Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture 140942393X, 9781409423935

Table of contents :
List of Figures ix
Notes on Contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xix
Introduction / Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown 1
PART I: Memory and Images
1. Images and the Work of Memory, with Special Reference to the Sixth-Century Mosaics of Ravenna, Italy / Jean-Claude Schmitt. Translated from the French by Marie-Pierre Gelin 13
2. "Images Gross and Sensible": Violence, Memory and Art in the Thirteenth Century / Martha Easton 33
3. Beyond the Two Doors of Memory: Intertextualities and Intervisualities in Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscripts of the "Roman de Troie" and the "Histoire Ancienne" / Rosa María Rodríguez Porto 55
PART II: Commemoration and Oblivion
4. The Making of the Carolingian "Libri Memoriales": Exploring or Constructing the Past? / Eva-Maria Butz and Alfons Zettler 79
5. Status and the Soul: Commemoration and Intercession in the Rayonnant Chapels of Northern France in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries / Mailan S. Doquang 93
6. Ritual Excommunication: An "Ars Oblivionalis"? / Christian Jaser 119
PART III: Memory, Reading and Performance
7. "The Speculum Maius", Between "Thesaurus" and "Lieu de Mémoire" / Mary Franklin-Brown 143
8. The Memory of Roman Law in an Illuminated Manuscript of Justinian's Digest / Joanna Frońska 163
9. "Quant j’eus tout recordé par ordre": Memory and Performance on Display in the Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut's "Voir Dit" and "Remede de Fortune" / Kate Maxwell 181
10. Acrostics as Copyright Protection in the Franco–Italian Epic: Implications for Memory Theory / John F. Levy 195
PART IV: Royal and Aristocratic Memory and Commemoration
11. Changes of Aristocratic Identity: Remarriage and Remembrance in Europe 900–1200 / Elisabeth van Houts 221
12. Longchamp and Lourcine: The Role of Female Abbeys in the Construction of Capetian Memory (Late Thirteenth Century to Mid-Fourteenth Century) / Anne-Hélène Allirot. Translated from the French by Lewis Beer 243
13. Louis IX and Liturgical Memory / M. Cecilia Gaposchkin 261
PART V: Remembering Medieval France
14 Pierre Loti's "Memories" of the Middle Ages: Feasting on the Gothic in 1888 / Elizabeth Emery 279
15. Celebrating the Medieval Past in Modern Cluny: How Popular Events Helped Shape Collective Memory for a
Small French Town / Janet T. Marquardt 299
16. "A Mere Patch of Color": Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Shattered Glass of Reims Cathedral / Shirin Fozi 321
Index 345

Citation preview

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

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Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

Edited by

Elma Brenner Wellcome Library, UK Meredith Cohen UCLA, USA Mary Franklin-Brown University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown and the contributors 2013 Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture 1. Memory – Social aspects – Europe – History – To 1500. 2. Memory – Religious aspects – Christianity. 3. Memorialization – Europe – History – To 1500. 4. Civilization, Medieval. 5. Memory – Social aspects – France – History – To 1500. 6. Memorialization – France – History – To 1500. I. Brenner, Elma. II. Franklin-Brown, Mary. III. Cohen, Meredith. 940.1-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Memory and commemoration in medieval culture / edited by Elma Brenner, Mary Franklin-Brown and Meredith Cohen. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Europe – History – 476–1492. 2. Europe – Social life and customs. 3. Europe – Intellectual life. 4. Memory – Social aspects – Europe – History – To 1500. 5. Memorials – Europe – History – To 1500. I. Brenner, Elma. II. Franklin-Brown, Mary. III. Cohen, Meredith. D117.M46 2013 940.1–dc23 2012030427 ISBN: 978-1-409-42393-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-59487-3 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures   Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgements   Introduction   Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown

ix xiii xix 1

PART I: Memory and Images 1 2 3

Images and the Work of Memory, with Special Reference to the Sixth-Century Mosaics of Ravenna, Italy   Jean-Claude Schmitt Translated from the French by Marie-Pierre Gelin ‘Images Gross and Sensible’: Violence, Memory and Art in the Thirteenth Century   Martha Easton Beyond the Two Doors of Memory: Intertextualities and Intervisualities in Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie and the Histoire Ancienne   Rosa María Rodríguez Porto

13

33

55

PART II: Commemoration and Oblivion 4 5

The Making of the Carolingian Libri Memoriales: Exploring or Constructing the Past?   Eva-Maria Butz and Alfons Zettler



Status and the Soul: Commemoration and Intercession in the Rayonnant Chapels of Northern France in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries   Mailan S. Doquang

6

Ritual Excommunication: An ‘Ars Oblivionalis’?   Christian Jaser

79

93 119

vi

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PART III: Memory, Reading and Performance 7 The Speculum Maius, Between Thesaurus and Lieu de Mémoire   143 Mary Franklin-Brown 8 9 10

The Memory of Roman Law in an Illuminated Manuscript of Justinian’s Digest   Joanna Frońska ‘Quant j’eus tout recordé par ordre’: Memory and Performance on Display in the Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit and Remede de Fortune   Kate Maxwell Acrostics as Copyright Protection in the Franco–Italian Epic: Implications for Memory Theory   John F. Levy

163

181

195

PART IV: Royal and Aristocratic Memory and Commemoration 11

Changes of Aristocratic Identity: Remarriage and Remembrance in Europe 900–1200   Elisabeth van Houts

221



Longchamp and Lourcine: The Role of Female Abbeys in the Construction of Capetian Memory (Late Thirteenth Century to Mid-Fourteenth Century)   Anne-Hélène Allirot Translated from the French by Lewis Beer

243

13

Louis IX and Liturgical Memory   M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

12

261

PART V: Remembering Medieval France 14 15

Pierre Loti’s ‘Memories’ of the Middle Ages: Feasting on the Gothic in 1888   Elizabeth Emery Celebrating the Medieval Past in Modern Cluny: How Popular Events Helped Shape Collective Memory for a Small French Town   Janet T. Marquardt

279

299

Contents

16

‘A Mere Patch of Color’: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Shattered Glass of Reims Cathedral   Shirin Fozi

Index  

vii

321 345

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List of Figures 1.1

1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Thirteenth-century Psalter of Elizabeth of Thuringia, fo. 167v.–168r. (image courtesy of the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval (GAHOM), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). Genealogical tree of the Welf lineage in the Historia Welforum, c. 1185 (image courtesy of GAHOM, Paris). Fourteenth-century tomb of Giovanni da Legnano (image courtesy of GAHOM, Paris). Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), diptych containing portrait of Carondelet, dean of Besançon (left) and the Virgin and Child (right), 1517 (Paris, Louvre Museum) (image courtesy of GAHOM, Paris). Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), diptych containing image of a skull and a scroll of paper (left), 1517 (Paris, Louvre Museum) (image courtesy of GAHOM, Paris). Interior of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy (image courtesy of GAHOM, Paris). Mosaic showing the Three Wise Men, north wall, interior of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy (image courtesy of GAHOM, Paris). ‘The Flaying of Saint Bartholomew’, Legenda aurea, San Marino, The Huntington Library, HM 3027, fo. 108v. Jean Fouquet, ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia’, Hours of Etienne Chevalier, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS fr. 71, fo. 39r. (© Réunion des Museés Nationaux/Art Resource, New York) ‘The Flagellation of Christ’, Picture Book of Madame Marie, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acqu. fr. 16251, fo. 36r. ‘The Beheading of Saint Gordianus’, Legenda aurea, San Marino, The Huntington Library, HM 3027, fo. 63r. ‘The Torture of Saint Agnes’, Legenda aurea, San Marino, The Huntington Library, HM 3027, fo. 23v.

3.1 Penthesilea and the Amazons go to the aid of Troy. Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 20125, fo. 141v. (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France).

20 22 23 25 26 28 29 37 40 45 48 50

63

x

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

The death of Hector, his tomb and the death of Achilles. Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César British Library, MS Additional 19669, fo. 84r. Death of Hector. Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, Bibliothèque Municipale de Dijon, MS 562, fo. 96v. Photograph: E. Juvin. The death of Hector. Roman de Troie, Collection, Dr. J.H. van Heek. Foundation Huis Berg. ‘s-Heerenberg, The Netherlands. The episode of the Wooden Horse. Roman de Troie, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1610, fo. 156r. (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France). The funeral of Hector. Roman de Troie, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 783, fo. 109v. (Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France).

64 65 68 69 70

Liber memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 35r. First page of the list of nuns who died before 817. The list contains 386 names. 87 Liber memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 43v. Calendar of benefactors. Entries of Charlemagne and (King) Guntram. 89 Liber memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 3v. The kings’ diptych, 862/863.90 Nave chapels, Notre-Dame, Paris. Photograph: Author. Choir chapels, Notre-Dame, Paris. Photograph: Author. Interior, Rouen Cathedral. Photograph: Author. Inscription for donor statue of Simon Matifas de Bucy, Notre-Dame, Paris. Photograph: Author. Effigy of Simon Matifas de Bucy, Notre-Dame, Paris. Photograph: Author. Guillaume de Mâcon, Amiens Cathedral. Photograph: Author. Saint-Nicolas chapel, Amiens Cathedral. Photograph: Author. Beau Pilier, Amiens Cathedral. Photograph: Author. Charles V, Amiens Cathedral. Photograph: Author.

94 94 100

Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 44. Illustration of the term ‘turpis’. Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 225. A man fleeing a rabbit. Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 146. Loan of a horse. Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 174. Deposit of a horse. Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 80v. Man cutting down the branches of a tree. Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 3. Justinian. Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 13. A proconsul receiving gifts. Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 14v. A poor woman in front of a judge.

168 169 173 173

107 108 111 112 114 115

175 175 177 177

List of Figures

14.1 ‘La salle à manger gothique, côté droit’. Photo Dornac. Published in an article by Albert Dayrolles, ‘Une conversation avec Pierre Loti’, La Revue illustrée (1893): pp. 213–19 (p. 215). Public domain; Photograph: Elizabeth Emery. 14.2 ‘Les Invitations au Festin Louis XI de Pierre Loti’. Drawing by Edouard Zier. Reprinted in Le Monde illustré, 62 (1888): p. 251. Public domain; Photograph: Elizabeth Emery. 14.3 ‘Un Festin Louis XI chez Monsieur et Madame Pierre Loti à Rochefort-sur-mer’. Drawing by Adrien Marie. Published in Le Monde illustré, 62 (1888): pp. 252–3. Public domain; Photograph: Elizabeth Emery.  14.4 ‘Le Menu du Festin Louis XI de Mr. Pierre Loti’. Drawing by Edouard Zier. Reprinted in Le Monde illustré, 62 (1888): p. 254. Public domain; Photograph: Elizabeth Emery.  14.5 The Saracen’s Ransom, photograph from Loti’s Louis XI dinner. Public domain; Photograph: Elizabeth Emery. 15.1 The remaining transept of the abbey church at Cluny. Photograph: Janet T. Marquardt. 15.2 Cover of Alfred Forest’s Histoire d’un Jubilé, 1899. 15.3 Programme cover, 1910 (Cluny Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University). (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design). 15.4 Official poster, 1910 (Cluny Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University). (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design). 15.5 Awaiting the arrival of Louis IX, 1910 (postcard). Photograph: Janet T. Marquardt. 15.6 Religious procession, 1910 (postcard). Photograph: Janet T. Marquardt. 15.7 Kenneth Conant at the 1949 Congrès (Cluny Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University). (Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design). 16.1 Stained glass fragments from Reims Cathedral, France. 21.5 x 13.5 inches. Inv. no. C8e1, Chinese Loggia, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. (Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston). 16.2 Cover of Ce qu’était Reims… (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library). 16.3a Opening from Ce qu’était Reims …, showing Reims Cathedral before it was bombed. (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library).

xi

281 284

287 290 294 302 306 309 312 313 313 316

323 327 328

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16.3b Opening from Ce qu’était Reims …, showing Reims Cathedral after it was bombed. (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library). 16.4 Cover of The Martyr Cathedral, special edition of Victory Magazine, 1919. (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library). 16.5 Chinese Loggia, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. (Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston). 16.6 Spanish Chapel, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Photograph: Sean Dungan. (Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston). 16.7 Photogravure of a fragmented female head from Reims, originally from the collection of Arthur Kingsley Porter. (Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library). 16.8 View of the Courtyard looking southwest from the North Cloister, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. (Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston).

329 331 337 337

342 343

Notes on Contributors The Editors Elma Brenner is resident Specialist in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine at the Wellcome Library, UK, former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and former Research Fellow at Hughes Hall, Cambridge. Her research focuses on medical history and religious culture in medieval Normandy, and she is completing a monograph, provisionally titled Leprosy and Charity in Rouen, c.1100–c.1400. Meredith Cohen received her doctorate from the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University in 2004. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the President of the International Medieval Society, Paris. Her research interests include medieval architecture, sculpture and urbanism, as well as nineteenth-century medievalism, particularly in France. Dr Cohen’s publications range in subject matter from nineteenth-century restoration theory and practice to medieval architecture and liturgy. An edited book on space in the medieval west and a monograph on the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris are due to be published soon. Mary Franklin-Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has published on Old French romance, the troubadours and encyclopedism. Her monograph, Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age, was published in 2012. The Authors Anne-Hélène Allirot studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She is a professeur agrégée and has a doctorate in medieval history. She is currently teaching in secondary schools. Her thesis, ‘Filles de roy de France. Princesses, mémoire de saint Louis et conscience dynastique, de 1270 à la fin du XIVe siècle’, supervised by Colette Beaune, was completed in 2007 and published by Brepols in 2010. Her research focuses on the legitimacy of royal blood, women and lineage. Lewis Beer received his PhD from the University of Warwick in 2010 with a thesis entitled ‘Fortune and Desire in Guillaume de Machaut’. He is currently a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, and is working on a book about didacticism in late-medieval love poetry.

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Eva-Maria Butz is Assistant Professor in Medieval History at the Historisches Institut, Technische Universität Dortmund. She is currently working on a book about the liturgical commemoration of early medieval elites. Mailan S. Doquang is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at McGill University.  She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2009. Her dissertation research, which was funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, focused on the interrelation of architecture, objects and rituals as a means of advancing patronal demands in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France.  She is currently working on a study of Solomonic references in French churches from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and a book project examining the thresholds of sacred spaces. Martha Easton received her PhD in 2001 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and is currently Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Seton Hall University.  She has taught at Bryn Mawr College, New York University and The Cooper Union, and worked at The Cloisters and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research and teaching interests include medieval illuminated manuscripts, gender and hagiography, the history of collecting medieval art and feminist theory.  She is the author of numerous publications on gender, eroticism and sanctity in medieval visual culture, with a particular focus on representations of the tortures of male and female martyrs and their complicated meanings for medieval and modern viewers.  She is presently working on a project that examines the collecting and display of medieval art in the United States, focused on Hammond Castle, a revivalist monument built in the 1920s in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French at Montclair State University where she teaches medieval and nineteenth-century French literature and culture.  She is the author of books, articles and essay anthologies related to the reception of medieval art and architecture in nineteenth-century France and America, among them Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-siècle French Culture (2001) and Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France (2003).  She has recently published a book exploring the early twentiethcentury phenomenon of writers’ private homes turned into public museums: Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881– 1914) (2012). Shirin Fozi (PhD Harvard University, 2010) is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Art History at Northwestern University. From August 2013 she will be Assistant Professor of Medieval European Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation, currently in preparation for publication, addressed the rise of the figural tomb effigy in the Holy Roman Empire during

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the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Opportunities to lecture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, have led to her growing interest in the modern reception of medieval art in the USA. Joanna Frońska was awarded her PhD from the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, Poitiers, and Warsaw University, with a thesis on ‘Fonctions et usages des images dans les manuscrits juridiques: Le Digestum vetus de Justinien de la Bibliothèque de Kórnik BK 824’. She has published on illustrated medieval law books. She currently works in the Department of History and Classics in the British Library, where she is in charge of cataloguing medieval manuscripts. She was a Project Researcher for the 2011–12 British Library exhibition ‘Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination’. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. She is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College, and author of The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (2008; paperback issue 2010), and Blessed Louis, the Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France (2012). She is currently working on a book which examines the intersections of crusade and liturgy. Marie-Pierre Gelin is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure; she is professeur agregée, and obtained her doctorate in Medieval Studies from the University of Poitiers. Her thesis on the stained glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral was published in 2006 (Lumen ad revelationem gentium: iconographie et liturgie à Christ Church, Canterbury, 1175–1220, 2006). Her current research interests focus on the role of images in the construction of identity and the transmission of memory, particularly in monastic contexts. She is currently Honorary Research Associate and Teaching Fellow in Medieval History at University College London. Christian Jaser is a Research Fellow at the Technische Universität Dresden working on the project ‘The Medieval Duel Between Law, Ritual and Physical Exercise’ funded by the German Research Foundation. His dissertation ‘Ecclesia maledicens. Rituelle und zeremonielle Exkommunikation im Mittelalter’ (2010) is forthcoming in the series Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation (2013). He co-edited (with Ute Lotz-Heumann and Matthias Pohlig) the anthology Alteuropa – Vormoderne – Neue Zeit. Epochen und Dynamiken der europäischen Geschichte (1200–1800) (2012) which addressed the validity of the epochal divide between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. He is currently preparing a postdoctoral project with the working title ‘Economies of Competition. Urban Sport Cultures of the Fifteenth Century in Comparative Perspective (Paris, Nuremberg, Florence)’.

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John F. Levy, a relatively recent (2000) PhD in Romance Philology, has held appointments as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature and for many years was a Visiting Scholar in French, at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies Old French epic, Franco-Italian literature, exempla and fabliaux, as well as miscellaneous topics in folklore and performance studies; he is currently doing research on the Roman de Renart and the Libro de Buen Amor. Customarily, he divides his time between France and Turkey, with winters in Berkeley where he has grandchildren. Janet T. Marquardt holds the rank of Distinguished Professor at Eastern Illinois University, where she has taught since receiving her PhD in medieval art history from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1986. She has written on contemporary American female artists and early medieval manuscripts. She is author of the thematic textbook Frames of Reference: Art, History, and the World (with Stephen Eskilson, 2004), as well as a monograph on the post-Revolutionary history of the ruins at Cluny entitled From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony (2007/2009). She co-edited (with Alyce Jordan) the anthology Medieval Art After the Middle Ages (2009/2011). A serendipitous find at the Royal Irish Academy resulted in an English edition of Françoise Henry’s personal diary written during her excavations in Ireland (Françoise Henry in Co. Mayo: The Inishkea Journals (2012)). Her forthcoming book on the Zodiaque publications is part of ongoing research into French Romanesque historiography. She was a Visiting Professor at the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale in Poitiers in 2006 and a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in 2011. Kate Maxwell is a postdoctoral researcher with the project ‘Multimodality and Cultural Change (Multikul)’ at the University of Agder, Norway. Here she is working on a project which explores the multimodality of the medieval ‘text’ and manuscript, with particular emphasis on the anthology manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut.. She obtained her PhD from the departments of French and Music at the University of Glasgow in 2009 with a thesis entitled ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the mise en page of Medieval French Sung Verse’. She has published scholarly articles on Machaut and on the Livre de Fauvel, the order of the lays in the Machaut manuscript E, as well as a graphic composition in the collection Notations 21 (2009). She is currently co-editing a volume entitled Performance and the Page, a collection of articles which seek to explore the importance of page layout in manuscript reception and interpretation. Rosa María Rodríguez Porto obtained her PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2012 with a dissertation on the illuminated books made for the kings and queens of Castile (1284–1369). Her research interests include medieval Iberian courtly culture, artistic production and cultural exchange in frontier societies, the classical tradition and the uses of images in the construction of historical discourse. She is the author of ‘Inscribed / Effaced. The Estoria de

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Espanna after 1275’, Hispanic Research Journal, 13.5 (2012): pp. 387–406, and ‘The Crónica Troyana de Alfonso XI (Escorial, h.I.6): A Visual Exemplum on Warfare, Chivalry and Courtliness’ (forthcoming). Jean-Claude Schmitt is Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where he directs the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval. His books include Le saint lévrier. Guinefort, guérisseur d’enfants depuis le XIIIe siècle (1979, second edn 2004), La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (1990), Les revenants. Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (1994), Le corps des images. Essais sur la culture visuelle du Moyen Age (2002), La conversion d’Hermann le Juif. Autobiographie, histoire et fiction (2003) and L’invention de l’anniversaire (2009). His next book is in preparation, entitled Histoire des rythmes. Elisabeth van Houts is a College Lecturer in Medieval History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Honorary Professor of European Medieval History in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. She has published widely on the history of the central Middle Ages with a special interest in the Anglo-Norman realm, gender and memory. Recent publications are Medieval Writings on Secular Women, translated with an introduction [with Patricia Skinner] (2011) and A Social History of England, 900–1200, edited [with Julia Crick] (2011). She is preparing a book on Marriage and Domesticity in the Middle Ages for Longman. Alfons Zettler is Professor of Medieval History, Technische Universität Dortmund. His publications include Die frühen Klosterbauten der Reichenau (1988), Offerenteninschriften auf den frühchristlichen Mosaikfußböden Venetiens (2000) and Geschichte des Herzogtums Schwaben (2003).

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Acknowledgements Several individuals, institutions and funding bodies have facilitated the completion of this book. The majority of the chapters were first presented as papers at the fourth annual symposium of the International Medieval Society, Paris, on ‘Memory’, held at the Maison de la Recherche of the Université de Paris IV in June 2007. We thank Frédérique Lachaud and Xavier Hélary for inviting us to hold the symposium at Paris IV and all those who took part in the meeting, with special gratitude to our keynote speakers Mary Carruthers and Jean-Claude Schmitt. We also thank the contributors to the volume for their hard work and the members of the International Medieval Society, Paris, for their support. We are very grateful to Marie-Pierre Gelin and Lewis Beer for translating Chapters 1 and 12, respectively, and to Marylin Brenner for her editorial assistance. Elma Brenner undertook work on this book as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and as a Research Fellow at Hughes Hall, Cambridge. She gratefully thanks the Wellcome Trust, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Hughes Hall for their support. Finally, we are most grateful to Emily Yates, our Commissioning Editor at Ashgate, the editorial team at Ashgate and the anonymous reviewers of the book.

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Introduction Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown

Memory was fundamental to medieval religious and secular life. Philosophers debated the role of memory in the processes of the mind and ‘arts of memory’ propounded techniques for memorization and invention, while communities honoured individuals, groups or events through rituals of commemoration. Thus, as scholars have increasingly come to recognize, the study of memory and commemoration can open windows upon the diversity and complexity of medieval culture and the respective roles of philosophy, rhetoric, religious beliefs and practices, and familial and community norms. In response to the growing body of scholarship on medieval memory, the International Medieval Society, Paris (IMS, Paris), convened a symposium on the topic in June 2007. The speakers at this interdisciplinary conference addressed issues as diverse as mnemonics, tradition, identity, the construction of memory and forgetting, provoking a lively discussion of the subject in all its breadth. The editors of the present volume have invited these speakers to expand their papers into book chapters and commissioned an additional chapter from a distinguished scholar, with the goal of making this new research available to a broader audience. The sixteen chapters that follow at once reveal the diverse themes within the field and illuminate how memory and commemoration shaped cultural, religious and social practices in medieval Europe. Together, these chapters encourage readers to think in innovative ways about the operation and significance of memory and commemoration, in and in relation to, the Middle Ages. While the annual symposia of the IMS, Paris, usually focus on the geographical area of Francia and medieval France,1 several papers at the 2007 symposium exploited comparative material from other parts of Europe, underlining some of the cultural connections between France and its environs, and the importance of memory and commemoration in medieval Europe more broadly. In consequence, this volume focuses on France but also includes discussion relating to different parts of Western Europe, including England, Italy and Germany. We thus hope that it will prove useful not only for scholars who specialize in the study of France, but also for those studying other regions of Europe.

1   Recent symposia include ‘Blood in Medieval France’ (2008), ‘Space in Medieval France’ (2009), ‘Translatio’ (2010) , ‘Ordo’ (2011) and ‘Human/Animal’ (2012).

