, Cerebus Stigiale monstrum, Perseus marinum portentum; sic et ego abolere cupiens de terra vivencium monstruosas huius lolhardi hereses subscriptas collegi ex sentenciis variorum sanctorum doctrinas, quas queso acceptare dignetur gratiose (?) generosa caritas. Scriptum Maguncie, 1458o, mensis octobris, die 20a.

Note i [On the affidavit’s date, Grundmann was misled by contemporary scholarship and the original phrase reads ‘from the affidavit of the previous day by five canonists’. The editor would like to thank Sean Field for the note.]

ex diversis venenatis herbis unum toxicum commune conficiunt’. PL 210, 307 ff. I thank Dr G. Opitz for this reference and other help with checking. 05 [1976 reprint: The model for what follows is Alan of Lille’s De fide, i.1; PL 210, 307.] 1

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5 Oportet et Haereses Esse: The Problem of Heresy in the Mirror of Medieval Biblical Exegesis* By Herbert Grundmann

The assertion that heresy must exist, that it has to be present, might sound to many theologians today all too ‘modern’, as suspiciously conciliatory or resigned, a fatal capitulation to the unfortunate ‘pluralism’ of opinions. Or it might have seemed so, had not the Apostle Paul written exactly that in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11, verse 19. Paul had heard complaints from all directions on problems and disputes in the young Hellenistic Christian congregation of Corinth, where he himself had worked for a year and a half on his second missionary journey. Some years later he learned that differences of opinion had split that congregation, even concerning the common celebration of the Last Supper. ‘I have heard’, the Apostle writes from Ephesus (probably in the year 54 or 57), among other recommendations, ‘that there are divisions (σχίσματα) among you, and I believe it at least in part; for there must certainly be αἱρέσεις (parties) (among you), so that the just, the reliable, the tested (οἱ δόκιμοι) will be openly with you.’ In the Latin Vulgate text it is: ‘Audio scissuras esse inter vos, et ex parte credo, nam oportet et haereses esse, ut et qui probati sunt, manifesti fiant in vobis.’1 Luther translated: ‘Ich höre, es seien Spaltungen unter euch, und zum Teil glaube ich’s. Denn es müssen Rotten unter euch sein, auf daß die, so rechtschaffen sind, offenbar unter euch werden.’2 In Galatians 5.20 Luther translates the word

* Original

publication in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 45 (1963), 129–64. to information generously provided by the Vetus-Latina Institute of Beuron Abbey, even before the Vulgate, αἱρέσεις in this passage was almost always translated as haereses; only with Ennodius was it certamina (contentions, battles or quarrels). In other passages, however, it was rendered as secta. In Titus 3. 10, αἱρετικὸς ἄνθρωπος was translated as haereticus (homo) – only in Caesarius of Arles, De mysterio s. Trinitatis, as contentiosus homo (quarrelsome man). See H. Pétré, ‘Haeresis, schisma et leur synonymes latins’, Revue des études Latines 15 (1937), 316–25. 2 [D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 120 vols. (Weimar, 1883–2009), is in separately numbered sections, with Luther’s translation of the bible in Section 3]. Luther, Die Deutsche Bibel, 12 vols.: VII, 117 (1 Corinthians 11. 19), 186 (Galatians 1 According

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Oportet et Haereses Esse αἱρέσεις with Rotten (‘gang’), listing those who were involved in a long series of damnable works of the flesh from adultery and whoring to murder, drunkenness, overeating and the like, along with disturbance, conflict and hatred; in the Vulgate the word at this point is sectae. Similarly, as the word Rotten in the sense of a ‘gang’ is unknown in our language since Luther’s time (and causes one to think of the rebellious Rotte Korah in Numbers chapter 19), the newer edition of the German Bible has replaced it [in 1 Corinthians] (though not in Galatians) with Parteien (‘parties’), so that it now reads: ‘there must be parties among you’. The phrase almost sounds contemporary, until one remembers that this translates the word αἱρέσεις – haereses. But surely Luther chose that word on purpose rather than translating it as Ketzerei, as it had usually been understood – or perhaps misunderstood – until then.3 Similarly, the most recent commentaries (whether by Catholic or Protestant theologians)4 inter5. 20) and 290 (Titus 3. 10). Rotten still stands in the so-called ‘Test-Bible’, the revised version of Luther’s translation prepared by the German Evangelical Church Conference of Eisenach and first published in Halle in 1883. 3 In the Bible translation that originated in 1360 and was first printed in 1466 by J. Mentel in Strasbourg, reprinted elsewhere thirteen times before 1518 (usually in Augsburg and Nürnberg), 1 Corinthians 11. 19 was originally – as in the Codex Teplensis – ‘Wann es getzympt ioch irrtum zesein’. In all reprints since 1475, which altered the ‘fremde teutsch und unverstentliche wort’ (‘strange German and incomprehensible word’), it became ‘Wann es müssen kätzerey sein’, as in Titus 3. 10: ‘Scheuch den kätzerschen menschen’ or ‘scheuhe die ketzer’. This was instead of what was originally ‘scheucht den mann irrer’ – as also in the Codex Teplensis, which had the marginal note ketzer. This corresponded to Old High German irro or keloubirro for haereticus. See Die erste deutsche Bibel, ed. W. Kurrelmeyer, 5 vols., Bibl. lit. Ver. Stuttgart 238 (1904–15), II, 90 and 237. Otherwise in the first printing there is always irrthum (error) for haeresis, and in the reprints ketzerey (of the Sadducees, Pharisees, etc.). 4 J. Sickenberger, ‘Die Briefe des heiligen Paulus an die Korinther und Römer’, Die Heilige Schrift des Neuen Testaments, ed. F. Tillmann, 4th edn., 10 vols. (Bonn, 1931–50), VI, 52 ff.; O. Kuss, Die Briefe an die Römer, Korinther und Galate, in Das Neue Testament übersetzt und kurz erklärt, ed. A. Witzenhausen [correction: Wikenhauser] and O. Kuss, 2nd edn (Regensburg, 1950), V, 167; P. Bachmann, Der erste Brief des Paulus an die Korinthe, 3rd edn, in Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, ed. T. Zahn, 18 vols. (Leipzig, 1903–26), VII, 362 ff.; H. Lietzmann, An die Korinther I.II, 3rd edn, in Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. H. Lietzmann, 23 vols. (Tübingen, 1906–31), IX, 56; J. Moffatt, The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, 8th edn (London, 1954), pp. 157 f. Spaltungen, Parteiungen, for αἱρέσεις (haireseis) is also in Das Neue Testament Deutsch. Neues Göttinger Bibelwerk, ed. P. Althaus and J. Behm, 12 vols. (Göttingen, 1932–8), II, 341. Against this is the opinion of G. Kittel. He says that for Paul, who uses here an apocryphal word of the Lord (in statements attributed to Jesus in apocrypha, according to Reisch), 1 Corinthians 11. 18 f. is ‘an eschatologicaldogmatic sentence’, and that – unlike σχίσμα (schisma, schism)- αἵρεσις (haireseis, heresy) should be understood ‘at an eschatological level’. For Kittel’s view, see his Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, 10 vols. (Stuttgart, 1933–79), I, 182, and on the Lord’s words in apocrypha, see A. Reisch, Agrapha, außerkanonische Evangelienfragmente [1976 reprint: Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) preting Paul’s words to the Corinthians do not speak of heresies that must exist but rather Parteiungen (‘parties’) or Sonderungen (‘associations’). They often stress that this must not and could not have meant variation of doctrine, nor heresy in the later sense; rather, Paul was thinking of customary, personal differences in the congregation of Corinth. He never uses the word αἵρέσιϛ again outside of the summary list of sins in the Letter to the Galatians, and it is rarely found in the New Testament overall. In the Acts of the Apostles of Paul’s pupil Luke, αἱρέσεις is used for the Sadducees (5. 17) and the Pharisees (15. 5 and 26. 5). Indeed Paul himself was called before Felix the procurator by the High Priest Ananias and the orator Tertullus as the conspiratorial leader of the αἵρεσις of the Nazarines, and he openly confessed to the activity that they call a αἵρεσις. Everywhere in the Vulgate there stands ‘sect’ for αἱρέσεις (only in this answer of Paul: ‘secta, quam dicunt haeresim’), Sekte in Luther. Finally the late 2 Peter (2. 1) warns against pseudo-prophets who would introduce αἱρέσεις ἀπωλείας, which the Vulgate translates as sectas perditionis (‘sects of perdition’), Luther as verderbliche Sekten (‘harmful sects’). Even where αἵρεσις stands, it is rarely called haeresis in the Vulgate, but often secta; with Luther it is never Ketzerei (‘heresy’) but rather Sekte (‘sect’) or Rotte (‘gang’). In fact, the word ‘heretic’ is encountered in the New Testament only once: Paul writes to his pupil and missionary companion Titus (3. 10) that one should avoid a αἱρετικὸν ἄνθρωπον (‘factious man’) after one admonition (or two, as was later added),5 for such a person is perverse, ἐξέστραπται (Vulgate: ‘subversus est et delinquit’ [‘he is undone and does wrong’]), he damns himself through his own choice. Luther also translated this αἱρετικὸν ἄνθρωπον (Vulgate: haereticon hominem) not as ketzerischen Menschen as it now appears in the German Bible of his church, but rather he said: ‘einen abtrünnigen Menschen meide’ (‘avoid a schismatic man’). The words heresy, heretic

altchristliche Literatur 15, 3/4, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1906)], pp. 100, 359. L. Goppel, ‘Kirche und Häresie nach Paulus’, in Gedenkschrift für Werner Elert (Berlin, 1955), pp. 9–23 does not deal with 1 Corinthians 11. 19, nor does H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth. A Study in the Relation between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church (London, 1954). 5 In Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose and also Augustine (Epistulae 43, CSEL 34.2 (1888), p. 85) it says only ‘post unam correptionem devita’ (‘avoid after one admonition’), and in the Ambrosiaster text: ‘post primam correptionem’ (‘after the first admonition’). Jerome is the first (in Titus 3. 10, PL 26, 597) to prefer the reading ‘post unam et alteram correptionem’ (‘after one admonition and another’), expressly citing ‘Pope Athanasius’ (certainly meaning Anastasius I, 399–412); a single admonition was not enough, for as in Matthew 18. 16, the sinner is to be admonished with ‘one or two witnesses’. Medieval commentaries on the Letter to Titus (Hrabanus Maurus, Hatto of Vercelli and others [1976 reprint: see below, notes 57 and 59] cited it thus. Peter the Chanter († 1197) says in the Verbum abbreviatum c. 78 (PL 205, 231): ‘Ait enim apostolus: haereticum hominem post trinam admonitionem devita’ (‘For the Apostle said: avoid a heretical man after the third admonition’). See also Thomas Aquinas, note 78 below.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse and heretical – long-standing, and even overused terms6 – do not appear in his Bible translation; not only because they were not useful for the correct interpretation of the Bible text and unnecessary for Paul’s words in particular, but also because they seemed misleading. There will have to be a separate investigation as to why he avoided them, even where the Vulgate spoke of haeresis and haereticus. But whatever Paul meant with the αἱρέσεις which had to be, and the αἱρετικὸς ἄνθρωπος to be avoided, this was subsequently understood after the early Patristic period and through the entire Middle Ages as referring to heresies and heretics, Ketzereien and Ketzer – with whom, by then, they sometimes had much anxious trouble. So in the following period, and again, throughout the whole Middle Ages, it was repeatedly asked: why does Paul state that heretics must be, and that one should avoid heretics after admonishing them once or twice – why only avoid them, and nothing more? For their judging or condemnation and persecution, they soon sought other biblical commands for the right, God-willed attitude to heretics, and they believed that they had found them, even if only via allegorical-symbolic interpretation or reinterpretation. This will be further discussed later. But what Paul expressly said to the Corinthians and to Titus on heresy and the attitude to heretical men was not easily side-stepped with the allegorical interpretation of other biblical passages; it was challenging to harmonise his words with Scripture, but also difficult to simply invalidate them. How was it, then, to be understood and applied? The earliest and most dramatic witness for the application of Paul’s words to the heresies and heretics of his own time is the Carthaginian jurist Tertullian, the first significant Christian author in the Latin West. Before he changed into a Montanist heretic out of rigorist zeal about the year 200, he wrote stringent attacks against heretics of his times, including a fundamental book De prescriptione haereticorum;7 that is, concerning the legal foundation 6 The

sect name Cathari became the German word Ketzer around 1200 – despite objections to this view from H. Collitz, ‘Das Wort Ketzer’, in Germanica, Eduard Sievers zum 75. Geburtstage (Halle, 1925), pp. 115–28. See E. Ohmann, ‘Das deutsche Wort “Ketzer”’, Neuphilologie Mitteilungen 40 (1939), 213–21; and A. Borst, Die Katharer, Schriften der MGH 12 (Stuttgart, 1953), pp. 252 f. 7 PL 2, 13–92; CSEL 70 (1942), pp. 1–58; CC 1 (1954), pp. 187–224; German translation by K. A. H. Kellner, ed. G. Esser, Bibliothek der Kirchenväter 24 (Munich, 1915). [The Prescription against Heretics, trans. P. Holmes, Ante-Nicene Fathers, American Edition, 10 vols. (Buffalo and New York, 1885–97), III, 243–67.] On this J. K. Stirnimann, Die Praescriptio Tertullians im Lichte des römischen Rechts und der Theologie, Paradosis. Beiträge zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur und Theologie 2 (Fribourg, 1949); E. Michiels, Index verborum omnium, quae sunt in Tertulliani tractatu De Praescriptione haereticorum, Instrumenta Patristica 1 (Steenbrugge, 1959); generally J. Lortz, Tertullian als Apologet, 2 vols., Münstersche Beiträge zur Theologie 10 (Münster, 1927–8), I; B. Nisters, Tertullian. Seine Persönlichkeit und sein Schicksal, Münstersche Beiträge zur Theologie 25 (Münster, 1950).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) of why one did not need to deal with heretics or engage in discussion with them on their errors, but should instead avoid them. They had no claim to be heard and, above all, no right to call upon the Holy Scripture, for this authority was bestowed legitimately only on the bishops of the Church through Christ and his apostles, transmitted and conferred as the regula fidei, the plumb-line of the faith. In this writing Tertullian wanted to prove his case more on juristical than theological grounds. Praescriptio is a concept in Roman trial law: it is an injunction against a trial so that the process cannot even begin, with its expression of, for and against, because a plaintiff has no right to make a claim and is therefore denied. So, according to Tertullian’s opinion, heretics have no right to have their arguments heard. And yet in this writing there is a remarkable, almost paradoxical-sounding sentence: ‘I am not offended to assert (or: “I am running no peril if I say”), the Holy Scriptures are so composed according to God’s Will, that heretics as well are given material, since I read: “Heresies must exist” (1 Corinthians 11. 19), but without the Holy Scriptures they could not exist.’8 Tertullian often cited that saying of Paul, always with emphasis,9 as meaning that heresies were not something good simply because they had to exist – as if evil has to exist! (‘Christ had to be betrayed, but woe to the betrayer!’) No one wished to defend heresy with that and try to excuse it, although it may arise from a misunderstanding or misuse of the Bible, permitted by God. In another later writing (around 210), Tertullian says that on the one hand Paul said heresies must exist; on the other, ‘heresies could only not exist if it were impossible for Scriptures to be misunderstood’.10 He remarks time and 8 De

praescriptione haereticorum xxxix.7 (CC 1 (1954), p. 220): ‘Nec periclitor dicere ipsas quoque scripturas sic esse ex Dei voluntate dispositas, ut haereticis materias subministrarent, cum legam oportere haereses esse, quae sine scripturis esse non possunt.’ In Kellner’s translation, p. 349: ‘Ich nehme nicht einmal Anstand, zu sagen, die Hl. Schrift sei nach dem Willen Gottes sogar so eingerichtet, damit sie den Häretikern das Material darbiete; denn ich lese, daß es Häresien geben müsse, und ohne die Schrift könnte es keine geben.’ 9 Ibid., xxx.4 (CC 1), pp. 210 f.); see also V.iii.190. 10 De resurrectione mortuorum xl.1 (CC 2 (1954), p. 973): ‘Nihil autem mirum, si et ex ipsius instrumento argumenta captantur, cum oporteat haereses esse, quae esse non possent, si non et perperam scripturae intelligi possent.’ [‘Now no wonder if captious arguments are drawn even from the apostle’s own writings, seeing there must needs be heresies, and these could not exist unless it were also possible for the scriptures to be perversely understood’; Treatise on the Resurrection, trans. E. Evans (London, 1960), p. 109.] De resurrectione mortuorum lxiii.8 (CC 2, p. 1012): ‘Nam quia “haereses esse oportuerat, ut probabiles quique manifestentur,” hae autem sine aliquibus occasionibus scripturarum audere non poterant, idcirco pristina instrumenta quasdam materias illis videntur subministrasse, et ipsas quidem isdem litteris revincibiles.’ [‘For because there must needs have been heresies, that those who were approved might be made manifest, and heresies could have had no boldness apart from a few opportunities of the scriptures, therefore the

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Oportet et Haereses Esse again that heretics can also call on the Holy Scripture – otherwise they would not be misbelieving heretics but non-believing heathens. But it is precisely therein that he perceives their seductive peril for the faithful. For that reason he emphatically warns the faithful not to involve themselves in any debate over the correct understanding and the true sense of Scripture; that would be a dispute of opinion incapable of conclusion, as when the philologists dispute what Homer or Vergil meant.11 In such a verbal contest, in a ‘Bible-quarrel’, the presumptive strength of heretics is in a useless congressio verborum. But they have no claim to the Holy Scripture and are not competent to use it,12 for by right it is only the bishops of the Church to whom Christ and his apostles transferred the Holy Scripture as legitimate property. Heretics, in contrast, are illegitimate, and thus to be avoided, as Paul wrote to Titus, without one having to examine and oppose their doctrine – although they rely on Scripture, which by the Will of God is so composed that it can also be misunderstood – otherwise there would be no heresy, and it must exist, Paul says. original testaments are seen to have furnished them certain materials, though these themselves are capable of correction by the same scriptures’; trans. Evans, p. 187.] 11 De praescriptione haereticorum xix.1 (CC 1, p. 201): ‘Ergo non ad scripturas provocandum est nec in his constituendum certamen, in quibus aut nulla aut incerta victoria est aut parum certa’. [‘Our appeal, therefore, must not be made to the Scriptures; nor must controversy be admitted on points in which victory will either be impossible, or uncertain, or not certain enough’; trans. Holmes, 251.] See De praescriptione haereticorum xvi.2 (p. 200) on Titus 3. 10: ‘quoniam nihil proficiat congressio scripturarum’ (Kellner, p. 323, translates this as ‘Bibelgezank’ [‘Biblequarrel’]) nisi plane ut aut stomachi quis ineat eversionem aut cerebri’. [‘because a controversy over the scriptures can, clearly, produce no other effect other than to help upset either the stomach or the brain’; trans. Holmes, 251.] Tertullian contemptuously compares the arts of philologists when dealing with the scripturae saeculares, with Virgil or Homer, ‘et utique fecundior divina litteratura ad facultatem cuiusque materiae’, De praescriptione haereticorum xxxix (CC 1 (1954), pp. 219 ff.). [‘Are more fruitful in resources of all kinds for this sort of facility’; trans. Holmes, 262]. G. Zimmermann, Die hermeneutischen Prinzipien Tertullians, dissertation (Würzburg, 1937), pp. 3 f.; and H. Karpff, Schrift und Geist bei Tertullian, Beiträge zur Förderung christlicher Theologie 47 (Gütersloh, 1955), esp. pp. 39 ff., only incidentally mention Tertullian’s warning against conlatio scripturarum in disputing with heretics. See also K. Holl, ‘Tertullian als Schriftsteller’ (1897), in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, 3 vols. (Tübingen, 1928–32), III, 1–12, esp. 6. 12 De praescriptione haereticorum xix.2 (CC 1 (1954), p. 201) asks: ‘Quibus competat fides ipsa? cuius sint scripturae? A quo et per quos et quando et quibus sit tradita disciplina qua fiunt christiani?’ [‘With whom lies that very faith to which the Scriptures belong. From what and through whom, and when, and to whom, has been handed down that rule, by which men become Christians?’; trans. Holmes, 251]. He always answers with juristic arguments, since scriptural matters can always be in dispute, and declares: ‘Sine scripturis probamus (haereticos) ad scripturas non pertinere’, De praescriptione haereticorum xxxvii.1 (CC 1 (1954), p. 217). [‘we, without the Scriptures, prove that they (the heretics) have nothing to do with the Scriptures’; trans. Holmes, 261.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Tertullian adds to this with an almost lawyerly sharpness: since this apostolic Church doctrine has predicted that heresies will appear and must exist, and grow out of themselves, one does not need to be amazed at this and allow oneself to be seduced by it: they are ‘de nostro frutice, non nostro genere’, from our branch but not our variety, grown out of the Holy Scripture, but degenerate, from the seed of truth, but degraded into a lie, ‘as from the mild oily kernel of the olive there also grows the coarse raw olive tree and from the seed of the sweet fig comes the wild, unfruitful fig tree’.13 In these concisely sharp sentences, Tertullian basically sets forth the entire problem of heresy in the Middle Ages, already revealed at its very root during Christian antiquity. Yet in the Middle Ages they appear never to have been cited and applied, although the sole surviving manuscript of De praescriptione haereticorum comes from the Carolingian period and belonged to Bishop Agobard of Lyon. Hence this work was known and read then, since Tertullian was not entirely so unknown in the Middle Ages as was assumed before Paul Lehmann hunted down his traces.14 But after Jerome remarked that Tertullian had also written books against the Church, and Pope Gelasius I around 500 declared in his decree De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis (‘Concerning Books to be Received and not Received’) that Tertullian’s works were placed among the apocrypha, his works were used and cited only with great care or preferably not at all. Thereafter no one appears to have dared the clever conclusion that since Holy Scripture must have been composed through the Will of God, it could also provide heretics the material for their errors – since otherwise heretics would not exist, but they had to exist. All heretics throughout the entire Middle Ages, in fact, appealed to the Bible, at least to parts of it or particular Bible passages, and they believed that they were more correct, truer than the Church, and claimed to follow it better. All heretics wanted to be Christians, ‘good Christians’, as they often called themselves, better Christians than the others. There were no ‘un-Christian’ heretics, since unbelieving heathens, 13 Ibid.,

xxxvi.6–8 (CC 1, p. 217): ‘Haec est institutio non dico iam quae futuras haereses praenuntiabat, sed de qua haereses prodierunt. Sed nunc sunt ex illa, ex quo factae sunt adversus illam. Etiam de olivae nucleo mitis et opimae et necessarie asper oleaster oritur; etiam de papavere ficus gratissimae et suavissimae ventosa et vana caprificus exsurgit. Ita et haereses de nostro frutice, non nostro genere, veritatis grano, sed mendacio silvestres’. [‘This is the discipline which I no longer say foretold that heresies should come, but from which they proceeded. However, they were not of her, because they were opposed to her. Even the rough wild-olive arises from the germ of the fruitful, rich and genuine olive; also from the seed of the mellowest and sweetest fig there springs the empty and useless wild-fig. In the same way heresies, too, come from our plant, although not of our kind; (they come) from the grain of truth, but, owing to their falsehood, they have only wild leaves to show;’ trans. Holmes, 261.] 14 P. Lehmann, ‘Tertullian im Mittelalter’, Hermes 87 (1959), 231–46; also in Erforschung des Mittelalters, 5 vols. (Leipzig, Munich and Stuttgart, 1941–62), V, 184–99.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse who as yet knew nothing of the Holy Scripture or wanted to know nothing thereof, soon were only on the borders of medieval Christendom and not in its interior. But a heretic, a haereticus, is in this concept a misbeliever, not an unbeliever. Hence in the Middle Ages one had to deal perennially with the question so summarily rejected by Tertullian: should one engage in a disputation with heretics over the correct faith, that is, over the correct understanding of the Holy Scripture, which they also claimed? Or in keeping with Paul’s words to Titus, one should simply avoid them if they do not listen to admonitions – how else can one settle with them? On the other hand, the Middle Ages also naturally knew Paul’s other ruling: ‘Oportet et haereses esse’ (‘there must also be heresies’), and as a result the heretic problem was always present and known, so to speak, even in times when there were no new heretics and there was no acute heretic peril. Even before thinkers of the Middle Ages experienced heresy directly, they knew (from the time of the Carolingians or even earlier) all of the patristic writings concerning and opposing the old heresies, particularly Augustine’s polemics against the Manichees, the Donatists, the Pelagians and so on. In addition, they were familiar with a series of heresy catalogues in which names and teachings of all the old heresies were collected in a condensed, comprehensible form.15 For example, there was the Liber adversus omnes haereses (‘Book against all Heresies’) under Tertullian’s name, if not written by him then at least of his time. Augustine, too, compiled a Liber de haeresibus (‘Book concerning Heresies’), supplemented with his own knowledge and experiences;16 this Isidore of Seville largely absorbed along with other heretic catalogues into his Etymologies, which soon became the encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages. In the following centuries, one could believe he knew whatever was knowable about heresies – past, present and future. And when a new erroneous doctrine appeared, it was sorted out into categories and assigned one of the ancient and familiar names pulled from the literature: Manichaeans, Arians, Pelagians or Simonists, who always headed such lists. Hence in medieval testimonies on heresies one cannot often effectively distinguish what came from actual experience, knowledge and observation and what was derived only second-hand from collected literature. In the latter, long-known concepts and names were simply applied to present-day heretics in order to sort them out into well-known and long-condemned categories. Two examples serve to illustrate. First, in the middle of the ninth century, the Saxon monk and poet Gottschalk was condemned by Archbishop of Mainz Hrabanus Maurus, and sentenced to prison for life by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims; defending his rigorous doctrine of predestination, he 15 Collected

in Corpus haereseologicum, ed. F. Oehler, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1856–61).

16 See pp. 199–202 below and note 53. [CC 46, 13.2 (1969), pp. 283–358; L. G. Müller, The

De haeresibus of Saint Augustine. A Translation with an Introduction and Commentary (Washington, 1956).]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) called his opponents Pelagians and Sabellians. They, in turn, labelled him a Manichaean.17 In fact, newly appearing heretical groups were often identified as Manichaeans in the eleventh century (or as Arians in the south of France),18 long after there were no more Manichaeans or Arians – and although these heretics never called themselves that and knew nothing of either Mani or Arius. It was as if these groups fought by Augustine had secretly survived and now returned, for the tradition of the old heresies and sects lived on continuously in the literary knowledge of theologians but not among the heretics themselves. Only starting in the time of Bernard of Clairvaux did the flood of heterogeneous new heresies confuse the old theological usage in word and thought, and they were compelled to learn a mass of new sect names: Cathars (certainly generating the German word for heretic, Ketzer),19 Patarenes, Waldensians, Arnoldists, Speronists, Ortlieber and so on. Papal bulls after 1184 and imperial heresy laws from Frederick II took care to include such new terms in their growing lists, while dropping only a few; before long, no one could discern what actually still existed as a heretical sect or what was simply continued by chancery tradition. Into the twelfth century, however, they mostly continued the old patristic heresy catalogue, with all names and doctrines indexed for application in case of new encounters. By 1123, when several heresies started to seem acute and dangerous, the prolific writer Honorius Augustodunensis transcribed a Liber de haeresibus in Regensburg largely from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville.20 The same heretical names and doctrines of the old Church remained in Honorius’s heresy book without any additions. It is as though there had not been – and could not have been – any new heresies or sects for the last five hundred years! But at just one point Honorius does diverge from his model, and it is in a way that is quite remarkable for his time. At the end of his treatment of sects and heresies, Isidore had written that the heresies condemned by the Fathers and councils were – via their many erroneous doctrines – divided among themselves; yet they were united in their conspiring against the Church. Then Isidore had added a sentence of Jerome (which later entered Gratian’s Decretum and thus the lawbook of the Church): ‘But whoever understands

17 C.

Lambot, Oeuvres théologiques et grammaticales de Godescalc d’Orbais, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense 20 (Louvain, 1945), p. 298. Cf. H. Grundmann, Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters (Göttingen, 1963), p. 7, n. 16. 18 Cf. R. Manselli, ‘Una Designazione dell’Eresia Catara: “Arriana heresis”’, Bulletino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano 68 (1956), 233–46; Y. Congar, ‘“Arriana haeresis” comme désignation du néomanichéisme au XIIe siècle’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 43 (1959), 449–61. 19 See note 6 above. 20 Honorius Augustodunensis, Liber de haeresibus, PL 172, 233–40; also in Corpus haereseologici, ed. Oehler, I, 323–32. Cf. H. Menhardt, ‘Der Nachlaß des Honorius Augustodunensis’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 89 (1958), 23–69, esp. 44 and 67 on dating.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse the Holy Scriptures otherwise than the meaning of the Holy Spirit, by whom they were written, requires, even if he does not depart from the Church, nevertheless can be called a heretic.’21 Honorius Augustodunensis did not take over this Jerome sentence from Isidore. In a short foreword to his book On Heresies, he says almost the opposite: a person becomes a heretic through error and quarrelsomeness, particularly when defending an error stubbornly or disrespecting the words or writings of the wise, for then he contradicts the Church and alienates himself from its faith. But Honorius expressly adds that one is not to be judged as a hereticus for understanding Scripture differently so long as he permits himself to be corrected by a superior (‘cum a doctore audierit’ [‘when he hears it from a teacher’]).22 This is obviously deliberately different from what had been said by Jerome-Isidore – probably due to his own newly developed understanding of Scripture. The school of Anselm of Laon († 1117) systematically compiled and collated all the patristic traditions of Scriptural interpretation in order to gain, through the mosaic of these different approaches, a clear overall picture of the manifold possibilities of the interpretation of scripture. What is called the Glossa ordinaria of the entire Bible appears to have emerged from the exegetical teaching of the school of Laon,23 which was earlier held to be a work of Walafrid Strabo from the ninth century; it became the basic textbook of all scholastic exegesis, parallel to the Sentences of Peter Lombard (†1160/64)

21 Isidore,

Etymologiae viii.70, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911); PL 82, 305: ‘Haec sunt haereses adversus catholicam fidem exortae, … quae dum in se multis erroribus divisae invicem sibi dissentiant, communi tamen nomine adversus ecclesiam Dei conspirant. Sed et quicumque aliter scripturam sanctam intelligit quam sensus Spiritus sancti flagitat, a quo conscripta est, licet de ecclesia non recesserit, tamen haereticus appellari potest’. [‘These are heresies that have arisen in opposition to the catholic faith … although they disagree with each other, differing among themselves in many errors, nevertheless they conspire with a common name against the Church of God. But also, whoever understands the Holy Scriptures otherwise than the meaning of the Holy Spirit, by whom they were written, requires, even if he does not depart from the Church, nevertheless can be called a heretic’; Isidore, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. S. A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Berghof (Cambridge, 2006), p. 178.] The last sentence is from Jerome, Comment. in ep. ad Tit. 3:10 (PL 26, 597), also ad Gal. 5:20 (ibid., col. 417); in Gratian’s Decretum c. 27 C. XXIV, qu. 3, Friedberg, I, 998. 22 PL 172, 234 (not in Oehler): ‘Fit autem haereticus errore et contentione, dum quis errorem suum contentiose defendit et sapientum dicta vel scripta contemnit. Is quippe ecclesiae contradicit et ab eius fide extitit. Non est autem haereticus judicandus, qui scripturam aliter quam est intelligit si modo sese correxerit, cum a doctore audierit’. (‘He becomes a heretic however by error and dispute, as someone pertinaciously defending his error and disdaining the words or writings of wise men. He indeed contradicts the church and stands out against its faith. For he, however, who understands Scripture to be other than it is, is not to be judged a heretic, provided that he corrects himself, when he listens to a teacher.’) 23 On this, see p. 205 below and note 61.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) for dogmatics. Around the same time and already in conflict with the rationaldialectic method of the School of Laon, Abbot Rupert of Deutz (from Liège, † 1129/30) ‘explicated almost the entire Scripture, enlightened by the Holy Spirit in a vision’, as Honorius Augustodunensis himself boasted24 as a friend who lived with him for a time in the cloister of Siegburg. Gerhoch of Reichersberg (as an Augustinian canon † 1169) in turn derived from Rupert a continuous quest for the intelligencia spiritualis, the spiritual sense and understanding of Biblical revelation, and sought its saving significance for the present. This was similar, despite Rupert’s many controversies with Anselm, the Praemonstratensian bishop of Havelberg († 1158), or the Augustinian canon from either Saxony or Brabant, Hugh of St Victor († 1158) or the Calabrian Cistercian and founder of his own order, Joachim of Fiore († 1202). In their manner of reading the Holy Scriptures differently, better than before, wishing to understand them more ‘spiritually’ as well as more literally, that Honorius Augustodunensis would not permit to be regarded as heretical so long as it was not combined with unteachable stubbornness. It is this single sentence that makes his heretical book of 1123 current and in keeping with the times. He could hardly have suspected how many heresies would arise from such concern to understand Scripture – all the way to Luther, who exceeded all previous medieval heretics, who wished to understand the Bible (or much that was therein) differently, and chose to follow another path than that of the Church, even eventually separating from it. The Glossa ordinaria as noted had already defined the concept of a heretic to explicate Titus 3. 10, probably with a patristic citation, as follows: a heretic is one who fights the law with words of the law, that is, who fights against the lex Dei (‘law of God’), the Holy Scripture’s true sense: specifically he supports himself on their words and calls it a proof for his personal sense, to strengthen the corruption of his spirit with the authority of Scripture.25 Tertullian had said that almost a thousand years earlier, but here his conclusion was omitted: that one should not permit a disputation with heretics about the correct understanding of Scripture, precisely because the Holy Scripture will provide them with material for their erroneous teaching. Unfortunately we know of almost no biblical commentaries, exegetical writings or sermons by medieval heretics; if such texts were ever written down, they have since been lost or destroyed, as were most heretical writings.