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Memory and Commemoration In this volume, ‘memory’ refers to the cognitive process of remembering, from the use of mnemonic images to the recollection of information about family history, while ‘commemoration’ designates practices and processes associated with honouring the memory of someone or something. Each occupied a unique position in medieval society and culture. Memory was central to the medieval understanding of the human mind, since medical discourse posited that memory was controlled by the ‘vital spirit’ (a kind of matter which linked the soul and the body), located in the third ventricle at the rear of the brain. According to this model, the quality of both the vital spirit and the ventricle affected the power of memory.2 At the same time, the rhetorical tradition had transmitted a set of highly effective mnemonic practices to medieval clerks. These techniques allowed them to recall great quantities of text, an ability indispensable to intellectuals working in an age before the printing press or computers. Their individual memory stores enabled them to engage in rhetorical invention. Hence memorization and creative thought were not viewed as inimical to each other, as they have often been portrayed in later periods.3 Commemoration, for its part, played a distinct role in religious practice. The Eucharist itself fulfilled Christ’s instruction to take bread and wine ‘in remembrance of me’ (I Corinthians 11: 23–6), and commemoration of the dead was a fundamentally important Christian activity.4 In these ways and others, the past – and the imperative to remember it – occupied a central position in medieval thought, from ideas concerning the family to those shaping secular and religious institutions.5 These aspects of memory and commemoration were brought to the attention of scholars by pioneering work in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966) may be considered the first landmark study of the subject.6 This book examined the practice of using images to create sites of memory from the classical period up to the seventeenth century, showing how memory is fundamental to the history of culture. Focusing specifically on medieval memory, Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record (1979, second edition 1993) addressed how literacy intersected with oral modes of retaining and transmitting   Ruth Harvey, ‘Psychology’, in Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey and Faith Wallis (eds), Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2005), pp. 426–7. 3   See Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2008), p. 1. 4   On the commemoration of the dead, see Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam 1000–1150 (Paris, 1998), Part II, Chapter 7; Charlotte A. Stanford, Commemorating the Dead in Late Medieval Strasbourg: The Cathedral’s Book of Donors and its Use (1320–1521) (Farnham, 2011). 5   See Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 8, 9–10, 15–16, 21–2. 6   Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966). 2

Introduction

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information in England after the Norman Conquest.7 In France, the project Les lieux de mémoire, directed by Pierre Nora between 1984 and 1992, and Jacques Le Goff’s Histoire et mémoire (1988) introduced the theme of memory to the Annales school and, more broadly, to those practising the New History.8 Nora’s seven volumes explored the bases of French identity through an analysis of French history, and developed the concept of the ‘realm of memory’, defined as a reified construction of the past that might be either physical or abstract. Since 1990, the work of Mary Carruthers (The Book of Memory, 1990, second edition 2008, and The Craft of Thought, 1998) has brought the subject of memory to the forefront of medieval scholarly inquiry.9 The Book of Memory, inspired by Yates’s work but also moving far beyond it, analyzed classical, patristic and medieval sources. Carruthers’s readings of these texts showed how memory functioned as an intellectual art in medieval culture, serving not only to enable the mental storage of large tomes that could not be transported, but also as a means of directed meditation or thought practice. Complementing this focus on intellectual culture, Patrick Geary’s Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (1994) investigated ‘the ordinary practices of recollecting, transforming and using the past’ exhibited by individuals, families and communities.10 Geary proposed that individual and collective memory, history and collective memory, or oral and written remembrance, were not incompatible with each other. His comprehensive book considered the topic in relation to gender, the family, archives, institutions and power.11 The chapters in the present volume build upon the important work of these scholars, while also integrating other recent historical approaches, such as the history of gender, ritual, violence and religious practice. Topics addressed by the authors here include: the differences between oral, written and visual memory (Levy, Frońska), perceptions about how commemoration operated in this world and the world to come (Butz and Zettler, Doquang), the role of memory in the family (van Houts, Allirot), the plurality and fallibility of memory (Gaposchkin, Doquang), and the interplay between remembrance and forgetting (Schmitt, Jaser).   Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1993). 8   Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, 1, La République ([Paris], 1984); Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, 2, La Nation (3 vols, [Paris], 1986); Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, 3, Les France (3 vols, [Paris], 1992); Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (3 vols, New York, 1996–98); Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire ([Paris], 1988); Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York, 1992). 9   Carruthers, Book of Memory; Mary J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998). Also see Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds), The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, 2002). 10   Geary, p. 10. 11   Ibid., pp. 7–22. 7

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Several chapters address the importance of memory in religious life, in terms of liturgical commemoration (Butz and Zettler, Gaposchkin) and architectural memorials such as chapels (Doquang). Memory is also seen as a constituent force that shaped music (Maxwell), literature (Rodríguez Porto, Levy), art (Easton) and law (Frońska). The final group of essays addresses ‘memories’ of medieval France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urging us to place medieval memory and commemoration in a broader chronological context by considering memorial processes in more recent historical periods. Together, the essays here encourage readers to reflect upon how memory is inevitably located in the ‘present’, and on how history itself is constructed.12 They complement another interdisciplinary volume of essays on medieval memory that has been published during the course of this manuscript’s preparation. This collection, edited by Lucie Doležalová, focuses on memory as a repository for information and on its role in constructing versions of the past.13 The present volume innovates by considering commemoration alongside memory and by placing both themes in their broader social, cultural and religious context. Indeed, research in this area is increasingly integrated with other fields of medieval scholarship, befitting the centrality of memory and commemoration in medieval culture. Furthermore, the chapters that follow take up related problems that preoccupy medievalists. Chief among these is the distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ memory. The concept of ‘collective memory’ was introduced by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, and has been elaborated more recently by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann in his notion of ‘cultural memory’.14 In their coauthored book, James Fentress and Chris Wickham preferred the term ‘social memory’ to the phrase ‘collective memory’, and envisaged a process by which individual memory becomes social through communication.15 Amy Remensnyder has examined the ‘imaginative memory’ at play in the formation of foundation legends by monastic communities, observing that, by constructing the past, these legends created the identity of groups, institutions and individuals, and promoted

  See Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Introduction: Medieval Memories’, in Elisabeth van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past in Europe, 700–1300 (Harlow, 2001), p. 10. 13   Lucie Doležalová and Tamás Visi, ‘Revisiting Memory in the Middle Ages (Introduction)’, in Lucie Doležalová (ed.), The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2010), p. 2. 14   Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Y. Ditter (New York, 1980); Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1992); English edition: Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2011); Jan Assmann (trans. John Czaplicka), ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, 65 (1995): pp. 125–33. 15   James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), pp. ix–x. 12

Introduction

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the cohesion of groups.16 In her study of History and Memory in the Carolingian World, Rosamond McKitterick has explored the issues of collective memory, literacy and identity in relation to historical texts composed in the early medieval Carolingian realm.17 Several of the chapters in the present volume also problematize the distinctions between individual and collective memory. Elisabeth van Houts discusses individual women as repositories for collective family memory. Mailan S. Doquang examines the efforts of individuals who founded chantry chapels and built funerary monuments to be remembered by society, and Christian Jaser considers the social forgetting of excommunicants. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin details how liturgical texts among different orders redefined the sanctity of Louis IX according to their specific monastic values. These essays reveal the considerable overlap between individual and collective memory, suggesting that one was a function of the other and that we should not necessarily make clear-cut distinctions between the two. Organization of the Volume The anthology is divided into five thematic sections. Each part is intended to highlight how memory and commemoration cannot be studied as isolated subjects, but instead intersect with other traditions of medieval scholarship, including art history, historiography, intellectual history and the study of religious culture. The different authors analyze a wide variety of sources, ranging from architecture (Doquang), mosaics (Schmitt) and stained glass (Fozi), to chronicles (van Houts), exempla (Jaser), liturgical books (Butz and Zettler, Gaposchkin), encyclopedias (Franklin-Brown), vernacular literature (Maxwell, Levy), registers and inventories (Allirot), manuscript illuminations (Easton, Rodríguez Porto, Frońska), and the accounts of nineteenth-century journalists (Emery, Marquardt). More restricted, however, are the cultural strata from which the authors’ sources are drawn. Almost all the essays address ‘high’ culture; indeed, this is unavoidable as the majority of medieval sources relate to aristocratic culture, even if medieval historians did sometimes ask the servants of elite individuals about their memories.18 Nonetheless, despite the problems of accessing ‘ordinary’ memories, many of the issues addressed in this volume, from excommunication to family memory and practices of commemoration, potentially affected all section of medieval society. Visual imagery played an important role in the production and reinforcement of memory in the Middle Ages. Part I, ‘Memory and Images’, examines the interplay 16   Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY, 1995), pp. 2–3. 17   Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004). Also see Rosamond McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2006). 18   van Houts, ‘Introduction: Medieval Memories’, pp. 4–5.

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between memory, images and language, and addresses memory as a cognitive process. Specifically, these papers illuminate the different ways in which images operate in relation to paradigms, fixing and locating an amorphous memory or idea within a physical reality – or else excluding it. Thus Jean-Claude Schmitt’s chapter, originally delivered as a keynote address at the symposium, explores the complex and dynamic interplay between images and memory, demonstrating how images could promote not only recollection, but also selective memory and forgetting. Schmitt’s case study, the sixth-century mosaics of the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy, reveals the manipulation of images to construct a particular memory of the past. The next two chapters are devoted to manuscript illumination. Martha Easton considers the powerful mnemonic function of violent images in medieval books. She argues that vivid illustrations showing the sufferings of Christ and the martyrs had a devotional, didactic purpose, serving to fix the memory of these events in the mind of the reader. Focusing on a manuscript of the Golden Legend, Easton discusses how and why violent images were considered particularly effective towards these ends and how they related to the accompanying text. Rosa María Rodríguez Porto explores how memory functioned in thirteenth‑century illuminated manuscripts of the history of the Trojan War. She suggests that visual similarities between these manuscripts indicate that there was an accepted tradition with regard to the telling of this story. The reader would have been acquainted with certain central elements and would have been reminded of these when viewing the manuscript’s illustrations. Thus, these manuscripts reveal a network of visual references, or memories, which both generated and reinforced a particular literary tradition. Part II, ‘Commemoration and Oblivion’, more extensively addresses the complex relationship between remembrance and forgetting in the Middle Ages. These papers highlight the central significance of commemoration as a religious practice, revealing deep anxieties about death and oblivion in medieval culture. The section begins with a study of commemoration as mediated through written texts: the early medieval Libri vitae or Libri memoriales, studied here by Eva-Maria Butz and Alfons Zettler. These memorial books contained lists of the names of the deceased, which were recited in the liturgy. Butz and Zettler focus on the ninthcentury Liber memorialis of the nunnery of Remiremont in the Vosges Mountains, examining how lists of the Frankish kings in this book reflect an understanding of history, and thus the historical consciousness of the Remiremont community. The chapels attached to French cathedrals from the 1230s receive the attention of Mailan Doquang, who considers these structures as sites of commemoration and intercession. Wealthy patrons founded chapels in order to promote their memory after they died, and to ensure that prayers were said on their behalf. Doquang connects the proliferation of these chapels to anxiety about the fallibility of memory: it was believed necessary to take decisive action to ensure that the living did not forget to pray for one’s soul after death. Christian Jaser takes a different approach to the relationship between memory and forgetting, by studying excommunication rituals in medieval France, England and Germany. Excommunicants were

Introduction

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supposed to be forgotten by Christian society. However, Jaser argues that, because commemorative prayers and Masses actually facilitated the longer term process of forgetting or ‘coming to terms’ with bereavement, the denial of a Christian burial and proper commemoration to deceased excommunicants made it impossible for the bereaved to forget them. Jaser’s chapter raises the question of whether it is possible to forget intentionally, and that of how clearly memory and oblivion were actually distinguished from one another in the Middle Ages. The essays in this section thus highlight the importance of ritual in processes of commemoration, and show how medieval thinking about memory encompassed complex ideas about the fading of memory and forgetting. Part III, ‘Memory, Reading and Performance’, considers the diverse and shifting roles that memory played in the creation and interpretation of medieval texts. This section takes account of various individuals who participated in medieval literary culture, from writers and compilers, to scribes and illuminators, to readers and performers. The first two essays deal with Latin compilations, the last two with vernacular court poetry. In her chapter on Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius, Mary Franklin-Brown examines how Vincent understood ‘memory’ as he was compiling his famous encyclopedia in the first half of the thirteenth century. She argues that Vincent’s text reflects memory as both a rhetorical art and a repository for knowledge. In this sense, it marks a transition from early medieval notions of memory and encyclopedism (here exemplified by Hrabanus Maurus) towards those of the modern era (exemplified by the Enlightenment Encyclopédie). Like the essays in Part V, therefore, Franklin-Brown’s paper draws connections between the Middle Ages and more recent times. Joanna Frońska similarly analyzes thirteenth-century material, in this case a manuscript, illuminated in thirteenth-century France, of Justinian’s Roman Law Digest. She focuses on the iconographic features of the manuscript: the historiated initials and the numerous marginal images added by the manuscript’s owner, which illustrate particular laws. Frońska argues that the marginal illustrations in particular reveal the selectivity of memory, as well as the relationship between the ‘past’ of Justinian and the medieval ‘present’. The owner chose to illustrate only certain laws, and these tended to conform to medieval (customary) legislation. Medieval gestures, rituals and clothing were depicted, enabling the owner to remember the laws in the context of his own cultural references. Thus, memory served to translate Justinian’s law code into the setting and circumstances of thirteenth-century France. Images and memory worked together to make the law code meaningful and relevant in the ‘present’. Moving to the vernacular context, Kate Maxwell considers how memory functioned in the creation and reception of the two poetic works of the fourteenthcentury writer and composer Guillaume de Machaut, the Remede de Fortune and the Voir Dit. She reflects upon the different roles played by the author-narrator, scribe and reader in this process: how important were their respective memories? In particular, she examines the use of the scribe’s memory in the visual presentation of the music in three separate manuscripts of these texts, the earliest dating from c. 1370. The

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issue of performance comes to the fore in the final essay of this section, John F. Levy’s examination of an intriguing case of ‘copyrighting’ in the fourteenth century. Levy argues that the poet Niccolò da Verona sought to protect his Franco-Italian epic narrative on Roman history from appropriation by jongleurs by inserting hidden signature verses in an acrostic (a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word or message). However, as Levy demonstrates, Niccolò misunderstood how jongleurs memorized texts. They did not memorize the performances of other jongleurs, but rather recreated songs using formulaic oral techniques. Thus the process by which songs were transmitted relied on both memory and creativity. As a whole, therefore, this section demonstrates that the literary and oral uses of memory were perceived differently by different authors and performers, and that the concept of memory in this literary context was highly fluid and varied. Part IV, ‘Royal and Aristocratic Memory and Commemoration’, focuses on the elite aspects of medieval remembrance, also addressing the particular role of women in practices of commemoration and the construction of memory. The essays reveal that aristocratic families took responsibility for their own memorial traditions, and that different memories of a prominent individual could coexist simultaneously. Building on her previous work that explored the interaction between men and women in creating and transmitting memories, Elisabeth van Houts concentrates here on the fundamental role that women played as repositories of family memory.19 Specifically, she examines how aristocratic women fulfilled their function of conserving and transmitting family memories when they remarried. Remarriage raised many different issues: the woman might leave behind her children from her previous marriage, and might be prevented from fully assuming her memorial role in her new family by an unfamiliar language and culture. The essay underlines how the construction and communication of memories depended on particular social circumstances, and thus how memory was shaped by the present as well as by the past. One group of high status women, the Clarisses or Cordelières of royal nunneries, are the focus of Anne-Hélène Allirot’s chapter on the memorial role of the abbeys of Longchamp, founded by Isabelle de France (the sister of King Louis IX (1226–70)), and Lourcine, established by Marguerite de Provence (the wife of Louis IX) and her daughter Blanche. The two abbey communities were particularly active in commemorating Saint Louis and other members of the Capetian dynasty. Here again, women were entrusted with familial remembrance. Like Mailan Doquang, Allirot also illuminates the close link between religious patronage and commemoration. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin devotes her essay to the liturgical commemoration of King Louis IX after his canonization in 1297. The liturgical offices composed to mark his feast day, by the royal court, the Cistercians and the Franciscans, each constructed a different memory of the king. While that of the royal court 19   See Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200 (Basingstoke, 1999); van Houts, ‘Introduction: Medieval Memories’, pp. 2–3, 6–10.

Introduction

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emphasized sacral kingship, that of the Cistercians presented Saint Louis as a penitent ascetic, and that of the Franciscans underlined his role on crusade. Thus, while establishing memories of the king, the liturgical rituals also served to define his sanctity. In addition, they confirmed the institutional identities of the communities that created them. As well as revealing the important role of women in commemorative activities, the essays in this section underline the multiple factors at play in the shaping of memories, and thus reveal how contingent memories were on the specific social and religious context in which they were constructed. Part V, ‘Remembering Medieval France’, takes a step back from the preceding sections by considering how French medieval history has been ‘remembered’ in more recent times. The three chapters encourage reflection upon how the French medieval heritage has been valued, exploited and reinterpreted since the late nineteenth century. Using the accounts of contemporary journalists, Elizabeth Emery studies the ‘Louis XI Dinner’ hosted by the French novelist Pierre Loti in 1888. Loti meticulously reconstructed every detail of a medieval banquet; yet the participation of Loti and his guests in this feast raises important questions. Although the participants believed that they were ‘remembering’ the medieval past, can a person who has not directly experienced a culture really ‘remember’ it? Imagination is undoubtedly essential to the functioning of memory, but is there a point at which imagining becomes fantasy?20 The nineteenth-century interaction with the medieval past described in Emery’s essay sheds further light on issues raised elsewhere in the volume, such as the role of imagination and creativity in the construction of memory (Levy, Gaposchkin) and the relationship between the past and the present (Schmitt, Frońska, van Houts). Janet T. Marquardt discusses three public events that took place in the town of Cluny between 1898 and 1949, to commemorate the former abbey of Cluny. Marquardt is particularly interested in collective memory and how it is shaped over time. Even in the space of 50 years, the local memory of medieval Cluny changed, being influenced by contemporary factors ranging from the rejection of Catholicism in post-Revolutionary France to the liberation of France after the Second World War. Marquardt’s essay also demonstrates how we ourselves, in the first half of the twenty-first century, can gain access to earlier collective memories (here those of 1898–1949), and can be critical about the manner in which medieval history has been constructed in more recent centuries. The final chapter, by Shirin Fozi, examines the fate of a collection of fragments of stained glass from the Gothic cathedral at Reims, largely destroyed during the First World War. The glass was gathered by an American ambulance driver in 1918 and installed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Fozi’s discussion shows how, with respect to medieval architecture, the issues of authenticity, restoration and aesthetic quality are closely associated with that of memory. Only some of the glass was medieval, drawing into question whether these fragments genuinely evoke the memory of the thirteenth-century cathedral.  

20

See Remensnyder, pp. 1–2.

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Yet, in any case, was the glass conserved as a vestige of the medieval monument, or to commemorate the tragic destruction of that monument during the war of 1914–18? Fozi argues that the glass served as a double memorial: both to what remained of the original cathedral, and to what that monument had experienced in the centuries since its construction. The final section thus explores ‘memories’ of medieval culture that more or less directly precede the modern-day study of the Middle Ages. This focus underlines the role of fascination and imagination in present-day historical inquiry and the centrality of constructions of memory to the discipline of history. However, this section also challenges what we mean by the phrases ‘medieval memory’ and ‘medieval commemoration’. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, can we really access medieval memories, as well as medieval processes of remembrance, given that our study of the Middle Ages is unavoidably shaped by our current preoccupations and the nature of the information we have inherited? This question touches upon methodological problems at the very root of the disciplines of history, art history, literary criticism and musicology. It is hoped that this multi-disciplinary collection contributes not only to the study of medieval memory and commemoration, but also to our understanding of medieval culture and our awareness of how current perspectives shape the study of the Middle Ages. The essays are intended to raise as many questions as they present conclusions, thus challenging accepted ideas about this period and encouraging further research on memory and commemoration in medieval culture.

PART I Memory and Images

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Chapter 1

Images and the Work of Memory, with Special Reference to the Sixth-Century Mosaics of Ravenna, Italy Jean-Claude Schmitt Translated from the French by Marie-Pierre Gelin

Any theme studied in history has its own history, that is to say historical reasons why it appears at a certain point in time and why it develops during a certain period. This is of course the case for the theme of memory: just like any other theme, it needs to be analyzed first and foremost from a historiographical perspective. The amount of recent research about the topic of memory and indeed the contents of this volume, attest to the fact that it currently enjoys considerable attention. This was not, however, always the case. André Burguière noted that even the Annales historians did not always devote as much attention to the history of memory as they have done in the last 30 years. In his opinion, Marc Bloch did not pay great attention to it, though he did study, in Feudal Society, the means by which the memory of the past was conserved in a society where communication was predominantly based on orality and gesture and where writing did not necessarily, or did not exclusively, function as a means of making a permanent record of past events for posterity.1 This has since been remarkably shown by Michael Clanchy in his magisterial book, From Memory to Written Record, for instance in the case of the famous Domesday Book, written in the wake of William of Normandy’s conquest of England. Domesday Book was not intended to be referred to in order to check the rights of the various vassals; instead, it always remained closed and guaranteed the new social order supposed to persist until the Last Judgement.2 Like Bloch, Lucien Febvre, who initiated the history of ‘mentalities’, did not devote any particular attention to memory. The silence of the two founders of the Annales school is all the more surprising because one of the pioneers of the 1   Marc Bloch, La société féodale, I. La formation des liens de dépendance (Paris, 1939); Marc Bloch, La société féodale, II. Les classes et le gouvernement des hommes (Paris, 1940); André Burguière, L’école des Annales: une histoire intellectuelle (Paris, 2006). 2   Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London, 1979).

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study of memory in the social sciences, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, was very close to the journal until World War II. In fact, Halbwachs’s major works, The Social Frameworks of Memory (1935) and The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land: A Study in Collective Memory (1941), which were, after the war, followed by the posthumous The Collective Memory (1950), only had a strong influence on later historians.3 The question of the history of memory, indeed, only became prominent quite late. In the context of decolonization and, more generally, of the expression of the identity claims of ethnic, regional or national minorities, it seemed to express an accusation against history. As an academic discipline, history was suspected of conveying a unique and dominant knowledge and its desire to account for the totality of the past, the richness and quantity of memories, was seen as an imposture. But those memories which have not left any trace in written archives, because they belong to oral tradition, are beyond the scope of history. For historians, the question of memory thus creates two problems: on the one hand, the problem of collective identities; and on the other, the problem of non-written sources, the sources of oral history, to which can be added iconographic sources. The renewed history of memory has been particularly prominent in France over the past 30 years. The three volumes of Faire de l’histoire: Nouveaux problèmes, Nouvelles approches and Nouveaux objets, published in 1974 under the direction of Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, did not yet have a chapter explicitly dedicated to memory and its history.4 However, three years later, Philippe Joutard’s book La légende des Camisards promoted the use of oral inquiry and charted, through time and up to the present day, the constant reinventions of a collective memory which was clearly distinct from the official written history of the wars of religion and Protestantism in France.5 Joutard showed how, for French Protestants, particularly in the Cévennes region of France, the resistance to monarchical and Catholic absolutism at the beginning of the eighteenth century was presented as a heroic struggle through the prism of the learned and apologetic tradition of the nineteenth century and from then filtered into oral traditions. More recently, the memory of the Camisards combined with other aspects of collective memory, in relation to the involvement of these regions with the Resistance against the Vichy regime and Nazism during World War II.6 This is a perfect example of the ways in which collective memory can blur the methodological and chronological certainties of traditional historiography.

3   Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris, 1925); Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte: étude de mémoire collective (Paris, 1941); Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris, 1950). 4   Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (eds), Faire de l’histoire, I. Nouveaux problèmes. II. Nouvelles approches. III. Nouveaux objets (3 vols, Paris, 1974). 5   Philippe Joutard, La légende des Camisards: une sensibilité au passé (Paris, 1977). 6   Ibid.

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In France, the years between 1984 and 1992 saw the publication of a vast study under the direction of Pierre Nora on Les Lieux de mémoire (The Realms of Memory). The French edition is divided into three parts: La République, La Nation and Les France.7 The study had an explicitly critical aim: it drew the consequences from the observation that it was no longer possible to write a univocal history of France (in the singular) based solely on the archives of the State or on the learned tradition. Nora acknowledged the variety of different, sometimes even antagonistic, memories (for instance, the memory of the Vendée region, contrasted with the memory of the centralized, Jacobinic State), that can be inscribed in ‘realms of memory’ which are material (monuments), institutional (the secular school system), intellectual (the Larousse dictionary), symbolic (the French flag), or even immaterial (the French language, the cultural heritage). The question of the relationship between history and memory is thus clearly outlined. It is a relationship which in France is often described in terms of opposition and even conflict, more so than in other countries. The conflict is between, on the one hand, a unified and univocal history: written, authoritative, imposed from on high by the institutions of the State, first monarchical and then republican and by the universities. And on the other hand, memories: oral, plural, regional, dominated, in the minority, but always strongly linked to identity. Professional historians must today take these types of memory into account as well. But their role is also to expose any attempt at instrumentalizing memory, in order to prevent the search for historical ‘truth’ from becoming subordinated to the identity and memory claims of regional, religious or gender minorities, however justified those claims are. The necessary inclusion of these collective types of memory therefore does not mean that the scientific and critical requirements of the historical research method should be set aside. As Jacques Le Goff reminded us in his book History and Memory (1988), history, studied in a scientific way, must be used critically against any form of distortion of the past.8 Taking into account collective memory adds depth and nuance to the ‘historian’s territory’. Historical criticism, however, must remain alert, in particular when it comes to the public debate of issues involving the whole of society or the still-open wounds caused by recent history. This is the case, for instance, regarding the issues raised by collaboration with the German regime and the Résistance during World War II and those raised by the colonial wars, the use of torture and more generally the use of violence by the State (as in the cases of the disappearance of Maurice Audin and the massacre of Algerians in Paris in July 1961 and of anti-OAS campaigners at the Charonne métro station in February 1962). It is also the case for issues raised by genocide, from Armenia at the beginning of the twentieth century to Bosnia and Rwanda in more recent years. An unexpected outcome of the conflict between history and memory has been the 7   Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1984–92): includes La République (2 vols, 1984), La Nation (3 vols, 1986–92) and Les France (3 vols, 1991–92). 8   Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris, 1988).

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increasing judicial dimension of the historian’s profession: historians can be called on to testify in court as expert witnesses, so that historical truth can prevail over the tampering of memories. This was the case, in particular, during trials dealing with the Nazi occupation of France and collaboration (the trials of Klaus Barbie and Paul Touvier). On the basis of an observation made by Patrick Geary in Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (1994), it would be possible to think that the debate between history and memory has been more animated in France than in other countries.9 This might be a reflection of a certain tradition of violence in social and cultural interaction in France, which the veneer of unanimity promoted by national history long succeeded in obscuring. Each country no doubt experiences such conflicts on account of its own past (for instance, Nazism in Germany and then the question of East Germany, the impact of the Vietnam War in the USA and so on), but the problems in each case are raised and resolved within a particular context which greatly influences historiography and the methods and concepts used by historians. Though quite different from that of France, the case of Germany, where reflection about the history of memory has also been quite deep over the past few years, deserves closer attention. Recently, German historians have on the whole subscribed to the theses put forward by Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist who defined the idea of a ‘memorial culture’ (‘kulturelles Gedächtnis’). While using the notion of ‘collective memory’ borrowed from Maurice Halbwachs, Assmann has led a reflection on what he calls ‘communicative memory’, within a project explicitly linked to the concept of Kulturwissenschaft inherited from the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the art historian Aby Warburg. Assmann emphasizes the means of transmission – both written and oral – which underpin collective memory through time, though their time spans differ according to the culture considered. The differing ‘memorial cultures’ from the ancient societies of Egypt, the Near East and Greece allow for the dichotomy between what Claude Lévi-Strauss called ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies to be tested.10 While ‘hot’ societies incline towards mythical thought and the reproduction of cyclical time, ‘cold’ societies, more receptive to change, find it easier to develop a linear conception of time, the framework in which rival types of memory can compete.11 Most specifically in those societies, the written word, alongside festivals and ceremonies, fulfils the essential function of ‘canonizing’ memory and tradition through the use of mnemonic devices, such as lists and numbers, to which the anthropologist Jack Goody has already drawn attention.12 9   Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994). 10   Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1992); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris, 1958). 11   Lévi-Strauss. 12   Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977).