24 PL

172, 232. 114, 538: ‘Hereticus est, qui per verba legis legem impugnat; proprium enim sensum astruit ex verbis legis, ut pravitatem mentis suae legis auctoritate confirmet; qui vitandi sunt, quia frequenter correcti exercitatiores essent ad malum’. (‘A heretic is someone who attacks the law through the words of the law, so that he may confirm the depravity of his mind with the authority of the law. And these are to be avoided because they are frequently more practised when corrected.’) On this, see p. 205 below and note 63.

25 PL

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Oportet et Haereses Esse Authors of the extensive surviving polemic writings against heresies, or acts of the Inquisition, were understandably disinclined to go into more detail about the biblical motivations for heretical teachings. Often concentrating on only a few relevant biblical verses, they insisted on them without much exegetical concern for meanings out of context. With such sporadic witnesses it is difficult, or only possible through supposition, to reconstruct a sort of heretical theology and exegesis. In contrast, an almost impossibly large amount of biblical commentary by Catholic theologians across the centuries has survived.26 Of course, they rarely deal with alternative or heretical views of discussed texts; yet they must at the least speak of heresy on passages where the Bible itself speaks of haeresis and hereticus, particularly in the explanation of the letters of Paul to the Corinthians and to Titus. Two other Bible verses from the Old Testament are also repeatedly taken as occasions to say something about heretics, although heretics do not appear in the text and are referred to only allegorically. In the Song of Songs there is the verse (2. 15), ‘Let us catch the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, for our vineyard is blooming’. This is always the anthem of love, ‘the most lyrical book in the Bible’, most desperately needing interpretation to relate it to Christ and the Church or the soul.27 From early times, since Origen and through the entire Middle Ages, it was understood that the little foxes laying waste to the blooming vineyard were an allegory for heretics who threaten the Church and thus must be caught. As Bernard of Clairvaux was writing sermons on the Song of Songs, the Premonstratensian provost Evervin of Steinfeld in the Eifel sent him reports of heresy just discovered in Cologne.28 He knew that when Bernard came to this verse, he would speak of heretics, and we actually obtain from his sermons the most contemporary, reliable account of the Cologne heretics of 1143. In all other commentaries on the Song of Songs there are at this passage at least general comments on the dangerous quality of heretics, who should be caught like the foxes. That this cannot be properly reconciled with Paul’s advice to avoid a stubborn 26 There

is a list in C. Spicq, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse latin au moyen âge, Bibliothèque Thomiste 26 (Paris, 1944), pp. 395 ff.; for commentaries on the Pauline letters, p. 399. Supplementing this is W. Affeldt, ‘Verzeichnis der RömerbriefKommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra’, Traditio 13 (1957), 369–406; F. Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi, 11 vols. (Madrid, 1950–80) lists all biblical commentaries in alphabetical order of authors. 27 Cf. F. Ohly, Hohelied-Studien. Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200 (Wiesbaden, 1958). This does not however deal with the usual interpretation of the Song of Songs 2.15. Index of Song of Songs commentaries in Spicq, Esquisse, p. 397. 28 Evervin’s letter to Bernard in 1143/44, PL 182, 677 [Heresies of the High Middle Ages, ed. and trans. W. L. Wakefield and A. P. Evans (New York, 1969), pp. 127–232]. Bernard’s Sermones in Cantica 65 and 66, PL 183, 1088 ff. [Sermon 65, trans. Heresies of the High Middle Ages, pp. 132–8; 66: Sermons on the Song of Songs, trans. K. Walsh and I. M. Edmonds, 4 vols. (Kalamazoo, 1971–81), III, 190–206.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) heretic appears never to have occurred to these exegetes. Rhyming with this is another passage from the Book of Judges (15. 4–5), where Samson catches a mass of foxes, binding their tails in pairs with torches, and throws them into the grain fields, vineyards and olive groves of the Philistines to set them afire. Because it is once again a question of foxes as well as vineyards, this story is always related to heretics, as with Augustine and earlier,29 and stresses as well that, like those foxes, they have various faces, but their tails are bound together. For despite the variety of heretical teachings – and this dissent speaks against them – they are still bound together in their enmity of the Church and of right faith, against the truth. ‘Opinio diversa est, vanitas una est’ (‘opinion is diverse, vanity is as one’), Augustine says on this,30 and it is repeated time and again, up to the papal heretical bulls in the thirteenth century and beyond; this comparison of heretics with Samson’s foxes is continually repeated as a formula: ‘facies quidem habentes diversas, sed caudas ad vicem colligatas’ (‘having indeed different faces but tails tied together’) 31 – each heresy’s differences and peculiarities were insignificant, since due to their hostility to the Church and the faith, they were to be condemned and combatted rather than simply avoided. This allegorical comparison with foxes from the Song of Songs and the Samson story with heretics was obviously more applicable to Church polemic and legislation against them than Paul’s word to the Corinthians and to Titus that heresies had to exist and that heretics were to be avoided. Precisely because there were few passages to justify fighting heretics and other passages for it were lacking, the allegory of the foxes had to do. That was indeed the case for a passage from the Gospel of Luke that Augustine had allegorically applied to heretics in his last years: the parable of the dinner (Luke 14. 16 ff.) to which those invited had not come, and in whose place poor people, cripples, the lame and the blind were invited – and yet still did not entirely fill the house. Finally the lord of the house said to his servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, so my house will be full’. It is certainly a stretch to apply this pasage to heretics, particularly given the comparable image in the Gospel of Matthew (22. 2–14). But Augustine believed, after long hesitation, that he was able to support state intervention against the Donatist sect in North Africa, and he could find no other biblical justification for it than the coge intrare (‘force them to come in’) in Luke 14. 23 (Jerome’s translation of the Vulgate: compelle intrare [‘compel them to come in’]): as the last-called guests from the highways and hedges,

29 A.

M. Dubarle, ‘Les renards de Samson’, Revue du moyen âge latin 7 (1951), 174–6. Enarrationes in Psalmos 80, PL 37, 1040 f.; CC 39 (1956), 1128. 31 See H. Grundmann, ‘The Profile of the Heretic’, pp. 23–4 above; also A. Oliver, Táctica de propaganda y motivos literarios en las cartas antiheréticas de Inocencio III, Collectanea Theatina 12 (Rome, 1957), pp. 180 ff. 30 Augustine,

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Oportet et Haereses Esse the heretics were compelled by force to enter into the Church.32 The application of the verse from Luke was so strained – even if Augustine thought: satis evidenter ostendit (‘it shows clearly enough’) – that it appears that no commentary on Luke accepted it,33 nor the Glossa ordinaria. Even Gregory I, who otherwise accepted so much from Augustine and who also was convinced (as Pope Pelagius I had previously been)34 that secular authority could be called upon against heretics and schismatics,35 still used the words of Luke compelle intrare not in this sense, but in an expressly different interpretation.36 During the later Carolingian period there was also a sort of Mirror 32 Augustine,

Ep. 93, v, to Vincentius Donatista (CSEL 34.2 (1898), p. 449) and Ep. 185 to the African proconsul Bonifacius ‘De correctione Donatistarum’ (CSEL 57 (1911), pp. 23 and 40), esp. Ep. 173 to Donatus presbyter (CSEL 44 (1904), pp. 647 f. [correction: p. 647]): ‘… tanto maiore utitur ecclesia potestate, ut non solum invitet, sed etiam cogat ad bonum. Hoc (Dominus) et in illa convivii similitudine satis evidenter ostendit, ubi misit ad invitatos et venire noluerunt, et ait servo: “Exi in plateas … et compelle intrare.”’ [‘That the Church wields greater power, so that she may not only invite, but even compel men to embrace what is good. This our Lord intended then to illustrate, for although He had great power, He chose rather to manifest His humility …: Go out quickly into the streets … and compel them to come in’; Letters, trans. J. G. Cunningham, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, 14 vols. (Buffalo and Oxford, 1886–90), I, 547).] Cf. also Contra Gaudentium Donatistarum episcopum i.25 (CSEL 53 (1910), pp. 226 f.) and Ep. 208 (CSEL 57 (1911), pp. 346 f.), while in the Explanatio psalmi 40, 26 (CSEL 64 (1919), pp. 246 f.) with the compelle ut intrent, not heretics, but rather Judas videtur signari (seems to be indicated). See J. Mausbach, Die Ethik des hl. Augustinus, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Freiburg, 1929), I, 345 ff. 33 Indeed all of the Luke commentaries after 1200 listed by Spicq, Esquisse, p. 399 remain unprinted except that of Bonaventura, Opera omnia, 11 vols. (Quaracchi, 1882–1902), VII, which makes no reference to heretics on Luke 14. 23, but relies on Gregory I and Bede. The frequently used, often-printed Bible postills of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra († 1349) have nothing about heretics for Luke 14. 23. And while E. Fascher, ‘Lukas 14, 23, Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Toleranz’, in Zeitschrift des Gustav-Adolf-Werkes: Die evangelische Diaspora 27 (1956), 1–16, is informative on older and more recent interpretations, he also skips over the medieval exegesis. 34 Pelagius I, pope (556–61), Ep. 2 to Narses, PL 69, 594 ff. 35 Gregory I, Registrum epistolarum I, 72 (MGH Epp. 1 (1891), p. 92), and often elsewhere – see F. H. Dudden, Gregory the Great, 2 vols. (London, 1905), II, 238 ff. and 413 – but never citing Luke 14. 23, as one might expect according to H.-D. Kahl, ‘Compelle intrare’, Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 4 (1955), 178. 36 Homiliae in Evangelia II, 36, PL 76, 1270 ff. (later also Bede, In Lucae ev. Expositio, PL 92, 516). He related the compelle intrare to later converted heathens, who huius mundi adversitatibus fracti ad Dei amorem redeunt atque a praesentis vitae desideriis corriguntur (‘those broken by adversity in this world return to the love of God and are corrected from the desires of this present life’). I owe this reference to H.-D. Kahl. However, he accepted a continuous exegetical-canonistic tradition for the understanding of Luke 14. 23 on heretics, schismatics and apostates in his article ‘Compelle intrare’, 161–93 and 360–401 (also in the collected volume Heidenmission und Kreuzzugsgedanke in der deutschen Ostpolitik des Mittelalters, Wege der Forschung 7, ed. H. Beumann (Darmstadt, 1963), 177–274), esp. 380; in Heidenmission, p. 245.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) of Princes by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims citing Augustine, and with him Luke, that ‘ad iustitiae observantiam etiam compellendum sit’ (‘it should also be compulsory to observe justice’),37 but that was not specifically coined for fighting heretics. When Brun of Querfurt in a letter to Henry II in 1008 pressed him to fight the Liutizen, who had fallen back into heathenism, to bring them back to Christianity (even though they were still allied with him against the Christian duke of Poland), he adds ‘quod est iubente evangelio compellere intrare’ (‘that is at the Gospel’s command to compell them to come in’).38 Or when the Duchess Matilda of Lorraine, urged by preachers in 1026/27, recommended to the Polish King Mieszko II the model of his father Boleslav Chobry, who had fought unimproved heathens with the sword, ‘compellens ad caenam dominicam barbaras ac ferocissimas nationes’ (‘compelling barbarous and most ferocious nations to the Lord’s table’)39 – then the peculiar interpretation of Luke by Augustine must have been known and still effective. In these cases, however, it was directed not against heretics, but chiefly against apostates or heathens. During the investiture controversy, Bishop Anselm of Lucca used not only the Gregorians (with the Luke passage that Gregory VII himself never used) in the letters of his register to fight Simonists and the following of the Imperial Antipope Wibert-Clement III;40 he also received all the letters of Augustine with that interpretation into his Collectio canonum (Collection of Canons).41 From there they entered into other canonical collections, including Gratian’s Decretum,42 and with that into the law-book of the Church. Thereafter the compelle or coge intrare in Augustine’s interpretation served as a ‘biblical’ justification for violent fighting of heretics and for crusades against heresy, both against the Albigensians and against the last Hohenstaufens. Even Thomas Aquinas believed the Luke verse to be an argument permitting, even requiring, fighting heresy with the force

37 Hincmar,

De persona regis et regis ministerio xvii (PL 125, 844). In this he used the Capitula diversarum sententiarum pro negociis rei publicae consulendis, ed. G. Laehr and C. Erdmann, NA 50 (1935), 120 ff., where c. 13, citing Augustine, Ep. 93, reads ‘Quod ad iustitiae observationem etiam adconpellendum sit’. Augustine’s Ep. 185 was also cited in c. 9 and 11, but not specifically applied to the fighting of heretics. 38 W. von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 6 vols., 5th edn (Braunschweig and Leipzig, 1873–95), II, 705; Kahl on the same (see note 36 above). 39 Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, II, 711, also referred to me by H.-D. Kahl. 40 Anselm of Lucca, Liber contra Wicbertum, MGH Libelli de lite 1 (1891), pp. 522 ff. 41 Anselm, Collectio canonum (=Apologeticus, around 1083) XII, 13. Cf. A. Stickler, ‘Il potere coattivo materiale della Chiesa nella Riforma Gregoriana secundo Anselmo di Lucca’, Studi Gregoriani 2 (1947), 235–85. C. Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart, 1935; reprint 1955), p. 225, presents Anselm as ‘the first among canonists [to have] extensively investigated the problem of ecclesiastical compulsion and war’; and ‘in this area [he] revived Augustine’s teaching to the widest extent’. 42 Gratian’s Decretum c. 37/38 and 42/43, C. 23 qu. 4; Friedberg I, 917, 919, 922 ff.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse of weapons.43 Only for this purpose were Luke’s words – one may well say, faute de mieux – used ‘allegorically’; nothing whatsoever was said about the heretics, only about the attitude of the Church and state power toward them, which was obviously difficult to justify from Scripture. The patristic and medieval interpretation and application of Paul’s ruling is all the more conclusive because it allows no allegorical interpretation, but speaks immediately and expressly of heresy and heretics. One must here reflect upon what the Apostle wished to say and what it indicated about his own attitude to heretics. Many medieval commentaries on Paul’s letters repeat the old patristic expressions to these verses in a virtual monotone, combining them and often including nothing new or personal. Medieval exegesis is generally highly traditionalist and conservative. Great patience is required to read the same commentaries again and again and establish where they originate, and to watch when a new thought surfaces, or an old position is presented anew or intentionally passed over. Since critical editions of biblical commentaries are usually lacking, one can all too easily make a mistake and discover, either later or never, that a seemingly new sentence was yet another patristic citation. And yet it is worth looking more closely at how the interpretation of certain Bible verses (those particularly susceptible to multiple readings) changed over time, which new authorities were cited, and when new interpretations were ventured. Therein are reflected, almost unconsciously, a shift in modes of thought, conceptionalisations and preoccupations over time. And what the exegetes wrote in their commentaries on the Bible could be influenced through sermons (which always derived from the biblical text and its explication), wielding a more powerful and wider influence than the scholastic school-learning of summas, sentences and questions. Recent research has concerned itself much more intensively with the commentaries of the exegetes, although the great scholastics also belong to their number, such as Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and others. Many biblical commentaries are still unprinted or used in inadequate editions such as Migne’s Patrologia. Completeness is hard to achieve, and the dependence of commentaries on one another is not always known with certainty. One must initially be satisfied with trial probing and accept many uncertainties. Greek–Byzantine exegesis may left to one side, since it had little immediate effect on the Latin West. On the other hand, one must continually reach back to Latin patristics, because medieval exegetes often did so as well. The first complete explanation of the Letters of Paul in Latin, independent of older Greek commentators, was written in Rome about 380 by an unknown author – certainly not by the Church Father Ambrose of Milan, as was 43 Thomas

Aquinas, Summa theologiae. 2. 2ae, qu. 10, art. 8, Opera omnia, Leonine Edition (Rome, 1882–), VIII, 89. Cf. H. Maisonneuve, Études sur les origines de l’inquisition, 2nd edn (Paris, 1960), pp. 362 ff.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) believed in the Middle Ages. We speak instead of Ambrosiaster since Erasmus recognised this error, to which the work owed its wide distribution and affection as the supposed work of Ambrose.44 On the words of Paul to the Corinthians that heresies, too, must exist, the Ambrosiaster remarks that45 the Apostle does not say that because he wanted it to be or because he wished it, but because he knew that it would be so; he knew that many would be corrupted by the wiliness of the Devil, and for that reason heresies would have to exist – just as Christ said, ‘There must be troubles coming’ or, ‘The son of man must still suffer much’, for he knew that Judas would become a betrayer. What appeared most needful of clarification, and what he sought to explain through parallel passages is particularly the word oportet: how must there be heresy? he asked himself. And he satisfied himself not only with Paul’s justification that through it one should be tested and proved, one who was steadfastly faithful and just or – as the Ambrosiaster profoundly explains – those who are the in traditione accepta durantes, who persevere in the received tradition and give an example for the evangelica disciplina. For his own part, he maintains – which Paul does not say – heresies to be the work of the Devil (as Tertullian already held); but Paul knew what was coming, and for that reason he said ‘oportet et haereses esse’. In this he betrays in all abruptness a particular grasp of what is not willed by God, but foreseen, and permitted to test and try the faithful, the permitted counter-effort of the evil, the destructive, the diabolical. That interpretation contrasts strikingly with the commentary of the Irishman Pelagius, written twenty years earlier, who became an opponent of and was fought intensely by Augustine for declaring that every person 44 H.

J. Vogels, Die Überlieferung des Ambrosiasterkommentars zu den Paulinischen Briefen, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen 7 (Göttingen, 1959); H. J. Vogels, Das Corpus Paulinum des Ambrosiasters, Bonner Biblische Beiträge 13 (Bonn, 1957); A. Souter, A Study of Ambrosiaster (Cambridge, 1903); A. Souter, The Earliest Latin Commentaries on the Epistles of St. Paul (Oxford, 1927), pp. 39 ff.; Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum, II, 900–95 and 145 f. 45 PL 17, 255. Also in Spicilegium Casinense iii.2 (1901), p. 141, from what is certainly the oldest manuscript, the sixth-century Codex Casinensis N 150: ‘Sciendo nonnullos mente corruptos versutia diaboli, dicit, “Oportet haereses esse.” Non utique voluit nec optavit, sed quia scivit futurum, dixit sicut et Dominus “Oportet” inquit “venire scandala” (Matthew 18. 7) et “Oportet filium hominis pati” (Luke 9. 22), praescius quia Iudas proditor erat futurus. “Ut probati” autem cum dicit “manifesti fiant inter vos,” illos significat, qui in traditione accepta durantes exemplum probationis erant evangelicae disciplinae ad condemnationem caeterorum’. (‘Knowing some corrupted in mind by the wiles of the devil, he says, “There must be heretics”. He assuredly did not wish or choose this, but because he knew the future, he said this just as the Lord also said, “It is necessary that scandals come” (Matthew 18. 7) and “It is necessary for the son of man to suffer” (Luke 9. 22), foreknowing that Judas was going to betray him. When, however, he says, “So that tested men may appear among you”, he signifies those who persisting in the accepted tradition were an example of being tested in evangelical discipline for the condemnation of others.’)

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Oportet et Haereses Esse was capable of the good from his free will, and not dependent solely upon God’s grace and help. In his case it would be very hard to conceive why Paul should have said, ‘Heresies must be’. It is extremely significant that Pelagius, who naturally does not deem himself heretical, holds it as correct46 that the Apostle had only warned, ‘If you have such conflicts among yourselves, this must lead to heresies – as if someone says that whoever drinks so much must become inebriated’. By way of explanation, the Apostle does not say that because and as if heresies have to be! The heretic Pelagius did not agree; Paul warns of heresy only in the case of dispute and splitting. And in response to the warning in the Titus Letter, ‘Avoid a heretical person’, Pelagius remarks in a very distinctive way:47 it would waste time to argue long with a heretic, for the freedom of judgement, of decision (freedom of the will), means that each forges his own sins. It is a precisely Pelagian argument, heretical in the view of Augustine and the Catholic Middle Ages, to question whether someone thought in an orthodox or heretical manner hinged on one’s own judgement and free will, as if it was not the work of God or the Devil. Hence these words of Pelagius were never repeated in later commentaries on the Letters of Paul, although his commentary was also used in a reworked, orthodox, purified form in the Middle Ages. In a reworking from the middle of the sixth century, earlier falsely ascribed to Bishop Primasius of Hadrametum but probably composed by Cassiodorus and his pupils, this passage was

46 Pelagius’s

Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul: II. Text and Apparatus Criticus, ed. A. Souter, Texts and Studies: Contributions to Biblical and Patristic Literature 9, no. 2 (Cambridge, 1926), p. 190: ‘Nam oportet … Quia tales dissensiones habetis, necesse est vobis etiam usque ad hereses pervenire, sicut si dicas: ille qui tantum bibit, necesse habet inebriari’. (‘“For it is necessary…” If you have such conflicts among yourselves, this must lead to heresies – as if someone says that whoever drinks so much must become inebriated’). The reworked text of c. 420–50 (the so-called Pseudo-Jerome, ed. J. A. Robinson, Texts and Studies: Contributions to Biblical and Patristic Literature 9, no. 3 (Cambridge, 1931), p. 37; PL 30, 782) adds for explanation: ‘Item non hoc dicit apostolus, quia debent esse haereses, sed quia inter se scissuras habebant, ideo dicit: oportet, hoc est: necesse est haereses esse’ (‘Again the apostle does not say this, but because they had splits among them, he thus says: it is needful, that is, it is necessary for there to be heresies’). Cf. on this, Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum IV, 201–12; Affeldt, ‘Verzeichnis der Römerbrief-Kommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra’, 392 ff. 47 Pelagius’s Expositions, p. 534: ‘Haereticum hominem … devita … Nec circa ipsos nos occupari permittit, si correpti iterum non corrigant(ur), ne tempus inani contentione perdamus; [et aliquid proprio iudicio conatus nihil efficiet] quia unicuique manet libertas arbitrii et funiculis peccatorum suorum unusquisque constringitur’ (‘“Avoid … an heretical man” … Nor are we permitted to occupy ourselves with them, if, when accused, they are not put right again, lest we lose time in vain disputes; [and something attempted with one’s own judgement would have no effect] because free will remains with each person and each person is constrained by the bonds of his own sins’). The bracketed text (instead of Titus 3. 11) added in Pseudo-Jerome, PL 30, 944.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) changed dramatically and significantly.48 Heresies must be, it says, not because it pleases God, but because the faithful are thereby tested and it is made clearer to people how they know God in any case. An advocate’s skill cannot be known when he has no trial through which to prove himself, and a sailor or pilot can earn no praise if his ship is always in port or lies still without wind. It is the test itself that counts in these very practical examples, and for that purpose heresy is needed. And Pelagius’ words on the waste of time in conflict with heretics will be left behind – although they could and should still test themselves in this way! – but not his remark that the freedom of judgement remains with every person. Instead, as so often with Augustine, the heretic’s stubbornness is blamed, his pertinacia even when he hears and knows the truth. The retouching and alteration of Pelagius’ commentary can be seen here in microscopic detail, revealing what conception of people and of the heretic lay behind medieval biblical exegesis.49 48 See

Pelagius’s Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul: I. Introduction, ed. A. Souter, Texts and Studies: Contributions to Biblical and Patristic Literature 9, no. 1 (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 60–3; Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum, IV, 482–7; Affeldt, ‘Verzeichnis der Römerbrief-Kommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra’, 394. Text, PL 68, 533 on 1 Corinthians 11. 19: ‘Non quod haereses Deo placeant, sed quod per eas fideles exercitati, sicut Deo noti sunt, ita etiam manifestentur hominibus et clarius innotescant. Nam unde advocati peritia apparebit, si causam nullam dicat ubi probetur? Unde nauclerus gubernator laudabitur, si navis semper in portu vel in tranquillitate consistat?’ (‘Will the skill of the advocate appear, if he speaks in no case where he is tested? Whence Nauclerus: Not because heresies would be pleasing to God but because, being tested by these, the faithful, known to God as they are, also become more clearly known to men. For will the steersman also be praised, if the ship always remains in port and in tranquillity?’) The first two sentences appear in the Bible text of the ninthcentury Codex Ulmensis after hereses esse in a first hand, later erased by a second hand; see Novum Testamentum Latine, ed. J. Wordsworth and H. J. White, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1889–1954), II, 237; K. Aland pointed this out to me. On Titus 3. 10, Novum Testamentum Latine, p. 684: ‘Nec circa ipsos nos vult occupari … (as in note 47). Quia post auditam et cognitam veritatem in sua pertinacia perseverat; funiculis enim peccatorum suorum unusquisque constringitur’ (‘Because he perseveres in his pertinacity after hearing and recognising the truth; for each person is constrained by the bonds of his own sins’). 49 The text cited in note 47 is adopted and expanded in the Collectanea in Pauli epistolas of Sedulius Scottus (after 860 in Liège). On 1 Corinthians 11. 19 ‘(ut et qui probati sunt) sive doctores in resistendo sive fideles in permanendo’; on Titus 3. 10 (… proprio iudicio condemnatus) Jerome (PL 26, 597 ff.) is cited: ‘propterea a semetipso dicitur damnatus, quia fornicator, adulter, homicida et cetera vitia per sacerdotes de ecclesia repelluntur, haeretici autem in semetipsos sententiam ferunt, suo arbitrio de ecclesia recedentes; quia recessio proprie conscientiae videtur esse damnatio’ (‘wherefore he is said to be damned by himself, because a fornicator, adulterer, murderer and other vices are rejected from the church by the priests; heretics however pass sentence on themselves, leaving the church by their own will, because abandoning one’s own conscience seems to be damnation’); PL 103, 151 and 249. See A. Souter, ‘The Sources of Sedulius Scotus’, Collectaneum. Journal

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Oportet et Haereses Esse Unfortunately Augustine wrote no commentary on the Letters of Paul. He knew the Ambrosiaster and used it with approval, but in many other writings he often had enough to say about heresy, since he ceaselessly battled with heretics: Manichaeans, Donatists, Pelagians, Arians and many others. He himself had to struggle to obtain his own conviction of faith and understanding of Scripture. Augustine seldom used Paul’s ruling from the Titus Letter or dealt with it simply, since in spite of it he disputed with heretical persons and attempted to convert them.50 It was not his way to avoid heretics; he confronted them when he could, he disputed with them and he wrote against them his entire life. On the way he often cited ‘Oportet et haereses esse’, to console himself and others that new heresies and sects were emerging all the time: the Apostle Paul had predicted that and it was fulfilled and presented him (Augustine) and the Church with its mission. Also in his Confessions51 Augustine expressed himself as genuinely thankful for Paul’s ruling in the light of his own wanderings on his search for the truth that almost made him a Manichaean and caused him to believe in other erroneous faiths: his engagement with heresies caused the emergence of what the Church believed and what the true doctrine was: ‘Oportet enim et haereses esse, ut probati fierent inter infirmos’ (‘for there must also be heresies so that there may be the tested amongst the weak’). At the only place where 1 Corinthians 11. 19 is cited in De Civitate Dei (‘On the City of God’), does he speak more thoroughly, though not concentrating only on himself.52 There he asks what was prophetically ‘prefigured’ through the sons of Noah: in the eldest, Sem, of Theological Studies 18 (1916/17), 184–228; Souter, Pelagius’s Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul: II. Text and Apparatus Criticus, pp. 336 ff; H. J. Frede, Pelagius, der irisch Paulustext, Sedulius Scotus, Vetus Latina: Aus der Geschichte der lateinischen Bibel 3 (Freiburg, 1961). 50 For example, Augustine’s Ep. 43, CSEL 34.2 (1898), p. 85. Cf. also De civitate Dei xviii.51, CSEL 40.2 (1900), pp. 321 ff.; De civitate Dei, 4th edn, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1928–9), II, 335, and also CC 48 (1955), 649. 51 Confessiones vii.19, ed. P. Knöll, CSEL 33 (1896), p. 139. 52 De Civitate Dei xvi, ed. Dombart and Kalb, II, 124 ff.; CSEL 40.2 (1900), pp. 124 ff.; CC 48 (1955), 499: (starting with the citation in the text): ‘Sed haec in usum cedunt proficientium iuxta illud apostoli: “Oportet et haereses esse …” Multa quippe ad fidem catholicam pertinentia, dum haereticorum calida inquietudine exagitantur, ut adversus eos defendi possint, et considerantur diligentius et intelleguntur clarius et instantius praedicantur, et ab adversario mota quaestio discendi existit occasio’. [City of God: ‘But even the heretics yield an advantage to those that make proficiency, according to the apostle’s saying, “There must also be heresies”… For while the hot restlessness of heretics stirs questions about many articles of the Catholic faith, the necessity of defending them forces us both to investigate them more accurately, to understand them more clearly, and to proclaim them more earnestly; and the question mooted by an adversary becomes the occasion of instruction’; trans. M. Dod, Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, II, 310.] Heretics as the servi Cham (the slaves of Ham) are also in Contra Faustum xii.24, CSEL 25 (1891), p. 353.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) the race from which Christ would be born and the primitiae Israelitarum (‘firstfruits of the Israelites’); in the youngest, Japhet, the ‘plenitudo (or latitudo) gentium, quae habitat in ecclesia’ (‘the fullness [or extent] of peoples living in the church’); Ham, however, who stands between the two, ‘quid significat nisi haereticorum genus calidum, non spiritu sapientiae, sed impatientiae, quo solent haereticorum fervere praecordia et pacem turbare sanctorum?’ (‘what does he signify except the hot race of heretics, not in the spirit of wisdom but of impatience, by which the entrails of heretics are wont to be inflamed and disturb the peace of the saints’). This, however, provides the faithful – or more precisely those progressing in the faith – with usefulness (in usum cedunt [‘they progress in usefulness’]), and for that reason the Apostle says that there must also be heresies in order that the tried and true among one become visible. For much that belongs to the Catholic faith will be respected more carefully, more clearly understood and more tellingly expressed, preached, if it is placed in question (exagitantur) by the sly disturbance of heretics – if it has to be defended, so that the questions posed by heretics provide an occasion for learning. Here as well the heretics were almost to be thanked as useful, regarded not as contemptible or even hateful so much as merely injurious. When Augustine was pressed toward the end of his life (around 427/8) to make a list of all heresies, with short refutations of all their errors for practical use, he hesitantly – almost reluctantly – agreed in a text, De haeresibus, to review and supplement already existing Greek and Latin heresy catalogues. There he stressed53 that it was hard to define what a heresy was and who was to be numbered among the heretics. Not every error is a heresy, although each heresy ‘quae in vitio ponitur’ (‘which is asserted in vice’) becomes a heresy only through an erroneous teaching. In a side-comment, he notes that it is not an error but a vitium, something sinfully immoral that makes a heresy when combined with an erroneous teaching. However, in the opening oration to that book of heretics it says: what makes one into a heretic (quid faciat haereticum) either cannot be defined at all or grasped only with difficulty by a regular definition. Augustine indeed creates an expectation that he will seek to establish how every heresy – either already or not yet known – may be avoided, and how the heresy already known is correctly to be judged. But he never came to this second, to him more important, part of his book following the index of heresies – perhaps not simply because of the lack of time at the end of his life, but perhaps also, due to his long, eventful experience, he knew how hard it was to define in theory and for all cases what was heretical and who was a heretic. For him this was first decided in the conflict, in the struggle 53 Augustine,

Ep. 221–224, CSEL 57 (1911), pp. 442–54; also as a prologue to De haeresibus, PL 42, 21 ff., and in Oehler, Corpus haereseologicum, I, 192 ff. J. de Guibert is very instructive on this point, ‘La notion d’hérésie chez saint Augustin’, Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique, L’Institut Catholique de Toulouse 3 (1920), 368–82.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse and seeking for the right belief. Once he used very unusual words in his sermons on the Psalms that apparently were never repeated in the Middle Ages or cited like so much of Augustine, although one always knew and used his Enarrationes in Psalmos (‘Expositions of the Psalms’). There is only a weak reflection of it with Gregory I,54 but without what is characteristic for Augustine, obviously alienating for the following times. Psalm 124 (Verse 2: ‘Jerusalem is surrounded by mountains, and the Lord is around his people …’) gives him the occasion to speak of the sense and importance of mountains as they appear in the Bible. They stand for something good, he believes, if they are mentioned in connection with God, but otherwise they can mean something bad, if also large, with the example of large but bad souls. And here Augustine continues:55 ‘Do not believe, brothers, that heresies could arise from little souls. Only great men produced heresies – but just as they were great, so were they wicked mountains. For they were not such mountains 54 Like

Augustine, Gregory I, Moralia in Iob xxxii.1, PL 76, 668 ff., asks (on Job 40. 15) what a mountain can signify for good or evil in the Bible: ‘aliquando quilibet haereticus designatur …’ (as in Psalms 10. 1). ‘Cum enim fidei animae unitate relicta in tumenti doctrina confidere haeretici praedicatoris dicitur, deserto Domino quasi in montem transmigrare suadetur.’ [‘any kind of heretic is expressed … For when a faithful soul is bidden to abandon unity, and to trust in the swelling doctrine of a heretical preacher, it is persuaded, as it were, to forsake the Lord, and to migrate to the mountain’; Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, trans. J. H. Parker and J. Rivington, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1844–50), III, 555.] But Gregory here pursues a different interpretation of mountains as saeculares potestates. 55 Enarrationes in Psalmos cxxiv.5, PL 37, 1652 ff.; CC 40 (1956), 1839: ‘At vero de illis montibus malis quando loquitur Scriptura, non eis addit Dominum. Tales montes, iam sepe diximus vobis, significant magnas quasdam animas, sed malas. Non enim putetis, fratres, quia potuerunt fieri haereses per aliquas parvas animas. Non fecerunt haereses nisi magni homines, sed quantum magni, tantum mali montes. Non enim montes erant tales, qui susciperent pacem, ut colles iustitiam; sed illi dissensionem susceperunt a diabolo patre suo. Montes ergo erant; ad tales montes cave ne fugias! Venturi enim sunt homines et dicturi tibi: Magnus ille vir et magnus ille homo. Qualis fuit ille Donatus! Qualis est Maximianus! et nescio quis Photinus qualis fuit! Et ille Arius qualis fuit! Omnes istos montes nominavi, sed naufragosos. Videtis quia lucet de illis aliqua flamma sermonis et aliquis de ipsis ignis accenditur. Si navigatis in ligno et noctem patimini, id est caliginem huius vitae, non vos fallant nec dirigatis illuc navim! Ibi sunt saxa, ibi naufragia magna fiunt. Cum ergo tibi laudati fuerint isti montes et coeperit tibi suaderi, ut venias ad ipsos montes quasi ad auxilium et ibi requiescas, responde: ‘In domino confido; quomodo dicitis animae meae: transmigra in montes sicut passer? (Psalms 10. 2) Bonum est enim tibi, ut in illos montes leves oculos unde tibi auxilium a Domino sit, ut evadas sicut passer de muscipula venantium, non transmigres in montes’. Cf. also the Enarrationes in Psalmos lxviii, 39 (CC 39, 896 f.): ‘Multi enim sensus scripturarum sanctarum latent et paucis intellegentioribus noti sunt, nec asseruntur commodius et acceptabilius nisi cum respondendi haereticis cura compellit. Tunc enim etiam qui neglegunt studia doctrinae, sopore discusso ad audiendi excitantur diligentiam, ut adversarii refellantur’. Cf. also the Enarrationes in Psalmos lxviii, 39 (CC 39 (1956), 896 f.).

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) as would receive peace, that the hills might receive righteousness; but they received conflict from their father, the Devil. There were therefore mountains; beware that you do not flee to such mountains! For men will come and say to you “there is a great hero and a great man. How great was that Donatus!”’ A hundred years before, Donatus was the bishop of Carthage from whom came the Donatus sect, so bitterly fought by Augustine. He counted many heresy names – ‘and Arius was really something!’ – including the head of the Arians, and in his own time, Christianised Germans such as the Vandals, whose penetration across Spain to North Africa he would experience. Those heresiarchs were bad, but they were great, and for that very reason very dangerous. Augustine’s experience with heresy never would be expressed so undogmatically and so personally, without the hateful diminution he often showed in earlier writings,56 even with a certain respect for the greatness of heretics, which he fought even more decisively as great dangers. Probably for that precise reason he had significant trouble bringing himself to a brief, teachable formula on how one became a heretic and what heresy is. He had encountered it himself in his own search for truth and right belief. He could fight heresy where he found it and win from it a clearer perception of the true faith, but he could define it only with difficulty. It is precisely in this that the early Middle Ages distinguishes itself from him and patristics in general in the most surprising way: the early Middle Ages had at first no personal experience with heresy, but learned from books, from the Fathers of the Church, what heresy is and what sort of heretics there were against which one should defend oneself. It was received as theory and teaching, as untouchable authority that had not yet been experienced and lived. One could well say that this was entirely characteristic of the early medieval intellectual attitude and in many regards fateful: all too much was only learned from books and communicated to laymen through preaching. In exegesis, the understanding of the Holy Scripture, it is evident that the Bible commentaries of the Carolingian period amount to almost

56 Augustine

had written much brusquer polemic in 391, immediately after his conversion, to his friend, Honoratus, who remained a Manichaean (De utilitate credendi c. 1, CSEL 24 [correction: 25.1] (1891), p. 3): ‘Haereticus est, … qui alicuius temporalis commodi et maxime gloriae principatusque sui gratia falsas ac novas opiniones vel gignit vel sequitur’. Peter Lombard cited this in his in his commentary on Paul (PL 191, 1638; see p. 206 below), and it entered Gratian’s Decretum (c. 28 C. XXIV qu. 3, Friedberg, I, 998), but without Augustine’s continuation: ‘ille autem, qui huiusmodi hominibus credit, homo est imaginatione quadam veritatis ac pietas inlusus’. [1976 reprint: correction – the sentence does in fact appear in the cited passage in the Decretum.] [On the Profit of Believing: ‘he … is a heretic, who, for the sake of some temporal advantage, and chiefly for the sake of his own glory and pre-eminence, either gives birth to, or follows, false and new opinions … but he, who trusts men of this kind, is a man deceived by a certain imagination of truth and piety’; trans. C. L. Cornish, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, III, 347.]

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Oportet et Haereses Esse nothing but patristic citations gathered willy-nilly, even if they do not really belong together. The much-used commentary of Paul written about 840 by Hrabanus Maurus, for example, says nothing of its own on Paul’s advice about heresies and heretics to the Corinthians and to Titus. As is typical of the Carolingian approach, he simply cites the Ambrosiaster in addition to a sentence from Augustine’s sermons on the Psalms. That is, whoever reads with a poor attitude – specifically in the Bible – must understand it falsely, as that is the result and punishment of sin. But through this the sons of the Church will be awakened out of their sleep, as if by thorns, and will thus achieve on their own the true understanding of the divine scripture.57 There the theologians join Augustine in seeing God’s appointed sense for heresy: they may have assigned eternal death to the heretics themselves, but the heretics indirectly aided the scholars to a proper understanding of the Bible. There is extant around 850 a later commentary (earlier attributed to Bishop Haimo of Halberstadt or Remigius of Auxerre, but today to the little-known monk Haimo of Auxerre).58 With naive scholarly pride, it says: heresies have certainly brought the Church great benefits, not in themselves but insofar as they have awakened the doctors of the Church who were sleeping (he relies on Augustine for this). ‘The Church would never have created so many books and so much knowledge of God if heresies had not arisen, through which 57 In

his Enarratio in epistolas beati Pauli xi.11, PL 112, 102, when dealing with 1 Corinthians 11. 19, Hrabanus Maurus cited the Ambrosiaster (see note 45 above) and then Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos 8, 15 (CC 38 (1956), 46): ‘Malo enim voto per peccatum legentes male coguntur intelligere, ut ipsa sit poena peccati; quorum tamen morte filii catholicae ecclesiae tanquam quibusdam spinis a somno excitantur et ad intelligentiam divinarum scripturarum proficiunt’ (‘Those reading with a bad intention through sin are forced to understand badly, as the very punishment for sin. By the death, however, of these people the sons of the Catholic church are roused from sleep as by some thorns and progress to the understanding of Scripture’). On Tit. 3. 10 the Ambrosiaster is again cited (col. 690) as well as Jerome, Comment. in ep. ad Tit. 3:10 (PL 26, 597). On the dating, see E. Dümmler, ‘Hrabanstudien’, SB Berlin (1891), 1, 34–42; A. E. Schönbach, ‘Über einige Evangelien-Kommentare des Mittelalters’, SB Wien 146, 4 (1905), 91 ff.; J. B. Hablitzel, Hrabanus Maurus. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Exegese, Biblische Studien 11, 3 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1906); Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum, V, 9–37. 58 Haimo, Exposito in epistolas s. Pauli, PL 117, 569: ‘“Nam oportet”, id est necesse est …, non potest aliter esse. Et revera magnam utilitatem praestiterunt haereses sanctae ecclesiae, non per se, sed dum doctores excitaverunt, qui quasi dormierunt (cf. note 65 below). Nequaquam enim tantam copiam librorum haberet sancta ecclesia et tantam cognitionem de Deo, nisi haereses exortae essent, a quibus excitatus est Hieronymus, Augustinus, Hilarius, Gregorius aliique sancti doctores, qui multa conscripserunt contra hereticos’. On the author, see Pelagius’s Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul: I. Introduction, pp. 339 ff.; Affeldt, ‘Verzeichnis der Römerbrief-Kommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra’, 382 ff.; Spicq, Esquisse, pp. 50 f.; B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1952), pp. 39 ff.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Jerome, Augustine, Hilarius, Gregory and other holy teachers were compelled to write so much against heretics.’ Being aware of, and having learned from, the anti-heretical writings of the Fathers of the Church appears reason enough for heresy’s necessity even if it does not justify it – at least for theologians and scholars of a time that was having hardly any trouble with heresy. A century later it already sounded different in an explication of the Letters of Paul by Bishop Hatto of Vercelli (924–961), which he wrote before 945.59 He cited a saying of Augustine against the Manichaeans that had never before been used in this connection: ‘We must use the heretics well, making good use of them. As long as they were in the Church they are injurious; but if they stand outside the Church, they were not only not injurious but actually helpful – not as if they said anything good, we know nothing of that; but they excite and spur on the carnales who live according to the flesh, to questions and seeking (ad quaerendum), and on the other hand the spirituales, the people of spirit and religion, to declare the true and the good.’ The thought is no longer – as it was with the  Carolingian  scholars of the ninth century – only about heresy’s (unintended!) usefulness for theology, rather it is now also about its arousing effect on the faithful. However, this tenth-century text also contains an unusual example of heresy’s consequence for the tried and true: ‘As Job’, said Hatto of Vercelli, ‘whose pious way of life was known only to himself and to God, until through trials his hard testing became known to others.’ It is hard to imagine that new encounters with heresy were already detectible prior to the middle of the tenth century; but it is no longer solely academic argument of what heresy might mean for believers. Its character as a temptation to be endured is repeated over a century later in another thoughtful, influential commentary on the Letters of Paul – one which was attributed to Bruno of Cologne, the scholastic of Reims and founder of the Carthusian order. If not written by him, then it surely came from one in his vicinity.60 59 Attonis

Expositio epistolarum s. Pauli, PL 134, 378: ‘Non ideo apostolus dicit, ut … haereses esse velit, sed ideo, quia non potest esse, ut non venirent, sive ut venientibus electi viri et qui sibi soli et Deo cogniti erant, manifestarentur ut Iob. Ille enim sanctae conversationis erat sibi soli et Deo cognitus, sed ortis tentationibus aliis est manifestatus. Ita enim erant nonnulli inter Corinthios, qui dicebantur Appolliani, Petriani etc., alii Christiani, sed ortis haeresibus illi, qui Christiani erant, manifestati sunt. Sed dicit Augustinus’ (cf. De vera religione viii.15, PL 34, 135; CSEL 77.2 (1961), pp. 13 ff.): ‘Debemus haereticis bene uti. Quamdiu enim ipsi in ecclesia sunt, noxii sunt; extra ecclesiam consistentes, non solum non obsunt, sed etiam prosunt, non loquendum bonum, quod ignorant, sed carnales ad quaerendum excitando et spiritales ad bona proferendo’. On Titus 3. 10 Hatto cites only Jerome (like Hrabanus Maurus, see note 57 above). Cf. J. Schultz, Atto von Vercelli, dissertation (Göttingen, 1885); E. Pasteris, Attone di Vercelli (Milan, 1925); Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum, III, 20–2; Spicq, Esquisse, p. 54. 60 PL 153, 183: ‘… ad hoc ut “qui probati sunt” et a Deo electi “fiant manifesti in vobis” perdurantes in tentationibus, et ut reprobi fiant similiter manifesti’ (‘… to this, so that “those who have been tested” and chosen by God “may become

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Oportet et Haereses Esse During the Investiture Conflict, when simony was attacked as the most acute, worst heresy, the compelle intrare in Augustine’s interpretation was certainly more applicable than Paul’s injunction on avoiding heresy, and no commentary then appeared to be concerned with its understanding. Then, at the beginning of the twelfth century there followed the Glossa ordinaria already mentioned, from the exegetic school of Laon.61 For the first time in this context a passage of Augustine from De civitate Dei is applied: ‘All enemies of the Church, whether blinded by error or corrupted by evil, prosunt ecclesiae (‘benefit the church’), they work (‘against their will’) for the Church; for if they fight it with physical force, they practise and strengthen their toleration, but if they become enemies through false doctrine (male sentiendo [‘by bad opinions’]) they exercise and strengthen their wisdom’.62 That fits well into the later period of the Investiture Conflict, the early period of scholasticism, but it is – even with Augustine – levelled more against general enemies of the Church than specifically against heretics in the approaching (or already developing) sense of the term. Here in the Glossa ordinaria, as already said,63 one is marked as a heretic who attacks the true sense of Scripture through the very words of Scripture. Now it is definitively added why heretics are to be avoided and not engaged in long debate: if you attempt to instruct them, then they become all the more practised for evil. Through disputation

apparent among you” through persevering in temptations, and that the reprobate may become similarly apparent’). On the question of authorship, see A. Landgraf, ‘Probleme des Schrifttums Brunos des Karthäusers’, Collectanea Franciscana 8 (1938), 542–90; A. Landgraf, Einführung in die Geschichte der theologischen Literatur der Frühscholastik unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Schulenbildung (Regensburg, 1948), pp. 13 and 53 f. Whether Bruno composed the heavily used commentary in Regensburg before entering Chartreuse in 1084 has recently come into much dispute; but this location is defended by A. Stoelen, ‘Les commentaires scripturaires attribués à Bruno le Chartreux’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 25 (1958), 177–247. 61 See above pp. 189–90. On the much-studied rise of the so-called Glossa ordinaria, Smalley, Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, pp. 46 ff.; B. Smalley, ‘La Glossa Ordinaria. Quelques prédécesseurs d’Anselme de Laon’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 9 (1937), 365–400; J. de Blic, ‘L’œuvre exégétique de Walahfrid Strabon et la glossa ordinaria’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 16 (1949), 5–28; Affeldt, ‘Verzeichnis der Römerbrief-Kommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra’, 373 ff. with literature. In PL 114, it appears among the works of Walafrid. A critical edition is lacking. [See now L. Smith, The Glossa ordinaria. The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden, 2009).] 62 PL 114, 538: ‘Omnes enim inimici ecclesiae vel errore caecati vel malitia depravati prosunt ecclesiae, quia si accipiunt potestatem corporaliter affligendi, exercent eius patientiam; si vero male sentiendo adversantur, exercent eius sapientiam.’ Little changed from De civitate Dei xviii. 51, ed. Dombart and Kalb II, 336; CSEL 40.2 (1900), p. 352; CC 48 (1955), 649. Omitted here and later is Augustine’s continuation of the sentence: ‘ut autem etiam inimici diligantur, exercent eius benevolentiam aut etiam beneficentiam, sive suadibili doctrina cum eis agatur sive terribili disciplina’. 63 PL 114, 538, on Titus 3. 10.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) their erroneous doctrine learns to fight better and rob these academic Zeuses of their spiritual lightning bolts. Here speaks the confidence of the new dialectical-exegetical methods, which should not be shared with heretics, and also the growing awareness of how much depended upon correct, intellectually clarified understanding of Scripture. Now, and for the first time, the avoidance of heresy is only a question of the right theology and exegesis; for heretics of the twelfth century, in contrast, it was a question of the true Christian life, work and attitude that became much more important than all theological-dogmatic questions of doctrine. Even the Paris theologian and bishop Peter Lombard, whose textbooks would be fundamental for future scholasticism, adopted from the Glossa ordinaria word for word64 that explanation of the Letters of Paul, supplemented by a particularly promising, masterfully used sentence of Augustine from De civitate Dei, cited above: ‘The question posed by opponents becomes an opportunity to learn, because much within right belief becomes more carefully thought out, more clearly discerned, more deeply learned, if it must be defended against heretics, who throw it into stormy dispute.’ And the Lombard added even more: ‘For that reason, Divine Providence permits many heretics to exist, so that when they challenge us and ask us things we do not know, we get shaken out of our inertia and made to want to know scripture. For many are too lazy to ask unless they are woken up by the harrassment and attacks of heretics.’65 This is no longer the Carolingian glance back at the spurring effect of earlier heresies on patristics, with its justification by all the instructive books born of fighting heresy. Now the new dialectic-scholastic discipline, like the earlier patristic model, was conscious of how much its own rise was driven forward, clarified and enriched by the unavoidable duty of controversy with erroneous teachings. It is the time of the very first heretic trials, also directed against theologians such as Abelard and Gilbert de la Porrée, or earlier against Berengar of Tours and Roscellin. There they were forced to learn how to distinguish theological truth from erroneous teaching, to formulate sharply and to protect against misreading. A nit-picking, searching spirit such as the Bavarian provost Gerhoch of Reichersberg, not

64 Peter

Lombard, Collectanea in Epistolas Pauli, PL 191, 394, on Titus 3. 10.

65 Ibid., col. 1637 f. on 1 Corinthians 11. 19. After quotations from Augustine, De civitate

Dei xviii.51 (see note 62 above) and xvi.2 (see note 52 above), Augustine’s De Genesi contra Manicheos i (PL 34, 173 ff.) is cited: ‘Ideoque divina providentia haereticos esse multos permittit, ut cum insultant nobis et interrogant nos, quae nescimus, et sic excutiamus pigritiam et divinas scripturas nosse cupiamus … Sed multi ad quaerendum pigri sunt, nisi per molestias et insultationes haereticorum quasi de somno excitentur.’ [‘Divine Providence permits many heretics with their differing errors so that at least, when they insult us and ask us what we do not know, we may shake off our sluggishness and long to know the divine Scriptures … Yet many are slow to seek if they are not aroused as if from sleep by the troublesomeness and insults of the heretics’; On Genesis, trans. R. J. Teske (Washington DC, 1991), p. 48.]

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Oportet et Haereses Esse only a theoriser but a supporter of reform and certainly loyal to the Church, had to learn through his own experience to be on the watch against those hostile spirits – those who tended to call every person whose opinion did not totally agree with theirs a schismatic or heretic. For that reason he believed that in order to be able to explicate the Psalms securely, freely and without fear of hard words, he had to cover everything with a ‘truth shield’ of orthodox fathers, which could sound ‘novel to modern readers’.66 Conversely his esteemed teacher Rupert of Deutz had to defend himself against his dialectical opponents in Laon, who said that he marked every differently thinking person with heresy.67 And the philosopher of nature, William of Conches († 1145), also complained in his Dragmaticon philosophiae (‘A Dialogue on Natural Philosophy’) that every questioning, searching person was attacked as a heretic – even though words did not make a heretic, but only determined advocacy (defensio).68 Even Abelard stressed69 that a person did not become a 66 Gerhoch’s

letter to Abbot Gottfried of Admont in 1147 (dedication to the Liber contra duas hereses), PL 194, 1162: ‘Ut ergo tutus ac liber incedam in expositione Psalmorum neque timeam mihi a verbo aspero, – quoniam usitatum est quibusdam importunis vocare schismaticum vel haereticum quemcumque suo sensui viderint minus consonum, – si quae forte modernis lectoribus inusitata interponantur, antiquorum patrum orthodoxorum sententiis veris hinc inde cincta et scuto veritatis circumdata invenientur’ (‘In order that I may embark in truth and liberty on the exposition of the Psalms and not fear harsh words – because it is the practice of some troublesome people to call a schismatic or heretic, anyone they see less in harmony with their own point of view – if things are inserted which are perhaps unfamiliar to modern readers, they will be found to be girt with the true opinions of the ancient orthodox fathers and surrounded with the shield of truth’). See on this D. van den Eynde, L’oeuvre littéraire de Géroch de Reichersberg, Spicilegium pontificii Athenaei Antoniani 11 (Rome, 1957), pp. 78 ff. and 213 n. 40; P. Classen, Gerhoch von Reichersberg (Wiesbaden, 1960), pp. 125 ff. and 349. 67 PL 169, 203 f. To Abbot Cuno of Siegburg, at the front of the commentary to the Gospel of John. 68 William of Conches, De philosophia, i.23; under Bede’s works, PL 90, 1138, and under Honorius Augustodunensis, PL 172, 56. See R. L. Poole, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning, 2nd edn (London, 1920), p. 109: ‘Si inquirentem aliquem sciant, illum esse haereticum clamant, plus de suo caputio praesumentes quam sapientiae suae confidentes.’ (‘If they know anyone who is inquiring, they cry out that he is a heretic, presuming more on their own monkish cowls than trusting in their own wisdom.’) William’s Dragmaticon philosophiae (Strasbourg, 1567), p. 5: ‘Verba enim non faciunt haereticum, sed defensio’ (‘For words do not make a heretic but defending them’). 69 Abelard’s Prologue to his Introductio ad Theologiam, PL 178, 981: ‘Non enim ignorantia haereticum facit, sed magis superbiae obstinatio, cum quis videlicet ex novitate aliqua nomen sibi comparare desiderans aliquid inusitatum proferre gloriatur, quod adversus omnes defendere inopportune nititur, ut vel caeteris superior vel nullis habeatur inferior’. Similarly, Gilbert de la Porée supposedly said at the council of Reims in 1148: ‘se nec esse hereticum nec futurum, qui paratus erat et semper fuerat acquiescere veritati et apostolicam sequi doctrinam; hereticum namque facit non ignorantia veri, sed mentis elatio contumaciam pariens et in