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Jan Assmann’s influence has been quite considerable, first in Germany and then on both sides of the Atlantic. In Germany and France, his theory was applied to medieval history by Otto Gerhard Oexle, who wrote about ‘memory as culture’ (Memoria als Kultur, 1995).13 Mention must also be made here of the work of Johannes Fried, who wrote a volume of historical essays under the title Memorik (2004).14 These historians have greatly contributed to reviving an older field of research on monastic and funerary memoria and on kinship relations and genealogical literature among the Carolingian and Ottonian aristocracy. This field had been opened up a generation earlier, from the mid-twentieth century, by historians from Münster (Joachim Wollasch) and Freiburg (Karl Schmidt).15 Since then, the history of other groups, in particular urban communities and the use of other documentary sources, such as images, have built on these efforts, as shown by the collective works carried out in Oexle’s circle, or more recently the FrancoGerman volume Memoria, communitas, civitas, edited by Hanno Brand, Pierre Monnet and Martial Staub (2003) and dedicated to the forms taken by collective memory in late medieval and early Renaissance cities.16 So far, I have only looked at ‘collective memory’. It is indeed a particular focus of attention for historians of memory, who in this regard faithfully follow the teachings of Maurice Halbwachs, whose pioneering inspiration has been rediscovered after half a century. They cannot however ignore the metaphorical dimension of the phrase ‘collective memory’. For memory is, stricto sensu, a psychological aptitude of the individual. Ancient philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) only dealt with this type of memory and after them the Christian Neoplatonists and Saint Augustine in the famous Chapter VIII in Book X of his Confessions. There Augustine wrote of the ‘vast palaces of memory’, using spatial and architectural metaphors (praetoria [palaces], aula [palace, court]) which all conjure up mental images and obviously belong to the ars memoriae of Antiquity. Similarly, the object of neuroscience today is individual memory. If history and more broadly speaking the social sciences, have created and named a different kind of memory, a ‘collective memory’, they cannot ignore this individual memory, insofar as it can no more break free from the ‘social frameworks’ described by Halbwachs than can the collective type. Collective memory is not the sum of individual memories, yet many overlaps can be found between the two types of memory. In any individual person, memory and correspondingly, oblivion, are subjected to selection, reconstruction and occultation, that is to say, they undergo a psychological ‘reworking’ which   Otto Gerhard Oexle (ed.), Memoria als Kultur (Göttingen, 1995).   Johannes Fried, Der Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich, 2004). 15   Karl Schmidt and Joachim Wollasch, Gedächtinis, das Gemeinschaft stiftet (Munich, 1985). 16   Hanno Brand, Pierre Monnet and Martial Staub, Memoria, communitas, civitas: mémoire et consciences urbaines en Occident à la fin du Moyen Age (Ostfildern, 2003). 13 14

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can be compared to the way collective memory undergoes a social ‘reworking’. The ‘social frameworks’ defining all these different types of memory are, for instance, the position held within one’s kin group, the intensity of emotional relations between individuals and groups, the determinism associated with social class, institutional or professional affiliations, the force of religious or national identities and so on. In all cases, memory is a dynamic process, not a latent and passive content which can be accessed as the need arises. In all cases, furthermore, memory can rely on techniques which facilitate recollection, be they immaterial (mental), corporal (speech and movement) or material (graphical and iconic). Recently electronic techniques have also emerged, since not only does the world of information technology assist human memory with increased power, but it also borrows its metaphors from the vocabulary dedicated to psychological memory (‘random access memory’, ‘main memory’, ‘icons’ and so on). Historians cannot study collective memory without taking individual memory into account and vice versa, above all because the documents at their disposal were produced in a context where the individual’s initiative was often an integral part of a collective and institutional project. For example, the memories of a medieval monk may reflect those of his whole monastic community. Images play a central role in the way individual and collective memory functions. They have therefore been pivotal in creating a historical and anthropological science of culture, such as the German Kulturwissenschaft, concerned primarily with memory and art. At the root of this movement, which still inspires social scientists (as can be seen with Jan Assmann’s work), is Aby Warburg’s project, tellingly called Mnemosyne, in which he brought together large numbers of photographs showing art objects as well as ethnographic themes.17 A contemporary of the social science pioneers Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, G. Simmel and Max Weber, Aby Warburg can be seen as one of the founders (along with Halbwachs) of the history of cultural memory, although with a marked interest in images, many years before this became the case in France.18 Memory and images interact in many ways. The content of memory, which is never fixed but undergoes constant reworking, is made up of ideas, words and above all mental images which present themselves spontaneously or can be conjured up. These images make the past present, they help to make past experiences current through figures which are concrete and recognizable because they are similar to those which have been known before, for instance during a journey. Thanks to

  Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke in collaboration with Claudia Brink (Berlin, 2000). 18   Michael Diers, ‘Mnemosyne oder das Gedächtnis der Bilder. Über Aby Warburg’, in Oexle (ed.), Memoria als Kultur, pp. 79–94. 17

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memory, the past becomes images, whether it is an episode from one’s life or the recollection of a dead relative, who takes the shape of a ghost.19 The link between memory and images is even clearer when it comes to the rhetorical and intellectual technique of the art of memory, well known since the work of Frances Yates.20 According to this technique, the speaker is required to build in their mind a ‘theatre’ rigorously organised into ‘locations’ (‘loci’), in which they can place ‘active images’ (‘imagines agentes’) which they will associate, by either imitation or convention, with all the ideas and discursive themes that will be used in their speech. The association can be literal (‘ad verbum’), if it links the idea to be remembered to its imaginary representation, but it should preferably be conventional (‘ad res’), therefore avoiding any similarity between idea and image. In this case especially, it is the systematic aspect of the mental organization of the ‘locations’ which allows for successful recollection. These intellectual techniques taken from ancient rhetoric were revived in the Renaissance. As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, specific graphical devices were developed, as Mary Carruthers has shown, which were closely related to the art of memory and manuscripts from universities and monasteries attest to their use.21 Real images were used in this case, in contrast to the ‘imagines agentes’ of the art of memory. They reflect a stage in learned culture where oral transmission and learning by heart were still prevalent, in particular for prayers and liturgical chants. The psalter, for instance, was often the book in which young monks learnt to read. But they also needed to know it by heart for the celebration of the canonical hours of the daily office, where it was chanted throughout the week. The lectio-meditatio required a constant effort of recollection, which was facilitated by involving the whole body: using the voice, chanting, moving the lips and probably also the head and the upper half of the body, listening for assonances and rhymes and marching rhythmically around the cloister. Recollection was also assisted by material supports, in particular in manuscripts, such as the colours of the rubrics, the small initials dividing the page, the marginal images or the ‘borders’ which, without necessarily having a literal relationship with the content of the text, could be associated mentally with the passages to be remembered. One wonders whether neumes, the earliest form of musical notation, first used in the Carolingian period, performed mainly such a mnemonic function. They are in no way similar to modern systems of musical notation.22 They are not meant to be deciphered. They do not precede the performance of the chant, but at most support it visually, by marking   Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les revenants: les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale ([Paris], 1994); Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa L. Fagan (Chicago, 1998). 20   Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966). 21   Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2008); Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400­–1200 (Cambridge, 1998). 22   Olivier Cullin, Laborintus: essais sur la musique au Moyen Age (Paris, 2004). 19

20

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the general direction and the melodic inflexions, while at the same time no doubt conferring on the voice the dignity of writing, of being included in a book, on an equal footing with the Word contained in Scripture. The illuminated and neumed Psalter of Elizabeth of Thuringia (thirteenth century) provides a good example of this global performance, both musical and chromatic, based on a rhythmical memory of psalmody and litanies (Figure 1.1).23

Figure 1.1

Thirteenth-century Psalter of Elizabeth of Thuringia, fo. 167v.–168r.

The relationship between images and memory in the Middle Ages was, however, much deeper still. In a way, all Christian images perform a work of memory. From the time of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), the clerics who attempted to justify Christian images against heretics (such as Bishop Gerard of Cambrai in the eleventh century) or against Jews (such as Abbot Rupert of Deutz in the twelfth century), never failed to mention that Christian images fulfil a function of recordatio: they must record, bring back to life, make present, transmit the memory of the past gesta of Christ and the saints. Even if they do simultaneously fulfil many other functions, images have an explicit role to play in memory. Images do not merely illustrate the texts, authentic or apocryphal, which relate past actions – first and foremost, sacred history. In their own way images operate 23   Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Le rythme des images et de la voix’, Histoire de l’Art, 60 (2007): pp. 43–56.

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choices, they play an active role, within their own remit, in the way memory works. This point concerns all images and all the different types of memory, such as for instance genealogical memory, of which Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has analyzed the early iconographic representations. The eleventh-century architectural diagrams, which are already at this time called ‘trees’ (arbores), even before the appearance of the first actual tree representations of filiation and marriage, never show all the ramifications of a lineage. They make choices, favouring older sons, who remain in charge of the ancestral patrimony, over younger ones, who are forgotten as they only inherit peripheral lands. They emphasize the most prestigious alliances which enhance the prestige of the lineage, in opposition to secondary alliances and to dead branches which represent those who entered monasteries and died without heirs. Let us take the example of one of the very first real genealogical trees, that of the Welfs of Germany. It appears in one of the illuminations of the Historia Welforum, compiled by a monk from Weingarten in Swabia in about 1185 (Figure 1.2). The most prominent part of the tree is the trunk, which bends at its summit, with the last direct descendants of the line. The trunk is made up of a series of double arcades, each of which encloses, in order of succession, an ancestor from the main line inscribed on a blue background, while on either side rinceaux, more lightly drawn, contain the representatives of the secondary lines. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1155–90) is represented in one of these rinceaux, but it is the largest one, placed at the top and in the centre, in effect the place of honour. Since Frederick was only descended from the Welfs through his mother Judith, he does not belong on the main trunk, which he would nevertheless regenerate with all the power and the prestige of his own lineage, the Staufens. The genealogical tree truly belongs to the art of memory, listing as it does the degrees of kinship and the names of the ancestors, but it also belongs to a political language which celebrates aristocratic honour and the expected benefits of marriage alliances.24 Images play on the temporal dimension of memory, between the past they recall, the present in which they are visibly created and the imaginary future they project. This can be seen in the portraits of patrons and founders represented kneeling before the Virgin Mary or their patron saint. The portrait freezes in time a face which will never age, but instantly this same face becomes an image in memory and it plays the role of a funerary image, in accordance with one of the original meanings of the word imago. The image of the dead founder or patron, associated with a cultic image (an altarpiece), leads his or her close relatives to commemoratio, both an act of prayer and an exercise in memory. Does this mean that the history of portraiture is therefore intimately linked with the history of memory and more precisely that of funerary memory? This was certainly the case in Antiquity, with the ‘imagines mortuorum’ which were, in Rome, the basis of the domestic cult of the ancestors of the gens. It was also the case with the funerary portraits of the Hellenistic mummies of  

24

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, L’arbre des familles (Paris, 2003), pp. 66–7.

22

Figure 1.2

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

Genealogical tree of the Welf lineage in the Historia Welforum, c. 1185

Fayyum. Later, it was again the case, from the thirteenth century and even more so from the fourteenth century, with the funerary statues of the royal necropolises, at Saint-Denis or Westminster, or with the effigies or ‘representations’ which were displayed during royal funerals and stood in for the actual body of the

Images and the Work of Memory

Figure 1.3

23

Fourteenth-century tomb of Giovanni da Legnano

deceased. Many more people than kings and queens wished to leave to posterity a memento of their physical appearance during their lifetime. For instance, the great law professors of the University of Bologna, such as Giovanni d’Andrea and his son-in-law Giovanni da Legnano, did so in the second half of the fourteenth century. On the front of his tomb, the latter is represented alive and seated, in the centre, in the pose of the master surrounded by his students. But on the lid of the sarcophagus, he is shown dead and recumbent like a funerary effigy (Figure 1.3). The monument thus combines two types of memory. The first is the social memory of the membership of a prestigious group and it is illustrated by the representation of the knowledge and public role of the professor. The second is

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

24

the commemoration of the individual and it emphasizes the Christian’s humility in the face of death.25 In Flanders and Italy, at the end of the Middle Ages, the earliest portraits painted from life recorded for posterity the memory of the sitter as they had been in life, but also reminded their descendants and all the living that each man must prepare to die. Any portrait could thus become the instrument of the memento mori. We can consider two examples. The first is the ‘Portrait of Timotheos’, the earliest surviving portrait by Jan Van Eyck, now in the National Gallery, London. Dated to 1432, it bears an inscription, ‘Leal souvenir’, which seems to refer explicitly to the commemoration of a deceased person. The painting even imitates the border of a tomb and a motto carved in stone. As Hans Belting explained, the inscription plays on the two meanings of the word ‘leal’: in the sense of ‘legal’, it defends the legitimacy of the portrait, still a novelty at the time but which could lean on the whole tradition of legitimate funerary uses to assert itself. Furthermore, the image is ‘loyal’, that is to say, true: it expects to be believed to be authentic, when death has made comparison between the painting and its model impossible. But above all, it calls on the ‘recollection’: the painting is a souvenir, as can be said today of a postcard, in other words it records the memory of a man who was alive, but is now dead. And it requires the viewer to remember him, to cultivate his memoria.26 The second example is more recent by almost a century: it is the portrait of Jean Carondelet, dean of Besançon, by Jan Gossaert, also known as Mabuse, in 1517 (Paris, Louvre Museum) (Figure 1.4). It can be found on one of the four painted faces of a diptych which can be closed like a cupboard, thus putting the face of the model in contact with that of the Virgin with Child, the object of his devotion. Even if the painting was executed during Carondelet’s lifetime, it was intended to become fully meaningful only after his death, as shown by the inscription which can be read along the upper edge of the frame: ‘Representation de Messire Iehan Carondelet, hault doyen de Besançon, en son age de 48 ans’.27 The word ‘representation’ brings to mind the royal funerary effigies and can also be found in the Latin inscription around the Virgin: ‘Mediatrix nostra que es post Deum spes sola, tuo filio me representa’.28 By projecting himself into the future time of his death and the judgement of his soul, Carondelet asks the Virgin to ‘present’ him to her Son and to intercede for him. When the diptych was closed, Carondelet could contemplate either of the external faces: his own initials, I. C., were painted on   Andrea von Hülsen-Esch, ‘Zur Konstituierung des Juristenstandes durch Memoria: die bildliche Repräsentation des Giovanni da Legnano’, in Oexle (ed.), Memoria als Kultur, pp. 185–206. 26   See Hans Belting and Christiane Kruse, Die Erfindung des Gemäldes: das erste Jahrhundert der niederländischen Malerei (Munich, 1994), pp. 48–50, Plate 36; Hans Belting, ‘Mémoire et portrait. Face et interface du premier “sujet” moderne’, in Roland Recht (ed.), La Description (Strasbourg, 1998), pp. 171–82. 27   ‘Representation of Sir Iehan Carondelet, high dean of Besançon, at the age of 48’. 28   ‘You our mediator who are, after God, the only hope, introduce me to your son’. 25

Images and the Work of Memory

Figure 1.4

25

Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), diptych containing portrait of Carondelet, dean of Besançon (left) and the Virgin and Child (right), 1517 (Paris, Louvre Museum)

the back of the Virgin’s face; on the back of the portrait are a skull and an open scroll of paper (Figure 1.5). On the frame, the inscription ‘mors matura’ expresses the hope that death will come in its own time. The painting thus reveals, behind the portrait made from life, Carondelet’s skull, a haunting reminder that death is inevitable: ‘memento mori’ seems to associate the skull with the dislocated jaw with Carondelet. Since images are linked to all the different types of memory, it was possible conversely to use images to ban the enemies of the city or the prince from collective memory, to impose oblivion. The damnatio memoriae allowed for the removal of all the images which could recall the enemy’s existence, as well as calling for the stamping out of their name and the destruction of their house. But the condemned person’s image could also be displayed, after having been altered to represent their disgrace and to warn viewers against any attempt at rebellion. Such was the role of the pittura infamante commissioned by the authorities of the Italian cities, for instance in Florence after the Pazzi conspiracy, whose leaders were represented, upside down, on the walls of the city, in the same way that some of them had actually been executed.29 29   Gherardo Ortalli, ‘Pingatur in Palatio …’: la pittura infamante nei secoli XIII–XVI (Rome, 1979).

26

Figure 1.5

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), diptych containing image of a skull and a scroll of paper (left), 1517 (Paris, Louvre Museum)

The relationship between images and memory is therefore active and dynamic, in the same way that memory itself operates within each individual and each group: the ‘work’ of memory is made up of recollection and oblivion, destruction and stratification, all at the same time. At any given time, it allows only one potential memory to surface, leaving other images buried, mere traces ready to be reactivated and to take shape fully when their time comes. In order to clarify more fully how memory works in images, I will analyze in detail one particular example, that of the mosaics of the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. In the fifth century and until 476 (when the last emperor fell), Ravenna was promoted to the rank of capital of the Western Empire. The Goths, who were Christians but followed the Arian heresy, took it and their king, Theodoric (493–544), undertook to give it a splendour to compete with that of Constantinople. His kingdom, however, did not survive long after his death: Emperor Justinian the Great (527–65) retook Ravenna and the north of Italy and reasserted papal authority. Two new archbishops, Maximianus (546–56) and Agnellus (557–70), were entrusted with reestablishing Christian orthodoxy and erasing all traces of Arianism. Within barely a century, deep ideological and political changes thus affected the city. Monuments such as Galla Placidia’s mausoleum and the basilicas of San Vitale, Sant’Apollinare in Classe and Sant’Apollinare Nuovo were built. They were decorated in such a way that they would, thanks to their extraordinary richness, glorify the heavenly powers and their earthly representatives: first the king of the Goths, Theodoric and

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then his conqueror, Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora. We are lucky enough, 15 centuries later, still to have mosaics of unparalleled size. But we are also lucky to have at our disposal a text written three centuries later and which, in retrospect, throws rare light on these images: the Liber pontificalis ecclesiae ravennatis, written by Andrea Agnellus, a priest from Ravenna, in the first third of the ninth century.30 Agnellus recorded the actions of the archbishops of Ravenna and he described in particular the buildings and the mosaics with which they embellished the basilicas and baptisteries during the crucial period which interests us here.31 Among these buildings, the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, built between 500 and 525 by Theodoric, adopted a basilical layout with three naves terminated at the eastern end by an apse (which was destroyed in its original form by an earthquake in the eighth century) (Figure 1.6). The western wall has lost almost all its decoration, though some traces of mosaics can still be seen there. The side walls of the nave, on the north and the south side, display, above the columns and the arches, three tiers of mosaics one above the other. These three levels represent different periods of time. On the top tier can be seen a series of 13 miracles of Christ on the north wall and 13 scenes from the Passion and Resurrection of Christ on the south wall. Below, between the windows, 16 ‘prophets’ – that is to say, Old Testament prophets, the Apostles and the Evangelists – are represented full-size and in threequarter view. They are all Christ’s precursors. Finally, following a horizontal layout which contrasts with the vertical organization of the whole decoration programme, two processions are represented: those of the virgins and the martyrs. The north wall has a depiction of the port of Classe (identified by an inscription) and then shows a procession of 22 virgins identified by their names and preceded by the Three Wise Men coming to present their gifts to the Virgin Mary and Child, enthroned frontally between two pairs of angels (Figure 1.7). Opposite, on the south side, can be seen a representation of the city of Ravenna and of Theodoric’s palace (both labelled), from which a procession of 25 martyrs is issuing, following Saint Martin the confessor and heading towards Christ enthroned frontally between two pairs of angels. These processions were particularly described and commented on by the Ravennese priest Andrea Agnellus in the ninth century.32

30   Agnelli Ravennatis, Liber pontificalis ecclesiae ravennatis, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Delyannis (Turnhout, 2006). 31   The most detailed descriptions of the monuments and their decoration remain the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, Ravenna. Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes, I. Geschichte und Monumente (Wiesbaden, 1969); Ravenna. Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes. II. 1. Kommentar (Wiesbaden, 1974); Ravenna. Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes. II. 2. Kommentar (Wiesbaden, 1976); Ravenna. Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes. II. 3. Kommentar, Indices zum Gesamtwerk (Wiesbaden, 1989); Ravenna. Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes. III. Frühchristliche Bauten und Mosaiken von Ravenna (Wiesbaden, 1958, 2nd edn, 1995). 32   Agnelli Ravennatis, p. 254, line 64.

Figure 1.6

Interior of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy

Images and the Work of Memory

Figure 1.7

29

Mosaic showing the Three Wise Men, north wall, interior of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy

Far from being arbitrary, the arrangement and orientation of the mosaics correlate with liturgical requirements. On account of the link between the layout of the images and the liturgical performance, it is thus possible to see them as a type of art of memory. The east-west organization of the christological scenes – miracles on the north wall, the Passion and Resurrection on the south wall – seems to be the opposite of the order in which the Gospels are read. But, as Otto von Simpson has shown, the reason for this apparent contradiction is liturgical.33 Marching from west to east, those who were baptized, newly converted and reconciled with orthodox Christianity were first presented with scenes which symbolize baptism and the hope for redemption (Thomas’s unbelief, the pilgrims from Emmaus, the holy women at the tomb on one side and, on the other side, the healing at the pool of Bethesda, the exorcism of the demoniacs at Gerasa, the healing of the paralytic at Capharnaum). They then slowly approached the altar, around which the scenes symbolically represent the sacrifice of the Eucharist (the Last Supper on one side, the miracle of the multiplication of the bread and the miracle at Cana on the other). It was the progression towards the sacrifice at the altar which determined the succession from west to east of the Gospel scenes, by inverting the order of the Gospel narrative. 33   Otto von Simpson, Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (Chicago, 1948), pp. 76–9 (republished Princeton, NJ, 1987).

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Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

From west to east, the faithful were escorted by the two processions of the chosen, male and female. The gender division between the two processions mirrors the liturgical opposition of the north side of the church, which was allocated to women during the celebrations, with the south side, reserved for men. This observation strengthens the idea that the double procession offers a rhythmical, processional and vocal liturgical model, since the ordered succession of the saints, whose names are inscribed above the figures, can be linked to the listing of the same names in the litanies of the churches of Milan, Rome and Ravenna.34 The ‘text’ of the canons of the saints and of the litanies therefore found an echo in the monumental iconography. There is no systematic correspondence between the order of the figures and the order in which the saints appear in the calendar. However, the identity of the saints, who are all named, reflects the intention of the church of Ravenna to appropriate the catalogues of saints from both the other great metropolises, Rome and Milan and to combine them in the local liturgical canon. The order in which the figures are represented acknowledges the hierarchical pre-eminence of Popes Clement and Sixtus (they appear first and second in the male procession) and the particular glory of certain martyrs, such as the Roman deacon Laurence (he appears third) and the virgin Euphemia (she appears first in the female procession). Relationships of alliance or filiation also play an important part, as in the case of the holy husband and wife, Valeria and Vitalis, who appear facing each other and their two sons, Saints Gervase and Protase, who follow each other; the two brothers Saints Protus and Hyacinth walk together, as do the two sisters Saints Victoria and Anatolia. The grace of companionship in martyrdom is emphasized by the presence side by side of Saints Perpetua and Felicity. As for Saint Martin of Tours, he owes his presence at the head of the male procession to his fame, which had been confirmed in the same period by the Vita sancti Martini written by Venantius Fortunatus and to his title of ‘hammer of the heretics’, which would have appealed to the orthodox clergy who had just overcome the Arians. The whole heroic memoria of the Church was thus displayed and organized according to the liturgical logic of the litanies: through the interplay of images and chants, a liturgical art of memory could take place. In both processions, the chosen come to present their crown to the divine figures: the Virgin and Child on the side of the women, who are preceded by the Three Wise Men and, facing them, on the side of the men, Christ in majesty. In the ninth century, Andrea Agnellus gave great attention to the description of the Wise Men, whose gifts were models of those borne by the Virgins. His commentary, which progresses through a gradual accumulation of meanings, broadly follows the exegetical tradition which, through the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, described the Saviour as king, God and healer. A contemporary text, falsely ascribed to the Venerable Bede, propagated this three-fold symbolism, along with 34   Ibid., pp. 84–7, where Simpson remarks upon the strong presence of saints from the Roman canon, a sign that Archbishop Agnellus, patron of the processional mosaics, wished to reinforce links with Rome: ‘The liturgy of the age speaks the language of diplomacy’ (p. 86).