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) heretic through ignorance but rather obstinate pride (superbiae obstinatio), and as if explaining this with his own behaviour and mishaps, he continued: ‘If anyone wishes to make a name for himself from a new teaching, he rejoices in presenting what is new and seeking to defend it recklessly against all, conceding defeat to no one’ – then one becomes a heretic, as had occurred to him. A commentary on the Pauline Letters from the school of Abelard70 also regards the source of heresy to be that one fights for self-serving, poorly masked views, to appear to be a ‘special person’ and not as a person defeated or overcome. For the commentator, it is known from Jerome or from Isidore’s Etymologies that haeresis originally meant ‘choice’ or ‘selection’, electio, which in itself could be good or bad. So that once, next to the haereses of the Pharisees and the Saducees there were also the Essenes, who were highly praised (in Josephus). Nowadays, however, one called haereses those who were electiones against the faith of the Church out of an obsession with conflict, and in their fighting and overcoming, those emerge from hiding who develop and defend the truth of the faith and are needed by God’s Church. For that reason Paul says, ‘Oportet et haereses esse’. Here that is explained with the example of the Manichees and Augustine, who already recommended dialectics as the best inevitable defence weapon against heretics, to strike them with the weapon of their own arguments as David did Goliath.71 The same commentator also discusses after Titus 3. 10 the question of whether heretics were to be damned or avoided who hold the Church’s teaching on communion and transubstantiation to be in error, ‘sicuti fortasse nonnullis videtur’ (‘as perhaps so appears to some’).72 In this he comes to no clear, unambiguous conclusion, but like all theologians and exegetes when dealing with the question of heresy, thinks contentionis et scismatis presumptionem erumpens’; John of Salisbury, Historia pontificalis x, ed. R. L. Poole (Oxford, 1927), p. 22. [He was not, he said, a heretic, and would never be one, for he was ready and always had been to recognise truth and respect apostolic doctrine for it was not ignorance of truth that made a heretic, but pride of spirit giving rise to contumacy and presuming to cause disputes and schisms; John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court, trans. M. Chibnall (London, 1956), pp. 21–2]. 70 Commentarius Cantabrigiensis in epistolas Pauli e schola Petri Abaelardi, ed. A. Landgraf Publications in Mediaeval Studies 2, ed. P. S. Moore (Notre Dame, 1939), p. 262: ‘Non dicuntur haeretici nisi ex contentione, qui videlicet, ut quasi singulares homines videantur esse, sectam quandam eligunt et electam, quamvis malam esse deprehenderint, ne victi esse putentur, ex contentione defendant.’ 71 Ibid., p. 263: ‘Contra huiusmodi cavillatores illi, qui probati sunt, resistunt, et sicut David Goliam proprio gladio interfecit, ita illos propria armatura, id est argumentis, in quibus confidebant et suas haereses sanctiunt, convincunt. Unde et b. Augustinus dicit [De doctrina christiana ii.31, PL 34, 58]: “Dialectica sacro eloquio permultum necessaria est …” De cuius laude b. Augustinus in libro fidei christiane (De ordine ii.13. 38; PL 32, 1013; CSEL 63 (1922), p. 174) videtur etiam excedere (sic), qui ait: “Disciplina disciplinarum, quam dialecticam vocant, hec docet docere, hec docet discere, hec sola scientes facere non solum vult, sed etiam potest”.’ 72 Ibid., 640 f.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse only in terms of dogmatic-theoretical errors – or of heretics of dialectical theology, against whom Anselm of Canterbury had already cautioned in his conflict with Roscellin.73 As remarkable as this early scholastic articulation of the problem of heresy is on the one hand, it is just as surprising on the other hand how little attention, even in the exegesis of the Pauline Letters, was paid to heresy of an entirely different kind. This heresy, which began to be much more dangerous for the Church, focused less on theological thought than on the religious life and effect, less on learned interpretation of the Bible, the Gospel and the letters of the Apostles and more on pursuit of the apostolic life following Christ. Even before the emergence of the Cathars and the Waldensians, Bernard of Clairvaux (a contemporary of Abelard and Peter Lombard), preached against such heretics in southern France repeatedly, almost obsessively, and always in vain. Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny wrote and Norbert of Xanten worked to the same purpose. The exegesis of the school theologians and commentators of Paul, however, seemed almost entirely insensible to the new variety of heretics. Hence it remained ineffective and helpless as this heresy grew, sprouting dangerously in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and for a time truly threatening the Church. Little of this is audible or discernible in the numerous commentaries on the Pauline Letters in the time after Peter Lombard – even as his commentary on Paul became an exegetical textbook of schools and universities, and his Sentences became the basic textbook of dogmatics upon which every master of theology had to comment in lectures. Thus in exegetical lectures, Peter Lombard’s explanation of the Pauline Letters was used as a textbook case – the ‘magna glossatura’ (‘Great Gloss’), as it was called in contrast to the shorter ‘glossa ordinaria’; it was interpreted, not the actual text of Paul.74 It would be a thankless task to scour all these later commentaries for new conclusions on the heretic problem as reflected in 1 Corinthians 22. 19 and Titus 3. 10, not least because most are unprinted or in early and difficult-to-find imprints.75 Sampling the most used and often 73 Anselm

of Canterbury, Epistola de incarnatione Verbi, Opera omnia, ed. F. C. Schmitt, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1935–57), II, 9. 74 H. Denifle, Ergänzungen zu Denifle’s Luther und Luthertum, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1905–6), I, H. Denifle, Die abendländische Schriftausleger bis Luther, 94 ff.; supplement to Luther und Luthertum 1 (Mainz, 1905), pp. 94 ff.; C. Spicq, Esquisse, p. 126. Already in the twelfth century the commentary of Gilbert de la Porrée (the so-called media glossatura) was sometimes being commented upon or glossed, rather than the epistles of Paul themselves; for example, Commentarius Porretanus in prima epistolam ad Corinthios, ed. A. Landgraf, Studi e testi 117 (Vatican City, 1945); cf. Landgraf, Einführung, pp. 81 ff. Denifle, p. 90, pronounced the process ‘Nonsense’. 75 Spicq, Esquisse, p. 399, and Affeldt, ‘Verzeichnis der Römerbrief-Kommentare der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Nikolaus von Lyra’, 369 ff., name commentaries on the Pauline epistles – most of them unprinted – by the following: Odo of Châteauroux (Paris chancellor 1238–44, then Cardinal, † 1273); the Dominican Guerric of St. Quentin († 1245); Gottfried of Bléneau († 1250); Hugh of St Cher († 1263, often

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) printed commentaries of the Dominican Hugh of St Cher, the Franciscan Peter Aureoli and Nicholas of Lyra was disappointingly thin. Perhaps there is much to discover, perhaps in the endless repetitions there are also surprises. It might, however, suffice to ask the most important independent scholars of high scholasticism, who certainly will have the most to say on it. More than a century after Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas held lectures on the Pauline Letters that were transcribed and corrected and partly expanded by him.76 Citations from Jerome and Augustine are used rarely and judiciously, and rather than compiling earlier commentaries, he considers them independently and poses logical questions: What is heresy? Why does Paul say that heresy must exist? Why are heretics to be avoided? Then he moves to definition: a heretic is one who disrespects the God-given ‘disciplina fidei’ (‘discipline of the faith’) and stubbornly follows his own or others’ error.77 Though every heresy is erroneous, not every error is a heresy. First, printed); Peter of Tarentaise († 1276); Nicholas of Gorran († c. 1295); Remigio [dei Girolami] of Florence († 1319); James of Lausanne († 1321); Nicholas Trivet († c. 1330); the Franciscan John of La Rochelle († 1322, often printed); Peter of John Olivi († 1298); Alexander of Alessandria († 1314); Peter Aureoli († 1322, often printed, ed. P. Seeböck (Quaracchi, 1896)); Nicholas of Lyra († 1349, often printed); the Augustinian Hermit Giles of Rome (†1316); Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona († 1328). There is uncertainty about whether some other theologians wrote commentaries on Paul; see also Denifle, Die abendländische Schriftausleger bis Luther. 76 M. Grabmann, Die Werke des hl. Thomas von Aquin, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 22, 1–2, 3rd edn (Münster, 1949), pp. 266–72. P. Glorieux, ‘Essai sur les commentaires scripturaires de s. Thomas et leur chronologie’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 17 (1950), 236–66, esp. 254–8. It is only the lectures on the Epistles to the Romans and First Corinthians, up to ch.10, that were written and edited by Thomas himself; the rest survive in later transcripts; see here S. Thomae Aquinatis super epistolas s. Pauli lectura, ed. R. Cai, 2 vols., 8th edn (Turin, 1953). [A clear brief account is provided by J. A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino, His Life, Thought and Works (Oxford, 1975), pp. 372–3]. 77 On 1 Corinthians 11. 19 (S. Thomae Aquinatis super epistolas s. Pauli lectura, I, 352): ‘Haereticus dicitur, qui spernens disciplinam fidei, quae divinitus traditur, pertinaciter proprium errorem sectatur.’ [‘The heretic is one who scorns the discipline of the faith handed down by God and obstinately follows his own error’; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, trans. F. R. Larcher, B. Mortensen and D. Keating (Lander, 2012), p. 235.] On Titus 3. 10 (S. Thomae Aquinatis super epistolas s. Pauli lectura, II, 326): haereticus, id est electivus (from Jerome: haeresis = electio) quasi pertinaciter adhaerens sectae alicuius, quam elegit’. [‘Hence a heretic is a selector, who obstinately clings to some sect which he has chosen’; Thomas Aquinas, ‘Commentary on the Letter of St. Paul to Titus’, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, trans. F. R. Larcher (Lander, 2012), p. 456.] In the first text Thomas provides the ‘mysterium Trinitatis, nativitatis Christi et alia huiusmodi’ (‘the mystery of the Trinity, the birth of Christ and other suchlike’) as examples of ‘articuli fidei, qui per se credendi proponuntur; unde error circa hos secundum se facit haereticum, si pertinacia adsit’ (‘articles of faith that are held up per se to be believed; and therefore error about them in itself makes someone a heretic,

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Oportet et Haereses Esse some are only erroneous teachings that contradict, either directly or tangentially, the revealed truths of the faith (‘articuli fidei’ [‘articles of faith’]) – or good morals, Thomas adds, perhaps referring to the ‘free spirit’-libertine heretics of his time. For explanation he offers the example: ‘fornicationem non esse peccatum’ (‘that fornication is not a sin’). Second, when such error is stubbornly pursued, one must submit to the judgment of the Church. Heresy does not come from ignorance but evil, for the selfishness with which anyone may contradict the entire Church is rooted in ‘superbia’ (‘pride’), the sinful polar opposite of Christian humility. The Dominican Thomas indeed says that one should not separate from a heretic until it is evident that he cannot be cured78 – in no earlier commentator on the Pauline Letters is such

if combined with obduracy’). In the second text he named erroneous teachings ‘circa finem vitae humanae vel circa id quod ad fidem pertinet et bonos mores … Si vero erraret circa ea, quae sunt ad finem vitae humanae, semper est haereticus. Et dico finem vitae humanae, quia apud antiquos erant sectae ponentes diversum finem, ut patet de Stoicis et Epicureis’. [‘If the error is … about the end of human life or … about faith and morals … And I say the end of human life, because in ancient times there were sects, each positing its own end, as is clear from the Stoics and Epicureans’; trans. Larcher, p. 457.] Perhaps that is stressed in reference to the Averroists. 78 S. Thomae Aquinatis super epistolas s. Pauli lectura, II, 326 on Titus 3. 10: ‘post primam et secundam correptionem’: Sic enim fit in ecclesia in excommunicatonibus. Et ratio est, quia numerus omnis rei habet principium, medium et finem. Ideo accipitur ut sufficiens ad omnia (citing 2 Corinthians 13. 1). Item propter perfectionem numeri ternarii. Ratio autem devitationis est, quia cum errante agendum a principio, ut corrigatur [citing Matthew 9. 12]. Et ideo non est dimittendum quousque videatur, si curari poterit; sed si non potest sanari, tunc est dimittendus’ (citing Luke 19. 22). [‘After the first and second admonition, for that is the way the Church proceeds in excommunicating. The reason for this is that the number three suggests that everything has a beginning, middle and end. Consequently, it is taken as expressing all things this is the third time I am coming to you and also because of the perfection of the number three. But the reason for avoiding a heretic is that one must start from the beginning, if a heretic is to be corrected those that are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Therefore, he should not be dismissed, until it is obvious that he cannot be cured but if he cannot be cured, then he should be dismissed I will condemn you out of your own mouth;’ trans. Larcher, p. 457.] In the Summa theologiae 2a. 2ae, qu. 11 art. 3, Opera omnia, VIII, 100, Thomas writes: ‘Haeretici (far worse than counterfeiters) statim cum de haeresi convincuntur, possent non solum excommunicari, sed et iuste occidi. Ex parte autem ecclesiae est misericordia ad errantium conversionem. Et ideo non statim condemnat, sed post primam et secundam correctionem (= correptionem), ut Apostolus docet. Postmodum vero, si adhuc pertinax inveniatur, ecclesia, de eius conversione non sperans, aliorum saluti providet, eum ab ecclesia separando per excommuunicationis sententiam; et ulterius relinquit eum iudicio saeculari a mundo exterminandum per mortem’. [‘Since forgers and other malefactors are summarily condemned to death by the civil authorities, with much more reason may heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, be not only excommunicated, but also justly be put to death. But on the side of the Church there is mercy which seeks the conversion of the wanderer, and she condemns not at

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) an opinion to be found! But if the heretic refuses to be healed of his error and stubbornness, ‘tunc est dimmitendus’ (‘then he is to be repudiated’). Unfortunately it remains unclear what that might entail: is he to be left to himself, to be avoided, as Paul wrote to Titus, or is he perhaps to be relaxed to the secular arm, as was the practice of the Inquisition already in Thomas’ time? But why must there be heresy? Does it not sound, Thomas asked himself, as if not exterminating them would be opportune, even recommended? But the fact that something had to be done did not justify the intentions of those who did it (such as the judges, who had to care for law and peace among people). It can also be necessary from God’s ‘intention’ who also ordains (ordinat) the bad to the good, as he ordained the followers of Christ to salvation and fame through tyrants. So Augustine said,79 God is so good that he permits nothing bad to happen, if he is not so powerful as to allow the good to win something from the evil. So he permits the evil of the heretics to become good for the faithful. Indeed, he has ordered (‘ordinavit’) them to it: first, for the greater clarification and proclamation (‘declaratio’) of truth, which is characteristic for Thomas the scholastic); and second, to attempt to improve the orthodox, as gold in a crucible. According to Thomas, authentication and teaching above all are God’s valuation of heresy for the faithful, for the faith and for the Church. For that reason they must exist – and yet they must be avoided. Now even historians can and must concede that heresy existed in the twelfth and thirteenth century – the Cathars, the Waldensians and other sects – and in fact had a doubly positive influence: this spur on the one side for sharpening and clarifying theological thought all the way to High Scholasticism, and on the other side for invigorating and renewing the Church. Such was particularly the case starting with Innocent III, who very consciously sought to counter the growing peril of heresy. Dominic, aided by the pope, founded an order of learned preachers with the goal of converting and combatting heretics in southern France. The great Scholastics, Albert and Thomas, belonged to that order. All the more reason to ask whether the theologically learned exegesis of these men did not lose sight of what was in the Bible, in Paul, in the Fathers of the Church, in Augustine and others about heresy – or whether it even misrepresented it as what now threatened the Church, great masses attacked by the unlearned. For this heretical movement was not activated by theological and theoretical

once, but after the first and second admonition, as the Apostle directs. Afterwards, however, if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer confident about his conversion, takes care of the salvation of others by separating him from the Church by excommunication, and furthermore delivers him to the secular court to be removed from this world by death.’; trans. T. Gilby, Blackfriars edn, 60 vols. (London and New York, 1964–81), XXXII, 89.] On a certain discrepancy in Thomas’s statements on the heretic question, see Maisonneuve, Études, pp. 361–6. 79 Augustine, Enchiridion xi, PL 40, 236.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse obsession, but sought instead a righteous, truly Christian life and work according to the directions of the Gospels and the apostles and following their model. This new, specifically medieval variety of heresy was not arrived at by theological disputations and teaching, but theology could have gained greatly from it. They had sought from Bernard to Dominic to preach and dispute, to teach the heretics without being able to convert them; that is, until Dominic himself and Francis (in an entirely different way) effectively met the heretical danger by using religious impulses comparable to those of the heretics, to live the evangelical life in voluntary poverty and apostolic itinerant preaching while remaining obedient to the Church. Pope Innocent III, with astonishingly alert understanding for the crises, forces and needs of his time, assisted on a grand scale.80 He had also reconciled many heretic groups – Waldensians and Humiliati – with the Church and made many concessions to their ways of life, not only in their doctrine of belief. On the other hand, he acted against the unmovably hostile heresy that had come to threaten the Church, particularly in southern France, directing the weapons of the Albigensian Crusade. In so doing, he also opened the way for the Inquisition, which acted utterly against Paul’s call to ignore them, and instead sought them out, tried them and burned them. In the acts and textbooks of the Inquisition, as well as in the papal bulls on heresy from Innocent III on, Paul’s advice that ‘heresy must be’ is never found, nor his advice to Titus. In contrast, the allegorical interpretation of Samson’s foxes and the Song of Songs is applied to the heretics, who are to be caught so that the Lord’s vineyard may not be destroyed, or also Augustine’s interpretation of compelle intrare to heretics. The theologians and exegetes who knew how to deal with Paul’s word had interpreted it as if heresy was an evil allowed by God, so that one could use their contradictions and stubbornness to discover theological truths and as a trial for the orthodox. There was hardly a question about the particular character, the actual impulses and directions of medieval heresy. For their part, the theologians who relied too faithfully on authorities and exegetical traditions from the fathers onward, and thought in all too learned a fashion, were simply concerned with extracting what was useful for theological knowledge. Their exegetical arguments proved ineffective and inapplicable against the true heresy of their times; they could be countered only through different means, whether more sympathetic or severe. Both ways were needed, since theological exegesis, despite its biblical source, failed to solve the problems of medieval heresy. They had received nothing from the crude, paradoxical one-sidedness of Tertullian, and from Augustine only a mass of citations without his experienced, broad-hearted sense for the scale of the threat of heresy. Thus out of medieval theology and exegesis much less is provided regarding heretics of the times and their 80 On

this see Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, esp. p. 70 ff. on Innocent III [Grundmann, Religious Movements, pp. 70 ff.]; Grundmann, Ketzergeschichte, pp. 34 ff.: Church measures against heresy.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) motivations than about heresy from the writings of Augustine and other Fathers – writings which were studied and copied in place of describing the heretics of their own times. Learned men passed this task to the preachers and isolated polemicists, and finally to the Inquisition. Armed with ‘Oportet et haereses esse’ and scholarly self-satisfaction, arms full of citations, they were nonetheless unprepared for the heretics they would actually meet. None would come as close to them in practice as had Tertullian and Augustine; instead, their knowledge was entirely derived from books. Thus the exegesis of medieval theologians reflects not so much the heresy of their time as it depicts their own relationship to patristic tradition and their own selfconsciousness as learned men – even where Paul forces them to speak of heresy. They barely noticed, or refused to see, what they could have learned from Augustine:81 that heretics were Christians who thought, lived and worked in biblical terms, which Christianity wished to ‘make real’. For the theologians, their improved knowledge and its betterment through the very necessity of refuting heretical error was more important than the reality of heresy as a problem in their own time – even though, as Paul had written, ‘Oportet et haereses esse’.82 81 For

example, in Augustine’s Enchiridion [i.5] (written after 420), PL 40, 233: ‘Si enim diligenter, quae ad Christum pertinent, cogitentur, nomine tenus invenitur Christus apud quoslibet haereticos, qui se Christianos vocari volunt; re ipsa vero non est apud eos. Quod ostendere nimis longum est, quoniam commemorandae sunt omnes haereses, sive quae fuerunt sive quae sunt sive que potuerunt esse sub vocabulo christiano, et quam sit hoc verum, per singulas quasque monstrandum. Quae disputatio tam multorum est voluminum, ut etiam infinita videatur’. [‘For if we think carefully about the meaning of Christ, we shall see that among some of the heretics who wish to be called Christians, the name of Christ is held in honor, but the reality itself is not among them. To make all this plain would take too long – because we would then have to review all the heresies that have been, the ones that now exist, and those which could exist under the label “Christian,” and we would have to show that what we have said of all is true of each of them. Such a discussion would take so many volumes as to make it seem endless’; Augustine, Enchiridion, trans. A. C. Outler (London, 1955), p. 3.] 82 Arno Borst drew my attention to a late, very personal echo. Paul Verlaine composed a poem in 1892, four years before his death, when disturbed and turned in upon his ‘intimate liturgies’, as though it could help him recover his spirits about his own heretical sins: Opportet haereses esse Que notre foi, donc, s’édulcore: Il fallait quelque humilité Afin que tu t’édulcorasses, T’a tenté, ne nous dis pas non, T’entrainant du doute impur chez Or, maintenant, courage! assez Songe au pardon du Dieu d’amour Car il faut, en effet, encore, Opportet haereses esse.

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Oportet et Haereses Esse

ma Foi qui poses et grimaces. et l’hérésiarque entêté jusque vers les pires péchés, le Diable t’ouvrant son fanon, de larmes sur l’erreur d’un jour: Opportet haereses esse. Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 47 (Paris, 1959), p. 569; first version p. 1151. [Opportet haereses esse There must be heresy For, in fact, it has to be That our faith should sometimes give way There must be heresy. You needed some humility, My Faith, you who pose and grimace, To make you buckle; And the stubborn heretic Tempted you – and don’t say otherwise – Into the worst of sins, Leading you from impure doubt to The devil, opening up his wattle. So now, pull it together! Enough Tears over the error of a single day, Think of the pardon from the God of love. There must be heresies. (translation © Professor William Burgwinkle, 2019)]

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6 Learned and Popular Heresies of the Middle Ages* By Herbert Grundmann

In the proposal defining this colloquium’s objective and framework, Monsieur Le Goff posed the following questions: ‘Is heresy a matter for simple people or for the learned? Were there popular heresies and learned heresies? Did they play the same roles in the process of spiritual awareness? How did learned theorising and popular belief relate to the development of that heresy?’ Without a doubt, there were learned heresies throughout the Middle Ages – that is to say, dogmatic, theoretical and intellectual heresies that were the work of theologians or philosophers such as Abelard, Gilbert de la Porée, the Latin Averroists of the thirteenth century and many others. After being accused of divergence from Church orthodoxy, they were condemned as heretics. In view of such learned heretics, one cannot generally assert (as did Monsieur Le Goff) that ‘there is no such thing as an isolated heretic’. To be sure, learned heretics could have followers who were not disciples in heresy, and thus could teach without a heretical sect necessarily being formed. And since the Church sought at all costs to isolate learned heretics, the inverse could also take place; in other words, learned heretics belonged to a social group composed not of fellow heretics, but rather of fellow learned persons. They vied with each other for intellectual standing (‘more wise than it behoveth to be wise’, as St Paul said in Romans 12. 3), without consciously opposing either the faith of the Church or Catholic dogma. Yet at times learned heretics were indeed at the origin of a popular heresy or of a heretical sect. For example, John Wyclif was certainly a very learned theologian, a master of Oxford University, who only became a heretic after a long life as a professor and without ever wishing to create a heretical sect. Wyclif had almost no learned disciples in England, and it was only after his death that the Lollards became sectaries. On the other hand, despite

* ‘Hérésies

savantes et hérésies populaires au moyen age’, lecture presented at the International Colloquium at Royaumont in 1962. Original publication in Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle. 11e–18e siècles, Communications et débats du Colloque de Royaumont, ed. Jacques Le Goff, Civilisations et sociétés 10 (Paris, 1968), pp. 209–14.

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Learned and Popular Heresies of the Middle Ages his posthumous condemnation, his doctrines became popular in Bohemia through professors at the University of Prague. Likewise, Jan Hus died on the pyre at Constance in 1415 without having founded a heretical sect; the group that derived from his doctrines and bore his name did not form until several years after Hus’s death. What is certain is that neither Wyclif nor Hus were members of any heretical community, belonging instead to their clerical university group. Many comparable cases from the centuries after Christian antiquity testify to the pattern: Bishop Arius and the Arians, Bishop Donatus and the Donatists, the learned monk Pelagius and the Pelagians and so on. Even the first medieval heretics in the West, condemned and burned at Orléans in 1022, were learned men and masters in the schools of Orléans. They were of noble origins, with ties to the royal court at Paris, though almost nothing is known of their ties with widespread heretical sects of this era. Nearly two centuries later, around the year 1200, the heretic Amalric of Bène was a professor of the young University of Paris. A very subtle thinker (the contemporary chronicler of Laon says subtilissimus), he was esteemed by the king and perhaps even by the pope, to whom he appealed when his colleagues challenged his orthodoxy. It was only some years after his death that trials were launched against his disciples, priests and clerics of the Paris region; they were accused of having recruited devotees of their errors and lay and female sectarians. In a certain sense, it was the same with the learned Franciscan Peter of John Olivi and his posthumous adepts, beghards and beguines of Provence and Languedoc. Meister Eckhart, professor of theology at the Dominican Studium generale of Cologne, as well as the heretical mystics of Germany, brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit, offer an analogous case. In all these cases one must ask to what extent the doctrinal and religious motivations of these learned heretics were equivalent to those of their later followers, and in turn, what social factors of a learned heresy were modified to become a popular heresy. One cannot analyse and comprehend this transformation without accounting for the differences existing between the heresiarchs – that is, the original, primary and initial heretics on the one hand, and on the other hand the followers of pre-existing heresies, the sectarians. More than once, new heresies apparently attached themselves to an already adopted heresy or combined themselves into new forms. For many reasons, one must admit that a heretical sect was never able to preserve intact the doctrine of its heresiarch. I am willing to believe that the determination and social structure of a heretical sect could equally absorb modifications and changes. And this is all the more true if one thinks of medieval heresy in general. But does not the distinction that I propose between the heresiarchs – the initial and original heretics on the one hand and the sectarians of pre-existing heresies on the other hand – align with the distinction between learned heresies and popular heresies? Or rather, do heresies of a popular, non-learned origin exist in the Middle Ages? Are there non-learned heresiarchs? It cannot be doubted. But then, what does ‘popular’ mean? It is not the antithesis of 217

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) ‘learned’, except that in the medieval period, one could designate under the term ‘popular’ everything that is not clerical or monastic and literate, everything that is lay. The laymen of the Middle Ages, including the nobles, were in general illiterate; they were themselves incapable of reading the Bible or any other text. Auditors and not readers, they listened to preachers, poets, minstrels and heretics (like the Cathars’ auditores). But, if I am not mistaken, the point of departure for all heretics was always the effort to grasp the original and authentic intentions of Christianity; that is to say, to attain the true understanding of the Bible, the Gospels and the apostolic writings – essentially to be able to observe and realise the revealed divine will. One cannot find a single heresy in the Middle Ages that did not claim exactly that. Very few medieval heresies were founded on an immediate inspiration, on a vision or personal reasoning; almost all heresies, including Catharism, supported themselves on the Bible and alleged an interpretation divergent from that of the Church. But to read the Bible and seek to understand the Scriptures oneself, it is necessary to risk falling into heresy. See how rare it is for a layman to become a heretic without being pushed into heresy by others more learned than he – that is, by heretical propaganda. Here it is necessary to remark once again that the causes pressing an individual toward and into heresy could differ from those permitting the heresy’s birth. The best-known, most important example of a non-learned heresy of popular and lay origin is that of the Waldensian sect, whose founder, Valdes, was neither learned, nor literate, nor a cleric, nor a monk (as had been the case with so many of his predecessors, including Henry the Monk, Peter of Bruis the priest, Arnold of Brescia the canon and so on). Valdes was a rich merchant of Lyon, married, unable to read the Latin Bible or any other theological writings. One day, on the street, he encountered the Song of Alexis, recited in French by a minstrel. He was deeply touched by it. What was he to do? He approached two priests and two literate clerics of Lyon and asked them how, according to the Bible, one could become perfect as God wished. He had the New Testament, the Psalter and some patristic writings translated into French. He learned them by heart and began to preach on the roads. When the archbishop prohibited this activity, he became disobedient and heretical, because, he said, according to the Gospel one should obey God rather than men. And all of his companions would know by heart, as did he, biblical texts translated into vernacular languages to spread the Word of God among his friends. A German heresiologue of the thirteenth century, the Anonymous of Passau, is most impressed by the heretics’ collective zeal for biblical instruction. To those who excuse themselves and say they do not have the head to learn, they respond, ‘Learn a new word every day, and at the end of a year you will know three hundred words, so that you make progress’ (et sic proficies). The Anonymous says, ‘Erubescat negligentia fidelium doctorum’ (‘One should be ashamed of the negligence of faithful teachers’), to Catholic clerics, who do not know as many biblical texts as these perfidious heretics [Anonymous of 218

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Learned and Popular Heresies of the Middle Ages Passau, De causis heresum (On the Causes of Heresies), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser, ed. A. Patschovsky and K.-V. Selge (Gütersloh, 1973), p. 71]. Nevertheless, these heretics never became learned. The Waldensians never had the ambition to develop a learned and speculative theology as did many other heretical sects from the Cathars to the Hussites. In this setting, the Waldensians represented the non-learned, lay and popular sect par excellence, despite the fact that I do not believe that the original intent of this sect was of a popular or social character; they were religious, they were Christian, they were biblical. One may always study the social structure and social impact of this sect, separated from the Church almost against its will, since they were persuaded that they had discovered in the Bible the true lesson a Christian’s life must obey in searching for salvation. This sect equally separated itself from the society of its time without ever becoming revolutionary, aggressive or subversive. On the contrary, in general they attracted pleasant and pacifist people in town and countryside, visited by their itinerant preachers, to whom they listened and to whom they confessed. These were ‘die Stillen im Lande’ (‘the quiet in the land’), the prototype of a Christian sect, the sole medieval sect to have survived to our own days despite all the persecutions of the Inquisition. It was entirely different with the Cathars, to whom the early Waldensians were opposed without ever mingling with them. No one can say who founded the Cathar sect. If the Cathars were Manichees, their eponymous heresiarch Mani was a very learned and speculative man. If they were Bogomils, their heresiarch could have been a Bulgarian priest. The Cathars themselves knew nothing of either of them. In the West, it was itinerant preachers who imported Catharism from the East along with its Greek name. At the outset they preached a sort of apostolic and evangelical life by giving themselves as an example – no doubt why they were well received. But then they revealed their dualist doctrine, which is neither of popular origin nor purely biblical. It was an oriental cosmology and mythology, derived from Manichaeism and absolutely incompatible with the doctrine and morality of the Church. Perhaps it was this contrast that won more sectarians for the Cathars among the rich and nobles of Languedoc and Lombardy than the dualist doctrine itself and the Cathar cult. I would willingly believe that the Cathars exercised a real attraction to certain social levels of the society of the twelfth century, much more due to their bitter opposition to the ecclesiastical hierarchy and Catholic doctrine than by their strange dualist doctrine or their rather severe, rigid morality. Still, there were Cathars claiming to be learned who wrote theological books in Latin to display their dualist cosmogony and their moral consequences. Making use of biblical arguments as shown by the Liber de duobus principiis and other writings recently recovered, these Cathars sought to become learned, just as they had sought to become popular. At length they failed on both fronts. I agree with my friend A. Borst that the reason why Waldensians survived while Cathars vanished was not only due 219

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) to the crusade against the Albigensians or the Inquisition. Catharism was too complex a phenomenon, an amalgam of Oriental and Western elements, religious and speculative, popular and learned. It was very active, even aggressive for a certain time; later, it grew discouraged, defending itself, but it was beaten and disappeared after 1300. It seems to me quite difficult to analyse the social structure of the Cathar sect, which is neither homogeneous nor constant. And I doubt that it had a durable effect in the process of forming the Western conscience. In conclusion, I will say that the concepts of heresy and the heretic are negative notions that were formed by contrast and contradiction against the faith, dogma and cult of the Church, and against the morality of its clergy or the attitude of the hierarchy. These contradictions were not created by non-believers, sceptics or pagans, but by dissatisfied and deceived believers. And the factors determining these contradictions and oppositions were very diverse: they could be intellectual or religious, moral or social, or even political. The sole common denominator for all medieval heresies, whether learned or popular, appears to me that all were convinced that they comprehended and realised Christianity better than the Church that condemned them. Their creations, their intentions, the ends they pursued, the effects they obtained are of such diversity that one cannot distinguish in a general way either their profound causes, nor their role and social structure. To study these, it would be necessary not only to establish a distinction between learned and popular heresies, but equally to make a distinction, as I am trying to demonstrate, between primordial or initial heresies – those of the heresiarchs (learned or not, founders of sects or not) – and the heresies of the sectarians. It is one thing to agree about an existing sect under the effect of the propaganda it generates, and it is another thing to become a new heresiarch arbitrarily following his own authority. Perhaps historians of the Church and spirituality, of thought and personality, will interest themselves first of all in the initial heresiarchs, while social history will naturally prefer the social aspects of heretical sects to the study of properly religious or intellectual phenomena of emerging heresies. As our colloquium deals with the study of heresies and societies, it must not fail to touch on the relationships between the heresies of the heresiarchs and those of their followers and sectarians. Perhaps this distinction will prove more important than that which is established between learned and popular heresies.

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7 Obituary Essay (1970) By Arno Borst*

In 1928, the young Dr Grundmann invoked Joseph Bernhart’s warning against any man ‘who steps out into the deep night with a weak flame, barely illuminating his own face’.1 In 1950, the mature Professor criticised the German attitude ‘Everyone walks through the darkness of history with his own light, and he feels enlightened in his blindness’.2 And in his old age the President of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica elaborated on Goethe’s phrase ‘Where it is going, who knows? He can hardly recall where he came from’, saying in 1967: ‘We historians attempt to recall this and to grasp how it came about; we do this by projecting into the future, always with the wish that it will lead to the good life.’3 Where his own thought and action originated, and where it was headed, Herbert Grundmann was reluctant to say; when he did so it was tailored to a certain audience. But now that this life that clarified so much has been fulfilled, one may try to illuminate the face of * Original

publication in Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 26 (1970), 327–53. The original included cross-references within the main text to items in the bibliography of Grundmann’s works; here we have moved these to footnotes, and inserted additional footnote material for clarification and amplification on various points throughout. 1 [Joseph Bernhart (1881–1969), Catholic theologian and author. Here and below, references to Grundmann’s works, cited by Borst, are identified by the number allocated to them in the bibliography which follows in this volume. From 1 to 95a these numbers are the same as those in the bibliography compiled by Hilda Lietzmann. This was published in DA 26 (1970), 354–67 and reprinted in H. Grundmann, Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 3 vols., MGH Schriften 25.1–3 (Stuttgart, 1976–78), I, 26–37, with an additional item from 1971 and cross-references to the 1976–78 reprints. The reader needs to turn to Lietzmann’s bibliography for nos. 96–168, which are a miscellany of reviews, reports, memorial notices and encyclopaedia articles, which we have not reproduced in the bibliography to this volume. Where these are cited below they are preceded by ‘Lietzmann’.] 2 No. 47, p. 115. 3 [Grundmann presided over several learned societies, most important of which was the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) whose head is simply called ‘Der Präsident’. The quote is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Egmont, Act II: Egmonts Wohnung.] Lietzmann no. 162, p. 81.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) the man who lived it. The motivation should be neither private curiosity nor professional reverence; a life so frankly consistent across forty years as these three citations indicate could teach us how we might live with history today – and that we must know. Grundmann never hid where he came from but, rather, mocked himself with the remark that he shared his speech patterns with Otto the Great, ore iucundo saxonizans (‘with a mouth fit for Saxon’).4 Among his ancestors who worked as small-scale peasants and artisans in eastern Saxony, he particularly loved a teacher who – a bit of a black sheep in his family – emigrated to America. As determined as he was to move beyond his predecessors’ horizons, however, he retained their values: thrifty and industrious management, respect for solid craftsmanship, and quiet self-confidence based on accomplishment. His father rose from trading in yarn to become the joint owner of a stocking factory, and wished that his only son would eventually take over and expand the firm. But the young Grundmann resisted commercial gain in the absence of artisanal merit; even in his childhood he subscribed to Jesus’ motto of voluntary poverty (Matthew 19. 21) which Valdes and Francis had encountered in a similar setting. Among a circle of friends and at the YMCA – but not seeking out the approval of others – Grundmann early on sought his own understanding of the Christian Gospel and its realisation; here lay the deepest root of his life’s work. He was less close to his father than to his mother, who promoted strong literary and musical talents in him and his sister, awakening their enjoyment of theatre, concerts, chamber music and piano. She died before he went to university; afterward he clung to his parents’ house as little as he did to his native town, Meerane, where he had been born on 14 February 1902. After his second year of life he grew up in Chemnitz, attending the Higher Boys’ School from 1908, and from 1912 the branch for languages and classics at the town’s Realgymnasium. Taught by outstanding teachers, he launched himself into all the subjects the school offered, from philosophy to music, enriching himself through his own reading in literary circles and musical groups to receive a complete education as much centred on activity as on insight. Introduced by a history teacher to Spengler’s historical prophecy,5 the senior student was so drawn to the opening future after the lost war that he wanted to become a journalist. Having completed the graduation

4 [‘Speaking

Saxon with a pleasant voice’ is a quote from the poem De Heinrico (tenth century, part of the Carmina Cantabrigiensia). According to some Germans, the dialect of Saxony is not very pleasing to the ear and thus frequently the butt of jokes.] 5 [Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), German philosopher whose main work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2 vols. (Munich, 1918–23) – trans. C. F. Atkinson, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (London, 1926–29) – presumes a cyclic rise and fall of civilisations.]

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Obituary Essay (1970) examination with distinction, he went in April 1921 to Leipzig, the nearest university. To please his father he took economics and continued faithfully with that subject throughout his studies, even though other subjects and teachers had attracted him from the very first semester: history with Walter Goetz,6 economic and social history with Alfred Goren, sociology with Hans Freyer, and particularly idealistic philosophy – first with Theodor Litt, then with Hans Driesch and Johannes Volkelt.7 Wherever this broad course of study might lead or to what fulfilment – he did not himself want to know. In summer 1922 Grundmann went for a semester to Heidelberg, and for a further semester to Munich in summer 1923. Here his interests began focusing and deepening. The literary disciplines became points of concentration, influencing him in Heidelberg through Friedrich Gundolph, in Munich through Karl Vossler and Fritz Strich; and history, absorbed in Heidelberg through Hermann Oncken, Eberhard Gothein and Friedrich Baetchen, and in Munich again through Oncken and Paul Joachimsen. Joachimsen, an inspiring teacher, understood history, as he said in a presentation in 1930, as ‘making sense of a past related to the present. It is always given and a challenge at the same time. It should tell us where we stand, whence we come, and indicate to us whither we must go to fulfil our destiny.’ Grundmann experienced more than this in Joachimsen’s lectures on the ‘Prehistory of the Reformation’; he learned that in history the Christian religion was determined by the same dynamic tension between evangelical ideal and church reality that moved him personally. This course dealt with the span between Francis of Assisi and Boniface VIII, the riven but open epoch of the Later Middle Ages, centuries ‘that still are formless, dark and confused, but also fruitful and idea-filled, a corridor between the perceived unity of the medieval past and the actual unity of the present’.8 It was here that Grundmann caught the spark. When he returned to Leipzig in 1923, it was certain that he would not take over his father’s business – which later collapsed in the world economic crisis – nor would he be any longer involved in economics, business or profit. Now the literary disciplines dominated his studies, pursued with Friedrich Neumann, André Jolles, Eduard Sievers, Julius Schwietering and Herbert Schöffler, among others.9 Here in literature, as in philosophy and history, the 6 [Walter

Goetz (1867–1958), 1915–33 professor of history at Leipzig, in Munich after 1945. Unlike most of his colleagues, Goetz was a partisan of liberalism and democracy (a follower of Friedrich Naumann, 1860–1919) and retired after the Nazi seizure of power. Untainted by association with Nazism, he was asked immediately after the war to resume important positions, such as the presidency of the Historische Kommission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.] 7 [Alfred Doren (1869–1934), Hans Freyer (1887–1969), Theodor Litt (1880–1962), Hans Driesch (1867–1941), Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930).] 8 No. 1, p. 192. 9 [Friedrich Neumann (1889–1978); André Jolles (1874–1946); Eduard Sievers (1850– 1932); Julius Schwietering (1884–1962); Herbert Schöffler (1888–1946).]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) abundance of stimuli did not prevent the clear delineation of his goals;10 above all, he was helped by the newly promoted Privatdozent Johannes Kühn (no. 162).11 Kühn’s Habilitationsschrift investigated the tension between tolerance and revelation in German Protestantism in the sixteenth century: it dared to take the step from learned criticism to a bold confession that connected to the present without clinging to daily vicissitudes. Kühn’s first teaching in winter 1923/24 dealt with German Mysticism in the fourteenth century, a subject including theology, philosophy, literature and history. The course also generated Grundmann’s interest in sources and timelines, a field of study which he had previously underestimated, guarding against vague speculations and providing a solid foundation of evidence for broad questions. Grundmann’s first words in Kühn’s seminar were ‘I think there is a wrong translation here’. In this way the polarity of modern hermeneutics joined with late-medieval themes, beginning Grundmann’s lifelong balancing act between the extremes. The temptation of other schools grew strong. The most powerful for the Spengler reader came from the Forschungsinstitut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte [= Research institute for cultural and universal history] in Leipzig, where Karl Lamprecht had sought to establish rules for history from cultural philosophy and social psychology.12 Grundmann remained sensitive to Lamprecht’s questions, as later to Toynbee’s,13 though the former’s systematising answers soon alienated him. Yet he was not entirely willing to enter the opposing camp, the Historisches Seminar, where Gerhard Seeliger and Erich Brandenburg taught him close investigation of individual details and analysis of political entanglements with an almost surgical precision. Grundmann’s pulse quickened for none of these, but instead for the atmosphere of the kulturhistorischen Institut [= Cultural-Historical Institute]. It was located in the ‘Golden Bear’, in the old Breitkopf House, where the young Goethe had been a guest.14 Grundmann loved the creaking floorboards, the 10 [A young

intellectual such as Grundmann was likely to read across a wide array of subjects, as there was practically no syllabus in those days.] 11 [Privatdozent is the title of a scholar who has finished his Habilitationsschrift and is accepted by the faculty, but does not yet have a position. Grundmann thereafter maintained a correspondence with Johannes Kühn (1887–1973).] 12 [Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), a rather unconventional figure in German academia, both for his comprehensive view of cultural and economic history and the unique structure of his institute, which was independent and did not belong to Leipzig University. Lamprecht’s work was much disputed and rejected by the majority of his German colleagues, leading to the ‘Methodenstreit’ of the 1890s, but his unique grasp of guiding principles and structure of history was widely influential for future generations of scholars.] 13 [Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975), an English historian whose massive account of the rise and fall of civilisations – A Study of History, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1934–61) – was once very influential.] 14 [Leipzig’s Goldener Bär was an inn which became a publishing house (hence

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Obituary Essay (1970) dark corner of the library and the dim glow of the study lamps by which he rummaged through the immeasurable treasures of books. Under Goetz, Lamprecht’s academically open-minded successor, he could seek his way undisturbed; that he was allowed to do so prompted him to thank Goetz as his true teacher even decades later, more deeply even than for all the technical and methodological guidance.15 The late Middle Ages fascinated him, but not as precursor, as with Joachimsen and Kühn’s eye for early modern religion, nor with Goetz and Lamprecht’s focus on cultural or economic results. Here he found the topic of his life: those who, inspired by the Spirit, wanted to renounce and thus transcend the world while simultaneously and with great confidence changing it … all without knowing what would come of it. Of such communities there were many in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, muffled, confused, barely organised and difficult to fathom. Grundmann concentrated his questioning in 1925 on the one man considered ancestor of the spiritual movements, Joachim of Fiore16 – Joachim himself has not been as carefully studied as has his subsequent influence. Grundmann swiftly wrote the book about him; on 8 March 1926 he was promoted summa cum laude, and in the next year it appeared in the Cultural Historical Institute series. Its main theme is the Intelligentia spiritualis of Joachim, liberated from the prejudice of its time and daring a free view of the past to prepare the way for the coming Church of the Spirit. Joachim and his biographer shared the conviction, at odds with the dominant Augustinian and Thomist concept, that ‘perfection was not sought beyond everything earthly, a negation of mutability, but rather perfection could be a condition on earth, a possibility that could be achieved both in life and history’.17 The spirit of history could not be grasped through furious action or speculation; for Joachim and Grundmann alike, it must be patiently derived from the interpretation of complex texts and events, and every answer remained subject to future correction. It was of primary importance to establish Joachim’s authentic text. In his dissertation, Grundmann had announced a critical edition of Joachim’s three chief works,18 but these plans accompanied him for his entire life; he never completed it, nor was he ever again free of the figure of Joachim. The modesty of the theological scholar, who thought and rethought his texts again Goethe’s visits) and eventually home to scholarly institutions. The baroque building was destroyed in World War II.] 15 Lietzmann nos. 149, 151, 153, 154. 16 No. 1. 17 No. 1, p. 11. 18 [These are: Psalterium decem cordarum, ed. K.-V. Selge, Fonti per la storia d’Italia, Antiquitates 34 (Rome, 2009), and MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 20 (2009); Concordia novi ac veteris testamenti, ed. A. Patschovsky, 4 vols., MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 28 (2017). The Expositio in Apocalypsim has not yet been edited.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) and again, captivated him – as did the audacity of this religious prophet who spurred his future. The fact that things went differently in the Late Middle Ages than the scholar had conjectured, and that the future had misunderstood or forgotten its prophet, formed the conclusion of Grundmann’s dissertation and catalysed future works. The dissertation, still up to date in 1966,19 explored a nerve centre of medieval disruption and manifold influences; it cast a view both backwards and forwards, on symbolic exegesis of the Bible and the teachings of history in the twelfth century, and on Franciscan Spirituals and the free-spirit heretics of the fourteenth century. Grundmann would return to this later, but first he went further down the path he had cleared in a new direction: to the orders and sects of the thirteenth century. As usual, he did not bind the work to a ‘life’s plan’, and did not want to know what would come of it, or of himself. Yet Goetz pressed him to do his Habilitation, and gave him in 1926 one of the Institute stipends with which young scholars could work for two years on self-chosen themes without the burden of academic duties.20 Grundmann used this freedom to travel extensively in France and Italy to prepare an edition of Joachim’s work; source-critical articles on Joachite historical prophecy and biblical commentary followed.21 Grundmann did not participate in the comparative research that Goetz conducted with the other stipendiaries; instead in 1927 he dedicated an essay to his advisor that pointed in a new direction, ‘The Profile [Typus] of the Heretic in Medieval Perception’.22 Pious medieval individuals who resisted dominant forms of thought were pressed into social-psychological moulds by their contemporaries, and are thus misrepresented by the sources; modern viewpoints, including sociological research that should dismantle such prejudices, have in fact reinforced them by isolating heretics as marginalised outliers separated from the official Middle Ages. What really bound heretics to their own times? That question was answered by Grundmann’s most important book, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, on which he worked for nine years.23 On its appearance in 1935 it enriched the image of the Middle Ages by an entire dimension. The long subtitle joining heretical sects, the mendicant orders, the women’s movement and German mysticism was a response to a divided research situation. Catholic historical writing classified monks’ associations according to the static ordo-principle and orthodoxy of doctrine,

19 No.

77.

20 [Grundmann’s

Doktorvater (doctoral advisor) Walter Goetz became Lamprecht’s successor at the Leipzig Institute in 1915.] 21 Nos. 4–7, 10, Lietzmann no. 96. 22 No. 2; [chapter 1 in this volume]. 23 [This period would span the years from 1926 to 1934; that is, Grundmann revised the book even after his Habilitation in July 1933.] No. 13, preliminary works nos. 9, 11, 70.

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Obituary Essay (1970) while Protestant historiography separated sects from the Church, again on the basis of dogmatic distinctions. Grundmann, who in these years of ecclesiastical struggle had also separated himself from all ties to organised religion, shook the ramparts with Freyer’s motto,24 which he placed in the front of the book: ‘The historian restores history to the elemental state which prevailed when it was still in the course of being decided. He makes it into the present once more, reviving its acute alternatives.’25 These words were directed against any kind of superficial update: against a theological perspective which accepted the medieval groups’ religious motives, but judged them according to modern certainties, and no less against a materialist view that understood medieval piety as masking proletarian social need.26 At the moment Grundmann vigorously pursued the roots of religious movements in their own twelfth century, he now had to postpone their relationship to origins and impact. The investigated groups, like Joachim, were oriented by original Christian norms and the approaching end times; but their historical role, only half-known to themselves, arose through criticism of contemporary powers and concrete desires for reform. The common theme of these efforts following the Gregorian Reform, the shared root of all these religious movements, was endeavour for an evangelical life and apostolic poverty in the spirit of Matthew 19. 21. The bearers of such guiding principles were not oppressed but, rather, leading, spiritually alert groups earnestly desiring to enact a literal Christian life. Though their striving for an exemplary life superseded the demand for dogmatic justification, that does not necessarily make them heretics. Striving to act on the spirit of the Gospels, these communities did not at first become ecstatic followers of charismatic leaders and prophets. If Grundmann’s book indeed had a hero, it was not the saint, Francis of Assisi, but the pope, Innocent III.27 Innocent was sensitive to religious dissatisfaction; he permitted it to express and shape itself in order to make it more fruitful, even for the hardened institution of the Church. Unlike Joachim, he did not commit himself to a beatific 24 [Grundmann

left the Protestant church in October of 1934. In Germany, Church and State are not fully separated, as members of the official Protestant Landeskirchen and the Catholic church pay a church tax collected (together with income tax); a formal leave of church membership must therefore be filed when departing from the church.] 25 No. 13, p. 5; no. 104, p. 1. 26 [It is an open question to what extent Grundmann’s work was motivated by political opposition to Marxism and an idealistic view on history. When he returned to Leipzig (then a city in the German Democratic Republic) in 1956 to give a paper at the university, he spoke about the origins of medieval universities and idealised the motivations of its founders, who, according to him, were solely guided by their thirst for knowledge for knowledge’s sake.] 27 [Review of Das Register Innocenz III (Rome, 1945) and Registrum Innocentii III papae super negotio Romani imperii, ed. F. Kempf (Rome, 1947), in Zeitschrift der SavignyStiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 37 (1951), 416–31.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) vision of the future; he made his future at home in the banal everyday of the Church. Starting in 1198, he formed associations of itinerant preachers and poverty enthusiasts as organisations within the Church, steering the differentiation and definition of the new mendicant orders as well as the forced expulsion of heretical sects. In this way Grundmann demonstrated the common roots of the religious movements as well as their later branches, at least until the moment of their institutionalisation. Here he broke off; the organisation of monks and heretics and their effect on society were not his theme. Thus he never addressed the social origin and position of the pious as a motive for demanding poverty, acknowledging only their religious goals. This obscured many multifaceted intersections of orders and sects within their surrounding environment and with tradition; the most surprising gap in the book, which Grundmann himself later regretted, was his silence about the religious–political heretic Arnold of Brescia. Yet this narrowing emphasised all the more clearly the ethical, dynamic core of the movements and their inner unity: a life in the spirit which manifests through active piety and for that very reason forms groups. The central thesis was verified through painstaking review of multiple groups’ interrogation records, which many critics found tedious and taxing, perhaps also due to the lack of lustre in Grundmann’s writing; for him, however, these passages were the ultimate demonstration of his craftsmanship as a historian. Yet there were objections from positivist scholarship which sometimes did not see the forest for the trees.28 For German medieval research of the 1930s the book was too ambitious, too explosive, too far astray from the royal road of political history.29 It was attentively studied in foreign countries, however, and his thesis tested against other examples; here it proved its great fruitfulness. Yet not until the Historical Congress in Rome in 1955 did it became obvious that Grundmann’s work had stimulated many branches of research, and even helped encourage a dynamic concept of the Middle Ages. 30 The long out-of-print book was published again.31 With this masterpiece, Grundmann received his Habilitation on 28 July 1933 from the philosophical faculty of the University of Leipzig. It earned him supporters and friends: Hermann Heimpel, who appropriately honoured 28 The

review in the first issue of Deutsches Archiv 1 (1937), 256–7. impression over forty years later may be accurate, but there are other explanations for the lack of circulation and reception at the time. From Grundmann’s papers in Leipzig, one gets the impression that the book was voluminous and expensive; at a time when Germany was still recovering from the depression, few libraries and even fewer individuals might have been in the position to acquire a copy.] 30 Nos. 36–37. 31 No. 59. [Borst’s phrasing that the book was ‘vergriffen’ (out-of-print) could suggest good sales, but the complete edition was destroyed during the war when the press storehouse burned down during the bombing of Berlin.] 29 [Borst’s

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Obituary Essay (1970) it,32 and other Leipzig professors, who invited the quick-witted man into conversation and social engagements. That he did not immediately receive a call to a chair at a German university had political reasons. Neither he nor his teacher were members of the [National Socialist] Party, and although he did not engage himself politically, his scholarly attitude had a political impact. An example of this was his review of Kantorowicz’s book on Emperor Frederick II, which appeared on 30 April 1933.33 For Grundmann the Hohenstaufen was indeed a Teuton, but no German; akin to Innocent III, he was seen as a mediator between intellectual movements and political actions.34 But even on this field, Grundmann found contingent circumstances temporally shaped by decisions of individuals, not teleologically by the mythic power of a Führer. It was not merely as an expert on medieval eschatology that Grundmann refused the apocalyptic exaggeration of Frederick’s lasting impact on the future. In 1935 he dared to criticise the ideologically excessive interpretation of Eckhart by the powerful Erich Seeberg35 based on an Eckhart text36 and received an aggressive response: ‘Are such products of a substantially reactionary discipline, which exhausts itself in the production of non-sellers, still recommendations for chairs or promotions?’37 Lacking in resources as he was, Grundmann could not even concentrate on teaching as a Privatdozent; though he held seminars in Leipzig, he found few students and little resonance. That did not concern him because, like Cassiodorus, he did not work for the moment, and because he could continue his endeavours. Support came from a position that Erich Brandenburg had already given him in 1928: as the successor of Kühn, he was on the staff of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences editing in Leipzig the

32 Historische

Zeitschrift 158 (1938), 363 ff. [Hermann Heimpel (1901–88) came to Leipzig University in 1934 as the successor of his teacher Siegmund Hellmann (1872–1942), who lost his position in 1933 because he was Jewish (he perished in the Theresienstadt ghetto). Heimpel and Grundmann soon became lifelong close friends. The very late date of the review – in the second issue of the renowned Historische Zeitschrift for 1938 – suggests the speculation that Heimpel was doing a favour for his friend, as there had been few reviews in the preceding years.] 33 Lietzmann no. 101. [Review of E. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Text und Ergänzungsband (Berlin, 1927–31) Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung 66 (1933) no. 18, 30 April; reprinted in Stupor mundi. Zur Geschichte Friedrichs II. von Hohenstaufen (Darmstadt, 1966), pp. 103–8.] 34 Nos. 14, 79, 80. 35 [The Protestant theologian Erich Seeberg (1888–1945) became a member of the Nazi party in 1933. At that time, he was dean of the Protestant School of Divinity at Berlin University and one of the most influential figures of Protestant academia.] 36 Lietzmann no. 105. 37 Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 8, issue 87 (1937), 395; cf. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 56 (1937), 89ff. [The Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte was a journal founded in 1930 by Alfred Rosenberg.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) acts of the Augsburg Imperial Diet of 1530 and its prehistory. In 1937 he married the Joachimsen student Annelies Scherrmann, who also worked at the Historical Commission, and provided him a firm, friendly counterpart in scholarly disputes for the rest of his life.38 The published works of these years reveal Grundmann’s predilection less for pure editing than for interpreting source details in the context of problems. Some studies still pertained to the area of Religiöse Bewegungen, such as those on Meister Eckhart;39 two others sketched the beginning of works that would be carried only out decades later. The Habilitation colloquium summary delivered in 1933, ‘Principles of the Medieval View of History’, plumbed the confusing, multifaceted historical concepts to pinpoint one common to all, the belief in a fixed order of time.40 The essay ‘Women and Literature in the Middle Ages’ identified the origins of vernacular literature in the linkage between clerical writing traditions and the oral education of laypeople forged within circles of courtly and pious women, introducing a history of medieval literature not yet in vogue.41 He could give only a preliminary essay on the importance of the Reich as idea and reality for the development of the German state and people.42 Moreover, the topic of a Probevorlesung [job talk] on the evolution of electoral forms in the Middle Ages had to be left fallow for thirty long years.43 These projects reveal that Grundmann was already seeking a method of combining intellectual and political history. The fact that he could see through political realities and resistance as well as intellectual posturing is evident in the most beautiful product of his docent period, the portrayal of the High Middle Ages and the German imperial period in the second Propyläen-Weltgeschichte.44 In the first edition, Karl Hampe had presented the same period in serene balance tempered by the circumspection of old age. Grundmann’s contribution introduced many colourful details and a new aspect to the whole: he stressed the variety of 38 [Dr

Annelies Grundmann (1906–2009).] 15 and 16. 40 Nos. 12 and 61. 41 No. 18; [chapter 2 in this volume]. 42 No. 17. 43 Cf. nos. 71, 81, 93. 44 No. 19. [Borst uses the verb durchschauen (to see through) here to indicate that Grundmann was above political realities and capable of looking behind ideology and egotistical motivations. This perspective aligns with Grundmann’s self-image after the war – namely, that of one who had always been distant to the regime. However, for the suggestion that the contents and tone of the volume suggest a degree of political opportunism, and that Grundmann was not always consistently distant from the National Socialist regime, see Anne Christine Nagel, ‘“Mit dem Herzen, dem Willen und dem Verstand dabei”: Herbert Grundmann und der Nationalsozialismus’, in Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. H. Lehmann and O. G. Oexle, 2 vols., Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 200–201 (Göttingen, 2004), I, 593–620.] 39 Nos.

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Obituary Essay (1970) active characters and their changes (such as with Barbarossa), the interweaving of opposites among all groups, even small ones, and the tensions between the epoch’s alternative options as a whole. He wrote in a vibrant, flexible language that channelled the hopes and anxieties of the medieval sources – world history as the shifting endeavour of men, the best of whom may err yet do not succumb. It is understandable, if regrettable, that this picture of the High Middle Ages almost disappeared in the turmoil of war; until the 1960s, Germany possessed nothing comparable.45 Meanwhile, Grundmann concerned himself little with the reverberations and later fate of his writings; he had long moved on. After eleven semesters as a Privatdozent, two calls reached him in early 1939 – to Freiburg and to Königsberg. He answered the call to take up the chair of medieval history at Königsberg University, where he became Baethgen’s successor. He now entered a landscape that had always attracted him (since his youth he had been a devotee of broad stretches of water and long-distance swimming) and a university that in these years drew numerous young scholars. With the Germanist Hermann Gumbel and the historians Alfred Heuss, Kurt von Raumer and Theodor Schieder,46 he soon formed hearty friendships. The Königsberg Scholars’ Society [Learned Society Koenigsberg] received him as a member; and in the Kant Society he found an intense intellectual companionship extending beyond the academic circle, one evidently troubled by the war in the East and particularly allergic to Hitler’s politics.47 That Grundmann felt at home in Königsberg can be gleaned from his first forays into local and regional history.48 In lectures that remained unpublished, he dealt with the relationship of Kant to history, with the Eastern policy of the Middle Ages, with the Hanseatic League and the German Order [Teutonic Knights]. One essay, using the specific example of the Teutonic Knights, revived the general question of how the vernacular entered administration and the historical writing of history, and how it changed reality in so doing.49 A lecture on Barbarossa’s shifting image across the epochs of German national consciousness revitalised plans begun in Leipzig and, along with

45 [Borst’s

praise of a text which is a controversial read today is surprisingly uncritical for such an unorthodox historian, but reassessment of historiography penned during the Nazi and post-Nazi years is a development that took place only after this obituary came out. The disappearance of the Neue Propyläen Weltgeschichte is, again, due to poor sales (it was a luxury edition with gilt edging and included facsimiles of high quality, a wartime effort bestowed only on editions dear to the regime) and the destruction of the press’s warehouse during the war.] 46 [Hermann Gumbel (1901–41); Alfred Heuß (1909–95); Kurt von Raumer (1900–82); Theodor Schieder (1908–84).] 47 [The texts of Grundmann’s unprinted lectures in his papers at Leipzig do not confirm this interpretation.] 48 Lietzmann no. 147. 49 No. 20.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) two basic reviews,50 evinced his growing interest in Barbarossa’s biography. The question of ‘religious movements’ and the experience of war stimulated a penetrating study on twelfth-century mercenary armies – the reprehensible gangs similar to pious communities but arising out of social unrest, who gathered and travelled across various lands until they were absorbed by strengthened state authorities.51 Yet these essays remained fragmentary, since the war brought all work to a halt. At first Grundmann was spared from active war service because of his age and weak eyesight, but he was still summoned to lecture before highly varied public audiences: at University weeks, in Volkshochschule [community colleges], to camps of German officers and refugees and to French prisoners of war.52 After brief anti-aircraft service in autumn 1941, he was called into the infantry in autumn 1942, but landed in a staff writing room in Königsberg, where he had to continue lectures and presentations. After a pause for breath at the University, he was once again called in 1944, this time as a truck driver, where he failed the driver’s examination, and entered an officers’ training course together with others of his age, subsequently participating in an anti-tank defence regiment. No special arrangements were made for Private Grundmann, and in February 1945 his left wrist took a bullet; the wound healed in a prisoners’ hospital, but it made it impossible for him ever to play the piano again. He sensed, at first in conversation with sceptically stoic soldiers, and then through his own physical being, how absurd the press of history can be for the individual, but it was characteristic that he made no attempt to dodge the deadly senselessness. If death had missed him in 1945, Grundmann – who was also in a severe automobile accident in 1959 – was simply curious why destiny had spared him, and believed above all that he had just been lucky. In summer 1944 he was appointed successor to Gerd Tellenbach at the University of Münster, where Raumer had preceded him in 1942. Grundmann’s wife and three children left for Westphalia before the Russians occupied Königsberg;53 in July 1945, he would be released from an English prisoner of war camp to join them.