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31

the idea that the number three stands for the Trinity, which is the reason why, according to Agnellus, there are three Kings and not ‘four, six or two’. Andrea Agnellus’s ekphrasis underlines the religious dimension of the double procession, thus echoing numerous other texts, biblical as well as exegetical. But the profound originality of Agnellus’s text lies elsewhere, in the fact that it accounts quite faithfully for all the transformations undergone by the basilica since its foundation. The basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, dedicated to Christ, was originally the church of the royal palace, the schematic representation of which can be seen at the western end of the north wall. The representations of the cities of Classe and Ravenna, along with that of the king’s palace, survive from the original iconographic programme. The mosaics with the two processions of saints, however, were created in about 561 under Archbishop Agnellus, on the occasion of the reconciliatio of the church with the orthodox religion. At that time, the church was dedicated to a new patron saint, Martin, which justifies his presence at the head of the martyrs’ procession, although he was a confessor. The church only received its dedication to Saint Apollinaris, first bishop of Ravenna, in the ninth century (the new title was mentioned for the first time in 959), when his relics were transferred from the port of Classe. At that time the side walls of the church already showed the image of a procession (perhaps unfinished), but this procession was probably that of the royal cortège of Theodoric and the officials from his court.35 Some traces of this procession can be seen on the area of the mosaic representing Theodoric’s palace and the city of Ravenna: hands and arms are visible in front of the columns. They were not erased, but probably kept intentionally, as witnesses to an earlier state of the image.36 The orthodox archbishop no doubt intended to erase the memory of the Ostrogothic king, through a partial damnatio memoriae, while at the same time recalling the anterior state of the church, thus emphasizing the memory of the conversio of the building to orthodoxy and to the new authority, alongside the defeat of the Gothic king and the victory of the legitimate emperor.37 In the Middle Ages, the general and fundamental paradigm of conversio, of which the reconciliatio of churches as well as heretics was one particular form, could affect places and objects as well as people. One of its distinctive features was that the conversio did not abolish the previous state, but transformed it while keeping a trace of the past, such as a hand on a column, or a reminder of the former status of Jew or heretic.38   This image was perhaps comparable with the representations of Justinian and Theodora and their retinues in the presbyterium of the basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna. 36   Deichmann, Ravenna. Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes. II. 1. Kommentar, ill. 114–19. 37   Arthur Urbano, ‘Donation, Dedication, and Damnatio Memoriae: The Catholic Reconciliation of Ravenna and the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 13/1 (2005): pp. 71–110. 38   On these questions, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, La conversion d’Hermann le Juif: autobiographie, histoire et fiction (Paris, 2003); Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Conversion of 35

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Undergoing this transformation, the meaning of the mosaic changed completely: the royal and earthly cortège had been changed into a heavenly procession. It is easy to link this work of obliteration to the work of memory, since that obliteration entails the conservation of a remnant of the past in a mosaic which not only covers the whole length of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, but also condenses the whole history of the ecclesia of Ravenna between the beginning and the middle of the sixth century. Oblivion is not absolute: minute traces of the past bring out a more vivid memory of the recent past to be glorified. The individual memory, our own memory, presents the same layers, where images are superposed, merge and fade to make space for more vivid memories which we hold closer to our hearts.

Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century, trans. Alex J. Novikoff (Philadelphia, PA, 2010).

Chapter 2

‘Images Gross and Sensible’: Violence, Memory and Art in the Thirteenth Century Martha Easton

The art of memory as it was understood and practised in the Middle Ages has been a topic of increasing interest among scholars, inspired in a large part by the work of Mary Carruthers.1 The mnemonic techniques that were revived from ancient treatises and developed in the later Middle Ages, often relied upon a combination of the textual and the visual, so that words and images could be used either separately or in tandem to fire the imagination and imprint themselves upon the memory. Here I want to consider the connection of violence and memory, especially the way violence is memorialized in visual form through late medieval images of martyrdom. I am interested in how medieval people ‘memorialized’ suffering and loss and how they might have responded to such images, specifically depictions of the violent tortures of Christian martyrs appearing in manuscripts such as Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), as well as other manuscripts containing hagiographic illustrations. The effect of such images is two-fold: the theatrical, graphic nature of the violence inflicted upon a human body makes the image easy to recall, but in addition, the image itself becomes a simulacrum of an actual body suffering particularized pain and thus becomes a testament, a monument, a memorial. Real violence visited upon actual bodies becomes memorialized through the trace left by the image, leaving but an impression upon the memory, but one that can be returned to any number of times for devotional, educational, or perhaps less exalted, purposes. Here I will be concerned with the way in which a certain confluence of phenomena in the thirteenth century provided a fertile environment for the intersection of art, violence and memory. I will examine the burgeoning interest in mnemonic techniques, the increasing devotion to humanized and bodily fallible saints and martyrs, and the reintroduction of torture and public punishment, and the way this social and religious climate helped texts such as the Golden Legend to become so very popular. It is the increasing emphasis in the later Middle Ages on texts and images devoted to the sufferings of the martyrs that I am interested in here and the way that images of the tortures of the martyrs in particular might have 1   Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990); Mary Carruthers, Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 200–1200 (Cambridge, 1998).

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been used in a devotional way as mnemonic devices. The vivid explicitness of these images facilitates the recall of memory, augmenting a religious (and perhaps voyeuristic) response on the part of the viewer – but they also stand as visual memorials to beings lost, permanent records of remembrance and commemoration. In our own time, memorials, such as the World War II Memorial in Washington DC, provide a visual monument to the intersection of violence and memory and, because of this, they can be fraught with political and ideological concerns. Since memorials serve as public markers to memorialize trauma and sometimes to assuage collective guilt, the visual form that they take has significance beyond the formal and aesthetic and often serves as a point of public debate. Often these memorials provoke such strong feelings that it takes years for them to be completed: even years after the events of 11 September 2001 in New York City, consensus was hard to build among architects, designers, city planners, the families of the victims and the general public about what a memorial commemorating the date should look like and what function it should have. Because the purpose of memorials is to mean something significant to large numbers of people, a modern solution has been to make them minimalist in form, with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial the supreme example, so that private meaning may be gleaned in personal and not necessarily universal, reactions to the monument.2 What is usually left out of these minimalist memorials to victims of wars, of holocausts, of disasters, of tragedies, is the violence. On the other hand, there was at least initial public dissatisfaction with Lin’s black granite triangular wall when it was first erected in 1982 and to satisfy the most vocal opponents of the design, a figural monument of three soldiers was erected nearby. Perhaps there is a need to equate suffering and trauma with the bodies upon which it is visited. When photographs surfaced of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by American troops on prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the reaction of the American public was primarily one of outrage and shock. Not only were most people unaware of what was happening, they were horrified that it was American troops carrying out these bizarre humiliations. But the sight of visual images and not just written descriptions of the torture and violence, brought the experience of knowing to a more visceral and human level than words alone would have done.3 With the possible exception of some forms of ‘entertainment’, such as horror and action films, or violent video games, it is the modern tendency to shy away from, or at least ghettoize, displays of graphic violence. In contrast, medieval depictions of holy suffering embrace this kind of explicit damage to the body in a way that many modern viewers find unsettling and even grotesque. Unlike our 2   For discussion of Lin’s Vietnam Memorial as well as the initial proposals for the World Trade Center memorial, see Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago, 2006), pp. 7–23. See also Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, pp. 35–40. 3   For a perceptive analysis of the Abu Ghraib photographs, see Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, The New York Times Magazine, Sunday 23 May 2004.

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modern public memorials, medieval images of the tortures of the martyrs do not memorialize grief for personal or national loss, but perhaps instead memorialize a kind of religious loss. However, with the increasing interest during the later Middle Ages in affective piety and its prescriptions for personal and empathetic identification with the sufferings of Christ and the martyrs, these images functioned as tools of memory in a manner which perhaps does relate to the way our own memorials function. After all, many visitors to, for example, Holocaust memorials and museums or war memorials were not personally affected by the events these sites commemorate and yet can find both sadness and solace in them. The thirteenth century is a particularly interesting period in which to consider the intersection between violence and memory. It was during this century that there was an increasing interest in the art of memory and Aristotelian mnemonics. In addition, Dominican theologians such as Jacobus de Voragine and Thomas Aquinas were having a profound effect on religious thought, practice and artistic iconography with their writings. The increasing production of devotional manuscripts for private patrons and the development of the skill of silent reading among those who owned and used books, also profoundly affected the way books were produced and consumed. Furthermore, the growing interest in the sufferings of Christ and the saints had its social equivalent in the reintroduction of torture and public punishment into medieval judicial practice. Although graphic depictions of martyrdom had been a long-standing feature of hagiographic illustration, with roots in early Christian and Byzantine iconography, such images seem to have increased with the creation of the Legenda aurea around 1260.4 Jacobus de Voragine compiled the Legenda aurea at a time when popular curiosity about and devotion to saints and especially martyrs, reached an unprecedented level and his text both reflected this contemporary fascination and aroused even greater popular interest in these holy men and women. It became one of the most widely read and reproduced texts of the later Middle Ages. What Jacobus had intended to provide was a compilation of feast days organized in accordance with the liturgical year, thus including not only the lives of the saints but also events from the lives of Christ and the Virgin and incidents such as Helena’s finding of the True Cross. Since the text followed the church calendar, it was often used by preachers as a sourcebook for sermons and readings on important feast days.   For a recent translation, see William G. Ryan, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints (Princeton, NJ, 1993). See also Alain Boreau, La Légende dorée: le système narrative de Jacques de Voragine (Paris, 1984); Sherry L. Reames, The Legenda aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History (Madison, 1985); Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (ed.), Legenda aurea: sept siècles de diffusion (Montreal, 1986); Barbara Fleith, Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Lateinischen Legenda aurea (Brussels, 1991); Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (ed.), Legenda aurea – la Légende dorée (XIIIe–Xve s.) (Montreal, 1993); Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, Ricerche sulla composizione e sull trasmissione della Legenda aurea (Spoleto, 1995). 4

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36

In addition to the veritable litany of graphic tortures and executions suffered by the martyrs in the Legenda aurea, Jacobus de Voragine begins each hagiographic entry with a series of etymologies of the saint’s name. The various puns and imaginative associations that Jacobus ascribes to individual syllables seem to represent a ready-made directory of mnemonic devices to help preachers remember and reconstruct stories about the saints for their sermons.5 Much of the scholarship on medieval mnemotechnics is in fact focused on how such practices were used by preachers.6 Of the over 1,000 surviving copies of the Legenda aurea in manuscript form, only a small number are elaborately decorated. However, the few that are illustrated usually include one miniature for each chapter and, as might be expected, those illustrating the lives of the martyrs almost always select the ultimate scene of torture or death. A little-known manuscript created in Paris between 1270 and 1280 (now at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California) follows this pattern of illustration. This seems to be the earliest surviving extensively illuminated manuscript of the Golden Legend in Latin, with 135 surviving column miniatures, including a large number of images of graphic tortures and violent martyrdom scenes such as the flaying of Bartholomew (Figure 2.1).7 Despite the rich narrative possibilities of the Golden Legend and the numerous incidents that could have been selected for illustration from each saint’s life, almost without exception the scene illustrating the life of a martyr in the Huntington manuscript is a scene of violence, either a torture or the ultimate murder. Because martyrs were notoriously difficult to kill, surviving numerous murderous attempts through the grace of God, most of them were ultimately beheaded. It is the death of the martyrs that sets them apart from other saints; they are Christ-like in their sacrifice to their faith. In the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, this ultimate act of faith is gendered: while male martyrs are usually shown in the process of undergoing the final release of decapitation, female martyrs, even if they also lose their heads in the end, are predominantly depicted suffering the gruesome, pseudosexual tortures that take place before their ultimate death. This emphasis on violence both memorializes and obscures the martyrs. The violence of the images sets them apart from the other saints illustrated in the Legenda aurea; even without reading the text, the user of the manuscript understands something about the saint in question. Medieval theories about the intersection of   See the discussion in Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, pp. 158–60.   See, for example, David L. D’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars (Oxford, 1985). 7   San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, HM 3027. See Martha Easton, ‘Pain, Torture and Death in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea’, in Samantha J.E. Riches and Sarah Salih (eds), Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (London, 2002), pp. 49–64; Martha Easton, ‘The Making of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea and the Meanings of Martyrdom’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University, 2001); Consuelo W. Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (2 vols, San Marino, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 590–94. 5 6

‘Images Gross and Sensible’

Figure 2.1

37

‘The Flaying of Saint Bartholomew’, Legenda aurea, San Marino, The Huntington Library, HM 3027, fo. 108v.

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violence and memory underscore that images of a tortured body were believed to impress themselves on the mind in a particular way. Yet the very preponderance of masculine decapitations diminishes their overall effect: although the scenes are violent, their codification renders them almost interchangeable. This, however, is not the case with the individualized scenes of the sufferings of the female martyrs. These small, brightly-coloured images of pale women being stabbed in the throat and stomach, immobilized with ropes and burned in fire, make even the modern viewer cringe. The images create both a memorial and a memory. Translations of the Golden Legend from Latin into other languages are more often lavishly illuminated, particularly the elaborate copies in French that usually had royal or aristocratic patrons.8 These versions continued the tradition of selecting the torture or death to represent the fuller life of the martyr, in preference to scenes of miracles, charitable works, or other narrative episodes that might be associated with that martyr. Besides the depictions of martyrdom in manuscripts of the Golden Legend, the interest in the martyrs and their bloody demises is seen also in legendaries and breviaries dating from the later Middle Ages. Similar scenes appear too in Books of Hours from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and point to the increasing lay devotion to and identification with Christ and individual saints and martyrs in this period.9 But there is a paradoxical aspect to late medieval images of Christian martyrs: public punishment came back into judicial practice in the thirteenth century and criminals (and heretics) suffered some of the same punishments as martyrs.10 8   For the French translation of the Legenda aurea by Jehan, or Jean, Belet, see Paul Meyer, Notice sur trois légendiers français attributés à Jean Belet, vol. 36, Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale et autres Bibliothèques (Paris, 1899). For the French translation by Jean de Vignay, see Hilary Maddocks, ‘Illumination in Jean de Vignay’s Légende dorée’, in Dunn-Lardeau 1986, pp. 155–70; Hilary Maddocks, ‘Pictures for Aristocrats: The Manuscripts of the Légende dorée’, in Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir (eds), Medieval Texts and Images: Studies of Manuscripts from the Middle Ages (Chur, 1991), pp. 1–23. 9   See James Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk, 1979); Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, 1990); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991). 10   For more on the reintroduction of torture as a method of extracting confession and exacting punishment, see Talal Asad, ‘Notes on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual’, Economy and Society, 12/3 (1983): pp. 287–327; Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden, 1993); Esther Cohen, ‘Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages’, Science in Context, 8/2 (1995): pp. 47–74; Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1996); Edward Peters, Torture (Philadelphia, 1996). For the intersection of violence in society and violence depicted in art,

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Thirteenth-century public ceremonies of torture and execution were conceived as lavish and propagandistic spectacles of power, confirming an authoritative right to mete out punishment in public on a grand scale. Because of the public nature of these tortures, medieval viewers were in fact witnessing the kinds of events that at least some of them then might go home and contemplate in their devotional manuals. The well-known image by Jean Fouquet of Saint Apollonia having her teeth ripped out, in the Hours of Etienne Chevalier, alludes to the public and theatrical nature of punishment with its elaborate stage set and multiple witnesses (Figure 2.2).11 In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes how the shift from bodily punishment to rehabilitation has meant that pain as spectacle has disappeared from the vocabulary of criminal justice in the West.12 The theatrical displays of power over the criminal’s body so familiar in the Middle Ages gradually changed until, by the nineteenth century, such spectacles as public punishments and executions had almost completely disappeared. In the United States today, those states that even permit capital punishment require that it be a procedure carried out within prison walls, behind closed doors, with only a select few in attendance. Yet the possibility of televised executions in the future suggests that publicly viewed punishment is still conceived as an efficient way of providing a deterrent to would-be criminals and displaying the power of legal authority. Those who would choose to become spectators at an execution made public, be it modern or medieval, might have a variety of responses ranging from voyeurism, sadism, relief, compassion, empathy, vindictiveness, horror, fear, a sense of justice served or injustice perpetrated.13 Above all, whatever the reaction, violence inflicted upon another person’s body evokes necessarily an immediate and powerful response in the person viewing such a scene and is instantly memorable. In the Middle Ages, public punishments were thought to have great pedagogic potential: children were even brought to witness executions and were subsequently whipped or struck in order to facilitate the internalization of moral lessons derived from watching public pain and humiliation and then experiencing their own private version. Images, too, could convey similar lessons: a set of woodcuts by Lucas see Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1985); Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence and Martyrdom (New York, 1991); Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1998); Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London, 2005). 11   Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS fr. 71, fo. 39r. See Leslie Abend Callahan, ‘The Torture of Saint Apollonia: Deconstructing Fouquet’s Martyrdom Stage’, Studies in Iconography, 16 (1994): pp. 119–38. 12   Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979). See also the discussion in Merback, The Thief, especially pp. 304–8. 13   Robert Mills discusses the varying responses a medieval viewer might have had to images of punishment and violence: see Mills.

This image has been removed due to copyright reasons, please refer to the print edition.

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 2.2 Jean Fouquet, ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia’, Hours of Etienne Chevalier, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS fr. 71, fo. 39r.

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Cranach the Elder depicting the martyrdoms of the 12 apostles was used for the instruction of children.14 Books of Hours were also used to teach children to read: the word ‘primer’ for a schoolbook derives from the hour of Prime. Since illustrated Books of Hours often included martyrdom scenes, particularly in the Suffrages section, some children must have been exposed to scenes of violence on a fairly regular basis. It seems clear that in late medieval society, violence, either real or imagined, served as a tool to circumscribe social order, facilitate devotional fervour and underscore pedagogic practice. In fact, these uses of violence often seem to be conflated. Ultimately, one can understand the social and religious displays of violence as a means of inscribing and solidifying memory. The repetition of scenes of martyrdom in sources such as the Golden Legend and Books of Hours suggests that such images were not only memorable in practice, but in their very design were intended to function as mnemonic devices to facilitate devotional interaction between the viewer and the image.15 In the later Middle Ages, around the same time as the compilation of saints’ lives in the Golden Legend, there was an increasing interest in mnemotechnics. One of the most widely circulated texts on the subject was the Roman treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium. Jody Enders notes that the description of artificial memory in this work is ‘rife with imagery of destruction, mutilation, dismemberment and bodies in pain … As concerned with disfiguring as it was with figuration, memory was the place where virtual bodies were mentally staged in virtual pain.’16 For example, the text suggests that images can be more effectively impressed upon the memory if ‘we somehow disfigure them (‘aut is qua re deformabimus’), as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking …’.17 These ideas about the intersection of violence and memory can be seen in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, a fellow Dominican and thirteenth-century contemporary of Jacobus de Voragine, who promoted the memory section of Ad Herennium as being particularly effective for mnemonics. He stated:

  Mitchell B. Merback, ‘Torture and Teaching: The Reception of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles in the Protestant Era’, Art Journal, 57/1 (1998): pp. 14–23; Mills, pp. 153–4. 15   For a discussion of the way manuscript illumination might aid the process of memory, see Sylvia Huot, ‘Visualization and Memory: The Illustration of Troubadour Lyric in a Thirteenth-Century Manuscript’, Gesta, 31/1 (1992): pp. 3–14. 16   Jody Enders, ‘Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence’, Theatre Survey, 38/1 (1997): p. 144. 17   [Pseudo-] Cicero, Ad C. Herennium, De ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, 1977), vol. 3, p. 37; Enders, ‘Emotion Memory,’ p. 144; Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1999), pp. 68–9; Peter Parshall, ‘The Art of Memory and the Passion’, Art Bulletin, 81/ 3 (1999): p. 457. 14

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Man cannot understand without images; the image is a similitude of a corporeal thing, but understanding is of universals that are to be abstracted from the particular … We remember less easily those things which are of subtle and spiritual import; and we remember more easily those things which are gross and sensible.18

In thinking about images of violence as mnemonic tools in the Middle Ages, it is important to remember that these scenes were created and viewed in an environment where not only were public tortures and executions common, but there were other ways that people became used to seeing scenes of unspeakable violence in the name of religion. By the late Middle Ages, plays re-enacting the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of various saints were common fare; some of these theatrical spectacles were filled with simulated violence and bloodshed. The true effect of this type of performed violence was sometimes called into question, even as early as the writings of the Church Fathers. Jody Enders discusses the case of Saint Augustine, who in his Confessions admits that he had been attracted in his youth to plays that turned pain into pleasure. Augustine writes: ‘What is the reason now that a spectator desires to be made sad when he beholds doleful and tragical passages, which he himself could not endure to suffer? Yet for all that he desires to feel a kind of passionateness, yea, and his passion becomes his pleasure too.’19 On the other hand, Tertullian in his De spectaculis proscribes the viewing of dramatized bloodshed as an alternative to pagan public displays of wrestling: ‘See … perfidy slain by faith, cruelty crushed by pity … Have you a mind for blood? You have the blood of Christ.’20 In discussing Tertullian, Enders observes: ‘How audiences were to distinguish between a despicable pagan spectacle of immoral violence and a desirable Christian spectacle of moral violence is a question still unresolved today.’21 At least in part, spectacles of religious violence captured in performances and in visual images were intended as worshipful devotion and empathy – the techniques of affective memory enhancing and reinforcing an experience of affective piety, even if other by-products of the experience were less than spiritual. As Enders discusses, both performances and images of violence are simulacra of actual violence and images of tortured bodies make perpetually present bodies that are actually absent. It is the representation of the virtual bodies that underscores the absence of the actual bodies. This substitution works to make the images memorable and the violence enacted on the represented bodies functions as a mnemonic device to ensure that the memory is lasting.22   Quoted in Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 242–3. 19   Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1950), Book 2, Chapter 2, quoted in Enders, ‘Emotion Memory’, p. 152. 20   Tertullian, De spectaculis, trans. T.R. Glover, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1977), Chapter 29, quoted in Enders, ‘Emotion Memory’, p. 152. 21   Enders, ‘Emotion Memory’, p. 152. 22   Enders, The Medieval Theater, especially pp. 71–82. 18

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It is also important to stress that illustrated manuscripts of the Golden Legend and illuminated Books of Hours, were most likely used for personal devotion rather than public display, most likely read and viewed silently in private by their owners rather than transmitted orally to other listeners, the images functioning as a type of memory device for the individual to recall the text and its significance. Paul Saenger has discussed the profound effect that the advent of silent reading had on late medieval culture: a silent reader could read whatever they wanted, wherever and whenever they wanted. Saenger suggests that this change from oral to silent reading, from public to private consumption of text and image, led to such innovations as a revival of interest in erotic writings and art.23 Similarly, the violent, sadistic or sexual scenes in these manuscripts could be appreciated in private and at leisure. This focused, private contemplation of such scenes would only intensify the depth of the experience: a viewer might find them both stimulating and disturbing, both attractive and repulsive. Silent perusal of the manuscript allowed the miniatures to function not just as illustrations to the text but also as didactic tools on their own, permitting a deeper and more meaningful devotional experience, an opportunity to indulge fully in imagining the suffering of the martyrs without self-consciousness.24 Unlike the far more common unillustrated copies of the Legenda aurea used by clergy as sourcebooks for sermons and lively stories for their congregations, a carefully produced book like the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, with miniatures accompanying every chapter, would have been a treasured object of private possession. The manuscript is similar in style to the Grandes Chroniques de France, commissioned in 1274 by the monks of Saint-Denis for presentation to King Philip III (1270–85) and it is not unlikely that the Huntington Library Legenda aurea was produced for someone affiliated with Philip’s court, perhaps even Frère Laurent, Philip’s confessor and the author of La Somme le Roi, the manual of moral instruction written in 1279–80 at Philip’s request.25 As a Dominican, Frère Laurent would surely have owned a copy of Jacobus de Voragine’s text; as a cleric, this copy would have been in Latin; as confessor to the king, his copy would perhaps have been a more extensively decorated one than the utilitarian manuscripts used by those priests less highly-placed. One can imagine that Frère Laurent might have used such a text to assist the king in his own religious instruction and spiritual devotion.26 Frère Laurent was probably closely associated with Thomas Aquinas, since Laurent was the prior of Saint-Jacques, the Dominican house in Paris and   Paul Saenger, ‘Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society’, Viator, 13 (1982): pp. 412–13. See also Lewis, p. 148. 24   For more on silent reading and contemplation, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 170–73. 25   I first suggested this in Easton, ‘The Making of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea’, p. 43. 26   Gerald B. Guest has suggested that such a role might have been played by the moralized Bibles produced earlier in the thirteenth century: see Bible Moralisée (Codex 23

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Thomas was a member of the community at the same time. In composing his Somme for Philip, Laurent may even have been inspired by Thomas’s own Summa theologica, which was designated as an official teaching of the Dominicans the previous year.27 If the Huntington Library Legenda aurea did in fact belong to Frère Laurent and if he had a hand in directing the contents of its illumination, as patrons often did, he may very well have instructed that the images of the saints be ‘gross and sensible’, as Thomas put it, to further their devotional and mnemonic impact on himself, Philip and anyone else viewing the manuscript. Saint Louis IX (1226–70), the father of Philip III, seems to have written instructional manuals in his own hand for Philip and another child, Isabelle. Louis’s biographer (and his daughter Blanche’s confessor) Guillaume de SaintPanthus records that Saint Louis also sent his daughter Isabelle a hair belt and a flagellant consisting of little chains of iron with which she beat herself and that Louis himself practised this sort of self-mortification with his own Dominican confessor, Giefroi de Biaulieu.28 An image of Saint Louis being flagellated by Giefroi appears in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, the tiny Book of Hours belonging to Louis’s great-granddaughter, possibly made on the occasion of her marriage and at the instigation of her husband (and Louis’s great-grandson), King Charles IV (1322–28).29 The sufferings of Christ and the martyrs, their physical bodies long absent, are thus appropriated and transferred to a present body as a method of ritualistic and fervent devotion. This infliction of pain onto the present body finds a parallel in the way that some owners treated the images in their manuscripts. Unlike the instances of medieval iconoclasm which targeted the images of others because of religious, philosophical and ethical differences, private owners of manuscripts could both augment and vandalize their own property, mutilating the simulated bodies represented in their books. In this case, however, instead of the violence being inflicted on the holy body, it tends to be directed against figures of evil. In the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, there are several instances in which the faces of torturers and evil kings have been defaced. In the full-page miniatures of the late thirteenth-century Picture Book of Madame Marie, the faces of those humiliating and torturing Christ and the saints have often been completely rubbed away (Figure 2.3).30 The Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreischische Nationalbibliothek), vol. 2, Glanzlichter der Buchkunst (London, 1995), pp. 17–18. 27   Leo M. Carruthers, ‘Lorens of Orléans and the Somme le Roi; or, The Book of Vices and Virtue’, Vox Benedectina: A Journal of Translations from Monastic Sources, 5/23 (1988): pp. 190–200. 28   See the discussion in Joan Holladay, ‘The Education of Jeanne d’Evreux: Personal Piety and Dynastic Salvation in her Book of Hours at the Cloisters’, Art History, 17/4 (1994): pp. 598–601. 29   New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, MS 54.1.2, fo. 103r. For an illustration see Holladay, p. 587 fig. 33. 30   Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acqu. fr. 16251, fo. 36r. For the manuscript, see Alison Stones, Le livre d’images de Madame Marie (Paris, 1997); Alison

‘Images Gross and Sensible’

Figure 2.3

45

‘The Flagellation of Christ’, Picture Book of Madame Marie, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acqu. fr. 16251, fo. 36.r

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phenomenon of the mutilation of ‘evil figures’ in medieval manuscripts has been little discussed, but this type of personal and physical involvement with the images is very interesting and needs to be further explored.31 When the defacement of art is carried out in a modern context, the perpetrator seems to want to attack the artwork itself as a physical representation of the thing or idea it portrays. For example, a man offended by Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporated elephant dung and cutouts from pornographic magazines, began to paint over it with white paint when it was exhibited at the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, in 1999–2000.32 In the many instances of defacement in medieval manuscripts, on the other hand, it was often that the viewer still treasured the object itself but expressed their disgust with figures such as the devil and tormentors of Christ and the martyrs. Art in this way became a vehicle for audience participation in a way that is generally unthinkable today. Of course, it is likely that the owner of the piece was responsible for this kind of activity and not outside viewers, although we cannot be sure of this and, in fact, we cannot be sure that this type of mutilation was necessarily contemporary with the production of the piece. It could in fact have been a later, non-medieval owner who was moved to express their piety and empathy in such physically tangible ways. But Madame Marie (or a later owner of her manuscript) seems also to have expressed her love and devotion to Saint Anne and the infant Virgin in the scene of the Virgin’s birth – the faces of both have been touched or kissed so repeatedly that there is little paint left.33 We might compare this to the phenomenon of visitors to the Vietnam Memorial making rubbings of names on the monument in order to commemorate or carry away a reminder of their loved one. In both cases, there is physical contact with the object itself, although rubbing the Vietnam Memorial produces a type of memento, even a relic, to be carried away, while the physical interaction with medieval manuscripts ends up erasing the image itself. The images in the Golden Legend manuscripts or Books of Hours could also serve as a type of visual index to the manuscript, a means of locating particular sections quickly without having to read the text. By the time these manuscripts Stones, ‘Nipples, Entrails, Severed Heads, and Skin: Devotional Images for Madame Marie’, in Colum Hourihane (ed.), Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, NJ, 1999), pp. 47–70. 31   One contribution, focusing on images considered obscene, is Michael Camille, ‘Obscenity under Erasure: Censorship in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts’, in Jan M. Ziolkowski (ed.), Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden, 1998), pp. 139–54; see also David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen, 1985); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989). 32   Brooks Adams et al, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (London, 1998). See also Lawrence Rothfield (ed.), Unsettling ‘Sensation’: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001). 33   Paris, BnF, MS nouv. acqu. fr. 16251, fo. 19; see Stones, Le livre d’images.