50 [Reviews

of P. Rassow, Honor Imperii: Die neue Politik Friedrich Barbarossa 1152–1159 (Munich and Berlin, 1940), in Historische Zeitschrift, 164 (1941), 577–82; E. Otto, Friedrich Barbarossa (Potsdam, 1940), in Historische Zeitschrift 170 (1950), 354–5.] 51 No. 21. 52 [The ‘highly varied’ audiences included SS cadets to whom Grundmann read a paper in 1943. It was printed in a 1944 volume, but Grundmann denied its existence. Missing in the bibliography drawn up by Lietzmann, it is listed in the bibliography in this volume, as no. 21a.] 53 [The Russian conquest of East Prussia in 1944–45 and the actions by both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army inflicted horrors on a hapless civilian population between the front lines. Clearly aware of the looming threat, Grundmann made strenuous efforts to secure himself the post of medievalist at Münster University in West German Westphalia, while his wife brought their three small children to the

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Obituary Essay (1970) The following fourteen years in Münster would be the most fruitful in Grundmann’s life. They resembled his Leipzig student days insofar as the future again appeared completely open after the catastrophe, and perhaps this time it would flourish. The city and University of Münster had been destroyed; the family was located far outside, in Lengerich, and had to wait a long time for an apartment in Münster. The Historisches Seminar was at first located in the Staatsarchiv in dreadfully cramped quarters, then on the edge of the city in desolate brick barracks. But Grundmann found his tiny office pleasant – at least the groaning of the barracks planks reminded him of the ‘Golden Bear’. Returning to his favourite themes of those years, he presented only preliminary updates in 1950 on Joachim of Fiore,54 in 1951 on Innocent III55 and in 1955 on the religious movements.56 The fact that the works of his youth had meanwhile achieved canonical status irritated him; he preferred to address questions that he had previously posed but never answered. What particularly moved him were the ideas of the Cologne canon Alexander of Roes, a man he had encountered in 1930 in connection with Joachite historical teaching and of whose works he had made a partial edition.57 After 1945, those ideas grew in importance. In the 1280s, after the decline of German imperial power, Alexander had dedicated himself not to völkisch (German) complaining about lost world power, nor to the frantic prophecies of the Spirituals; he had soberly considered the imperial situation and was the first to attempt to ‘describe the political and cultural order of Western Christendom and the individual peoples contained in it, to establish it historically, and to justify it’.58 Bolstered by ecclesiastical schism and imperial reform across Germany,59 Alexander’s ideas resonated in Westphalia, and not only among scholars;60 in vernacular translation, Alexander’s Latin works helped to clarify the historical and conceptual world of lay nobles and citizens.61 With forethought and the cooperation of his friend Heimpel, Grundmann published a masterful German translation of Alexander’s writings in 1949.62 He was decidedly in favour of translations (often suspect to scholars), if they met academic standards.63 What warmed him even more to Alexander of Roes was the discovery that he had written his

Palatinate where her parents lived – a region less prone to bombing and, most of all, not likely to be taken by the Red Army.] 54 Nos. 25 and 31. 55 Lietzmann no. 121. 56 Nos. 36–38. 57 No. 8. 58 No. 24, p. 5. 59 No. 30. 60 No. 22. 61 No. 23. 62 No. 24. 63 Lietzmann nos. 126, 132.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Memoriale in four different versions and ‘relentlessly believed that he could improve his first version’:64 he was a man who stood by his conclusions and yet remained open to new experience. This before all else, not scholarship for its own sake, led Grundmann and Heimpel to edit Alexander’s work on the basis of more than seventy manuscripts and their widely scattered variants, and to publish it in a monumental edition in 1958.65 Grundmann’s instincts were moved in a new direction because Alexander of Roes, like some of his contemporaries, wished to grant scholarship and university a rank equal to the papacy and the Empire.66 Where did this unusual esteem for the university in the medieval world come from? The genetic investigation, ‘On the Origin of the University in the Middle Ages’,67 searched for the common motivation of various groups forming higher schools from the twelfth century on, and concluded, ‘The origin of and reason for universities [lies] not only in a general pressure for education or in the need to create professions, nor in state or ecclesiastical, economic or social interest, as much as they later made use of the university or even overpowered it, but rather in the spontaneous desire to know and discover for the sake of truth, even at the risk that it is unpopular and leads to conflict.’68 Perhaps Grundmann underestimated the intertwining with practical interests which, at least in the juridical and canonistic parts of higher schools, operated more strongly than in the foundation of orders and sects. But he judged the institution, in whose house he felt at home, from his own experiences and expectations, and not only the positive ones. When he gave a lecture in his old university town in 1956, he sought to warn Leipzig, as later West Germany, that state interventions and utilitarian considerations could once more alienate the university from its mission. Grundmann’s presentation at the Ulm Historikertag [History Day] in 1956,69 directed against the increasing solidification of political and cultural horizons, became a creed for him.70 Already in the Middle Ages, freedom was what it is today: not only the safeguard of dependence on public order, but also support for enabling an autonomous, many-faceted, open life. The essay of 1958 on the educational norm of the litteratus was permeated with a related tone, scholarly and oblique.71 It resolved Grundmann’s question of the tension between the laity and the literary language through a broad historical survey. 64 No.

43, p. 23. 43. 66 No. 32. 67 Nos. 40, 47, 56. 68 No. 40, pp. 58 f. 69 [The Historikertag in Germany is a congress organised every two years in a different city by the two main professional associations of historians: the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands and the Verband of history teachers.] 70 Nos. 41 and 46. 71 No. 49; [chapter 3 in this volume]. 65 No.

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Obituary Essay (1970) After the mass migration of peoples, knowledge of writing was increasingly limited to the Church; thereafter persisted the non-written education of the laity, separate from the Latin literature of the clergy. Only in the twelfth century did new social layers and groups begin to bridge the two through an ‘illiterate’s literature’ in the people’s language: knights, mendicants, mystics and citizens. It arose not from marginal traditions and powers, but from living communities that wanted something new. When Grundmann returned to regional history, he was guided by a similar idea. The German tribes are not spontaneously generated, interchangeable blocks but, rather, living communities that continually change;72 even today, one can derive ‘no generally valid formulas or usable prescriptions’ for how history would develop in the future ‘from historically looking back’.73 It was a bitter pill for die-hard Westphalians to swallow.74 Grundmann valued their power of persistence, but only when they did not resist renewal. When the Münsterites wanted to rebuild their bombed-out cathedral exactly as it had been before, he commented, ‘Too bad for the lovely ruins!’75 He felt himself drawn to another representative of this nation, to Gottfried von Cappenberg, who had barely earned a glance in the Religiöse Bewegungen of 1935. This powerful warrior-count gave away all his influence and property to found, in his father’s castle, the first German Premonstratensian establishment and to enter the order with his entire family. It moved Grundmann that Cappenberg ‘was radically serious with this decision, unmoved by all resistance and temptation and unconcerned for what would become of himself and his dependents, what could develop from his property and foundation, and that he brought this to a sudden, bitter end where no one could follow him’.76 The magic of this saint prompted Grundmann to investigate his statue of 1263 in the Münster Domparadies [cathedral cloister],77 and to explicate the history of the Barbarossa bust of Cappenberg.78 In so doing he was intrigued by the similarity of pictorial and literary idealisation to the living appearance of the Hohenstaufer, but he did not pursue his earlier intention to write a biography of Barbarossa; other things lay closer to hand. The writings of the golden fifties bear witness to how well Grundmann now felt in the university community. In the first post-war years he worked in the 72 [Franconia,

Saxony, Swabia, Lotharingia and Bavaria as the historical ‘Stämme’ of Germany.] 73 No. 39, p. 607. 74 [Borst seems to allude to a controversy of sorts, but no explanation as to its nature is yet known.] 75 [This could be a hint that the free thinker Grundmann and the Catholic inhabitants of Münster (with its equally Catholic-dominated university) were, at least on occasion, not on the same page.] 76 No. 52, p. 15. 77 No. 51. 78 No. 50.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) Hofgeismar Kreis [Hofgeismar Circle]79 on plans for university reform – until he remarked that the institution was less to be renewed through theoretical planning than through the personal attitude of its members. Thereafter he worked in the philosophical faculty, as dean in 1947/48 and continually as a mentor.80 In meetings he was a blunt critic who did not accept tradition for its own sake, pierced even trivial excuses and was adamant against alliances on behalf of petty interests. Yet his combative, often sarcastic, intelligence was without tactical motives; when confused colleagues asked what they were to do now, he would sit with them for the rest of the evening over beer while searching for fitting solutions. The respect he enjoyed was beyond dispute, because he did not use it for himself.81 His domain remained research, and herein lay the cooperation that had become indispensable to him in Leipzig and Königsberg. He was among the first German historians to make connections with English colleagues.82 Along with the philosopher Joseph Koch and the Germanist Schwietering he was a principal support of the Cologne gatherings, where medieval researchers of various specialties gathered.83 In Münster, he founded a Mondkreis [Moon Circle] with the Germanist Jost Trier and his trusted Raumer;84 therein professors of many disciplines, not only medieval, waged learned wars with one another regularly every month, when the full moon replaced the destroyed street lighting (hence the ironically pompous name of the circle). Out of this cooperation emerged the series Münsterschen Forschungen, beginning in 1950,85 and what was perhaps Grundmann’s most charming essay, ‘Jubilation’, presented to his neighbour Trier for his birthday, passed ‘over the fence dividing the specialties’.86 This history of the word for wondrous joy charged into the thicket between biblical exegesis and mysticism, inwardness and eccentricity, Hebrew, Latin and German, following wayward historical paths before ending in roguish cheers for the birthday celebrant. 79 [Hofgeismar

is a small town in the north of Hessia where a circle of reform-minded university professors met in order to discuss matters of reform in academia.] 80 [After his Entnazifizierung (de-nazification, a process that mainly consisted of filling out an extensive questionnaire), Grundmann was considered unbelastet (clear). He had been neither a member of the Nazi party nor an office-holder of Nazi organisations; he did not give a list of his publications during the Nazi period as was requested in the questionnaire.] 81 [Borst paints the picture of a disinterested ‘elder statesman’, but Grundmann was a very active and shrewd networker and power-broker, as revealed in his papers and in the publications of Peter Herde; see n. 189.] 82 No. 27 and Lietzmann no. 148. 83 [Biennial meetings at the Thomas Institute. From 1962 their papers have been published in the series Miscellanea Mediaevalia; no. 94 is an example.] 84 [Joseph Karl Koch (1885–1967); Julius Schwietering, see n. 9; Jost Trier (1894–1970); Raumer, see n. 46 above.] 85 Nos. 25 and 50. 86 No. 33.

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Obituary Essay (1970) When the Assistants joined forces to form a heated debating circle of Mondkalben [Moon-Calves],87 Grundmann would have been happy to participate, but did not want to interfere. In particular, he encouraged the young fellows to their own opinions. In a class in 1956, he provoked a dispute in which an English student and a Franciscan wildly pelted each other with the arguments of Gilbert de la Porrée on the one side, Bernard of Clairvaux on the other. Grundmann was overjoyed as long as the fighting cocks did not agree. He did not overvalue discussion, especially not in the Teutonic style of working through fundamentals, but if a participant had his own ideas – perhaps even new ones – that should be enough. From such seminars grew thirty-three dissertations in fifteen years,88 some on themes far removed from Grundmann, such as ‘House and Court in West-German Traditional Law’.89 Works on spiritual and religious movements were not numerous but important, such as ‘Gilbert of Poitiers and His Trials in the Judgment of His Contemporaries’90 or ‘The Beginnings of the Order of Austin Friars in the Thirteenth Century’.91 Most of the doctoral dissertations dealt with historical concepts and writing, such as ‘Modernus and Other Concepts of Time in the Middle Ages’,92 ‘Studies on the Latin World-Chronicle’,93 ‘The “Life” of the First Bremen Bishop Willehad’,94 and ‘Writing History and Politics in German Towns of the Late Middle Age’.95 Grundmann repeatedly discussed medieval historical perception in seminars before presenting his first lecture on the topic in 1953; after 1957 emerged a book on genres, epochs and the characteristics of historical writing in the Middle Ages.96 The work gives the impression that it developed gradually out of complex discussions and that it followed the original framework of his Leipzig essay. One feels that this work had gradually fused with and grown out of these complex discussions. Further, that over time the original framework of his Leipzig article [his 1934 ‘The essential features of medieval historical views’]97 – just a sketch of the principles – had been progressively 87 [‘Mondkalb’

in German is a rather affectionate nickname for an uninformed, naïve person.] 88 [Quite a few of Grundmann’s pupils became eminent scholars of their own right, such as Kaspar Elm, Anna-Dorothea von den Brincken and Alexander Patschovsky. Not as a formal Doktorvater, but as teacher and scholar, Grundmann assisted even more historians, from Germany and abroad, such as Robert Lerner and Kenneth Pennington, and welcomed brief visitors (e.g. Peter Biller).] 89 H. Dölling, 1956. 90 S. Gammersbach, 1957. 91 K. Elm, 1957. 92 W. Freund, 1956. 93 A. D. von den Brincken, 1956. 94 G. Niemeyer, 1953. 95 J. B. Menke, 1957. 96 Nos. 42, 72, 89 and 91. 97 No. 12.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) fleshed out textually with materials about the characteristics of particular periods and the systematic traits of the genres in which historians wrote. Unfortunately this remains the sole literary witness to Grundmann’s teaching. Indeed, he held himself to be a poor teacher, particularly because he never formed a school. The colourful ad-hoc circle of his students and assistants certainly did not constitute a school and, as an anti-Simonist, he did not enjoy their preoccupation with securing livings. But he was an educator for freedom as few others. He never proffered ready theses or themes, but challenged others to do their own research by wilfully not finishing certain trains of thought. Grundmann’s lectures contributed much to this, although he summarily dismissed them as mere necessities. Each semester he formulated them anew and wrote them out word by word, since he had great trouble as a speaker. But when he stood at the podium, gesticulating, often stopping, then suddenly rushing on, he usually abandoned the manuscript and launched into the topic with a stubbornness and agility that swept his listeners along with him. Most impressive for many was the lecture of winter 1952/53, ‘The Imperial Ideal in the Middle Ages, Idea and Reality’, which derived from the Leipzig plan for a history of the idea of the Reich. Its tension consisted of the fact that the apparently consistent, traditional idea received ever new colours from the political embedding which changed constantly and did not always produce an actual new situation; one might argue that Grundmann did not yet know when and how the next crowning of an emperor would come to be. He later published only fragments.98 One finds little of Grundmann’s piercing questions, his hunger for contradiction or his clever intuitions in the enormously informative 1954 contribution in Gebhardt’s Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte (nos. 35, 95).99 The beginning, which marked the turn of the Middle Ages around 1200, pleased him as a drumroll; the end, via the eastern movement, the Teutonic Knights, and the Hanseatic League, reminded him of Königsberg. Otherwise he grumbled about the obligatory division of history into paragraphs as well as the excision of individual subjects from their contexts. His contribution intertwined intellectual history and political history, and the restriction to German history pleased him so little that when he began editing the Handbuch, he offered his students a lecture cycle on European history. What allowed him to get through his toilsome work was a didactic idea in the foreword

98 Nos.

34, 63, and Lietzmann no. 168, the encyclopaedia article ‘Kaisertum und Papsttum’. 99 [This handbook, founded by Bruno Gebhardt (1858–1909) at the end of the nineteenth century, is one of the most authoritative and influential manuals of German history, composed for students, teachers and scholars alike. Grundmann was the general editor for the eighth and ninth editions, which were in ample use for half a century, from 1954 into the 2000s. In 2001, the tenth edition appeared with a new organisational framework.]

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Obituary Essay (1970) to the first volume in 1954: a distinction between the ‘generally important’ and the ‘particular’ is mostly arbitrary, and also not justified on educational grounds. That was casually stated, as something personal often was; only later did he reject in principle the distinction between individual events in ‘Gebhardt’ (‘knowledge of details’) and a ‘knowledge of truth’ that evaluates the whole.100 Between editing and interpreting, he tolerated no division, nor between the particular and the general, between research and teaching.101 If proof were required that the connection between research and teaching is not self-evident, but only occasionally possible – and then extremely contagious – Grundmann would have supplied it in Münster. Nevertheless, editing ‘Gebhardt’ was a way-station along the road that led him out of the University. Since he had been unable to withdraw, he jumped in (as he put it), in order to continue the work that, begun in 1891, had already become an institution of the German historical discipline. He took over a similar legacy in 1950 as co-editor of the Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, which his teacher Goetz had edited;102 from then on, Grundmann bore the chief burden of editing. For each contribution he carefully attended to citations and page numbers, even style and punctuation, and not always to the author’s delight. On the whole, however, he did not wish to focus the journal, and he was of the opinion in 1968 that the Archiv had proved itself ‘as a frame – almost a changeable frame – for much that in the course of time could be gathered here better than elsewhere’.103 Yet the journal never became a forum for discussion, because Grundmann was selective about engrossing themes and original authors, and desired neither a thematic programme nor a closed group of contributors and colleagues. Since he had scruples whether the continuation was worth it, he plagued himself, and others plagued him; he once said to me, ‘It is easier to found than to close, starting is easier than ending, helping a birth is easier than allowing to die – or to keep alive.’ Such justification for the continuing tradition was often to be heard from Grundmann in the later Münster years, probably because it was no longer evident within the learned guild and brought more work than honour. Grundmann repeatedly accepted new duties from old institutions.104 The Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, created in 1886, elected him as treasurer at the time of its revival in 1946; he sacrificed much effort over five years to financially safeguard the association through thriftiness. In 1946 the Historical Commission elected him a member; after that he oversaw the Newer Series of the Acts of the Imperial Diet (Junge reihe Reichstagsakten), and finally

100 Lietzmann

no. 162, pp. 78 ff. no. 29, p. 547. 102 [A renowned journal founded in 1894.] 103 AKG 50 (1968), 2. 104 [Indeed, Grundmann accumulated a variety of positions that made him one of the most powerful medievalists and historians in the scholarly world of his time.] 101 Cf.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) submitted his own contribution after working on it for twenty years. From letters and acts of 1530, it microscopically reconstructed the contentious back and forth of political negotiations, plans and intrigues.105 How deliberately Grundmann placed himself in this ambivalent continuity is shown by his critical look backward in 1958 on the ‘divided, not always enjoyable, but entirely informative history’ of the undertaking.106 The Zentraldirektion of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica elected him in 1947 as one of its members. Here he launched a new intellectual history source series dealing with the exegetical and historical-theological literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,107 continuing a dormant series from the Leipzig Institute and reviving ‘our largely ossified general picture of the Middle Ages’.108 If the nineteenth century’s cooperative project treated new areas, it would also serve the twentieth century. Grundmann took over the leadership of this series, in which his Joachim editions would be included, full of great expectations. What came of it was something quite different: in December 1957 the Zentraldirektion of the Monumenta elected him as successor to Baethgen as its future president.109 For a long time he considered whether he should accept the election and leave the University. The growing numbers of students and the encroaching impersonality of the ‘teaching business’ depressed him, but could he live without the everyday debates with students and colleagues? At the Munich research institution whose worldwide fame tempted him, he hoped to be able to continue his research as well as teaching advanced students. Could a lively circle be stimulated there that could radiate to the University, which was suffocating in vocational education, and scholarship drowning in publications? Despite such hopes, the feelings of the 57-year-old as he departed Münster in April 1959 resembled those of Gottfried von Cappenberg; he did not want to establish himself where he pleased, he wanted to work where he was needed. What would come of it remained to be seen. When Grundmann was named President of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica on 1 May 1959 by the Bavarian prime minister, he did not (like the Westphalian count) come as an equal into a convent having departed the troubles of the world;110 he took on the solitary office representing the historical discipline of the German Middle Ages to the whole world. 105 Nos.

44 and 48. 45, p. 132. 107 Nos. 26 and 29. 108 No. 29, p. 547. 109 [The lengthy process with its scholarly intrigue and struggle is traced by Peter Herde, ‘Die Auseinandersetzungen über die Wahl Herbert Grundmanns zum Präsidenten der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (1957–1959)’, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 77 (2014), 69–135.] 110 [Count Gottfried of Cappenberg (1096/97–1127) left the world with his wife and entire family to join the young Premonstratensian order.] 106 No.

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Obituary Essay (1970) To this office he committed his high reputation as a scholar, but what it additionally demanded and what he gave it were other than learned virtues. He designed no new programme; in response to the question he said, ‘The Monumenta has had its programme for a century and a half.’ He had never wanted to be a manager and planner, and he saw once more that the prosperity of the institution depended on the people who bore it. In order to protect their work against disruption, he now dealt with legal and administrative problems on a longer and more fundamental basis than he had expected. The first question could be answered relatively quickly: the old-age care of permanent co-workers and appointees, previously handled case by case, was replaced in 1961 by insurance from the Pension Institution of the Federal Republic and Federal States on a fixed basis that became an exemplar for similar institutions.111 A second problem was more serious. Due to its amorphous legal position, the Monumenta had been changed twice through state intervention, in 1875 and 1935 – not always to its disadvantage, but from outside nonetheless. In shrewd, tough and ultimately dramatic negotiations, Grundmann and his helpers succeeded: as of 3 April 1963 the Monumenta was granted the status of a corporation of public law by the Bavarian minister of cultural affairs, and hence vested with a high degree of autonomy. The new organisation and election ordinance assured a free presidential election through the Zentraldirektion, yet also burdened the president with additional responsibility by abolishing division leaders, the ‘seconds in command’. The obvious had been accomplished, but a glance at the future demanded further measures. The provisional post-war residence of the Monumenta in Meiserstrasse allowed co-workers neither direct access to the library nor concentration at the writing desk. With the help of all participants, Grundmann finally found a perfect home for the Monumenta in the Bavarian State Library. After the move was planned in 1963, years’ worth of effort was needed on details; but when the Institute actually moved to Ludwigstrasse in December 1967, the prepared work places and library spaces surpassed immediate needs. This was the groundwork for the president’s next plan, the expansion and alteration of the circle of co-workers; once accomplished, his successor could perhaps have that model working association of which Grundmann dreamed. Indeed few colleagues were continually in the institute, since most taught in German universities. Although this had long caused frequent changes of editors, delaying their cooperation and slowing the completion of editions, it was yet tolerable as long as the source-critical foundation of medieval studies remained firmly established in all universities. The actual combination of study and editing had in the meantime been given up, but the

111 [The

wages paid by scholarly institutions such as the MGH were notoriously meagre, though improved since the 1960s.]

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) institutional element survived until the confusion of university reform from 1965 onwards began to endanger the long-term work of the Monumenta.112 The problem arose in early 1966 with the question of Grundmann’s successor; it also touched on the junction between universities and the Monumenta, because it had become standard practice since Georg Waitz113 that the person elected as president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica must be an experienced university professor.114 At the very least, the future president and associates of the Monumenta had to be on equal footing with university professors and graduates. Grundmann saw that this would determine the future of the Monumenta, and he did everything to resolve it, even that which affected his own fate; as difficult as it was for him to hold this office, upon reaching retirement age in 1967, he extended his term year by year until the question of succession and status could be settled. Yet he would have happily returned instead to his desk, to his scholarly projects. Though he never saw the resolution of his succession question, Grundmann persisted; at the solemn celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Monumenta in 1969115 as well as at the plenary meeting of the Zentraldirektion in March 1970, a week before his death, he showed ‘energy and intellectual capacity that was as suited to the cause as ever’.116 Ever open to new needs, he also dropped old convictions. Having silently absorbed large financial losses upon changing from Professor to President, he now fought like a simoniac for salaries, subsidies and positions for others. He had never wanted to tear research and teaching apart, but now he left the overcrowded universities to their teaching obligations in order to save the Monumenta and research. He had agitated against ‘The Middle Ages for Simpletons’ that was to be bred at planned university institutes for medieval studies;117 he himself did not want to restyle the Monumenta into an Academy of the Middle Ages, because to him what was before, around and after it all lay dear to his heart. At this point, relationships to Medievalia that he had formed in all directions concentrated themselves: connections with Monumenta advocates in East Berlin, Vienna and Zürich, with supportive foreign German-speaking academies, with foreign medieval institutes in Brussels, Paris, Rome and Prague. Cooperation from many other professional bodies, particularly the international commission for the reworking 112 [University

reforms since the mid-1960s sought to rein in the quasi-absolute power of the Ordinarien, the tenured owners of professorates, and to establish boards with collective decision making, in which lecturers, untenured assistants and even students had votes. The academic establishment was not happy.] 113 [Georg Waitz (1813–86), was a renowned professor of history at Göttingen University before he became president of the MGH in 1875.] 114 Lietzmann no. 158. 115 No. 92. 116 DA 26 (1970), I. 117 No. 85, p. 137.

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Obituary Essay (1970) of Potthast’s repertory of sources,118 demanded from him what he had earlier not particularly valued: organisation and planning, specialisation and coordination. Grundmann stuck with the office that continually gave him ever new duties, but also manifold satisfactions. He saw with pride the high recognition that he received for his office as well as his scholarly works, although he otherwise was not very sensitive to honours; his membership in the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and in the Société des Bollandistes meant much to him. He sought and found conversational partners everywhere, at the academies in Göttingen, Leipzig and Munich, whose member he was, with the members of the Zentraldirektion, with the colleagues of the Monumenta, with visiting colleagues, with foreign doctoral candidates, with the students with whom he held textual studies as an honorary professor at the University of Munich. He now had fewer disputes; the outsider and maverick, as he called himself, had ‘gradually learned the charm of getting along’. And when he spoke with others, it was often on technical questions that people could agree about, not about the ‘fireworks of self-confirmation’ that disturbed him in Festschriften and congresses. Most of all, this restless activity benefitted the Monumenta, its reputation and its work. He moved business forward; slowly but surely new editions appeared that then passed across his desk to the occasionally sluggish publishers. His yearly reports in the Deutsches Archiv bluntly indicated where progress had halted or contributors departed;119 but they also recorded in satisfaction that almost all divisions, not only the intellectual history series or the late-medieval sources, were advancing and that long overdue plans for Early- and High-Medieval editions were finally fulfilled. One must consult the president’s annual report for details, but on the whole it seems that he became increasingly patient the longer he undertook and led the ever-beginning, oft-interrupted and never-completed work of editing. In the end it was ‘as if the sources themselves waited patiently for their editor’.120 He himself had to set aside the collation of the Concordia novi ac veteris testamenti of Joachim of Fiore,121 but someone, sometime, would pick it up again. That this work was hardly noticed by the public, overcome by the noise of everyday, now disturbed him in Munich as little as before in Leipzig. ‘Everyone does his own’, he wrote in 1960, ‘and there is no final harmony. But what can anyone

118 [August

Potthast (1824–98), wrote an overview of medieval sources (Bibliotheca Historica Medii Aevi), later re-edited as Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi, 11 vols. (Rome, 1962–2007); now ‘Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters’, www. geschichtsquellen.de.] 119 Lietzmann no. 165. 120 No. 92, p. 13. 121 See n. 18 above.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) do in the end that perhaps can be used again? It seems ever more like the labour of Cassiodorus.’ Grundmann’s scholarly writings from his Munich period are reminiscent of Cassiodorus’ aged wisdom. The old themes, and some new ones as well, were no longer composed as large books but, rather, as investigations and essays, bricks left for later, placed one next to another. Predominantly individual studies about new discoveries or hitherto misunderstood sources, they precisely observe the thinking and doing of individual persons. Alongside these (and publication of the ninth ‘Gebhardt’ edition) there stand a pair of concluding observations on the Middle Ages, perhaps the most exciting that Grundmann ever wrote, since here, as in a Retractatio,122 the expectations and experiences of a life with history are salvaged. Written in a loose style, the individual studies are quicker to acknowledge the legitimacy of each opponent in conflicts than Grundmann’s earlier work. The treatment of Boniface VIII and Dante in 1959 no longer stood with the Spiritualist opponents of the pope; it showed understanding for Boniface, who, as a capable financier, jurist and statesman, made the best of his disputed office. Dante damned him as a simoniac, not out of personal hatred, but as a representative of the papacy itself, which had become entangled since the Donation of Constantine in power struggles and material avarice.123 It was recognition of imperatives rather than arbitrary lordly action that prompted Pope Gregory IX to prohibit the Franciscans from following the literal directives of Francis’s testament and the evangelical demand of poverty to the letter. Only later did the Spirituals sever the strained connection between piety and institution.124 Grundmann’s last work on medieval heresy was marked by greater understanding for the position of the Church. Now, based on a lecture in Münster in 1953/54, he told its history as a whole, from Frankish times to the Hussite wars. The heretics appear throughout not only as adversaries, but also as partners of the Church in their common struggle for the realisation of Christendom, especially ‘in the context of the spiritual, religious and social movements, the forms of thinking and life of the Middle Ages’.125 Such width of horizon allowed space for the individual as well as anonymous mass movements, especially the scholars among the heretics. In addition, Grundmann now distinguished religiously inspired initiators more precisely from their adherents, among whom social and political ambitions played a role.126 Thus he came to the social-historical view of heresy, but not without

122 [In

the meaning of ‘spiritual occupation’ or ‘mental reassessment’, as in St Augustine’s Retractationes.] 123 Nos. 53 and 57. 124 No. 60. 125 No. 66, p. 2. 126 No. 88; [chapter 6 in this volume].