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were produced in the later Middle Ages, certain scenes such as the grilling of Lawrence, the perforation of Sebastian, the double mastectomy of Agatha and the flaying of Bartholomew would have been so codified that the viewer would have immediately recognized the scene and the saint. But in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, most of the male martyrs are depicted in almost identical fashion: fully clothed, kneeling and in the process of being beheaded. The miniature accompanying the legend of Gordianus is a typical example of this arrangement (Figure 2.4). These interchangeable and mimetic beheadings would not have triggered any immediate recognition of the specific chapter being illustrated and here the red rubrics of the text would have needed to be checked to determine the specificity of the legend. Saenger mentions that, from the thirteenth century onwards, such manuscript features as subdivisions, running headlines and coloured paragraph marks were introduced to aid the silent reader, all of which are used in this particular manuscript.34 The repetitive nature of the beheading scenes mimics to some extent the repetitive structure of Jacobus’s text and of martyrdom accounts in general. Various conventions are routinely used to describe the lives and deaths of martyrs; these conventions are often individualized for the particular saint and yet standardized to fit the typical hagiographic pattern, including confrontations with and conversions of non-believers, trials and judgements before a figure of authority, torture, execution and posthumous miracles.35 The most common leitmotif is the beheading scene: after all, decapitation is the handy foolproof method of disposing of a troublesome figure, male or female, who has managed to survive through God’s grace any number of other tortures. (There are exceptions, of course: Saint Denis picks up his severed head and travels a good distance before finally succumbing and receiving his crown of martyrdom.). A decapitated saint automatically conveyed a certain status in religious, political and judicial milieus.36 Except for the entire body, the head of a saint was the most important body part that a religious institution could own. The procurement of saintly relics had a long history, but most head reliquaries seem to date from the thirteenth century onwards and therefore attest to the late medieval interest in separated and displayed holy heads.37 The division of the body after death was practised on royal and aristocratic bodies as well as saints and martyrs: the 1299 papal bull of Boniface VIII (1294–1303) prohibiting the evisceration and boiling of corpses and by extension the division of the body into pieces, was issued in

  Saenger, p. 392.   See Easton, ‘The Making of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea’, pp. 7–20. 36   See Easton, ‘Pain, Torture and Death’, pp. 54–6. 37   Joan Holladay, ‘Relics, Reliquaries, and Religious Women: Visualizing the Holy Virgins of Cologne’, Studies in Iconography, 18 (1997): p. 88; see p. 110 n. 65 for bibliography on reliquary busts. See also Barbara Drake Boehm, ‘Medieval Head Reliquaries of the Massif Central’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University, 1990). 34 35

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Figure 2.4

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

‘The Beheading of Saint Gordianus’, Legenda aurea, San Marino, The Huntington Library, HM 3027, fo. 63r.

‘Images Gross and Sensible’

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response to a widespread burial practice.38 Because Dominican and Franciscan establishments were often the recipients of such royal remains, William Rishanger, a monk at Saint Albans, wrote in his late thirteenth-century chronicle that the mendicant orders were akin to dogs skulking around corpses, waiting to bite off body parts. Indeed, two different Dominican institutions were the recipients of the flesh, entrails and heart of Philip III of France himself after his death.39 Portraying a saint in the process of being beheaded signified in a way that other forms of execution did not. Decapitation was a superior means of execution for martyrs as it was reserved for citizens of ancient Rome and it also had connotations of class and gender in thirteenth-century secular society. Male criminals of noble birth tended to be beheaded during public executions in the later Middle Ages, while lower-class criminals were hung on the gibbet and women were more likely to be burned or buried alive.40 In the Legenda aurea, Jacobus de Voragine details numerous tortures and bodily humiliations endured by the martyrs, but most of the legends end with a decapitation, regardless of the sex of the victim. Yet despite the frequency with which female saints are beheaded in the text, only rarely are women depicted being decapitated in the miniatures of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea: they are more likely to be stripped and penetrated and/or burned.41 At the same time, Lambert, Matthew, Maurice and Simon are not beheaded in their legends but are pictured that way in the accompanying miniatures in the manuscript: in the text Matthew is specifically stabbed in the back and Simon is crucified. The tortures of the female martyrs are powerful because they are often nude and their bodies punished in shocking ways, but there is a prurience to the images that is absent in most of the scenes of male martyrs. For example, Agnes stands naked in a fire while a sword is run through her neck and the seated king both directs and observes her fate (Figure 2.5). In fact, the mix of eroticism and violence makes them the perfect combination of the sensual and the bloody, the striking imagines agentes (active images) often described in treatises on memory as particularly effective mnemonic devices.42 The combination of nudity and graphic, individualized, tortures visited upon the female martyrs renders them ultimately more memorable than the parade of nearly identical male beheadings. As Ted E. McVay puts it, ‘[M]arginalization works in both directions’. Although he is describing, in theoretical terms, the absenting of men’s bodies and the way the individual ‘penis’ is traded for the ‘societally defined Phallus’, his   Elizabeth A.R. Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’, Viator, 12 (1981): pp. 221–70. 39   Ibid., p. 249 (William Rishanger); pp. 235 ff. and n. 53 for further sources and bibliography regarding the case of Philip III. 40   For more on decapitation, see Paul-Henri Stahl, Histoire de la décapitation (Paris, 1986). For more on judicial procedures, see Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice. 41   See Easton, ‘Pain, Torture and Death’, pp. 49–64 for more on this dichotomy. 42   Lina Bolzoni, ‘The Play of Memory between Words and Images’, in Wessel Reinink and Jeroen Stumpel (eds), Memory and Oblivion (Dordrecht, 1999), pp. 11–18. 38

50

Figure 2.5

Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture

‘The Torture of Saint Agnes’, Legenda aurea, San Marino, The Huntington Library, HM 3027, fo. 23v.

‘Images Gross and Sensible’

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observations are also pertinent to the way that male martyrs lose their individuality in the codification of their visual presentation. McVay writes: ‘The system, while specifically designed to exclude the female and empower the male, leaves him powerless as an individual. The power he wields is not of his own making but rather is something he embraces’.43 The very codification and repetition of the beheading scenes, even when there is more than one victim, causes the viewer to focus on the torture itself rather than the victim. The male martyr loses his head and his identity; his individuality is subsumed into a social category. He trades away his ‘penis’ and, in this way, a male viewer of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea and other hagiographic texts with a textual and visual emphasis on beheading, may have had a personal reaction to a plethora of decapitation scenes. In his ‘Medusa’s Head’, Freud has a psychosexual reading of decapitation: the severed head of Medusa with her phallic serpents is a metaphor for castration anxiety.44 Indeed, the model for the other male decapitations is perhaps that of John the Baptist, beheaded because of the castrating wishes of the seductive Salome. Some miniatures of male martyrdoms in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea connote castration in ways much more explicit than decapitation, as in the image of George tortured on the wheel of swords (folio 49r.), or Bartholomew with a knife between his legs (folio 108v.), or Lawrence, shown covering his genitals, perhaps in modesty, perhaps in protection (folio 97v.). The decapitation scenes themselves have executioners wielding oversized, seemingly phallic swords. Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ posits that male fear of castration can be controlled through the gaze, by men either seeking voyeuristic pleasure through punishment, or objectifying a woman viewed.45 Both activities can be seen in the scenes of female martyrdom in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea and the voyeuristic, punishing, objectifying kings that often accompany scenes of female martyrdom can function as stand-ins for the viewer. Thus the contrast between the anonymous scenes of beheading and the tortures of the female saints makes the latter more memorable, not just because they are more individualized, but also because, in their striking appearance, they help to minimize the impact of the decapitations/castrations. But Mulvey and her followers limit their discussion to male viewers gazing at female subjects: what of 43   Ted E. McVay Jr, ‘Beheaded Women: Masculine/Feminine Dualities in Garcilaso’s Égloga III’, The Romantic Review, 83/22 (1992): p. 228. 44   Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in James Strachey et al (eds), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1953–74), vol. 18, pp. 273–4. See also Neil Hertz, ‘Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure’, Representations, 4 (1983): pp. 27–54; and the responses to the previous article in Catherine Gallagher, Joel Fineman and Neil Hertz, ‘More about “Medusa’s Head”’, Representations, 4 (1983): pp. 55–72. 45   Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16/3 (1975): pp. 6–18; reprinted in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989).

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male viewers gazing at male subjects? What about female viewers?46 Eroticallycharged voyeurism need not be confined to one gender looking at the other: in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea, the endless beheadings of men seem sexual and fetishistic. Because of the overlapping ways that images of violence signified in late medieval society, the scenes of martyrdom in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea might have inspired sympathy, admiration and horror, entwined with a profound understanding of the devotional and social significance of the tortured saintly body. In his analysis of the intersections between torture in medieval society and the violence done to Christ’s body in late medieval Passion narratives, Thomas Bestul states: The Passion texts do not merely reflect these new social conditions but reinforce and give shape to the reality that surrounds them and of which they are a part … [they] teach the lesson … that such spectacles are part of human experience – through repeated assaults on the human body they show us that such behavior is not unthinkable.47

So both texts and art can be ideological, not just reflecting reality but also reinforcing it, presenting certain ideas as normal and acceptable.48 In this way, images of martyrdom that commemorate and make memorable the sacrifices of bodies long absent can paradoxically, in their ubiquity and inevitability, justify and normalize the violence perpetrated on present bodies. The very visibility of the violence is significant: as Michael Camille has written, ‘The image, not the Word, mediated most powerfully between God and the believer in late medieval spirituality.’49 Perhaps, in contemplating martyrdom scenes, the viewer both experiences discomfort and participates vicariously in the suffering of the martyrs, while simultaneously awed and shamed by their forbearance and the grace granted them by God. Yet there is a voyeuristic aspect to many of these torture scenes, male and female, that seems inescapable. Perhaps medieval and modern viewers can observe tortures more dispassionately if they cannot fully identify with the victims. Martyrs and criminals (and prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib) are perceived as ‘outside’ the parameters of typical society. But the image of a body in pain   For more on the potential eroticism of medieval imagery, see Martha Easton, ‘“Was It Good for You Too?” Medieval Erotic Art and its Audiences’, in Rachel Dressler (ed.), Different Visions, 1 (2008): http://www.differentvisions.org/. 47   Bestul, p. 158. 48   For more on art as ideology, see Jonathan J.G. Alexander, ‘Iconography and Ideology: Uncovering Social Meanings in Western Medieval Christian Art’, Studies in Iconography, 15 (1993): pp. 1–44. 49   Michael Camille, ‘The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies’, in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester, 1994), p. 74. 46

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cannot help but have an effect on the viewer. Elaine Scarry has argued that pain transcends language: it cannot be described but only experienced and therefore we cannot possibly understand the pain of another human being.50 But through images and the assaulting effect of images of torture on the psyche of the viewer, a better understanding of pain can be achieved. As Scarry has written: ‘… it is not just that pain can be apprehended in the image of the weapon (or wound) but that it almost cannot be apprehended without it.’51 The focus on violent images in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea and other hagiographic illustrations of the later Middle Ages could serve as a means of eliding the division between victim and viewer, providing a fuller meditative and devotional experience than would be possible through text alone.52 Above all, the holy martyrs would be remembered.

  Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1985). 51   Ibid., p. 16. 52   See Freedberg, The Power of Images, especially pp. 168–75. 50

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Chapter 3

Beyond the Two Doors of Memory: Intertextualities and Intervisualities in Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie and the Histoire Ancienne1 Rosa María Rodríguez Porto

To Patricia Stirnemann

In the prologue to his Bestiaire d’Amours, written some time before 1260, Richard de Fournival, chancellor of Amiens Cathedral (c. 1246–59?), equates painture and parole as parallel ‘paths that lead to the two doors of memory, sight and hearing’.2 But, in this oft-quoted passage, Richard’s reflection goes on, to analyze and compare the effect evoked by image and text: For when one sees an illustrated story, whether about Troy or something else, one sees the action of brave men [who] were in the past as if they were present. Word does the same thing. For when we hear a romance read, we grasp the adventures as clearly as if they were unfolding before our eyes.3 1   This chapter results from the Proyecto de Investigación ‘Cultura visual y cultura libraria en la Corona de Castilla II (1284–1369)’ under the auspices of the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HAR2009–12933) and directed by Professor Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras. I would like to thank Patricia Stirnemann, Elma Brenner, Mary Franklin-Brown, Elizabeth Morrison and Meredith Cohen for reading earlier drafts and offering valuable suggestions. The errors that remain, of course, are my own. 2   ‘Ceste memoire si a .ij. portes, veïr et oïr, et a cascune de ces .ij. portes si a un cemin par ou on i puet aler, che sont painture et parole’. Li Bestiaires d’amours di maestre Richard de Fornival e li Response du bestiaire, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan, 1957), p. 4. See Alison Stones, ‘Seeing the Walls of Troy’, in Brigitte Dekeyzer and Jan van den Stock (eds), Manuscripts in Transition: Recycling Manuscripts, Texts and Images (Louvain, 2005), pp. 161–78. 3   ‘Car quant on voit painte une estoire, ou de Troies ou d’autre, on voit les fais des preudommes ki cha en ariere furent, ausi com s’il fussent present. Et tout ensi est il

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As Mary Carruthers has cogently argued, the poet refers not only to the recollective

enhancement produced by the combined use of text and images, as in his own Bestiaire, but also to the analogous role played by parole and painture as vehicles for a text (historia), whether it be heard (parole) or read (painture, understood here as the graphic appearance of the words written in a book), since both give way to the production of mental images that bring back to life those who are no longer present.4 Ancient and medieval treatises on mnemonics emphasized that human memory relies upon the production, storage and invention of mental images or phantasmata.5 This Greek word, the source of the terms ‘phantasm’ and ‘fantasy’ in most European languages, evokes not only the ghostly condition of recollections, but also the potential of these mental images for generating new images and meanings. In the ancient and medieval periods, the internalization of the voices and deeds of the past by keeping them alive in memory was the ultimate goal of reading, either through words or images, and the mark of true knowledge and ethical conduct. Books functioned, then, as repositories of memory. They constituted virtual spaces where medieval audiences were able to encounter these ‘brave men [who] were in the past as if they were present’. Illustrations accompanying texts underlined the visionary and liminal quality of the book (as a threshold to other worlds), stimulating the emotional involvement of readers in the events narrated. To be sure, the bibliophile Richard chose the story of Troy as an example for good reason.6 Although it cannot be inferred from the text that he was talking about an actual illustrated manuscript instead of wall paintings or tapestries, his remarks were made synchronously with the development of a new type of book, the secular illuminated book, which was to spread widely throughout the late Middle Ages. de parole. Car quant on ot .i. romans lire, on entent les aventures, ausi com on les veïst en present’. Li Bestiaires, ed. Segre, p. 5. English translation with slight modifications in Brigitte Buettner, ‘Profane Illuminations, Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society’, The Art Bulletin, 74/1 (1992): pp. 75–90 (p. 80). 4   See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 221–4. See also Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NJ, 1987), pp. 135–73. 5   See Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 46–79 (‘Descriptions of the Neuropsychology of Memory’). 6   The chancellor of Notre Dame of Amiens wrote a catalogue of his own library, considered for a long time to be only a literary exercise, entitled Biblionomia. In this catalogue, item 110 reads as follows: ‘Phrigii Daretis Yliados historia prosaice deinde metrice. Item Meonii Homeri libellus Yliados et versus Primatis Aurelianensis de eodem’ (referring to Dares’s De excidium Trioiae historia, the Ilias Latina and some lost verses by Hugues d’Orléans). Léopold Delisle, Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale (3 vols, Paris, 1868–81), vol. 2, p. 531. Also see Patricia Stirnemann, ‘Les bibliothèques princières et privées aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles’, in André Vernet (ed.), Histoire des bibliothèques françaises. Les bibliothèques médiévales du VIe siècle à 1530 (Paris, 1989), pp. 173–91 (especially pp. 181–4 and the bibliography mentioned there).

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This fascinating episode of European cultural history has recently attracted the attention of scholars who consider these manuscripts, previously dismissed as second-rate works of art, to be tokens of the awakening and consolidation of a profane culture and courtly imagery.7 This, of course, is too far-ranging an issue to be addressed here. I will focus on several aspects in the texts and images of the two main works that broke new ground for the representation of the Trojan War in the thirteenth century: the Roman de Troie and the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. Some aspects related to manuscript transmission and iconographic traditions have already been pointed out independently by philologists and art historians, but these hypotheses, which have arisen in different fields of inquiry, still await critical review. It is my contention that intervisualities detected between the illustrations of these two texts should be approached in the same way that intertextualities are approached by literary historians. Instead of considering these images only as the consequence of miniaturists copying from older exemplars, I would like to scrutinize their role as bearers and catalysers of memories, along with the mechanisms that govern their creation, mutation and migration from the realms where they were first formulated. Examined against the backdrop of reading and mnemonic practice, the first illuminated manuscripts devoted to the Trojan War give us a view into the birth and further development of the visual matière de Troie. By that, I mean not only the generation of a repertoire of images for these texts but also the dynamics which govern their interpretation and transformation, once illustrations are turned into phantasmata. Parole In the central Middle Ages, the Trojan War was one of the most powerful and appealing themes in royal and aristocratic circles and even in the privacy of prominent burgher and merchant families, enjoying an unrivalled success all over Europe from the mid-twelfth century onwards. The Roman de Troie and the Histoire   See the pioneering studies by Fritz Saxl, ‘The Troy Romance in French and Italian Art’, in Lectures (2 vols, London, 1957), vol. 1, pp. 125–38 and vol. 2, pp. 72–81; Hugo Buchthal, Historia Troiana: Studies in the History of Mediæval Secular Illustration (London, 1971). See also: Alison Stones, ‘Secular Manuscript Illumination in France’, in Christopher Kleinheinz (ed.), Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1976), pp. 83–102; Alison Stones, ‘Sacred and Profane Art: Secular and Liturgical Book-Illumination in the Thirteenth Century’, in Harald Scholler (ed.), The Epic in Medieval Society (Tübingen, 1977), pp. 100–112; Alison Stones, ‘The Illustrated Chrétien Manuscripts and Their Artistic Context’, in Keith Busby et al (eds), The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes (2 vols, Amsterdam, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 227–332; James A. Rushing Jr, Images of Adventure: Ywain in the Visual Arts (Philadelphia, 1995); Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Scheingorn, Myth, Montage & Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003). 7

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ancienne proved to be extremely influential in this process of dissemination, although they were written in distinct socio-political circumstances. The different meanings conferred upon this matière by the audiences targeted in each case do not conceal, however, the existence of intertextual rapports between these two texts, which partially account for the configuration of a common imagery in them both. This proliferation of Trojan texts – and, as time went by, images – is inseparable from the name of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, whose Roman de Troie (c. 1165) was the source or essential reference for almost all medieval and early modern versions of the legend, even well after the Iliad had become available once again in the West.8 In addition to the revered, though matter-of-fact, narratives by Virgil and Ovid, the supposed eyewitness accounts found in Dares’s De Excidio Troiae Historiae and Dyctis’s De Ephemeri Belli Troiano (sixth and fourth century BC, respectively) constituted the most reputable authorities, and for that reason were extensively used by Benoît, who presented his poem as a translation of these late Antique texts.9 Nevertheless, in the translation from Latin to Old French, these materials underwent a creative re-elaboration that made them products of – and for – a medieval society.10 The Roman de Troie and its predecessors, the Roman d’Eneas and the Roman de Thèbes, as well as other texts that can be included in the genre of the roman d’antiquité, namely the various versions of the Roman d’Alexandre, created a virtual space where it was possible to bridge the gap between ancient past and medieval present. Institutions, customs and aspects of material culture that were no longer understandable or meaningful were medievalized, Christianized and reformulated under the rules of chivalry and courtliness. The alterity of the past remained, though, in the diabolic appearance of pagan idols, the merveilles erected by some ancient magicians or the thrilling lure of classical tragedy.11 8   Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, ed. Léopold Constans (6 vols, Paris, 1904–12). See Marc-René Jung, La légende de Troie en France au Moyen Âge: analyse des versions françaises et bibliographie raisonée des manuscrits (Basel-Tübingen, 1996). For a general overview, see Adolf Emil Cohen, De Visie op Troje van de Westerse Middeleeuwse Geschiedschrijvers tot 1160 (Assen, 1941). The return of Homer to Western European civilization is currently dated to 1354, when a copy of the Iliad was sent to Petrarch from Constantinople. The Iliad was known in the medieval West, though, through the intermediary of a short Latin hexameter version, the Ilias Latina, written c. 60–70 BC. Richard de Fournival kept a copy of this work in his library (see footnote 6). 9   See Benoît, Roman, vol. 6, pp. 192–263 (on sources). 10   See Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991). 11   See, among others, Guy Raynaud de Lage, ‘Les Romans antiques et la representation de l’Antiquité’, Le Moyen Age, 67 (1961): pp. 247–91; Raymond J. Cormier, ‘The Problem of Anachronism: Recent Scholarship on the French Medieval Romances of Antiquity’, Philological Quarterly, 53/2 (1974): pp. 145–57; Aimé Petit, L’anachronisme dans les romans antiques du XIIe siècle (Lille, 1985). Also see Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1993), pp. 109–18.

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Close and distant at the same time, antiquity attracted broad medieval audiences only after the romans d’antiquité had provided lay readers with access to ancient history and the Graeco-Roman legacy without any clerical restriction or Latin language barrier. This crucial shift in available literature prompted the constitution of a literary public for the first time since the dawn of the Roman Empire.12 It also generated rituals of collective reading that contributed to the forging of class ties and identities.13 As a source of both exempla and delight, romans d’antiquité and, in the following century, vernacular historiographical works, reasserted or questioned what was supposed to be memorable, and that meant not only the names and deeds of past personages, but also the very essence of what should be learned and debated: political virtues, social codes and dynastic legitimacies.14 These were some of the issues encapsulated in the Roman de Troie, which has repeatedly been linked to the Angevin court of King Henry II of England (1154–89) and Eleanor of Aquitaine, although definitive evidence is still lacking.15 Whatever its origin, several decades after its completion the poem was popular reading on both sides of the Channel and even in other francophone areas, such as northern Italy. The poem presents an extended narrative of the two destructions of the city, the first one by Jason and the Argonauts, and the ill-fated return of the Achaean leaders to their native lands. In order to make the account more pleasurable for his public, Benoît de Sainte-Maure intertwines the war narrative with the passionate love stories of several main characters, such as Troilus and Briseida (a character entirely invented by Benoît, who would reappear in English literature as Criseyde or Cressida) and Achilles and Polyxena, and includes such fantastic details as the arrival of a centaur, the Sagittarius, who fights on the Trojan side. Written in c. 1208–13, several decades after the Roman de Troie and in a very different vein, the Histoire ancienne was dedicated by its anonymous author to Roger, châtelain of Lille.16 It relates world history from Creation to the rise   This was the panorama presented by Erich Auerbach in his classic Literaturspräche und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Bern, 1958). 13   See Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996); Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 2000). 14   By suggesting genealogical links with prestigious ancestors or by projecting onto the past present concerns, historical and even fictional works such as the Arthurian romances were able to provide medieval courtly audiences with other worlds that mirrored their own and reaffirmed their values and interests. See, for instance, Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, WI, 1987); Spiegel, Romancing the Past; David H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2002). 15   Jung, p. 11. 16   Three different redactions of the Histoire ancienne have been preserved, although I shall refer only to the first. See Jung, pp. 502–65. The Trojan section of this work has also been published in Jung, pp. 358–430. Also see Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. Estoires Rogier, ed. Marijke de Visser-van Terwisga (Orléans, 1999), vol. 2 (this volume contains 12

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to power of Julius Caesar, including sections devoted to the Book of Genesis, Assyria, the history of Thebes, the war between Greeks and Amazons, the history of Troy, the flight of Aeneas, the kings of Persia, the deeds of Alexander the Great and Roman history. It is the first example of a universal chronicle written in a vernacular language and, in his ambition to write a comprehensive account, the author was obliged to abridge several episodes, including that of Troy, ‘por ce que l’estorie est tant oïe’.17 Therefore, the author of the Histoire preferred the concise Excidio Troiae Historia by Dares to the lengthy Roman de Troie, despite the fact that he made use of the Roman de Thèbes and of the Roman d’Alexandre, in addition to the Æneid.18 It is unlikely however that brevity was the only reason for returning to the late antique source instead of Benoît’s Roman de Troie. Since Merovingian times, French Latin historiography in France had turned to Dares to support the claim for the Trojan ancestry of the Francs and this tradition may have exercised a more powerful influence over the author’s choice of source.19 It is in the section devoted to Eneas that this prestigious ancestry is affirmed, by presenting Francion, Eneas’s nephew, as ‘la semence des Fransois premeraine’.20 However, this historical compilation left aside Capetian pretensions in favour of the Flemish nobility, by making use of the ideology of translatio imperii and translatio studii. As MarcRené Jung and Gabrielle Spiegel have emphasized, the prologue states that the original intention of the work was to prolong the narration of biblical and secular history up to twelfth-century Flanders, linking past and present in a continuum of legitimacy and cultural eminence.21 Thus the Histoire ancienne made explicit what in the Roman de Troie was an implicit claim of Trojan ancestry. This dynastic manifesto, uttered just as the aggressive centralizing policy of King Philip Augustus of France (1180–1223) was pushing Flemish nobility to the limits, certainly may have constituted a defiant response by the counts of Flanders.22 Although in both the Roman de Troie and the Histoire ancienne, fact and fiction were subtly woven together in an account presented as a ‘truthful’ narrative, the introduction and notes to an edition of the episodes relating to Assyria, Thebes, the Minotaur and the Amazons). 17   ‘Because it is such a well-known story’. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), MS fr. 20125, fo. 123v. Quoted in Jung, p. 336. 18   See Paul Meyer, ‘Les premières compilations françaises d’histoire ancienne’, Romania, 14 (1885): pp. 1–81; Raynaud de Lage, ‘Les romans antiques dans l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César’, Le Moyen Age, 63 (1957): 267–309. 19   In addition to Adolf Emil Cohen’s book (see footnote 8), see Colette Beaune, ‘L’utilisation politique du mythe des origines troyennes en France à la fin du Moyen Age’, in Jean-Yves Tilliette (ed.), Lectures médiévales de Virgile (Rome, 1985), pp. 331–55. 20   ‘The seed of the first Francs’. Jung, p. 12. 21   The chronicle, however, ends abruptly at the moment of Caesar’s conquest of Flanders. Ibid., p. 335; Spiegel, Romancing the Past, pp. 109–13. 22   Spiegel, Romancing the Past, pp. 11–54; Histoire ancienne, ed. Visser, vol. 2, pp. 257–72.

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the latter text went further in its rhetorical quest for authenticity by departing from verse to embrace prose as the medium of discourse.23 But what I would like to underscore here is that the overt rejection of the model represented by the ‘mendacious’ versified text of the Roman de Troie, evident in his selection of Dares as source and prose as form, forced the author of the Histoire ancienne to engage in a tacit controversy with his predecessor. Certain interpolations, already detected by Guy Raynaud de Lage, can only be fully understood as intertextual references to the Roman de Troie, and enable us to ascertain to what extent the author wrote with an eye on the poem, a text his readers would certainly have known. For instance, he offered a more detailed account of the death of Hector, and amplified the passage devoted to the Amazons, two variations that had decisive consequences in the realm of illustration.24 Painture The rhetorical prowess of authors like Benoît and the anonymous writer of the Histoire ancienne seems to have been effective in stimulating the imagination of these audiences. Troy was rebuilt in the realm of memory and, as in the Bestiaire d’amours, words seemed to summon images. It was not until the middle of the thirteenth century, however, that artists began to depict pagan heroes in chivalric fashion, prompted by royal and aristocratic patrons. But the challenge for miniaturists, one they did not face when illustrating the Bestiaire, was the absence of an iconographic tradition, except that of biblical illustration.25 As a consequence, the first secular illustrators dealt with unprecedented problems, which gave rise to tentative proposals of distinctive layouts or new narrative strategies.26 In addition, they were obliged to create new iconographic formulae and distinctive visual cues to help audiences recognize the Trojan (hi)story. At this embryonic stage, a variety of systems of illustration and iconographic cycles were developed in order to translate in visual terms the accounts provided by the Histoire ancienne and the Roman de Troie. Among the 31 surviving   See Spiegel (footnote 14) and Catherine Croizy-Naquet, Écrire l’histoire au début du XIIIe siècle: l’Histoire ancienne et les Faits des Romans (Paris, 1999). 24   de Lage, ‘Les romans antiques dans l’Histoire ancienne’, pp. 267–77; Jung, p. 416. 25   See François Avril, ‘Gli autori classici ilustrati in Francia dall XIII al XV secolo’, in Marco Buonocore (ed.), Vedere i classici: l’illustrazione libraria dei testi antichi dall’età romana al tardo Medioevo (Rome, 1997), pp. 87–98. However, several classical motifs survived in these manuscripts, such as the wooden horse and Dido’s suicide, which refer back to such late antique codices as the Vergilius Vaticanus (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Lat. 3225). 26   Apart from the bibliography in footnote 7, for an insightful overview see Madeline H. Cavinness, ‘“The Simple Perception of Matter” and the Representation of Narrative, ca. 1180–1280’, Gesta, 30/1 (1991): 48-64. 23

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thirteenth-century manuscripts of these two textual streams of the legend, 20 include miniatures. Their scattered geography of origin attests not only to the mobility of these texts in the francophone aristocratic circles of Europe and the Crusader colonies in the East, where one finds the Histoire ancienne, but also to their versatility in bearing different meanings for changing audiences. A detailed overview of the visual narratives they contain will allow us to track this process and to follow images in their course from one textual tradition to the other, and back again. New evidence also arises for the origin and chronology of some of these manuscripts. The popularity of the Histoire ancienne in Flanders and its journey to the Holy Land had much to do with Roger de Lille’s family ties. His descendants were married to members of the most important households in northern France and Flanders, and his younger brother was a Templar, a detail which may explain the favour that this historical compilation found in Acre.27 As a consequence, all the extant thirteenth-century manuscripts can be ascribed to one of these regions, with the exception of the MS 18295 in the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels (BRB), which has been linked to a Parisian atelier,28 and the MS fr. 20125 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF; Figure 3.1) whose origin, northern France or the Holy Land, has been the subject of controversy for the last 50 years.29 Groups of Flemish and Crusader manuscripts form in each case an iconographic family of their own. Among the five different groups that Doris Oltrogge was able to identify in her study devoted to the illuminated copies of the Histoire ancienne, the Flemish family is tagged as C. She includes in this group five manuscripts:

27   Jung, p. 354. The manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne in Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS fr. Z. II (=223) and Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 726, as well as the Genoese and Neapolitan Histoires and Romans, are all beyond the geographical and chronological scope of this chapter. 28   The Brussels manuscript has been dated to c. 1295–1300 by Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Manuscript Illumination at Saint-Jean d’Acre (Princeton, NJ, 1976), p. 205. See Doris Oltrogge, Die Illustrationzyklen zur Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, 1250–1400 (Frankfurt, 1989), pp. 238–40. 29   Buchthal considered the manuscript to be French, produced in c. 1300, although its pictorial cycle betrayed the existence of an earlier archetype made in c. 1250. See Hugo Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford, 1957), p. 70. The iconographic and linguistic analyses submitted by Oltrogge (pp. 302–7) and Visser (vol. 2, pp. 24–7) seem to support his view. For Folda, however, the codex was manufactured in Acre in c. 1287. See Folda, Crusader Manuscript Illumination, pp. 97–102; Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, from the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 429–33. Mary Cocker Joslin, Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona have offered further arguments in favour of this hypothesis (see footnote 39). Patricia Stirnemann has kindly confirmed that this manuscript was made in Acre, since its pen-work initials ‘are blatantly of the style of the Holy Land’ (20 December 2010, personal communication).

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Figure 3.1 Penthesilea and the Amazons go to the aid of Troy. Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 20125, fo. 141v. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 78 D 47;30 London, British Library (BL), MS Add. 19669 (Figure 3.2); Pommersfelden, Gräflich-Schönborn’sche Schlossbibliothek, MS 295; and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 17177.31 The first three can be attributed to the same Picard workshop, the so-called ‘Histoire-Atelier’.32 All can be dated to c. 1260–70 (Oltrogge) or a little later, c. 1270–80 (Avril). The Paris manuscript has been placed in an area extending between the north of the Parisian

  These miniatures may be viewed online at http://www.kb.nl/manuscripts/search/ index.html. 31   According to Visser, another manuscript found by Avril in the Biblioteca Nacional of Lisbon should be added to the list (Il. 132). Histoire ancienne, ed. Visser, vol. 2, p. 18. The manuscripts in Venice and Chantilly mentioned in footnote 27 are also part of Group C. 32   Oltrogge suggests that Saint-Omer or Lille could have been the nucleus of the ‘Histoire-Atelier’. Avril contends that Soissons would be more suitable (1 September 1998, personal letter to Marijke de Visser). Histoire ancienne, ed. Visser, vol. 2, p. 19. 30

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This image has been removed due to copyright reasons, please refer to the print edition.

Figure 3.2

The death of Hector, his tomb and the death of Achilles. Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, British Library, MS Additional 19669, fo. 84r.

region and the south of Picardy by Patricia Stirnemann, who proposes an earlier date for it (c. 1270–80) than that initially advanced by Oltrogge (c. 1280–1300).33 Whatever their provenance and date, these manuscripts display a similar layout, where miniatures are one column wide and divided into two registers containing two, three or four scenes. Usually, these scenes are related to the same episode in such a way that they create short narrative sequences of an almost ‘cinematographic’ or ‘comic-like’ character.34 In Group C’s cycle of illustrations, the following episodes constitute the nodal points of the visual narrative concerning Trojan history:

  See Maria Careri et al, Album de manuscrits français du XIIIe siècle (Rome, 2001), pp. 143–5. Stirnemann has recently pointed out that this manuscript also was most probably made in Soissons (personal communication). 34   Oltrogge, pp. 119, 138. 33

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Figure 3.3

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The death of Hector. Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, Bibliothèque Municipale de Dijon, MS 562, fo. 96v.

1. Jason and the Argonauts and the first destruction of Troy. 2. The death of Hector, sometimes preceded by Andromacha’s premonitory dream (Figure 3.2).35 3. The death of Penthesilea (queen of the Amazons) and the sack of Troy. 4. The departure of the Greeks. Group D, composed of three manuscripts produced in the same workshop in Acre, as well as the problematic MS fr. 20125 of the BnF, presents a very different panorama. The Acre manuscripts are: Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 562 (Figure 3.3); Brussels, BRB, MS 10175; and London, BL, MS Add. 15268.36 In contrast with the previous examples, these are very large luxurious books   Andromacha’s dream is depicted in BnF, MS fr. 17177, fo. 68r.   These manuscripts were dated by Buchthal respectively to c. 1260-70, c. 127080 and c. 1285. Buchthal, Miniature Painting, pp. 68–87. Folda has agreed with him: see Folda, Crusader Manuscript Illumination, pp. 17, 26, 36 (D, E and F in the Appendix); Folda, Crusader Art, pp. 408–12 (MSS Dijon 562 and Brussels 10175), 419–24 (MS BL 15268). There are other later manuscripts in the BnF which belong to Group D: MSS fr. 9682, fr. 168 and fr. 686. 35 36

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with miniatures that can be two columns wide and even full-page.37 The small miniatures usually depict a single scene, whereas the large opening miniatures can have two registers related to the same episode. These distinctive traits transform the manuscripts in group D into an entirely new type of book and one of the most impressive achievements of thirteenth-century secular illustration. The original synthesis of Western and Byzantine elements that can be detected in these manuscripts attracted the attention of Hugo Buchthal, who also emphasized the unprecedented prominence of books on ancient history made at Acre and pointed out the survival of several classical motifs in their illustrations.38 Nevertheless, despite the obvious differences in layout and narrative devices employed in Groups C (unknown to Buchthal) and D, the abridged Trojan section of the Crusader Histoires seems to have been structured around almost the same key episodes: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The departure of Jason and the construction of the Argo. The death of Hector (Figure 3.3). The arrival of the Amazons (Figure 3.1). The battle between the Amazons and the Greek army.

The two miniatures devoted to the Amazons suggest that this episode had an extraordinary appeal for a Crusader audience, to the extent that this preference for Penthesilea and her pucelles leaves incomplete the visual narrative of the Trojan section and, therefore, leaves a story that one expected to be edifying without any clear moral.39 The Amazons, who in Penthesilea’s own words were not ‘comme outre femmes communaus’ (verse 24092), have a privileged place, although not as prominent a role, in the narrative and illustrations of the Roman de Troie.40 As would be expected, the manuscripts of the Roman de Troie offer a much more detailed account in text and images of the Trojan War. However, patterns in the selection of episodes and narrative strategies are not as apparent in them as in the manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne. The earliest preserved illustrated copy, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1610, dates 37   Compare, for instance, the dimensions of BnF, MS fr. 17177 (313 x 198 mm) with those of London MS Add. 15268 (370 x 247 mm). 38   Buchthal, Miniature Painting, pp. 78–83. See also Bianca Kühnel, ‘The Perception of History in Thirteenth-Century Crusader Art’, in Daniel Weiss and Lisa Mahoney (eds), France and the Holy Land (Baltimore, 2004), pp. 161–86. 39   In view of the prominence given to the Amazons in BnF, MS fr. 20125, Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona conjectured that this manuscript may have been made in the Holy Land for Alice de Blois in c. 1287. See Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, ‘Amazons and Crusaders: The Histoire universelle in Flanders and in the Holy Land’, in Weiss and Mahoney (eds), France and the Holy Land, pp. 187–228. Mary Cocker Joslin has also noted that feminine characters occupy a more prominent role than usual in the Old Testament sections. See Mary Cocker Joslin, ‘The Illustrator as a Reader: Influence of Text on Images in the Histoire ancienne’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 20 (1993): pp. 85–121. 40   ‘like other ordinary women’.

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to 1264 (Figures 3.4 and 3.5).41 It was considered by Saxl and Buchthal to be a provincial derivative of a lost archetype made by 1250 and linked to the Morgan Picture Bible (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 638), according to the latter’s judgement.42 Although Buchthal mentioned some of the innovations in the manuscript, such as the use of several full-page miniatures, it is only recently that the MS fr. 1610 has been recognized as an avant-garde product made in Paris for the royal court.43 In her dissertation on the illuminated manuscripts of the Roman de Troie and Capetian ideology, Elizabeth Morrison identifies this manuscript as the supposed ‘lost’ archetype, arguing that it displays a complete narrative of Benoît’s poem in its 38 miniatures, from the quest for the Golden Fleece to the sack of Troy and the death of Ulysses in Ithaca. Furthermore, its broad iconographic cycle entails a partisan reading of the text, evident in the selection and arrangement of the episodes selected for the full-page miniatures. The Trojans, above all Hector, are presented as noble and valorous knights, in contrast to the Greeks’ cowardly and treacherous behaviour. As Morrison argues, this copy of the Roman de Troie could have fostered the claim of Trojan origins for the French kings in the time of Saint Louis, even if the illuminated manuscripts of the Grandes Chroniques de France would go a step further by supplying the explicit genealogical link with the Capetian dynasty absent in Benoît’s work. Actually, the Roman de Troie may have been read as a prologue to the Grandes Chroniques.44 The remainder of the late thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts of the poem that were produced in France only highlights the narrative sophistication of MS fr. 1610. Of the four illuminated manuscripts of the Roman, BnF MS   Four folios from this codex, including one of the images reproduced here, are now at Huis Bergh, ‘s-Heeremberg (The Netherlands) and can be viewed online at http:// web.mac.com/hortense1/_Roman_de_Troyes/Miniatures_from_the_Roman_de_Troyes. html. Concerning this manuscript, see Elizabeth Morrison, ‘Illuminations of the ‘Roman de Troie’ and French Royal Dynastic Ambition (1260–1340)’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2002), pp. 82–133. See now her ‘Linking Ancient Troy and Medieval France: Illuminations of an Early Copy of the Roman de Troie’, in Medieval Manuscripts, Their Makers and Users. A Special Issue of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 72-102. 42   Saxl, ‘The Troy Romance’, p. 130; Buchthal, Historia Troiana, pp. 10–11. 43   The use of full-page miniatures was an innovative device in secular manuscripts of that time. Stones, ‘Secular Manuscript’, pp. 92–3; Morrison, ‘Illuminations’, p. 82. Among the Histoires, only BL MS Add. 15268 presents a full-page miniature, which serves as a frontispiece for the Trojan section. 44   Following Anne Hedeman, Morrison points out that the frontispiece of the earliest Grandes Chroniques made for King Philippe III in 1274 was partly copied after the MS fr. 1610, something that seems to suggest that this manuscript of the Roman was known in the Capetian sphere. See Morrison, ‘Illuminations’, pp. 102–6; Anne Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the ‘Grandes Chroniques de France’, 1274–1422 (Berkeley, CA, 1991), pp. 12–15. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that there is no secure evidence that this illuminated copy of the Roman was made at the demand of King Louis IX. 41

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Figure 3.4

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The death of Hector. Roman de Troie, Collection of Dr. J.H. van Heek, Foundation Huis Berg. ‘s-Heerenberg, the Netherlands

fr. 783 (Figure 3.6) and Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, MS H251, which are both datable to around 1300, appear to be linked iconographically to MS fr. 1610, to the extent that they include similar miniatures next to the same textual passages, although sometimes simplified in their design by comparison with their supposed source.45 The cycles of these manuscripts were designed, however, from a model without full-page miniatures, according to Morrison. As a consequence, their visual account lacks some crucial episodes, such as the abduction of Helen, the deaths of Hector, Troilus and Paris and the second destruction of Troy.46 In a very different vein, the illustrations of the two remaining codices illuminated outside Paris (Nottingham, University Library, MS Mi LM 6 and London, BL, MS Harley 4482) run counter to Morrison’s ‘Capetian model’ not only in their stylistic heterogeneity but also in their even-handed portrayal of the struggle between Greeks and Trojans.47 45   BnF, MS fr. 783 has one miniature-frontispiece and 26 historiated initials, whereas the Roman in Montpellier has 23 small miniatures. See Morrison, ‘Illuminations’, pp. 134– 81, 242–4, 254–7. 46   Morrison, ‘Illuminations’, p. 166. 47   The Nottingham manuscript (c. 1275–1300) has been linked to the Mayenne region by Jung, while the BL Harley 4482 seems to have been produced c. 1290–1310 in

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Figure 3.5 The episode of the Wooden Horse. Roman de Troie, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1610, fo. 156r. To be sure, the Trojan legend had other overtones outside the court. Nevertheless, the divergences or inconsistencies in the visual rendering of the text present in some of these manuscripts, made by less skilful artists, seem to have resulted from a misreading of the text or the rubrics, which also served as guidelines for the painter. As Jung has noted, the sentence ‘Commant il rassamblerent ensamble a tout leur olifanz pour bataillier’ led in the Montpellier Roman (fo. 85r.) to the depiction of knights mounted on elephants, instead of playing horns.48 He has also pointed out that the miniature derives ultimately from the Histoire ancienne, where turreted elephants are recurrent elements in the depiction of the battle between Alexander and King Porus of India.49 The painter’s misconception in the Montpellier Roman does reveal an acquaintance with the iconographic formulas in the manuscripts of the Histoire northern France, perhaps in l’Aisne or Arras, according to Patricia Stirnemann (personal communication). See Jung, pp. 124–33; Morrison, ‘Illuminations’, pp. 176–7. In the former manuscript, the treacherous killing of Achilles by Paris is depicted (fo. 115v.), an aspect remarked upon by Jung, p. 130 and fig. 4. 48   ‘How the Greeks assembled at the sound of the horns in order to do battle’. 49   Jung, p. 121; Morrison, ‘Illuminations’, p. 171. Also see Oltrogge, pp. 108–9, figs 128–31.

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Figure 3.6

The funeral of Hector. Roman de Troie, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 783, fo. 109v.

ancienne and serves, thus, as an incentive for discussing the relationship between these two iconographic programmes. At first sight, it might be reasonable to contend that the Histoire ancienne’s reduced cycles derive from the expanded visual narratives in the manuscripts of the Roman de Troie. However, Buchthal proposed that the earliest illuminated version of the Histoire ancienne would have been made when the Roman de Troie was ‘not yet available for copying’.50 This hypothesis might be corroborated by the fact that coincidences between them are  

50

Buchthal, Miniature Painting, p. 71.

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limited to the depiction of the Argonauts. Apart from this slight concurrence, the manuscripts offer asymmetrical visual translations in each case, due not only to the unequal length of their respective cycles of illustration, but also to the selection of the episodes that receive emphasis, demonstrated by the important role of the Amazons in the Histoire ancienne. Divergences and interferences between the illustrated Roman de Troie and the Histoire ancienne are in fact far more complex. Cross-fertilization seems to have worked both ways, the confusion in the Montpellier Roman being only one side of the coin, and this situation warns against easy assumptions about the relationship between them. As I will try to suggest in the following paragraphs, both iconographic traditions may have formed part of a common imagery shared by audiences and artists alike. The first cases to be considered are instances of transference from the Roman de Troie to the Histoire ancienne cycles. Doris Oltrogge has called attention to two examples that deserve careful analysis in manuscripts of the Histoire in Group C. The first is the representation of the Wooden Horse in Pommersfelden MS 295 (fo. 81r.), despite the absence of any clear reference to it in Dares’s account of the betrayal and pillage of Troy.51 The second is the depiction of the astonishing tomb of Hector (Figure 3.2) in one of the tiny vignettes of a four-compartment miniature in the Picard Histoire ancienne in the British Library (Add. MS 19669, fo. 84r.).52 As in the previous example, this is by any measure a striking feature, for this monument is only described by Benoît in his Roman (verses 16575–16858), while the Histoire ancienne omits any reference to the actual appearance of the tomb.53 Although these two examples could be considered proof of the Romans’ precedence over the illustrated Histoires, I believe, quite to the contrary and like Buchthal, that the iconographic cycles for the latter were designed prior to any illustrated copy of Benoît’s poem. First of all, none of the thirteenth-century manuscripts of the Roman de Troie, either French or Italian, includes a depiction of the tomb of Hector. Rather, BnF, MS fr. 1610, and all cycles that copy either it or some related manuscript (for example, Figure 3.6), betray a marked preference on the part of the artist for depicting funerals, a more touching image for a Capetian audience since it might have evoked the reception and mourning over the body of Saint Louis after its arrival from the Holy Land in 1271, a suggestion advanced by Elisabeth Morrison.54 With regard to the Wooden Horse, the Pommersfelden   Oltrogge, p. 100, fig. 111. However, it should be noted that, at the end of the work, the anonymous author alludes in passing to a different version of the story, according to which ‘Troie ne fu traïe, se par un chival non de fust’. See Jung, p. 401; Benoît, Roman, vol. IV, p. 158. 52   The same motif appears in the late fourteenth-century copy in Venice, BN Marciana, MS fr. 2 II (=223), fo. 94v. 53   Oltrogge, p. 100. Texts in Benoît, Roman, vol. 3, pp. 92–108; Jung, pp. 378–9, ill. 5. 54   Morrison, ‘Illuminations’, pp. 125–6, 168. See also Jung, ills 10–13. The choice of the funeral scene instead of the tomb of Hector in BnF, MS fr. 1610, produced before 51

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version is clearly distinct from the unique depiction in a Roman de Troie, BnF, MS fr. 1610 (Figure 3.5). In the miniature present in the Histoire ancienne, the horse has a caparison under which the Greeks are hidden until they enter the city. This detail is at odds with the description offered by Benoît – who specifies that the Greeks were inside the horse – and has nothing to do with any other representation of this motif that I have been able to find in manuscripts, whatever their date and provenance, devoted to the Trojan War. To be sure, Benoît’s memorable descriptions and electrifying passages were alive in memory, ready to be recollected. His words were powerful enough to seduce artists and patrons even when the text to be illustrated was not the Roman de Troie itself, as the presence of the tomb of Hector or the Wooden Horse in manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne reveals. When this happened, images triggered the recollection of Benoît’s poem, in order to complete what was missing. However, this process also worked the other way around. Actually, a miniature in the ‘Capetian’ Roman de Troie (BnF, MS fr. 1610) can be the clue for solving the slippery issue of the precedence of the illustrated Histoire ancienne over the Roman. In a full-page miniature on a bifolio removed from the codex, now in ‘s-Heerenberg (Figure 3.4), the death of Hector is depicted following a fixed iconographic formula easily recognizable in many other manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne (Figure 3.3). Achilles always treacherously slays Hector with his spear from behind. For Buchthal, it was ‘impossible to say with which of the texts this pictorial formula was first associated’, but he overlooked the fact that the formula translates the text of the Histoire ancienne in visual terms, as Jung rightly observed.55 Benoît, in contrast to the Histoire ancienne, recounts the event in confusing terms, specifying neither which kind of weapon Achilles used in his attack, nor Hector’s imprudence in leaving his back unprotected.56 Nevertheless, not only has a motif from the Histoire ancienne narrative been appropriated here, just as the illuminated manuscripts of the Histoire did with the Roman’s better known episodes, the miniature belongs to a complete and recognizable iconographic formula, as Jung noted in his survey. This is the only illustration from the Capetian manuscript that can be traced back to the Histoire ancienne cycles with certainty, and perhaps the balance of narrative legibility and moral edification

Louis’s death, might be explained by a desire to elicit a more empathetic response in the audience, already partial to the Trojan cause. 55   Buchthal, Miniature Painting, p. 75; Jung, p. 220. Raynaud de Lage had already pointed out that the author of the Histoire ancienne provides readers with a more coherent description of the legend than that of Benoît: de Lage, ‘Les romans antiques dans l’Histoire ancienne’, p. 281. 56   Benoît, Roman, vol. 3, p. 74 (verses 16215–16230). Also see Histoire Ancienne, ed. Visser, ch. 40, Ills 17–24; Jung, p. 378.