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Obituary Essay (1970) stressing the role of lone individuals. In both of these he was reinforced by a congress that was the purest pleasure for him; it met in May 1962 in the Gothic Cistercian house at Royaumont and brought heresy researchers from East and West together in a virtual heretical council in Klausur. To the published proceedings, Grundmann was happy to add an international bibliography on the history of heresy.127 He also dedicated an equally patient investigation to the pursuers of heretics, first of all theologians and exegetes of the Church.128 The statement of the Apostle that there had to be heresy could not have been an incentive to turn heretics toward a sincere Christian life, since the theologians knew heresy from the patristic written tradition, not from living encounters, and for that reason handled them incorrectly, as if they were simply a touchstone for dogmatic orthodoxy. For the same reason, inquisitors talked right past the accused.129 Interrogations sought to locate heretics within already categorised sects and their doctrines: faced with the brooding peculiarities of free-spirit heretics of the fourteenth century, judges of heresy did not so much maliciously distort as laboriously systematise it with their question-list.130 Literature and life missed each other. In these essays the thought processes of a closed system repeatedly ran up against the variety of human attitudes. The question of how original thinkers oriented themselves in critical situations became ever more important for Grundmann. Source findings for the biography of Joachim of Fiore and his friend Rainer of Ponza allowed the clarification of this question for Joachim.131 He was no visionary living already half-blind in his own future, but a prudent man of peace who took seriously the day’s obligation and for its sake left his lonely cell. He never forgot the perspective of the salvation story, but saw that the current hour had its own place; it was only with his lesser successors that his conjectures hardened into a system. Similar in attitude was Rupert of Deutz, of whom Grundmann had never lost sight since his dissertation, but only now placed next to Joachim of Fiore.132 Rupert’s biography also showed that he rethought his broad image of history, in this case within the context of a disturbing local conflict with the Cologne archbishop and the count of Berg – particularly after the incendiary night of 1128, shortly before his death. The more concrete reference to historical reality became, the more dubious seemed the use of abstract schemata, juridical hierarchies and comfortable 127 Nos.

82 and 87. 69; [chapter 5 in this volume]. 129 No. 74; [chapter 4 in this volume]. 130 [Contemporaries of Borst would recognise the allusion to the de-nazification questionnaire here. It was highly unpopular among Germans, as indicated by Ernst von Salomon’s controversial novel Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire; Hamburg, 1951; trans. C. Fitzgibbon, London, 1954).] 131 Nos. 58, 68, 90 and 94. 132 Nos. 76 and 77. 128 No.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) conventions. Grundmann had already asked in 1933 how medieval communities elected their representatives, and he investigated it in a stimulating seminar in 1957: his question evolved into the problem of how truth asserted itself among people. In the abbatial selection process of the Benedictine Rule, the President in 1964 found his belief confirmed. It was not through decision by a prelate or of the ‘second highest’, nor always the majority of monks; sometimes a few spoke against formalism and legal inertia,133 and this would prevail. Even in the High Middle Ages it was not the herd of numbly obedient monks who created religious movements: it was individuals, often noble laymen, who spontaneously gave up their warrior life, bucked social convention and inspired others. They did not all enter rigid monasteries as converts; some withdrew from the tumult of the world as hermits, not always from pessimism but to help others from afar in a trustworthy manner.134 Grundmann discovered that the hermit Trevrizent from Wolfram’s Parzival had many historical models in the German twelfth century; these never entered the priestly-scholarly hierarchy, however, just as Wolfram von Eschenbach was no pencil-pusher transcribing Latin theology at a desk.135 Here life was translated into influence, also literary influence. Grundmann now understood the defenders of tradition better than before, though his sympathy certainly lay as always with the self-willed and solitary. Daily experience caused him to feel the happiness and anguish of tradition as well as freedom; but where did they meet and how did history result from that? Obviously not with the one victorious and the other defeated. Since no one reaches the goal, at best one finds a path on which others might follow at some distance. On this Grundmann liked to cite Lessing or the philosopher Georg Simmel: ‘Things never happen in this world as the prophets and leaders thought and desired; but without prophets and leaders nothing at all would “come to be”.’136 So is the journey more important than the destination? Towards this question, which permeates Grundmann’s concluding contemplations on the Middle Ages, he steered his 1959 lecture on natural science and medicine in medieval schools. He later declared that the medieval era was no ‘thousand-year recess or vacation’ for natural sciences but, rather, ‘its long, difficult time for schooling and learning’.137 Yet it pressed the Middle Ages beyond itself into many detours and dead ends, to the limitless horizon we have today, which could not be foreseen then – and of which it can only be said today that it is not the final form. What were the Middle Ages, then, if a time without a peaceful centre? To repeat a word-game of Grundmann’s:

133 Nos.

71 and 81. 65, 67 and 73. 135 No. 84. 136 [Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81); Georg Simmel (1858–1918).] No. 75, p. 446; no. 90, p. 88. 137 No. 55, p. 35. 134 Nos.

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Obituary Essay (1970) doesn’t the formula of the ‘essence [Wesen] of the Middle Ages’ include its ‘deterioration’ [Verwesung]? The Göttingen Academy lecture in 1967 on the problem of the Middle Ages dealt with just that (no. 83). Grundmann opposed the more or less static models developed in recent years: Otto Brunner’s ‘Inner structure of the West’,138 encompassing the entire Medieval and a large part of the Modern Age; Wolfram von den Steinen’s ‘Cosmos of the Middle Ages’, which still regarded the first thousand years after Christ as restful at heart.139 Even Michael Seidlmayer, closest to Grundmann, had spoken of medieval structure in 1948:140 the medieval era itself would have wanted to stand still, the ‘Parchment Age’, seeking to secure its traditions as lasting, Latin and canonical. Yet it was in Europe, and only here, that something dynamic emerged – and not first of all in the late Middle Ages, which for Grundmann was still the great knot between the unity of the antique tradition and the unity of modern world politics. With such discrepancy between the goal and what has been achieved in reality, what can still be called the ‘Medieval World’? This question is thoughtfully elaborated in dense and powerful language in the essay ‘On the World of the Middle Ages’, published in 1965 in the Summa historica, which appeared in the final volume of the third Propyläen-Weltgeschichte. It is at the same time a summation of Grundmann’s life’s work.141 He understood the many medieval people who believed they lived in a world narrowly bordered by time and space, and who took their everyday situation seriously. Their world was not as uniform as they believed, however, but had grown together out of fragmentary traditions that did not really fit together. The mixture brewed confrontation between the claims of traditional ideas, between the realities of formed lives, between demands and actualities. These differentiations did not come from outside, but, rather, they worked externally on the comparatively more self-sufficient Byzantines and Muslims, to draw foreign cultures across those boundaries which expanded from Europe to encompass the world of today, even the universe. The movement to an open future, to world history, began in the Middle Ages, even though it perceived itself as the end time. This movement was not invented, only discovered, recognised from the twelfth century and then accelerated by Grundmann’s old friends who reappear here one more time: Joachim of Fiore, mendicant brothers and the heretical poor in spirit, Innocent III, Frederick II, Alexander of Roes, Dante, Meister Eckhart. They burst open the seemingly

138 [Otto

Brunner (1898–1982) was a Nazi supporter, but had a successful career after the war.] 139 [Wolfram von den Steinen (1892–1967);] no. 140. 140 [Michael Seidlmayer (1902–61). Review of M. Seidlmayer, Das Mittelalter, Umrisse und Ergebnisse des Zeitalters, Unser Erbe (Regensburg, 1948), Historische Zeitschrift 170 (1950), 354–5.] 141 No. 75.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) closed world without themselves knowing what would come from it, or where this expanding universe was headed. But was Grundmann entirely correct? Did he not neglect the basic conditions that held the Middle Ages together despite all movement? The essay lacks a chapter on the forms of life and thought of the peasants and of noble country life. More important than this particular question is the explosive power of Grundmann’s unfolding central thesis, of which he had been convinced for forty years, and according to which he lived ever after. This thesis declares that the Middle Ages was not a world separated from our own, nor an organism in Spengler’s sense, or a structure, construct, or cosmos, but, rather, the beginning of our road; it proclaims that we are today part of the same movement begun then and whose goal we cannot yet see; we will see it only at the end, after it stops, and we will know it then as the essence and truth of the whole. With an image by Grundmann, from a presentation made about 1941: Whoever is hiking in unfamiliar mountains will hold the route that he already passed in his mind, even if he cannot see it entire. He will often have doubts about whether a new turn is correct or a detour or in error as long as he does not see the goal approaching. But when he comes to the heights, the image of the route he has taken clarifies, which is now clear to him in his course.

That almost sounds like faith in progress … but in the mountains there is also progress in the wrong direction. If Grundmann passionately condemned belief, it was the presumptuous or smug certainty that we are now sitting on the highest peak, can see our entire long road, and may rest. When he died of cancer in Munich on 20 March 1970, his work was not finished – but he would never have come to its end. He desired peace, but was it rather otium, also cum dignitate? He would never have wanted to become his own icon. We will long miss the unwritten works of the scholar, though he felt the written was already out of date. Few who knew the man will quickly forget his face, but he knew that he would soon become only one name among many in the catalogue of professors and presidents. What elevates him is not the weight of the books he wrote or the positions he filled but, rather, the connection between life and work, the successful attempt to live in history as a ‘historian in his time’, logical and curious, sure of himself and modest in the double medieval sense that Grundmann gladly gave this word: to be humble and to be in the know [sich bescheidend und Bescheid wissen]. Where the study of history might lead in our turbulent times was described by Grundmann in 1950.142 These words were not only his programme, but also his portrait:

142 No.

27, pp. 115 ff.

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Obituary Essay (1970) [History as a discipline] trains us to count what is documented as real, even if one wishes it were otherwise and does not like it to be true. It trains us to evaluate contradiction, and to give justice to the other side; to measure the degree of certainty that can be reached by our insight; to assert nothing that cannot be established; to see through the changeability and variety of human will in its condition; to grasp the necessity as well as the risk of decision in every situation, so as to live in history not blindly, but seeing … It trains us to an intellectual attitude and a humane disposition that in fact is not the sole preserve of any individual party, does not tolerate any dogmatism, radicalism and fanaticism, but is the prerequisite for the decent human coexistence of all.

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8 Bibliography of Herbert Grundmann The following bibliography is drawn mainly from two lists: (i) the first section of Hilda Lietzmann’s ‘Bibliografie Herbert Grundmann’1 and (ii) the list of Grundmann’s works in the ‘Literature Database for the Middle Ages’ of the Regesta Imperii.2 It lists published works and articles, together with a selection of encyclopaedia articles and Grundmann’s Monumenta reports. The reader should go to Lietzmann’s bibliography for its selection of reviews and its fuller lists of Grundmann’s short notes, commemorative pieces, Monumenta reports and encyclopaedia articles. The numbers as well as the contents of Lietzmann’s bibliography – 1–95, covering 1926–713 – are followed below. Nos. 60a and 95a denote her afterthought additions. But within the range 1–95 the other numbers followed by letters are our additions, as are also nos. 96–107. References to Grundmann’s works in this volume’s Introduction and its translation of Arno Borst’s memorial of Grundmann use these bibliography numbers. Studien über Joachim von Floris, Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 32 (Leipzig and Berlin, 1927 (Ph.D. dissertation, Leipzig 1926); improved reprint no. 93 below; Italian translation, no. 103. 2. ‘Der Typus des Ketzers in mittelalterlicher Anschauung’, Kultur- und Universalgeschichte. Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig and Berlin, 1927), pp. 91–107; reprinted in no. 98; English translation in this volume, chapter 1. 3. ‘Mystik und Aufklärung im Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Bildung 4 (1928), 449–55; reprinted in no. 98. 4. ‘Über den Apokalypsen-Kommentar des Minoriten Alexander’, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 45 (1928), 713–23; reprinted in no. 99. 5. ‘Die Papstprophetien des Mittelalters’, AKG 19 (1929), 77–138; reprinted in no. 99. 1.

1 First

published, DA 26 (1970), 334–67; reprinted with additions, H. Grundmann, Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 3 vols., MGH Schriften 25 (1976–78), I, 26–37. 2 www.opac.regesta-imperii.de 3 In the edition of the bibliography published in Ausgewählte Aufsätze, I, 26–31, Lietzmann placed asterisks beside the articles reprinted in the Ausgewählte Aufsätze.

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Bibliography of Herbert Grundmann 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

‘Kleine Beiträge über Joachim von Fiore’, ZKG n.s. 11, 48 (1929), 137–65; reprinted in no. 99. ‘Liber de Flore: eine Schrift der Franziskaner-Spiritualen aus dem Anfang des 14. Jahhunderts’, Historisches Jahrbuch 49 (1929), 33–91; reprinted in no. 99. Alexander von Roes, De translatione imperii und Jordanus von Osnabrück, De prerogative Romani imperii, ed. Herbert Grundmann, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 2 (Leipzig and Berlin 1930). ‘Zur Geschichte der Beginen im 13. Jahrhundert’, AKG 21 (1931), 296–320; reprinted in no. 98. ‘Dante und Joachim von Fiore. Zu Paradiso X–XII’, Deutsches DanteJahrbuch n.s. 5, 14 (1932), 210–56; reprinted in nos. 16 and 99. ‘Die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der Deutschen Mystik’, DVLG 12 (1934) 400–29; reprinted in no. 70, with corrections and additions in footnotes; these were reproduced inside angled brackets in the reprint in no. 98. ‘Die Grundzüge der mittelalterlichen Geschichtsanschauungen’, AKG 24 (1934), 326–36; reprinted in nos. 70 and 99. Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, Historische Studien 267 (Berlin, 1935). Habilitation thesis Leipzig 1933. Reprint Vaduz, 1966; second, improved and expanded edn, no. 69; see no. 59 for translations. ‘Kaiser Friedrich II., 1194–1250’, Die Großen Deutschen, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1935–7), I, 124–42; reprinted in no. 80. ‘Meister Eckhart, etwa 1260–1327’, Die Großen Deutschen, I, 230–45; reprinted in no. 98. ‘Dante und Meister Eckhart’, Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 18 (1936), 166–88; reprinted in no. 98. ‘Das deutsche Nationalbewußtsein und Frankreich. Vom Antichristspiel bis zu Alexander von Roes’, Jahrbuch der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Rheinischen Geschichtsvereine 2 (1936), 51–60. ‘Die Frauen und die Literatur im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach der Entstehung des Schriftums in der Volkssprache’, AKG 26 (1936), 129–61; reprinted in no. 100; English translation in this volume, chapter 2. ‘Das hohe Mittelalter und die deutsche Kaiserzeit’, Die Neue PropyläenWeltgeschichte, vol. 2: Der Aufstieg des Germananentums und die Welt des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1940), 173–350. ‘Deutsches Schrifttum im Deutschen Orden’, Altpreußische Forschungen 18 (1941), 21–49; reprinted in no. 100. ‘Rotten und Brabanzonen. Söldner-Heere im 12. Jahrhundert’, DA 5 (1942), 419–92. 251

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) 21a. ‘Reich und Kaisertum des Mittelalters’, in Germanische Gemeinsamkeit. Vorträge gehalten an der SS-Junkerschule Tölz, ed. Der Reichsfüher-SS, SS-Hauptamt (Poznań [then Posen], 1944), pp. 73–93; Hamburg, Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek, AMW-F3/2477; ms. located in Munich, http://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/archiv/k/K_00107.htm. 22. ‘Politische Gedanken mittelalterlichen Westfalen’, Westfalen 27 (1948), 5–20. 23. ‘Übersetzungsprobleme im Spätmittelalter. Zu einer alten Verdeutschung des Memoriale Alexander von Roes’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 70 (1948–49), 113–45; reprinted in no. 100. 24. Die Schriften des Alexander von Roes, ed. and trans. Herbert Grundmann and Hermann Heimpel, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter 4 (Weimar, 1949). 25. Neue Forschungen über Joachim von Fiore, Münstersche Forschungen 1 (Marburg, 1950); Italian translation in no. 106. 26. ‘Geistesgeschichte in den Monumenta Germaniae historica’, Die Welt als Geschichte 10 (1950), 98–116. 27. ‘Geschichte, Politik und Erziehung. Betrachtungen über eine deutschenglische Historikertagung’, Geschichte in Wissenschft und Unterricht 1 (1950), 109–16. 28. Co-deliverer of paper with H. Löwe, ‘Das Werden des Abendlandes im Geschichtsbild des frühen Mittelalters’, Bericht über die 21. Versammlung deutscher Historiker in Marburg/Lahn 13–16. September 1951 (Offenburg and Stuttgart, 1951), 11–13. 29. ‘Neue Aufgaben der Monumenta Germaniae Historica’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 2 (1951), 538–47. 30. ‘Über die Schriften des Alexander von Roes’, DA 8 (1951), 154–237; reprinted in no. 100. 31. ‘Federico II e Gioacchino da Fiore’, VII Centenario della morte di Federico II Imperatore e Re di Sicilia (10–18 dicembre 1950). Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Federiciani (Palermo,1952), pp. 82–89; reprinted in no. 99. 32. ‘Sacerdotium – Regnum – Studium. Zur Wertung der Wissenschaft im 13. Jahrhundert’, AKG 34 (1952), 5–21; reprinted in no. 100. 32a. ‘Altfrid, dritter Bischof von Münster (seit 839), Abt von Werden / Ruhr, † 22.4.849, begraben Werden’, Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin, 1953- ), I, 218–19. 32b. ‘Adela, Gräfin aus sächsischen Geschlecht, * um 950, † vor 1021 Köln’, ibid., I, 56–7. 32c. ‘Adolf I., Erzbischof von Köln (1193–1205), † 15.4.1220 Neuß’, ibid., I, 82–3. 33. ‘Jubel’, Festschrift für Jost Trier zu seinem 60. Geburtstag am 15. Dezember 1954 (Meisenheim am Glan, 1954), pp. 477–511; reprinted in no. 100. 34. ‘Otto II. Kaisertum und Christentum im Mittelalter’, Der christliche Staatsmann, Schriftenreihe der Evangelischen Akademie Hamburg 7 (Hamburg, 1954), pp. 6–11. 252

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Bibliography of Herbert Grundmann 34a. Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, ed. B. Gebhardt, 8th edn, ed. H. Grundmann, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1954). 35. ‘Wahlkönigtum, Territorialpolitik und Ostbewegung im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (1198–1378)’, ibid., I, 341–504; 2nd edn in no. 95. 35a. ‘Der Staat des Deutschen Ordens in Preußen und Livland’, ibid., I, 489–96. 36. ‘Eresia e nuovi ordini nel secolo XII’, Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche, 6 vols. (Florence 1955), III: Storia del Medioevo, pp. 467–84. 37. ‘La mistica tedesca nei suoi riflessi popolari: il beghinismo’, Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche 3: Storia del Medioevo (Florence, 1955), pp. 467–84. 38. ‘Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der religiösen Bewegungen im Mittelalter’, AKG 37 (1955), 129–82; conveys the two conference reports of nos. 36–7, with expanded notes; reprinted nos. 59 and 98. 39. ‘Stämme und Länder in der deutschen Geschichte’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 6 (1955), 591–607. 40. Vom Ursprung der Universität im Mittelalter, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Phil.-hist. Klasse, 103.2 (Berlin, 1957); second edition with addendum, no. 56; reprint of no. 40 (with no. 56’s addendum) in no. 100. No. 47 contains an Italian translation of a shortened version of no. 40. 41. ‘Freiheit als religiöses, politisches und persönliches Postulat im Mittelalter’, Historische Zeitschrift 183 (1957), 23–53, reprint in no. 46. 42. ‘Geschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter’, Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß, ed. W. Stammler, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1952–57), III, 1273–1336; new version in no. 72. 43. Alexander von Roes, Schriften, ed. H. Grundmann and H. Heimpel, MGH. Staatsschiften des späteren Mittelalters 1.1 (Stuttgart, 1958). 44. Valentin von Tetleben, Protokoll des Augsburger Reichstages 1530, ed. and introduced by H. Grundmann, Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 4 (Göttingen, 1958). This also appeared as Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 177, Jahrgang 64/65 (Gütersloh, 1958). 45. ‘Deutsche Reichstagsakten, Jüngere Reihe’, Die Historische Kommission bei der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1858–1958 (Göttingen, 1958), pp. 132–57. 46. ‘Freiheit als religiöses, politisches und persönliches Postulat im Mittelalter’, Das Problem der Freiheit im europäischen Denken von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Beiträge zur europäischen Geschichte 1 (Munich, 1958), 23–53; reprint of no. 41. 47. ‘La genesi dell’università nel Medio Evo’, Bulletino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano 70 (1958), 1–18; translation of shortened version of no. 40. 253

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) ‘Landgraf Philipp von Hessen auf dem Augsburger Reichstag 1530’, Aus Reichstagen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 50 (Göttingen, 1958), pp. 341–423. 49. ‘Litteratus – Illitteratus. Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm vom Altertum zum Mittelalter’, AKG 40 (1958), 1–65; reprint in no. 100; English translation in this volume, chapter 3. 50. Der Cappenberger Barbarossakopf und die Anfänge des Stiftes Cappenberg, Münstersche Forschungen 12 (Cologne and Graz, 1959). 51. ‘Der hl. Theodor oder Gottfried von Cappenberg im Domparadies zu Münster’, Westfalen 37 (1959), 160–73; reprint in no. 98. 52. ‘Gottfried von Cappenberg’, Westfälische Lebensbilder 8 (Münster, 1959), 1–16; reprint in no. 115; shortened version printed in Die Heiligen in ihrer Zeit, ed. Peter Mann, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1966), II, 35–7; reprint in no. 98. 53. ‘Bonifaz VIII. und Dante. Zur Problematik der Konstantinischen Schenkung’, Hochland 52 (1959–60), 201–20; published in anticipation of no. 57, but without notes. 54. ‘Deutsch-italienische Beziehungen im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Entwurf’, Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichtsunterricht 7 (1959–60), 40–4. 55. Naturwissenschaft und Medizin in mittelalterlichen Schulen und Universitäten Deutsches Museum. Abhandlungen und Berichte 28 (Munich and Düsseldorf, 1960); a little expanded in the reprint, no. 100. 56. Vom Ursprung der Universität im Mittelalter (Berlin,1960); second edn of no. 40 with addendum; reprinted, Darmstadt, 1964. 57. ‘Bonifaz VIII und Dante’, H. Grundmann, O. Herding and H. C. Peyer, Dante und die Mächtigen seiner Zeit, Münchener romanistische Arbeiten 15 (Munich, 1960), 9–36; reprint of no. 53, but with notes; reprinted in no. 99. 58. ‘Zur Biographie Joachims von Fiore und Rainers von Ponza’, DA 16 (1960), 437–546; reprinted in no. 99; Italian translation in no. 106. 58a. ‘Jordanus von Osnabrück’, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 10 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1957–67), V (1960), 1120. 59. Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1961). Second, improved and expanded edition of no. 14, with addition of no. 43, Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der religiösen Bewegungen im Mittelalter; unchanged reprint, Darmstadt, 1970; Italian translation, no. 97; English translation, no. 104. 60. ‘Die Bulle Quo elongati Papst Gregors IX’, AFH 54 (1961), 3–25; reprinted in no. 98. 60a. [a = Lietzmann’s own addition to her bibliography]. ‘Die Eigenart mittelalterlichen Geschichtsanschauung’, Geschichtsdenken und Geschichtsbild im Mittelalter, ed. W. Lammers, Wege der Forschung 21 (Darmstadt, 1961), pp. 430–33; reprint of no. 42, cols. 1333–6. 61. ‘Die Grundzüge der mittelalterlichen Geschichtsanschauungen’, ibid., pp. 418–29; reprint of no. 12. 48.

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Bibliography of Herbert Grundmann 62. ‘Merians Topographia Germaniae’, AKG 43 (1961), 355–62. 63. ‘Betrachtungen zur Kaiserkrönung Ottos I’, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 2 (Munich, 1962). 64. Additions to report by K. V. Sinclair, ‘Ein Fragment der Gesta archiepiscoporum Magdeburgensium’, DA 18 (1962), 245–8. 64a. ‘Ortliebe, Sekte’, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, VII (1962), 1256–7. 65. ‘Zur Vita s. Gerlaci eremitae’, DA 18 (1962), 539–54; reprinted in no. 98. 66. Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters, Die Kirche in ihrer Geschichte. Ein Handbuch, 2, issue G, 1st part (Göttingen, 1963). Although part of an encyclopaedia, this was paginated and issued separately. 2nd edn 1967. 67. ‘Deutsche Eremiten, Einsiedler und Klausner im Hochmittelalter (10.–12. Jahrhundert)’, AKG 45 (1963), 60–90; reprinted in no. 98. 68. ‘Kirchenfreiheit und Kaisermacht um 1190 in der Sicht Joachims von Fiore’, DA 19 (1963), 353–96; reprinted in no. 99; Italian translation in no. 106. 69. ‘Oportet et haereses esse. Das Problem der Ketzerei im Spiegel der mittelalterlichen Bibelexegese’, AKG 45 (1963), 129–64; reprinted in no. 98; Italian translation in no. 97; English translation in this volume, chapter 5. 70. ‘Die geschichtliche Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik’, Altdeutsche und altniederländische Mystik, Wege der Forschung 23 (Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 72–99; reprint of no. 11, with corrections and additions in footnotes. 70a. ‘Roes, Alexander von (13. Jh.)’, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, IX (1964), 41. 71. ‘Pars quamvis parva. Zur Abwahl nach Benedikts Regel’, Festschrift Percy Ernst Schramm zu seinem 70. Geburtstag von Schülern und Freunden zugeeignet, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1964), I, 237–51. 71a. ‘Gebhardt, Bruno, Historiker, * 9.10.1888, Krotoschin (Posen), † 13.2.1905 Berlin. (israelitisch, dann Dissident)’, Neue Deutsche Biographie, V (1964), 120–1. 71b. ‘Salimbene de Adam (1221–1287), Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, IX (1964), 266. 71c. ‘Gottfried von Cappenberg, als Heiliger verehrt, westfälischer Graf und Prämonstratenser, * um 1096, † 13.1.1127 Kloster Ilbenstadt bei Friedberg (Oberhessen)’, Neue Deutsche Biographie, VI (1964), 670. 72. Geschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter. Gattungen – Epochen – Eigenart, Kleine Vandenhoeck-Reihe, 209/210 (Göttingen, 1965); see 2nd edn, no. 91. 73. ‘Eremiti in Germania dal X a XII secolo: “Einsiedler” e “Klausner”’, L’Eremetismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII. Atti della seconda Settimana internazionale di studio Mendola, 30 agosto – 6 settembre 1962, Miscellanea del Centro di Studi Medioevali [dell’Università Catolica del Sacro Cuore] 4 (Milan, 1965), pp. 311–29; translation of no. 67. 74. ‘Ketzerverhöre des Spätmittelalters als quellenkritisches Problem’, DA 255

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) 21 (1965), 519–75; reprinted in no. 98; the version in this volume, chapter 4, includes but does not translate the texts edited in section vi. 75. ‘Über die Welt des Mittelalters’, Propyläen-Weltgeschichte. Summa historica (Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna, 1965), pp. 363–446. 76. ‘Zwei Briefe des Kanonikers Meingoz von St. Martin an Abt Rupert von Deutz (after 1124-start of 1128)’, DA 21 (1965), 264–76. 76a. ‘Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Bericht für das Jahr 1963/64’, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Anzeiger phil.-hist. Klasse 101 (1964), published 1965, pp. 123–32. 77. Studien über Joachim von Fiore (Darmstadt, 1966); reprint of no. 1, with a new foreword. 78. ‘Der Brand von Deutz 1128 in der Darstellung Abt Ruperts von Deutz. Interpretation und Text-Ausgabe’, DA 22 (1966), 385–471. 79. ‘Friedrich II. und das Geistesleben seiner Zeit’, Stupor Mundi. Zur Geschichte Friedrichs II. von Hohenstaufen, Wege der Forschung 101 (Darmstadt, 1966), pp. 359–64; reprint of no. 35, pp. 373–6. 80. ‘Kaiser Friedrich II. 1194–1250’, ibid., pp. 109–33; reprint of no. 14. 81. ‘Zur Abt-Wahl nach Benedikts Regel. Die “Zweitobern” als “sanior pars’’?’, ZKG 77 (1966), 217–23. 82. Bibliographie zur Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters (1900–1966), Sussidi eruditi 20 (Rome, 1967); with two indexes and addendum. Although the French version at no. 87 was published later, it represents an earlier version of this. 83. ‘Das Mittelalter-Problem’, Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (1967), 40–54. 84. ‘Dichtete Wolfram von Eschenbach am Schreibtisch?’, AKG 49 (1967), 391–405. 85. ‘Institut für Mediävistik?’, Euphorion 61 (1967), 132–7. 85a. M. Seidlmayer, Das Mittelalter. Umrisse und Ergebnisse des Zeitalters: Unser Erbe, 2nd edn, ed. H. Grundmann, Kleine Vandenhoeck-Reihe 247–8 (Göttingen, 1967). 86. ‘Adelsbekehrungen im Hochmittelalter. Conversi und nutriti im Kloster’, Adel und Kirche. Gerd Tellenbach zum 65. Geburtstag dargebracht von Freunden und Schülerns (Freiburg im Breisgau, Basel and Vienna, 1968), pp. 325–45; reprinted in no. 98. 87. ‘Bibliographie des études récentes (après 1900) sur les hérésies médiévales’, Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle 11e–18e siècles. Communications et debats du Colloque de Royaumont (Paris-La Haye, 1968), pp. 407–67. This is an earlier version of no. 98, and does not have indexes; Spanish translation in no. 102. 88. ‘Hérésies savantes et hérésies populaires au moyen âge’, in Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle 11e–18e siècles, pp. 209–18; reprinted in no. 98; Spanish translation in no. 101; English translation in this volume, chapter 6. 256

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Bibliography of Herbert Grundmann 89. ‘Geschichtsschreibung im späteren Mittelalter’, Geschichtsschreibung. Epochen, Methoden, Gestalten (Düsseldorf, 1968), pp. 86–93; new version of no. 88, pp. 64–71. 90. ‘Joachim von Fiore’, Die Wahrheit der Ketzer, ed. J. J. Schultz (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1968), pp. 80–8, 264–8. 91. Geschichtsscheibung im Mittelalter. Gattungen – Epochen – Eigenart, Kleine Vandenhoeck-Reihe, 209/210 (Göttingen, 1969); 2nd edn of no. 88. 92. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. 1819–1969 (Munich, 1969). 92a. ‘Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Bericht für das Jahr 1967/68’, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Anzeiger phil.-hist. Klasse 105 (1968), published 1969, pp. 224–36. 93. ‘Eine neue Interpretation des Papstwahldekrets von 1059’, DA 25 (1969), 234–6. 94. ‘Lex und Sacramentum bei Joachim von Fiore’, Lex und Sacramentum im Mittelalter, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 6 (Berlin, 1969), pp. 31–48; reprinted in no. 99. 95. ‘Wahlkönigtum, Territorialpolitik und Ostbewegung im 13. Und 14. Jahrhundert (1198–1378)’, Gebhardt, Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 9th edn (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 426–606; revised edn of no. 35. 95a. ‘Das Schreiben Kaiser Karls IV. an die heidnische Litauer-Fürsten 1358’, in a Festschrift for Jindřich Šebanek, published in the first volume of Folia Diplomatica, Opera Universitatis Purkynianae Brunensis, Facultas philosophica 158 (Brno, 1971), pp. 89–103. 96. ‘Holder-Egger, Oswald, Mittelalter-Forscher, * 19.8.1851 Bischofswerder (Westpreußen), † 1.11.1911 Berlin. (evangelisch)’, Neue Deutsche Biographie, IX (1972), 526. 97. ‘“Oportet et haereses esse”. Il problema dell’eresia rispecchiato nell’esegesi biblica medievale’, L’Eresia medievale, ed. O. Capitani (Bologna, 1972), pp. 23–60; translation of no. 69. 97a. Movimenti religiosi nel Medioevo. Ricerche sui nessi storici tra l’eresia, gli Ordini mendicanti e il movimento religioso femminile nel XII e XIII secolo e sui presupposti storici della mistica tedesca, trans. M. Ausserhofer and L. Nicolet Santini (Bologna, 1974; translation of no. 59). 98. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, MGH Schriften 25.1 (1976). This reprints nos. 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 38, 52, 60, 65, 67, 69, 74, 86, 88. 99. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, MGH Schriften 25.2 (1977). This reprints nos. 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 31, 57, 58, 68, 94. 100. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, MGH Schriften 25.3 (1978). This reprints nos. 18, 20, 23, 30, 32, 33, 40, 49. 101. ‘Herejía cultas y herejías populares en la Edad Media’, Herejías y sociedades en la Europa preindustrial, siglos XI–XVIII. Communicaciones y debats del Coloquio de Royaumont (1962), ed. J. Le Goff (Madrid, 1987), pp. 159–62; translation of no. 88.