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accomplished in this image was the reason for copying it in such a carefully designed account as the one offered by the illustrations of BnF, MS fr. 1610.57 But it is possible to go further and refine Buchthal and Jung’s hypothesis about the priority of illuminated Histoires with respect to the Roman.58 A closer examination of the miniature in the Roman (Figure 3.4) and the depiction of the same scene in Groups C (Figure 3.2) and D (Figure 3.3) bring to light the conspicuous resemblance between the latter and the Capetian manuscript. In all cases, the Trojan hero is trying to pick up the bejewelled helmet of Polibetes, one of the Greek leaders, as recounted in the text. Moreover, all of these miniatures rely on the same compositional devices, although the Capetian Roman has set this climactic event at the core of a general battle scene. The exemplars from Acre are at best contemporary with the illustrated Roman, which throws this theory into question, unless we are to accept Buchthal’s proposal that a lost archetype, created in France, was brought to the Holy Land and provided a model for the Crusader Histoires ancienne manuscripts. Buchthal considered the BnF, MS fr. 20125 (Figure 3.1) to be a ‘sister manuscript’ of the one used in Acre and, therefore, the link that would bear witness to the existence of a French model designed in c. 1250 and inspired by the astonishing visual cycle of the Morgan Picture Bible (Morgan Library, MS 638).59 Folda’s more recent book has discarded this hypothesis by identifying the Histoire ancienne under dispute and the supposed sister manuscript as ‘one and the same codex’.60 That would place the origin of Group D in the Holy Land around 1260–70, the date of the older Acre Histoire, Dijon, BM MS 562 (Figure 3.3), and would make copying the Histoire’s iconographic formula in the Parisian Roman almost impossible in geographical and chronological terms.61 It is my belief that a new examination of the controversial MS fr. 20125 should be made in order to solve this puzzle of texts and images. To begin with, philological research tilts the balance in favour of an early date for this copy of the Histoire ancienne, since it contains the older version of the text, including several moralizing poems and addresses that were left out in later witnesses, such

57   The death of Hector was not depicted in either BnF, MS fr. 60 (c. 1330–40) or in the first Italian copies of the Roman. On the other hand, the representation of this event in the Roman at Nottingham (fo. 84r.) clearly evinces that there was no fixed iconographic formula for it outside the Capetian sphere. See Jung, ill. 2. 58   See Jung, p. 220. 59   Buchthal, Miniature Painting, p. 70. 60   Folda, Crusader Art, p. 433. 61   No manuscripts of the Roman de Troie made in Acre have been preserved. On the other hand, it seems that illustrated Histoires made in Acre only began to arrive in France in the fourteenth century, as attested by an inscription in Dijon, BM MS 562 (Oltrogge, p. 246), or by the BnF, MS fr. 9682, whose pictorial cycle was designed in France after some Crusader Histoire in c. 1350.

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as those of the Crusaders.62 This deliberate conservatism of the text is paralleled by an absence of any Byzantine stylistic or iconographic features, a distinctive trait of the Histoires that are known to have been made in Acre. To adopt Folda’s hypothesis would imply that scribes and painters had sought out an older version of the text and expurgated any Crusader additions from the cycle of illustrations. This seems very unlikely. I would rather like to offer a reformulation of Buchthal’s original hypothesis, that is, to consider BnF, MS fr. 20125 as a late copy intended to be faithful to an older Flemish – or northern French – model (if made at Acre in c. 1287, as Folda said in 1976). If the origins of Group D are placed in northern France or Flanders, the direct copy of the Histoire ancienne formula into the Capetian Roman de Troie seems more plausible. But I would also like to present further details in support of the Flemish origin of Group D. There are remarkable similarities between Groups C and D in the depiction of several episodes, which point towards the use of common models, as in the miniatures devoted to Joseph and Potifar’s wife in The Hague, KB, MS 78 D 47 (fo. 35v.) and BnF, MS fr. 20125 (fo. 63v.). Both present the female character in a more sympathetic light than the Acre manuscript and refer back to the Morgan Picture Bible (fo. 5r.), with the small but meaningful detail that Potifar’s wife wears a crown in the two miniatures.63 Although Doris Oltrogge rightly refused to propose a common archetype for the five iconographic families of the Histoire ancienne that she was able to discern, further research should be undertaken in order to explore possible cross-fertilization between Groups C and D and their relative chronologies. If they are found to have emerged in Flanders around the same dates, it may be productive to consider the reasons for developing two distinct cycles of illustrations and layouts. Moreover, even if there is no stylistic kinship between the Flemish Histoires and the famous Picture Bible, the latter has been linked to Flanders – perhaps Bruges – by François Avril and Alison Stones, a fact that should be borne in mind in future studies of these manuscripts.64 It seems to me that the iconographic effort involved in the creation of the Picture Bible had its continuation in BnF, MS fr. 20125. Less splendid but still impressive, 62   See Renate Bluemenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Moralization and History: Verse and Prose in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (in B.N. fr. 20125)’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 97 (1981): pp. 41–6; Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 178–94 (‘Social Change and Literary Language. The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century Old French Historiography’). 63   Cocker Joslin, ‘The Illustrator’, p. 95, fig. 5. It is striking that the miniature related to Alexander and the talking tree is depicted in almost the same way in BL, MS Add. 19669 (fo. 156r., see Oltrogge, ill. 9) and MS Add. 15268 (fo. 214v., see Buchthal, Miniature Painting, pl. 126c). It should be remembered that Groups C and D have several common points in their selection of episodes to be depicted. Oltrogge, p. 123. 64   François Avril, La France de Saint Louis (Paris, 1970), p. 103, n. 203; Alison Stones, ‘Questions of Style and Provenance in the Morgan Picture Bible’, in Colum Hourihane (ed.), Between the Picture and the Word (Princeton, NJ, 2005), pp. 112–21.

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the Histoire ancienne visualized biblical and pagan history for a lay audience with an unprecedented lavishness. As never before, its images showed ‘the actions of brave men [who] were in the past as if they were present’. Conclusion: Li .ij. portes The Roman de Troie and the Histoire ancienne were singular texts but not isolated works. Over the century in which the Trojan legend was appropriated, roughly 1160 to 1260, the poem, the chronicle and their illustrations were woven into a common fabric created by the superposition of layers of commentaries and interpretations. Thus, the Histoire ancienne seems to have been read at first in the light of the Roman de Troie, a well-known older text. But when these two texts began to be illustrated, personal preferences and attractive themes were decisive factors in the selection of the episodes to be represented, even if, as a consequence, the images failed to create a coherent visual account of the whole story, as in the Histoire ancienne of Group D or in some manuscripts of the Roman de Troie produced outside the Capetian sphere. Nevertheless, episodes such as the death of Hector or the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts would have functioned as synecdoches of the whole narrative or a part of it, that is, as points de repère.65 Certainly, in the limited realm of the royal and aristocratic courts, paroles and paintures of the Trojan legend may have participated in a network of textual and visual references. Intended citations such as the depiction of the tomb of Hector in the Histoire ancienne (BL, MS Add. 19699) would have reinforced the sense of a common matière by recalling Benoît’s poem. Thus, it could be argued that the process of diegesis accomplished by the readers presupposed a varying degree of acquaintance with the whole tradition, both visual and textual, to the extent that they would be able to complete one visual narrative with elements remembered from other visual versions of the legend. Moreover, they may also have been able to recognize canonical narratives and subversions of the received material, for instance, the attention paid to the Amazons in the BnF, MS fr. 20125 or the insistence on the heroism of Trojan knights in the Roman de Troie, BnF, MS fr. 1610. It should also be stressed that public reading defined a way of accessing texts, an aurality that entailed a social and more mediated construction of meaning than private reading.66 In a way, canonical texts belonged to an intangible library, that of collective memory, and were activated in interaction with individual memories that also treasured words and images. As a consequence, intertextualities and intervisualities between the thirteenth-century Roman de Troie and the Histoire ancienne took place in the realm of memory, whether collective or individual, and seldom involved the direct copying of texts or miniatures from one manuscript 65   Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Narrative in Manuscript, (2 vols, Amsterdam, 2002), vol. 1, p. 276. 66   Coleman, Public Reading, pp. 34–51. Also see Green, The Beginning, pp. 35–54.

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to another. Whatever the case, images always brought with them a new array of meanings that subtly influenced the reception of the text they illustrated. However, this process involved not only audiences but also writers, scribes and artists, since memory was a repository of images and words and, therefore, the source of any creative effort or inventio, as medieval poetological treatises claimed.67 As time went by, the Roman de Troie and the Trojan section of the Histoire ancienne, together with other texts dealing with the same legend, were inextricably linked in the memory of authors, artists and audiences, giving birth to the Trojan matière.68 If literary creation or imagination was conceived of as a retrieval of something in the realm of memory, that is, as a transformation of the materia usitata, ‘already used or known’, into a new work (materia propinqua), it may be reasonable to regard illustrations in a similar way.69 None of the manuscripts described here, not even the ones attributed to the same workshop, are identical to other codices. There are always more or less evident differences due to the reelaboration of iconographic formulas, or to the inclusion of new illustrations by importing images from other cycles or by creating new ones after rereading and, sometimes, misinterpreting the text again. The configuration of a Trojan textual matière was paralleled, then, by the articulation of a visual repertoire interwoven with these texts. However, words and images maintained their distance. Images not only operated as emotional triggers in illustrating the text with which they were placed – sometimes they even entered into a dialectic interplay with texts, as the manuscripts analyzed in this chapter attest.70 Parole and painture come in through separate doors, as Richard de Fournival correctly stated.

  Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 10–12. See also César Domínguez, El concepto de ‘materia’ en la teoría literaria del Medievo. Creación, Interpretación y Transtextualidad (Madrid, 2004), pp. 131–53. 68   This process can be tracked through the analysis of the codicological configuration of these manuscripts, usually bound together with other romans antiques – as in the case of the Roman de Troie – or with other texts dealing with ancient history, such as the Faits des Romans, for the Histoire ancienne. See Busby, Codex and Context, vol. 1, pp. 367–494. On the other hand, from the end of the thirteenth century onwards, it was quite common for both works to be illustrated in the same workshops in France and Italy, resulting in the transference of iconographic formulas from one text to the other. Examples of this process can be found in Oltrogge, ills 43 and 112. 69   Domínguez, p. 129. 70   Buettner, ‘Secular Illuminations’, p. 86. See also Desmond and Sheingorn, Myth, Montage & Visuality. For the concept of ‘emotional trigger’, see Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, pp. 196–8. 67

PART II Commemoration and Oblivion

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Chapter 4

The Making of the Carolingian Libri Memoriales: Exploring or Constructing the Past? Eva-Maria Butz and Alfons Zettler

In this chapter we would like to introduce a very particular sort of historical document from the early Middle Ages – the libri memoriales or confraternity books.1 It was only in the early Middle Ages that libri memoriales were made in a significant number and, as it seems, only in some regions of the Frankish Empire, that is, in the regions around the Alps.2 Additionally, there are two extant examples from Anglo-Saxon England, the famous Liber vitae of Durham, probably originating from the monastery of Lindisfarne (c. 840) and the Winchester Liber vitae (1031) but these insular books will not be considered here.3 On the Continent, six or eight libri memoriales have come down to us from the Carolingian period – the books of Brescia in Italy, Pfäfers and Saint Gall in   Libri memoriales have been addressed, most recently, by Dieter Geuenich, ‘A Survey of the Early Medieval Confraternity Books from the Continent’, in David Rollason, A.J. Piper, Margaret Harvey and Lynda Rollason (eds), The Durham Liber Vitae and its context (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 141–47; Holger Schmenk, Die frühmittelalterlichen Gedenkbücher des Bodenseeraums (Marburg, 2003); Gerd Althoff, Amicitiae und Pacta: Bündnis, Einung, Politik und Gebetsgedenken im beginnenden 10. Jahrhundert, MGH Schriften, 37 (Hannover, 1992); Karl Schmid, ‘Zeugnisse der Memorialüberlieferung aus der Zeit Ludwigs des Frommen’, in Peter Godman and Roger Collins (eds), Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (Oxford, 1990), pp. 509–22. 2   Hansmartin Schwarzmaier and Alfons Zettler, ‘Karolingerzeit. B. Alemannien im fränkischen Reich im Lichte der urkundlichen Quellen und der Memorialüberlieferung’, in Meinrad Schaab and Hansmartin Schwarzmaier (eds), Handbuch der badenwürttembergischen Geschichte. 1: Allgemeine Geschichte, Teil 1: Von der Urzeit bis zum Ende der Staufer (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 357–80; Alfons Zettler, ‘Gedenkbücher und Nekrologien als Quellen zur monastischen Welt’, in Christoph Stiegemann and Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen (eds), Schatzkunst am Aufgang der Romanik: Der Paderborner Dom-Tragaltar und sein Umkreis (Munich, 2006), pp. 28–40. 3   David Rollason and Lynda Rollason (eds), The Durham Liber Vitae (3 vols, London, 2007); Simon Keynes (ed.), The Liber vitae of the new minster and Hyde Abbey Winchester: British Library Stowe 944; together with leaves from British Library Cotton Vespasian A.VIII and British Library Cotton Titus D. XXVII (Copenhagen, 1996). 1

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Switzerland, Reichenau in Germany, Salzburg in Austria and Remiremont in France.4 We say ‘six or eight books’, because the number depends on the method of counting. The monasteries of Saint Gall and Saint Peter of Salzburg both, in fact, produced two memorial ‘books’ or records of this sort during the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries. In the case of Saint Gall, at least, there can be no doubt that these manuscripts of c. 813 and c. 855 existed as separate entities for some centuries, whereas in the case of Salzburg another manuscript was added to the original liber vitae of 784 in the eleventh century. Even the voluminous confraternity book of Reichenau (c. 823–25) had one quire and several single leaves added to it during the tenth century. And, if we take a closer look it becomes clear that most of these ‘books’ consist of several parts or quires, put together over the course of time. This is also true for the Liber memorialis of Remiremont that will be the focus of this chapter. What was the function of the Libri memoriales or confraternity books, and what do they contain? Firstly, these books, as a rule, do not contain texts in the full sense of the word. They contain, for the most part, long rows and columns of personal names. We find thousands of names in these manuscripts, more or less structured in columns or name groups. Sometimes, there is a short note or title mentioning the origins of a group of persons or the institution that they came from. The confraternity book of Reichenau Abbey on Lake Constance, for example, has almost 40,000 names.5 Thus it would not be exaggerating to say that the Libri memoriales probably mention a good portion of Carolingian society, at least the higher echelons of society like the princes, the nobility and the clergy. All these people had their names inscribed in such a book because it was regarded as a liber vitae, an earthly copy of the Book of Life mentioned in the Bible.6 The Book of Life is a heavenly book, God’s book, containing the names of 4   Johanne Autenrieth, Dieter Geuenich and Karl Schmid (eds), Das Verbrüderungsbuch der Abtei Reichenau, MGH Libri memoriales et necrologia, N. S., 1 (Hannover, 1979); Karl Forstner (ed.), Das Verbrüderungsbuch von St. Peter in Salzburg: Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat der Handschrift A 1 aus dem Archiv von St. Peter in Salzburg (Graz, 1974); Karl Schmid, ‘Versuch einer Rekonstruktion der St. Galler Verbrüderungsbücher des 9. Jahrhunderts’ in Michael Borgolte, Dieter Geuenich and Karl Schmid (eds), Subsidia Sangallensia I: Materialien und Untersuchungen zu den Verbrüderungsbüchern und zu den älteren Urkunden des Stiftsarchiv St. Gallen (Saint Gallen, 1986), pp. 81–283; Albert Bruckner, Hans Rudolf Sennhauser and Franz Perret (eds), Liber Viventium Fabariensis (Stiftsarchiv St. Gallen, Fond Pfäfers, Codex 1), I: FaksimileEdition (Basel, 1973); Eduard Hlawitschka, Karl Schmid and Gerd Tellenbach (eds), Der Liber Memorialis von Remiremont, MGH Libri memoriales, 1 (Dublin, 1970); Dieter Geuenich and Uwe Ludwig (eds), Der Memorial- und Liturgiecodex von San Salvatore / Santa Giulia in Brescia, MGH Libri memoriales et necrologia, N. S., 4 (Hannover, 2000). 5   Dieter Geuenich, ‘Die Namen des Verbrüderungsbuches. Ihre Aufnahme, Lemmatisierung und Wiedergabe in den Registern’, in Johanne Autenrieth, Dieter Geuenich and Karl Schmid (eds), Das Verbrüderungsbuch der Abtei Reichenau, MGH Libri memoriales et necrologia, N. S. 1 (Hannover, 1979), pp. XLII–LIX. 6   Ex 32.32; Ps 69.29.

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the elect. The idea of the heavenly Liber Vitae became linked with the recitation of diptychs in the early Christian Church, that is, with the lists of those who were to be remembered in prayer in the liturgy. It was believed that the names written in the liturgical Book of Life laid on the altar, with prayers offered for those listed in it, would also be inscribed in God’s heavenly Book of Life.7 The early Christian diptychs may be regarded as one of the main roots of the medieval Libri memoriales. But there are other important factors that contributed to the rise of such books in the Frankish Empire.8 One reason was the creation of monastic confraternities of prayer or prayer associations: hence the term ‘confraternity book’. The bonds of association of these groups involved reciprocal prayer and the exchange of names.9 The Reichenau book, for example, contains lists of the names of monks of more than 50 Frankish abbeys who were to be prayed for and commemorated in the liturgy by the Reichenau monastic community.10 The other factor that promoted the creation of the Libri memoriales was the obligation of royal abbeys to pray for the emperor and his family and for the welfare of the Empire, an obligation that was decreed by Emperors Charlemagne (768–814) and Louis the Pious (814–40).11 The Indicularius of Abbess Theothild of Remiremont (c. 820–65) reveals the number of prayers offered to the royal court by the Remiremont community.12 The Indicularius is a collection of 7   Leo Koep, Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur altchristlichen Bildersprache, Theophaneia, 8 (Bonn, 1952), pp. 100–109; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Theologie und Liturgie der mittelalterlichen Toten-Memoria’, in Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch (eds), Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 48 (Munich, 1984), pp. 193–4; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Missa specialis: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Entstehung der Privatmesse’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 17 (1983): pp. 153–221; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Buße und liturgisches Gedenken’, in Karl Schmid (ed.), Gedächtnis, das Gemeinschaft stiftet (Munich, 1985), pp. 39–49; Arnold Angenendt and Gisela Muschiol, ‘Die liturgischen Texte’, in Dieter Geuenich and Uwe Ludwig (eds), Der Memorial- und Liturgiecodex von San Salvatore / Santa Giulia in Brescia, MGH Libri memoriales et necrologia, N. S., 4 (Hannover, 2000), pp. 28–55. 8   Karl Schmid, ‘Zum Quellenwert der Verbrüderungsbücher von St. Gallen und Reichenau’, Deutsches Archiv, 41 (1985): pp. 376–80. 9   Karl Schmid and Otto Gerhard Oexle, ‘Voraussetzungen und Wirkung des Gebetsbundes von Attigny’, Francia, 2 (1974): pp. 71–122; Karl Schmid, ‘Das liturgische Gebetsgedenken in seiner historischen Relevanz am Beispiel der Verbrüderungsbewegung des früheren Mittelalters’, Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 99 (1979): pp. 20–44; Karl Schmid, ‘Mönchtum und Verbrüderung’, in Raymund Kottje (ed.), Monastische Reformen im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert, Vorträge und Forschungen, 38 (Sigmaringen, 1989), pp. 117–46. 10   Karl Schmid, ‘Wege zur Erschließung des Verbrüderungsbuches’, in Johanne Autenrieth, Dieter Geuenich and Karl Schmid (eds), Das Verbrüderungsbuch der Abtei Reichenau, MGH Libri memoriales et necrologia, N. S., 1 (Hannover, 1979), pp. LX–LXIII. 11   Schmid and Oexle, ‘Attigny’, pp. 72–6. 12   Michel Parisse (ed.), La correspondance d’un éveque Carolingien: Frothaire de Toul (ca. 813–847) avec les lettres de Theuthilde, abbesse de Remiremont (Paris, 1998), p. 154 no. 1.

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Theothild’s letters. The first letter addressed to Louis the Pious shows that the nuns of Remiremont offered 1000 psalmodies and 800 Masses a year for the emperor and his family. Recent research has suggested that at least two Masses and three psalmodies would have been administered every day, and that for the performance of these memorial services six priests would have been required.13 Theothild’s report to the imperial court might also illustrate the habit of entering the names of the kings and other members of the royal family in the confraternity books. These names were entered in the form of lists, so-called diptychs, sometimes separated into the living and the dead as in the confraternity book of Reichenau.14 There is a chronological sequence of deceased Carolingian rulers up to 824 in the first column of page 114. Starting with Charles Martel, who died in 741, the diptych lists nine princes (eight Carolingians and the Alemannic duke Lantfrid) and 15 female members of the Frankish royal family. The royal diptychs in the Libri memoriales are lists that were inscribed in these books to be used in the liturgy, for liturgical purposes. Obviously, they were composed according to this function. The result was, in the case of Reichenau, a sequence of 24, or two dozen, members of the Carolingian family, calling to mind the biblical number of the twelve Prophets and the twelve Apostles. We might admire this kind of theological symbolism and the elaborate functioning of such diptychs, but as historians we have to inquire into the nature and quantity of historical information they contain. Many historical events have left their traces in the Libri memoriales. Thus, they are without any doubt important documents of not only social, but also political, history. Furthermore, Libri memoriales formed part of and symbolized, the collective memory and identity of religious houses in their period. They record the names of members of the local religious or monastic community, as well as their specific confraternities and even their benefactors.15 And they reveal, as soon as we take a closer look, even more facets of history and memory. The original entries in such a book usually draw on previous records, for example lists of names. Those lists would be revised and amended in the course of being transferred into the book. We may assume that some of them have even been completely rearranged. For the most part, the entries are not just simple copies of previously existing lists, even if they do contain the names of persons who had lived in the past. The fact that groups of names and lists received such attention when entered into memorial books sheds new light on the Libri memoriales. They do not only preserve the names of members, benefactors and fraternities of   Karl Schmid, ‘Auf dem Weg zur Erschließung des Gedenkbuchs von Remiremont’, in Karl Schnith, Roland Pauler (eds), Festschrift für Eduard Hlawitschka zum 65. Geburtstag, Münchener Historische Studien: Abteilung Mittelalterliche Geschichte, 5 (Kallmünz, 1993), p. 86. 14   Autenrieth, Geuenich and Schmid (eds), Das Verbrüderungsbuch der Abtei Reichenau, pp. 98–9 and 114–15 (diptychs of the royals and the laymen). 15   Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), p. 171. 13

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religious houses and social groups. Containing carefully arranged and composed lists and groups of names reaching far into the past, they form part of what Patrick Geary has called ‘creative memory’.16 The compilers of the books filled in gaps in their material, they rearranged it and worked upon it according to what they and their contemporaries thought to be necessary. Similar ‘manipulation’ of other sorts of texts, like annals and Traditionsbücher, has previously been observed and examined by Patrick Geary and Rosamond McKitterick.17 We agree with McKitterick, who draws parallels with other narrative sources of the central Middle Ages, and finds that memorial books also give ‘narratives’ of the past.18 And like the above-mentioned Traditionsbücher, they seem to contain interpretations of the past insofar as they most probably reflect the historical consciousness and political thinking of their ‘authors’.19 Not much is known about the Libri memoriales in this respect, and in what follows we will try to regard these books as not only possessing liturgical functions, but also as being witnesses to the process of structuring and conserving the past. It is the Liber memorialis of Remiremont, a nunnery in the Vosges Mountains in eastern France, that attracts particular attention when we consider the links between liturgical commemoration, politics and historical consciousness.20 The book was created in the year 821 as a consequence of Louis the Pious’s reform synods at Aachen beginning in 816.21 Thus it is also a major document of the ecclesiastical and political reforms of the Carolingian Empire under Louis the Pious.22   Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), p. 178. 17   Geary, Phantoms; McKitterick, History; Rosamond McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN, 2006). 18   McKitterick, History, pp. 186–7. 19   Geary, Phantoms, pp. 84–7. 20   McKitterick, History, pp. 163–73. 21   Franz-Josef Jakobi, Der Liber Memorialis und die Klostergeschichte von Remiremont: Neue Wege zur Erschließung und Auswertung der frühmittelalterlichen Gedenk-Aufzeichnungen einer geistlichen Frauengemeinschaft (Münster, 1983; unpublished); Franz-Josef Jakobi, ‘Diptychen als frühe Form der Gedenk-Aufzeichnungen: Zum ‘Herrscher-Diptychon’ im Liber Memorialis von Remiremont’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 20 (1986): pp. 186–212; Schmid, ‘Remiremont’, pp. 59–96; Michèle Gaillard, D’une réforme à l’autre (816–934): les communautés religieuses en Lorraine à l’époque carolingienne, Histoire ancienne et médiévale, 82 (Paris, 2006). 22   Pius Engelbert, ‘Benedikt von Aniane und die karolingische Reichsidee: Zur politischen Theologie des Frühmittelalters’, in Gregorio Penco (ed.), Cultura e spiritualità nella tradizione monastica, Studia Anselmiana, philosophica, theologica, 103 (Rome, 1990), pp. 67–103; Thomas Schilp, Norm und Wirklichkeit religiöser Frauengemeinschaften im Frühmittelalter, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts, 137 (Göttingen, 1998); Josef Semmler, ‘Renovatio imperii Francorum: Die Herrschaft Ludwigs des Frommen im Frankenreich 814–829/30’, in Peter Godman and Roger Collins (eds), Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (Oxford, 1990), pp. 125–46; ‘Notitia de servitio monasteriorum’, in Kassius Hallinger (ed.), Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, 16