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Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970) 102. ‘Bibliografia de los estudios recientes (a partir de 1900) sobre las herejías medievales’, ibid., pp. 315–65; translation of no. 87. 103. Studi su Gioacchino da Fiore, intro. G. L. Potestà (Genoa, 1989); translation of no. 1. 104. Religious Movements in the Middle Ages. The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of Herman Mysticism, trans. S. Rowan, introduction by R. E. Lerner (Notre Dame and London, 1995); translates the 2nd edn of 1961, no. 59. 105. ‘Aus der Einleitung zu “Opera Minora” Joachims von Fiore’, Florensia 10 (1996), 117–54; introduction to a never published edition. 106. Gioacchino da Fiore: vita e opere, trans. S. Sorrentino, intro. G. L. Potestà (Rome, 1997); translation of nos. 25, 58 and 68. 107. Extract from Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (no. 104), Contesting Christendom: Readings in Medieval Religion and Culture, ed. J. L. Halverson (Lanham, 2007), pp. 137–46; see no. 104.

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Index Adam, 153–54, 166 Adamites/-tae, 27 n. 38, 28 n. 39 Adela, countess of Blois, 106, 252 n. 32b Adémar of Chabannes, 27 n. 35, 59 n. 9, 66 n.31 Ad nostrum (1311/1317), 7, 136–37, 140–43, 145, 147, 149, 156 n. 71, 157, 158 n. 76, 163–64, 174 Alan of Lille, 178 n. 104, 179 n. 104 Albertus Magnus, St, 137, 138 n. 44, 195 Alcuin, 62, 98, 101 Alexander III, pope, 59 Alexander of Roes, 9–10, 233–34, 247 Alfred the Great, king of England, 67, 92–96, 99, 108 alphabet, 57, 90–91, 97, 144 analphabeten, 5, 57–58, 63 see also literacy Amalasuntha, 86–88 Ambrose of Milan, St, bishop, 182 n. 5, 195–96 Ambrosiaster, 182 n. 5, 196, 199, 203 Anglo-Saxon, 62, 67, 80, 91–98 Anjou/Angevin, 104, 108, 110 Anonymous of Passau, 19 n. 8, 21 n. 16, 22 nn. 24 and 25, 23 n. 27, 24 n. 29, 25, 28 n. 41, 139 n. 43, 144, 218–19 Anselm of Laon, St, 101, 189 Anselm of Lucca, St, bishop, 194 Antichrist, 18, 20, 23, 25, 35, 138 n. 35, 153–54, 166 Endkrist, 153 apologetics, 27 n. 37, 29 apostles, 23, 57, 61, 63, 76 n. 30, 115, 135 n. 26, 182, 184–85, 209, 213 Aquinas, Thomas, St, 182 n. 5, 194–95, 210–12 Thomas Institute, 236 n. 83 Arnold of Brescia, 218, 228 Arnoldists, 188 Arnold, Gottfried, 16, 29 n. I, artes liberales, 60, 79, 93, 109 Asser, 92–93, 94 n. 17, Athalaric, 82, 86–87 Augustine of Hippo, St, medieval transmission, 98, 104, 201, 210, 225

on heresy, 6, 18–19, 27 n. 38, 29, 182 n. 5, 187–88, 192–94, 196–206, 208, 212–14 on reading and knowledge, 61, 78, 203 Augustinian canon, 190, 210 n. 75 Baldwin II of Guines, Count, 65, 66 n. 30, 68 n. 42 Beatrice of Burgundy, 41 n. 37, 47 n. 66, 69 Beatrice Portinari, 60 Bede, Venerable, 61–63, 80, 92, 101, 193 n. 33 and 36, 206 n. 69 beghards, 128 n. 6, 131, 136–39, 142–43, 145, 148–49, 150 n. 59, 152 n. 61, 155, 156 n. 70, 157 n. 73, 159–62, 217 beguines, 53–54, 119, 128 n. 6, 130–32, 134–39, 140 n. 47, 142, 160–61, 217 Benedict XII, Pope, 137 n. 31 Benedict of Aniane, St, 98 Benedict of Nursia, St, 55, 80 Life of, 80 Rule of, 80–1, 246 Benedictines, 126, 144 Bernard of Clairvaux, St, 23 n. 28, 29, 111–12, 114, 161 n. 90, 188, 191, 209, 237 Sermones in Cantica, 19 n. 8, 22 nn. 21 and 22, 23 n. 26, 25 n. 31, 114 n. 1, 191 n. 28 Bernard Gui, 20, 21 n. 15, 25 nn. 31 and 32, 29 Bernhard zur Lippe, Count, 31 n. 1 Berthold of Regensburg, 20 n. 13, 21, 22 n. 22, 24, 25 n. 31, 49, 50–1, 53 n. 83 Bible, 5, 8, 18, 22 n. 25, 35, 48, 49, 51 n. 79, 77, 78, 81, 89, 92, 99, 102, 116, 120, 137, 180 n. 2, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189–91, 193 n. 33, 195, 198 n. 48, 201, 202, 203, 209, 212, 218–19, 226 see also Scripture; Vulgate Boniface, St, 62, 98 Boniface VIII, Pope, 223, 244 Borst, Arno, vi–vii, 1 n. 1, 8–11, 14, 29 n. i, 183 n. 6, 214 n. 82, 219, 221–49 Brabant, 54, 131 n. 13, 190

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Index Burchard of Worms, Bishop, 35 n. 13, 68 Byzantium, 82, 83 n. 8, 84 n. 24, 88, 113 Caesar, 74, 76 Caesarius of Arles, St, 79, 81, 180 n. 1 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 28 n. 39, 45, 102 n. 2, 113 n. 43 Carolingians, 80, 95–96, 100–1, 186–87, 193, 202–04, 206 Carthusians, 133, 204 cartula, 126–28, 137, 141 Cathars, See Heresy, Cathars Charlemagne, 36, 40 n. 37, 60, 63, 66 n. 31, 96–100, 124 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 60, 117 n. 19, 160 Charles V, king of France, 123 Charles the Bald, 100, 107 n. 23 Charles the Good of Flanders, 108 n. 23 Charles Martel, 96 Chilperic, 90–91 chivalry, 38–40, 42–43, 48, 52–55 Chlodwig, 82 n. 15, 90 Cicero, 60, 61 n. 16, 72–75, 84 n. 25, 112 Cistercians, 45, 53, 114–15, 118, 121, 131 n. 13, 178 n. 104, 190, 245 Clement V, pope, 136, 137 n. 32, 138, 142, 163 Clementines, 136 n. 29, 137, 140–41, 143–47, 150, 153, 155 n. 65 Cologne, 9, 23 n. 28, 64 n. 26, 128, 138, 159 n. 80, 160–61, 191, 204, 245 Bruno of, scholastic of Reims in, 204 city council of, 128, 137 Dominican studium generale in, 217 Herbert Grundmann in, 236 Heymerich de Campo in, 159 n. 80, 161 Meister Eckhart in, 136 Synod of, 138 Walter of Holland, beghard, burned in, 160 See also Alexander of Roes, canon of Constantinople, 83 n. 18, 85 convents, 33–34, 37, 46, 47 n. 66, 49, 50–51, 53, 54, 138, 240 see also monasteries; and entries for individual orders Corpus iuris canonici, 137, 140 Cosmas of Prague, 59 n. 8, 64 n. 25, 102 n. 2,

Councils, Constance (1414–1418), 28 n. 39, 217 Fourth Lateran (1215), 21 n. 14, 29 n. ii Lyon (1123), 137, 160 Reims (1148), 207 n. 69 Toulouse (1119), 20 n. 14 Vienne (1311), 7, 136–39, 148, 162 courtly culture, 4, 38–39, 42–48, 52–55, 63, 116, 119, 230 creed, 21, 24, 61 n. 19, 92 Dante Alighieri, 10, 32–33, 59–60, 244, 247 David of Augsburg, 19–20, 49–50, 51 n. 76, 53 n. 83 Devil, 18, 27, 79, 128, 196–97, 202, 215 Deutschenspiegel, 33, 50 n. 74 Dominicans, 53–54, 67 n. 36, 119, 127, 135, 209 n. 75, 209–11, 216 Female houses, 51 n. 79, Inquisition, 24 n. 28 Inquisitors, Guillaume of Paris, 130 Heinrich Kalteisen, 156 Nicholas Eymeric, 144–45 Robert le Petit (le Bougre), 126, 128 Stephen of Bourbon, 116 Walter Kerlinger, 143 Preachers, 49 Studium generale, 217 See also: Albert the Great; Hugh of St Cher; Meister Eckhart; William of Paris Donatists, 6, 187, 192, 193 n. 32, 199, 217 Eckhart, Meister, 4, 10, 46, 49, 52, 130 n. 10, 135, 135 n. 29, 136, 138, 149, 217, 229–30, 247 Eichstätt, 138, 141–48, 154, 155 n. 65, 157–58, 163 Einhard, 40, 69 n. 43, 96–97, 98 n. 8 Elm, Kaspar, 1 n. 1, 3 n. 4, 237 n. 88 Ennodius of Pavia, Bishop, 83, 180 n. 1 Erfurt, 136 n. 34, hearing protocol, 140, 142–48, 150–52, 156–57, 162–63 Eucharist, 151, 157, 190 Evervin of Steinfeld, 23 n. 28, 191 formulary, 129, 140, 145, 147 foxes, as metaphor for heresy, 23, 24 n. 28, 191–92, 213

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Index Francis, St, 9, 20, 49, 114–15, 116 n. 12, 119, 122, 213, 222–23, 227 Franciscans, 20, 50 n. 74 and 75, 53 n. 84, 54, 63, 113, 115, 121, 131 n. 13, 135, 137, 139, 147 n. 57, 160, 193 n. 33, 210, 217, 237 preachers, 49–50 Spirituals, 153, 226 tertiaries, 140 women in, 52, see also Berthold of Regensburg; David of Augsburg; John of Winterthur; Peter of John Olivi; Salimbene; William of Ockham Franck, Sebastian, 16, 28, 29 n. i Frederick Barbarossa (Holy Roman Emperor), 40, 47 n. 66, 82, 113, 231, 235 Fulda, 97, 99, 103 Fulgentius of Ruspe, Bishop, 89, 103 Gandersheim, Abbey, 34 Gaul, 77–79, 89, 95 n. 1, 96 Gelasius I, pope, 186 Gerald of Wales, 41 n. 44, 105, 109 n. 26, 110 Gerberga, Abbess of Gandersheim, 34–35, Gervase of Tilbury, 66, 112, Glossa Ordinaria, 101, 189–90, 193, 205–06, 209 Goetz, Walter, 223, 225–26, 239 Gospel-poems, 98–99 Gratian, 77, 188, 194, 202 n. 56 Gregory I (‘the Great’), St, pope, 18 n. 3, 62, 80, 88, 91, 192 n. 34, 193 n. 35 Morals on the Book of Job, 116, 201 n. 54 Gregory IX, pope, 22 n. 20, 60, 126, 244 Gregory XI, pope, 128, 160 Guibert of Nogent, Abbot, 59, 112 n. 42 Guido II of Cambrai, Bishop, 130–31 Hadrian, 76–77 Hartmann von Aue, 39, 64 Haskins, Charles Homer, 67 n. 37, 126 n. 1, 127 n. 4 Haupt, Hermann, 142–43, 154–55 Heliand, 32, 98–99 Henne Becker, 155–56, 157 n. 71, 158–59, 161–63, 169, 178 160–62, 168, 177 Henry II (Holy Roman Emperor), 67, 194 Henry V (Holy Roman Emperor), 104 Henry VI (Holy Roman Emperor), 41, 112

Henry Kalteisen, inquisitor, 156–59, 163, 174, 178 Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria, 41, 45 n. 61, 47 n. 67, 66 Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria, 47 n. 67, 64 n. 25 heresy Arians, 89, 187–88, 199, 202, 217 Cathars, 26, 27 n. 35, 48, 115, 127 n. 4, 129, 178 n. 104, 188, 209, 212, 218–20 Cathari, 183 n. 6 Free Spirit, 26, 139, 145, 149, 150 n. 59, 151 n. 60, 154–55, 156 n. 70, 158, 162–63, 211, 217 Liber spiritu, 142, 145, 150, 151 n. 60, 164–65 Lollardy, 155–56, 159 n. 79, 216 Manichaean, 29, 187–88, 199, 202 n. 56, 204 Waldensians, 9, 19–21, 24 n. 28, 26, 28 n. 39, 48, 49, 109 n. 27, 114–16, 119, 129, 156 n. 70, 188, 209, 212–13, 218–19, 222 See also Arnold of Brescia; Beghards; Beguines; Jan Hus; Marguerite Porete; Peter of John Olivi; John Wyclif. Heymerich de Campo (van de Velde), 159 n. 80, 161 Hildegard of Bingen, 35–36, 39, 118 Hincmar of Reims, 188, 194 Holy Spirit, 19, 142–43, 148, 152, 154–59, 189 n. 21, 190 Honorius Augustodunensis, 188–90, 207 n. 68 Hrabanus Maurus, 34, 99, 100 n. 16 and 17, 182 n. 5, 187, 203, 204 n. 59 Hugh of Fleury, 106 Hugh of St Cher, 209 n. 75, 210 Hugh of St Victor, 19, n. 5, 190 hypocrisis, 19, 21 Innocent III, pope, 9–10, 41 n. 39, 58, 112–13, 116, 212–13, 227, 229, 233, 247 inquisition, 1–2, 7–8, 14, 24 n. 28, 129, 132–33, 138–39, 141, 144, 191, 212–14, 219–20 inquisitors, see Bernard Gui; Dominicans, inquisitors; Henry Kalteisen; John Wasmod; Konrad of Marburg, Nicholas Eymerich; Peter Cantor; Robert le Petit; Walter Kerlinger

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Index Investiture controversy, 104 n. 12, 194, 205 Isidore of Seville, St, 27 n. 38, 89, 187–88, 190 n. 21 Jan Hus, 129, 217 Jerome, St, 76 n. 30, 78, 80, 182 n. 5, 186, 188–90, 92, 197 n. 46 and 47, 198 n. 49, 203 n. 57, 204, 208, 210 Jerusalem, 68 n. 41, 156, 201 Jewish community, 24, 115, 150–51, 156, 229 n. 32 Joachim of Fiore, 3, 9–12, 153, 155, 156 n. 71, 190, 225–27, 233, 240, 243, 245, 247 John, king of England, 105 John XXII, pope, 137, 140 John of Salisbury, 110–12, 114 n. 1, 208 n. 69 John of Winterthur, 121 John Wasmod, inquisitor, 141 n. 47, 157 n. 71, 161 n. 90 John Wyclif, 8, 216–17 Johannes Hartmann, 141, 143–52, 153 n. 63, 158 n. 76, 163 Justin I (Roman emperor), 84 n. 23, 85–86 Justinian (Roman emperor), 85–86, 88 Kerlinger, Walter, 143, 145 Konrad of Marburg, inquisitor, 52, 127 Konrad of Würzburg, 42–43 Konrad Kannler, 141–58, 162–64, 167 Laity, 3, 31–34, 37–38, 46, 48–49, 61 n. 19, 64–65, 66 n. 32, 69–70, 90, 95–96, 99–102, 105, 107–08, 111–19, 123, 127 n. 5, 128 n. 6, 234–35 Latinate, 38, 62, 69, 123 Law, 70–71, 107–09, 147, 149, 189, 212 Anglo-Saxon, 94–95 canon, 62, 121, 149, 182, 189–90, 194, 245 see also: Corpus iuris canonici; Glossa ordinaria; Gratian Frankish, 87, 91, 97, Germanic, 33, 89, 107–08, 237 imperial, 107, 188 leges barbarorum, 97 Lex dei, 121, 147, 190 Natural, 28, Roman, 74 n. 14, 77, 87, 107–09, 184

literacy, 1–3, 5, 8, 12, 14, 56–57, 64 n. 24, 67 n. 37, 85 n. 28, 94 n. 16, 96, 108 n. 22, 111, 120 idiotae, 19, 57, 61–63, 92, 97, 100, 114, 116, 121 inlitteratus, 72 n. 7, 76, 78, 81–84, 85 n. 25, 86 n. 30 see also vernacular Liutprand, king of the Lombards, 69, 82, 88 Lord’s Prayer, 61 n. 19, 62 Louis IV ‘the Bavarian’ (Holy Roman Emperor), 41, 67 Louis IV, king of France, 35 Louis the Pious (king of France), 34, 40 n. 37, 69 n. 43, 98, 100 n. 17 love, 19, 32–33, 36, 37 n. 27, 38, 53, 55, 95, 131, 133 n. 20, 134, 160, 191, 193 n. 36 Lucilius, 61, 71, 72 n. 7 Luther, Martin, 5, 120, 180–82, 190 Mainz, 138–41, 143, 155–56, 158, 160, 162 Archbishop of, 97 n. 4, 99 n. 13, 142, 158, 160 n. 90, 178, 187 Beghard hearing in (1458), 155–63 Lollards in, 155–56 Suffragan council of, 140 n. 45 Synod of (1310), 138–39 Manichaean, See Heresy, Manichaean Marguerite Porete, 130–32, 133 n. 18 and 19, 134–36, 149, 159–60, 162 Marsilio of Padua, 121, 122 n. 30 Mary, Virgin, 37, 47 n. 66, 146 n. 55, 148–49 Matilda, duchess of Lorraine, 194, Mechthild of Magdeburg, 52–53, 118–19, 134 memory, 63, 71, 93, 124 n. 34, 142 n. 257 Merovingians, 90–91, 96, 100 Metz, 116–17, 140 n. 46 minne, 37 n. 27, 38, 44 n. 52, 46, 52–53 Minnesang, 38, 55 Monasteries, 64, 80, 135, 144, 246 See also convents; and entries for individual orders Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 2, 10, 14, 221, 240–42 music, 30, 70–71, 222 mysticism, 4, 32, 37–38, 48–49, 51–52, 55, 119, 134, 154, 224, 226, 236

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Index bridehood of the soul, 37, 53, 55 see also Marguerite Porete; Peter of John Olivi Nicholas Eymeric, inquisitor, 144 Nicholas of Lyra, 132, 193 n. 33, 210 novitatum presumptio, 19 nuns, see convents Ostrogoth(s), 80–82, 84, 87, 89 Otto I (Holy Roman Emperor), 34, 64 n. 26, 103 n. 9 Otto IV (Holy Roman Emperor), 66–67 Otto of Freising, 68, 69 n. 43, 112–13 Ovid, 35, 112 Papacy, 234, 244 See also Alexander III; Benedict XII; Boniface VIII; Clement V; Gelasius I; Gregory I; Gregory IX; Gregory XI; Innocent III; John XXII; Paschal II Parzival, 39–40, 44–45, 246 Paschal II, pope, 59 Patschovsky, Alexander, 1 n. 1, 138 n. 35, 139 n. 43, 219, 237 n. 38 Paul the Deacon, 69, 80, 82 Pelagians, 6, 187–88, 197, 199, 217 pertinacia, 19, 198, 210 n. 77 Peter Abelard, 113 n. 44, 129, 207, 207 n. 69, 209, 216 Peter Cantor, 144 Peter of Andlau, 42 n. 45, 108 Peter of Blois, 111 n. 34, 112 Peter of John Olivi, 210 n. 75, 217 Peter Lombard, 189, 194, 202 n. 56, 206, 209–10 Philip II, king of France, 42 n. 44, Phillip III, king of France, 67 Philip IV, king of France, 130 n. 12 Pirenne, Henri, 95, 119 Poetry, 3, 30–34, 37–38, 40, 42–48, 52–55, 66, 68–70, 78 n. 39, 79, 89–91, 94–95, 97, 98, 99–100, 106 n. 20, 116 Procopius of Caesarea, 85, 86 n. 30, 88 n. 34 protocols, 7, 16, 127–30, 139, 141–48, 151–54, 156–58, 160, 162–64 psalter, 33–36, 64, 80, 116, 118 n. 21 and 22, 218 Quintilian, 75, 91

Richard I ‘the Lionheart’, king of England, 105 Robert le Petit, le Bougre, inquisitor, 126–28 Robert, king of Naples, 121 Rudolf von Habsburg, 41, 59 n. 8 Rule of St Benedict, 55, 80–81, 126, 246 Rupert of Deutz, Abbot, 101 n. 20, 190, 207, 245 Sabbath, heretical, 27, 28 n. 39 Sachsenspiegel, 33–34 Saint-Denis, 130–32, 134 Salimbene, 35 n. 13, 111 n. 33, 113 Schwabenspiegel, 33, 50 n. 74 school, 5, 24, 27, 43, 70, 79, 83, 86–89, 93, 94 n. 15, 100, 101, 108, 113 n. 44, 120, 124, 189–90, 195, 205, 208, 209, 217 Grundmann at, 222, 224, 229 n. 35, 234, 238, 246 Scripture, 5–6, 8, 23, 40 n. 37, 48–49, 51, 61, 65 n. 28, 78, 79, 99, 105 n. 14, 114–16, 117 n. 19, 119, 132, 160, 183–87, 189–90, 195, 199, 202–03, 205–06, 218 Numbers, 181 Judges, 23, 192 Job, 36, 201 Psalms, 34, 36, 39 n. 34, 79–80, 89, 93–94, 104 n. 14, 121, 201, 203, 207 Song of Songs, 23, 36-7, 65, 191-2, 213 Matthew, 9, 21, 173 n. 102, 182 n. 5, 191, 196 n. 45, 211 n. 78, 222, 227 Luke, 171 n. 98, 182, 192–95, 196 n. 45, 211 n. 78 compelle intrare (Luke 14.23), 192–93, 205, 213 John, 23, 57, 61, 92, 114, 157, 159, 170 n. 96, 172 n. 100, 173 n. 101, 207 n. 67 Acts of the Apostles, 61, 76 n. 30, 180 Pauline letters, 116, 159, 191 n. 26, 208–11 Romans, 201 n. 76, 216 I Corinthians, 148, 165 n. 95, 180–84, 191–2, 196, 198 n. 48 and 49, 199, 203, 206 n. 65, 209, 210 nn. 76 and 77 II Corinthians, 25, 147–48, 156, 170 n. 97, 176 n. f, 191–92, 203, 211 n. 78 Galatians, 172, 174, 180-2 II Timothy, 20 Titus 3.10, 180 n. 1, 182–83, 185, 187, 190–92, 197, 198 n. 48 and 49, 199,

263

Index 203, 204 n. 59, 205 n. 63, 206 n. 64, 208–09, 210 n. 77, 211 n. 78, 212–13 II Peter, 182 See also Vulgate Senate, 87–88 Seneca, 73, 75, 112 sermons, 32, 48–51, 53, 65, 79, 106 n. 19, 136, 190–91, 195, 201, 203 Severus, Sulpicius, 77–78, 81 Sicard of Cremona, Bishop, 41 n. 37, 69 simony, 104, 205, 242, 244 Song of Hildebrand, 32, 97 Song of Roland, 47, 103 n. 6 species pietatis, 18, 20, 22, 25 Strasbourg, heretics in, 28 n. 39, 117, 129, 136, 138–41, 150 n. 60, 152 n. 61, 156, 160, 162 Suetonius, 72, 73, 76, 91 superbia, 18–21, 206 n. 70, 207–08, 211 Swabian Ries, 138, 139 n. 44, 150 n. 60 sword, 64 n. 26, 87, 107, 109, 194 Tacitus, 75–76 Templar, Knights, 130, 137 n. 32 Tertullian, 185 n. 11, 186–87, 190, 196, 213–14 Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, 69, 81–89, 99, 107 n. 23 treatise, antiheretical, 16, 23, 51, 65, 71 Trevrizent, 44 n. 55, 64, 246 Trier, 64 n. 26, 88, 138 Trinity, 136, 152 n. 61, 210 n. 77, 90 Tristan and Isolde, 44, 45, 47, 66 Trudpert, St, 36–7 Ulrich of Leonrod, 142 Ulrich of Lichtenstein, 43, 45, 54, 103 Frauendienst, 43, 55, 103 Ulrich of Türheim, 44, 47

University, 236, 237 n. 79, 239–40, 242 Basel, 108 Berlin, 229 n. 35 Bologna, 115 Heidelberg, 123 Koenigsberg, 4, 231 Leipzig, 223, 228, 229 n. 32, 234 Marburg, 124 Münster, 4, 232–33, 235 n. 75 Munich, 243 Oxford, 216 Paris, 130, 217 Prague, 217 Tuebingen, 123 Wittenberg, 124 Vergil, 35, 185 vernacular, 3, 5, 15, 30–38, 46, 48–51, 58–59, 65, 69, 91–92, 95–99, 106 n. 19, 111, 117, 120, 123 n. 34, 134–35, 160–62, 218, 230–31, 233 Vitruvius, 61 n. 16, 71, 72 n. 8, Vulgate, 48, 57, 180–83, 192 Walafrid Strabo, 34, 99, 189, 205 n. 61 Waldensians See Heresy, Waldensians Walter Kerlinger, inquisitor, 143, 145 Walter Map, 19, 42 n. 45, 105, 106 n. 19, 109, 115 Wibald of Stablo, 68, 108 William of Malmesbury, 110 William of Nangis, 67 n. 36, 131, 132 n. 16 William of Ockham, 129 William of Paris, 130 n. 12, 135 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 39–40, 43, 45, 63, 246 Wolfram von den Steinen, 82, 247

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YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages 1 Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations, L. J. Sackville (2011) 2 Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Medieval Quercy, Claire Taylor (2011) 3 Heresy, Inquisition and Life Cycle in Medieval Languedoc, Chris Sparks (2014) 4 Cathars in Question, ed. Antonio Sennis (2016) 5 Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives, Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerner, ed. Michael D. Bailey and Sean L. Field (2018) 6 Heresy in Late Medieval Germany The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians, Reima Välimäki (2019) 7 Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century: The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich, Derek Hill (2019) 8 Inquisition and its Organisation in Italy, 1250–1350, Jill Moore (2019) Details of other York Medieval Press volumes are available from Boydell & Brewer Ltd.

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I

n the field of medieval history, few scholars have matched the originality of the German academic Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970). Trained at the University of Leipzig and president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica from 1959 until his death, Grundmann published a series of brilliant books and articles that fundamentally reshaped how historians of culture and religion conceptualized the medieval past. Yet although later generations of scholars have since approached their research from vantage points shaped by his arguments, few of his writings have been previously accessible to an Anglophone audience. This volume presents translations of six of Grundmann’s most significant essays on the intertwined themes of medieval heresy, literacy, and inquisition. Together, they offer new access to Grundmann’s scholarship, one which will catalyze new perspectives on the medieval religious past and enable a fresh consideration of his intellectual legacy in the twenty-first century. JENNIFER KOLPACOFF DEANE is Professor of History at the

University of Minnesota, Morris.

HERBERT GRUNDMANN (1902–1970)

HERESY AND INQUISITION IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Cover image: Amalric of Bena teaching, c.1200. BnF, Paris, France. HIP/Art Resource, NY.

DEANE (ed.)

HERBERT GRUNDMANN (1902–1970)

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

Essays on Heresy, Inquisition and Literacy An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

Edited by JENNIFER KOLPACOFF DEANE