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The history of Remiremont can be traced back to the Merovingian period of the Regnum Francorum. The nunnery was founded in the early seventh century by a certain Romarich, an Austrasian magnate. Romarich was incited by the monk Amatus to subordinate to the monastery of Luxeuil, and Amatus was made prior at Remiremont. Later on, Romarich and Adelphius, together with a group of other Luxovian monks, took residence in Remiremont, on the hill which took its name after Romarich: Romarici mons. The Remiremont community was also governed by an abbess.23 These details are known from the biographies of the early abbots of Remiremont, Amatus, Romarich and Adelphius. But the ‘Vitae Amati, Romarici et Adelphii abbatum Habendensium’ were not composed before the first half of the ninth century and thus seem to stem from the same historical context as the Liber memorialis itself.24 Their composition may well have been the result of the translation of Amatus, Romarich and Adelphius from the Mons Romarici to the new nunnery in the Mosella valley nearby (c. 817). There are no other documents of the monastery’s history before the first layout of the Liber memorialis. The Liber memorialis of Remiremont is also the most important document for the history of the nunnery during the ninth century, and the book seems to have been made in close connection with the reform of Remiremont at this time, which included the adoption of the Benedictine Rule and the relocation of the monastery which originated on the Mons Romarici into the adjacent valley of the Mosella, to an area next to the royal palace in the actual city of Remiremont.25 The palace can be traced back to the early ninth century when it was frequented by the Carolingian emperors, particularly for hunting.26 The relocation of the nunnery was initiated under Abbess Imma and completed under Abbess Theothild. 1 (Siegburg, 1963), pp. 484–99; Heinrich Wagner, ‘Zur Notitia de servitio monasteriorum von 819’, Deutsches Archiv, 55 (1999): pp. 417–38. 23   Robert Folz, ‘Remiremont dans le mouvement colombanien’, in Michel Parisse (ed.), Remiremont, l’abbaye et la ville: Actes des journées d’études vosgiennes (Nancy, 1980), pp. 15–27; Maria Hasdenteufel-Röding, Studien zur Gründung von Frauenklöstern im frühen Mittelalter: Ein Beitrag zum religiösen Ideal der Frau und seiner monastischen Umsetzung (Freiburg, 1991; unpublished). 24   ‘Vitae Amati, Romarici et Adelphii abbatum Habendensium’, in Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi Merovingici et antiquorum aliquot (II), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov. 4 (Hannover, 1902), pp. 208–28; Eduard Hlawitschka, Studien zur Äbtissinenreihe von Remiremont (Saarbrücken, 1963), pp. 16–18. 25   ‘Relatio primæ translationis corporum SS. Romarici, Amati et Adelphii et quorumdam beneficiorum, quae eam subsecuta sunt’, in Bernardus Albertus van der Plassche (ed.), Acta Sanctorum Sept. III (Antwerp, 1750), pp. 829–31; Eduard Hlawitschka, ‘Zur Klosterverlegung und zur Annahme der Benediktsregel in Remiremont’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 109 (1961): pp. 249–69. 26   Josiane Barbier, ‘Fisc et ban à Remiremont: le fisc à l’origine de “ban” romarimontain?’ in Michel Parisse, Jean-Paul Rothiot and Pierre Heili (eds), Le Pays de Remiremont des origines à nos jours. Actes des journées d’études vosgiennes, Le Pays de Remiremont, 15 (2001): pp. 9–19.

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Theothild seems to have been very young at this point, because she governed the nunnery for more then 40 years and almost certainly did not come from the Remiremont community.27 Some of her letters indicate that she belonged to a noble and influential Frankish family with close relations to the Court.28 At any rate, Theothild was related to the younger Adalhard, seneschal of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, as Charles’s wife Ermentrud was a niece of the seneschal. She governed the nunnery together with ‘Pater’ Theodericus who definitely was a member of the royal family.29 Theothild’s close connections to, and her possible membership of, the royal family might explain why she became abbess at such a young age. Her abbacy under ‘Pater’ Theodericus testifies to close links between the Carolingian rulers and Remiremont, thus making Remiremont a focus of royal memory and commemoration. The reform of the monastery and its translation into, or next to, the royal palace of Remiremont, and, last but not least, the laying out of the Liber memorialis, were implemented under the rule of these two persons closely linked to the Carolingian court. That is why Karl Schmid even calls the laying out of the Liber memorialis an ‘imperial act’.30 What was the concept of the book? And whose names were entered in the Liber memorialis? Unfortunately, the Liber memorialis has not come down to us in its original shape as of 821 when it was first laid out. Large portions of the book were copied and updated in 862/863.31 Nevertheless the original shape may be reconstructed.32 The first version of the Liber memorialis (821) contained: 1. An agreement of Theoderich, Theothild and the community, concerning the commemoration of benefactors.33

27   Hlawitschka, Äbtissinnenreihe, pp. 36–8; Schmid, ‘Remiremont’, pp. 91– 2. Gaillard, Réforme, p. 51, is in doubt about the long regency of Abbess Theothild in Remiremont. 28   Schmid, ‘Remiremont’, pp. 86–92. 29   Eva-Maria Butz, Das europäische Königtum im Spiegel des frühmittelalterlichen Herrschergedenkens (in preparation). 30   Schmid, ‘Remiremont’, p. 83. 31   Liber Memorialis of Remiremont, pp. XXI–XXV. 32   Jakobi, Liber Memorialis; Schmid, ‘Remiremont’, pp. 71–83; Eva-Maria Butz and Alfons Zettler, ‘Two Early Necrologies: The Examples of Remiremont (c. 820) and Verona (c. 810)’, in L’histoire en mémoire: l’écrit à l’usage du temps au Moyen Age = Pecia, 15 (forthcoming). 33   Liber Memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 1v.: the nuns of Remiremont decided, with the approval of their pater and dominus Theoderich and their mother Theothild, to celebrate a daily Mass for their benefactors and those persons who had commended themselves to the nuns’ prayers. In addition to this decision, the nuns had their benefactors written into the book which is called memoriale, as well as the names of all friends, male and female. And it is commanded that these habits and institutions be observed by the following generations.

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2. An agreement about the commemoration of the members of the community of Remiremont (abbots, abbesses, brethren and sisters).34 3. A list of the nuns of Remiremont (c. 821).35 4. Records of the abbesses and nuns before c. 817, when the Rule of Saint Benedict was adopted.36 5. The nuns’ necrology.37 6. A necrology for the benefactors.38 In the book, different sections are set aside for the benefactors and the members of the monastic community. There are different instructions for prayers and separate necrologies for both groups.39 Similarly, a clear distinction is made between those members of the community that died before 817 and those who died after this date. Thus the composition of the Liber memorialis reproduces and reflects the history of the nunnery in this particular period of time. But it also represents the older history of Remiremont because it contains lists of names and entries of persons going back far into the past. The most prominent section in this context is the catalogue of the nuns that lived in Remiremont before 817 (Figure 4.1).40 It contains 386 names, suggesting that the nuns were commemorated from the abbey’s foundation in c. 620. It is not clear, though, what kind of records these names were derived from. Perhaps the nunnery kept a list of women who were offered as nuns to the monastery by their parents. At any rate, this imposing list of the nuns living in the community of Remiremont before 817 indicates the historical consciousness of the nunnery in the first quarter of the ninth century. A new feature of the book as laid out in 821 is, on first impression, the calendar of deceased benefactors.41 But even in this portion of the book we find traces of the monastery’s older history. The same scribe who laid out this calendar entered the names Karolus imperator and Guntramnus under the date of 28 January (Figure 4.2).42 The first name mentioned refers to Charlemagne who died on this day in 814. But who was Guntramnus? Given the fact that Guntram, together with Charlemagne, was written into the benefactors’ calendar 34   Ibid., fo. 19r.: on Sundays the Abbots Romarich and Amatus are to be commemorated in the holy Mass by reciting their names. In the same prayer, all brothers noted in the memoriale are to be commemorated too. A general anniversary day will be held once a year. (The last paragraph contains prayers for the daily mass to be celebrated in the cemetery.) 35   Ibid., fo. 42r.; see Eva-Maria Butz, ‘Der Liber Memorialis von Remiremont’, in Peter Erhart and Jakob Kuratli Hüeblin (eds), Bücher des Lebens – Lebendige Bücher (Saint Gallen, 2010), pp. 96–107. 36   Liber Memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 35r./v. 37   Ibid., fos 32r.–34v. 38   Ibid., fos 43v.–47r. 39   Butz and Zettler, ‘Necrologies’. 40   Liber Memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 35r./v. 41   Ibid., fos 43v.–47r. 42   Liber Memorialis of Remiremont, fol. 43v.

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Figure 4.1

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Liber memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 35r. First page of the list of nuns who died before 817. The list contains 386 names.

as an initial entry, or key entry, this person must have been very important to the Remiremont community. Another important element of the book is the diptych of the royal family on folio 3v. (Figure 4.3). Franz-Josef Jakobi has already pointed out that this diptych, which again testifies to the royal identity of the convent of Remiremont,43 has  

43

Jakobi, Liber Memorialis.

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been passed down to us in a version which was composed, probably based on an earlier draft from 821, only between 862 and 863.44 At that time the book was completely revised and amended. The instructions and agreements about prayer for the dead were copied out and the above-mentioned diptych of the royal family was updated and rewritten. The arches drawn in rough lines indicate that the original diptych had been entered under painted arcades and was probably much more elaborate. The names of King Charles the Bald and Queen Ermintruda must have been added in 862/863, but the sequence of Merovingian kings and Carolingians beginning with Guntram was copied from the 821 diptych. In the original version of 821 the sequence of names almost certainly ended with Charlemagne.45 The first column on the left contains the names of Merovingian kings, whereas the second column mentions the Carolingian majordomos and rulers. These columns have been examined already and it is quite clear that they were not composed according to the sequence of the obits of these persons in the form of a calendar or in the form of annals.46 The author of the book incorporated members of the different branches of the Merovingian family, and mainly chose crowned Merovingians.47 All this suggests an author who was not only interested in history, but also disposed of profound historical knowledge. For example, he put the Carolingian forefather Pippin at the end of the first column because he knew that Pippin, for the first time, gained the office of majordomo in all three kingdoms of Merovingian France. Consequently, Pippin ruled the Frankish Empire almost like a king and established the basis for the rise of the Carolingians. The other column contains mostly the names of Carolingians. But beside the main Carolingian line with Charles Martel, Pippin and Charlemagne, we also find illegitimate sons like Grifo and Drogo.48 Immediately above Charlemagne’s name are entered the names of the emperor’s sons Charles and Pippin who died before their father. In our opinion the original diptych of 821 ended with Charlemagne as the last Carolingian ruler who died before this date. The key persons of the diptych are obviously King Guntram of Burgundy (561–92), the first person mentioned,   Schmid, ‘Remiremont’, pp. 81–3.   Schmid, ‘Remiremont’, p. 79; Jakobi, Liber Memorialis, pp. 204–6. 46   Jakobi, ‘Diptychen’, pp. 186–212. 47   Eva-Maria Butz, ‘Die Sorge um das rechte Gebetsgedenken: Liturgische Memoria und Schriftlichkeit im Nonnenkloster Remiremont im frühen Mittelalter’, in Ruth Albrecht, Annette Bühler-Dietrich and Florentine Strzelczyk (eds), Glaube und Geschlecht: Fromme Frauen, spirituelle Erfahrungen, religiöse Traditionen, Literatur – Kultur – Geschlecht: Studien zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, Große Reihe, 43 (Cologne, 2008), pp. 153– 73. We do not agree with Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Frauen und Schriftlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter’, in Hans-Werner Goetz (ed.), Weibliche Lebensgestaltung im frühen Mittelalter (Cologne, 1991), pp. 79–81 and Valerie L. Garver, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (Ithaca, NY, 2009), p. 80, who believe that the Liber memorialis was made by the nuns themselves. 48   Eduard Hlawitschka, ‘Die Vorfahren Karls des Großen’, in Wolfgang Braunfels (ed.), Karl der Große: Leben und Nachleben, 1 (Düsseldorf, 1965), pp. 51–82 (nos 41, 54). 44 45

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Figure 4.2

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Liber memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 43v. Calendar of benefactors. Entries of Charlemagne and (King) Guntram.

and Emperor Charlemagne, at the very end. Now we understand the initial entry in the calendar of the benefactors, and we can identify the entry of Guntram in the calendar. It is the above-mentioned king of Burgundy, benefactor of the monastery of Luxeuil, who died in 592. His saint’s day is, as far as we know, on 28 March. The entries of King Guntram and Charlemagne in the calendar and the diptych indicate that both rulers were very important persons for the nunnery of Remiremont.

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Figure 4.3

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Liber memorialis of Remiremont, fo. 3v. The kings’ diptych, 862/863.

Originally, the nobleman Romarich was regarded as the founder of the nunnery, and in the course of the seventh century he became its patron saint. But in the Liber memorialis of 821, the history of Remiremont was reshaped and rewritten in the light of its new status and rank as a Carolingian royal monastery. Famous kings like Guntram and Charlemagne were now regarded as the most important benefactors or even patrons of the nunnery, as their entries both in the calendar

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and the diptych demonstrate. Franz-Josef Jakobi has suggested that the diptych was based on earlier memorial texts concerning the liturgical commemoration of kings and emperors, thus pointing to a long tradition of such commemoration in Remiremont. But our examination of the diptych and the necrologies reveals much more than that. The memorial book bears witness to the will of the persons who made it to place the nunnery of Remiremont into a longstanding and continuous relationship with the Frankish kings and emperors. The voluminous list of nuns and abbesses who lived in the nunnery before 817 seems to demonstrate a long and continuous tradition of liturgical commemoration at Remiremont. The same is true for the kings’ diptych. Obviously these two sections of the Liber memorialis stem from different sources. We do not know the sources for the nuns’ list, but the sequence of kings is reminiscent of those historical catalogues of rulers included in chronicles. Thus their primarily liturgical function is complemented by the aspect of historical memory.49 On the one hand, the instructions for prayer and the composition of all the elements of the Liber memorialis of Remiremont indicate that the year 817 marked a significant turning-point in the monastery’s history. But the changes of 817 did not result in a complete renunciation of the earlier history of Remiremont. In laying out the Liber memorialis, the author also tried to present ample evidence of Remiremont as a dignified and longstanding institution that had been established long before the Carolingians became the rulers of the Frankish Empire and that had always been in close contact with the royal court. In other words, the book suggested that Remiremont had been a royal monastery from the first day of its existence. This makes clear the fact that the Liber memorialis bears witness to the monastic community’s historical consciousness and its awareness of its own great history. In this respect the book not only evidences the extensive practice of liturgical memory, but is also an indispensible historical document.50 One last aspect! The kings’ diptych not only mirrors the historical consciousness of the monastic community itself, it is also a document of Carolingian politics and Carolingian self-awareness. It was Charlemagne who attributed his dynasty 49   Mechthild Sandmann, Herrscherverzeichnisse als Geschichtsquellen: Studien zur langobardisch-italischen Überlieferung, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften, 41 (Munich, 1984), pp. 53–4, who does not consider that lists of rulers in liturgical contexts could also have historical aspects; Otto Gerhard Oexle, ‘Liturgische Memoria und historische Erinnerung: Zur Frage nach Gruppenbewusstsein und dem Wissen der eigenen Geschichte in den mittelalterlichen Gilden’, in Norbert Kamp and Joachim Wollasch (eds), Tradition als historische Kraft: Interdisziplinäre Forschungen zur Geschichte des früheren Mittelalters: Karl Hauck zum 21.12.1981 gewidmet (Berlin, 1982), pp. 323–40; Franz-Josef Jakobi, ‘Geschichtsbewusstsein in mittelalterlichen Gedenk-Aufzeichnungen’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 68 (1986): pp. 11–13. 50   Eva-Maria Butz, ‘Adel und liturgische Memoria am Ende des karolingischen Frankenreichs’, in Nathalie Kruppa (ed.), Adlige, Stifter, Mönche: Zum Verhältnis zwischen Klöstern und mittelalterlichem Adel, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, 227 (Göttingen, 2007), pp. 9–30; Butz, ‘Gebetsgedenken’, pp. 153–73.

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to the Merovingian kings and documented his consciousness of his Merovingian ancestry by choosing the Merovingian names Lothar and Ludwig (Chlothar and Chlodwig) for his sons. The Merovingian columns in the book end with Pippin II and appear to underline the fact that he was the main hinge between Merovingian and Carolingian rule. Thus the kings’ diptych interprets the past as a basis for the present and presents a valid model of the monastery’s history as well as of the rise of the Carolingian family.51

  We are grateful to Nancy Turner for help with the English version of this chapter.

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Chapter 5

Status and the Soul: Commemoration and Intercession in the Rayonnant Chapels of Northern France in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Mailan S. Doquang

In his fourteenth-century description of Notre-Dame, Paris, Jean de Jandun, a member of the faculty of arts in Paris, enthusiastically proclaims: ‘Where does one find, I ask, the dazzling luminosity of such a belt of chapels?’1 Jean’s text reveals that the chapels at Notre-Dame were among the building’s most noteworthy features, contributing to its overall excellence (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). Notre-Dame is distinguished as the first French cathedral to receive such appendages, which were gradually inserted between the buttresses from about 1228. The sweep of lateral chapels not only became a defining characteristic of Notre-Dame, it also provided a model that spread throughout northern France. By the time of Jean’s panegyric in 1323, lateral chapels had become important elements in the typology of French cathedrals, as evidenced by their presence at the cathedrals of Rouen, Laon and Amiens among others (Figure 5.3).2 Rare are the texts that provide insights into medieval attitudes towards architecture. It is, therefore, ironic that Jean de Jandun’s favourable assessment of the chapels at Notre-Dame has not been given more weight in the scholarly literature.3 Scholars have generally been critical of French lateral chapels, either   ‘Ubi, queso, reperient tot circumstantium capellarum lucidissimas amenitates?’ Jean de Jandun, Tractatus de laudibus Parisius, cited in A. Le Roux de Lincy and L.-M. Tisserand, Paris et ses historiens aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1867), p. 46 (my translation). For a recent analysis of Jean’s text, see Erik Inglis, ‘Gothic Architecture and a Scholastic: Jean de Jandun’s Tractatus de laudibus Parisius (1323)’, Gesta, 42 (2003): pp. 63–85. 2   Lateral chapels were also added to the cathedrals of Noyon, Bayeux, Evreux, Lisieux, Coutances and Avranches (destroyed) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For a broad study of these chapels, see Mailan S. Doquang, ‘Rayonnant Chantry Chapels in Context’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2009). 3   The passage has been cited to provide the terminus ante quem of the choir chapels, but never as evidence of contemporary attitudes towards such structures. See Michael Davis, ‘Splendor and Peril: The Cathedral of Paris, 1290–1350’, Art Bulletin, 80/1 (1998): pp. 34-66. 1

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Figure 5.1

Nave chapels, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 5.2

Choir chapels, Notre-Dame, Paris

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dismissing them as stylistically derivative or characterizing them as disfiguring additions.4 This examination shifts the emphasis away from anachronistic notions of stylistic progress and ideal designs, focusing instead on the chapels’ commemorative and intercessory functions. It demonstrates that the chapels were functionally motivated structures whose construction was fuelled by two overarching concerns: the intertwined desires for earthly self-representation and post mortem remembrance and purification. French cathedrals served as settings for private, intercessory Masses as early as the twelfth century, but offered no discreet architectural spaces for the secondary altars at which such services took place.5 Equipping cathedrals with lateral chapels provided new venues for these Masses. This function, however, does not provide a full explanation for the proliferation of chapels, as these circumscribed spaces were liturgically superfluous. Logistical considerations, such as avoiding congestion within the buildings and minimizing the clamour of concurrent Masses, though important, also leave aside other compelling factors driving chapel construction in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France.6 Filled with commemorative and intercessory accoutrements, chapels afforded elite patrons with unique opportunities to display their identity, wealth and worldly rank, while simultaneously attending to anxieties about the afterlife. Patrons strategically used architecture, objects and services as a means of perpetuating their memory on earth, with the aim of garnering the spiritual aid of the living and, ultimately, shortening their time in Purgatory. This chapter is divided into three interrelated sections, each emphasizing different memorializing aspects of Rayonnant chapels. The first section addresses the role of the chapels as settings for private, intercessory Masses, which increased exponentially during the course of the thirteenth century. The multiplication of 4   On attitudes towards architectural additions and the prioritization of ideal designs, see Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New Haven, 2010). 5   At least 40 chaplaincies, for example, were founded at the cathedral of Laon by the twelfth century. These chaplaincies predated the construction of chapels at the cathedral, which took place in the second half of the thirteenth century. See Jacques Foviaux, ‘“Amassez-vous des trésors dans le ciel”: Les listes d’obits du chapitre cathédrale de Laon’, in J.-L. Lemaître (ed.), L’Eglise et la mémoire des morts dans la France médiévale. Communications présentées à la Table Ronde du C.N.R.S. le 14 juin 1982 (Paris, 1986), pp. 69-117. The earliest known chaplaincy at Notre-Dame was established in 1186 by Countess Marie de Troyes. See Benjamin Guérard, Cartulaire de l’église Notre-Dame de Paris (4 vols, Paris, 1850), vol. 1, p. 296 and Christian Freigang, ‘Chapelles latérales privées. Origines, fonctions, financement: le cas de Notre-Dame de Paris’, in N. Bock et al (eds), Art, cérémonial et liturgie au Moyen Age (Rome, 2002), pp. 525-44, especially p. 529, note 15. 6   Pragmatic issues, such as accommodating Masses, overcrowding and noise, have been cited as the primary motivators for the construction of the chapels at Notre-Dame. See Freigang, ‘Chapelles latérales privées’, pp. 528ff.

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these Masses, which brought to mind the individual at his or her funeral, was directly linked to the growing popularity of the idea of Purgatory and the related spike in the demand for personal intercession. The effectiveness of lateral chapels as memorializing loci depended largely upon their ability to capture the attention and beneficial prayers of passers-by. The second part of the chapter, therefore, focuses on the design of the chapels, as well as the roles and rights of fabric committees and individual patrons. The concluding section highlights the ways in which the objects in the chapels worked together with Masses to create a conspicuous and lasting ‘presence’ for elite patrons within cathedrals, thereby responding to desires for commemoration and salvation. Rayonnant chapels, therefore, allowed patrons carefully to construct their self-image, ossifying for posterity particular deeds and qualities and in so doing inviting spiritually beneficial forms of commemoration. Chaplaincies and Strategies for the Hereafter In the thirteenth century, cathedrals increasingly became the beneficiaries of endowed foundations known as chaplaincies.7 These foundations, which comprised a variety of suffrages, were carefully calibrated to afford the elite a measure of control over their future in the afterlife. Patrons typically made provisions for chaplaincies in their wills, exchanging property, or income generated from property (rentes), for suffrages. As the most effective suffrage, the private Mass was the centrepiece of chaplaincies. These Masses were essentially reenactments of requiem Masses, key components of medieval funerals aimed at honouring and memorializing the deceased.8 Patrons specified the frequency of the Masses, financing anniversary, weekly or even daily services. Candles and tolling bells, two other features of funerals, also figured in such foundations, making them multisensory experiences. Some patrons made arrangements for the distribution of alms to the poor in their foundations, generally in the form of food, clothing or money. Like private Masses, provisions for these ‘good works’ were a means of amassing spiritual benefits for the hereafter and, when performed on anniversaries, recreated part of the funeral. Patrons stipulated the duration of their chaplaincies: some were established for fixed

  There are two synonymous terms for such endowments: chaplaincy and chantry. I have chosen the former because of its affinity to the French term chapellenie. 8   Clive Burgess, ‘A Service For the Dead: The Form and Function of the Anniversary in Late Medieval Bristol’, Transactions of the British and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 105 (1987): pp. 183-211. On the connections between anniversary Masses and funerals, see Clive Burgess, ‘Longing to be Prayed For: Death and Commemoration in an English Parish in the Late Middle Ages’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 58ff. 7

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periods, while the more extravagant, like that of Bishop Simon Matifas de Bucy of Paris (d. 1304), were to last until the end of time.9 The primary goal of chaplaincy founders was to expedite their deliverance from Purgatory. Indeed, the sharp increase in chaplaincies in the thirteenth century is inextricably linked to the belief in Purgatory, officially recognized as doctrine at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274.10 The punitive and cleansing fires of Purgatory awaited all but those who had lived in a state of sanctity. One could amass benefits for the afterlife by living virtuously and performing good works, like caring for the poor and praying for the dead, both of which shortened purgatorial punishment. Opportunities for self-improvement, however, ceased with death. Jacques Le Goff remarked that Purgatory was ultimately a hopeful place, offering those who were not entirely good (nor entirely bad) a second chance at salvation.11 In time, sins would be expunged and souls released. All suffrages, including intercessory prayers, helped shorten time in Purgatory, but it was the private Mass, generally performed by a chaplain, that was the most effective means to this end.12 The ability to minimize time in Purgatory, furthermore, reflected the social order. The wealthiest members of the elite could afford better foundations, abbreviating their suffering in Purgatory, whereas the poor were entirely excluded from this intercessory system.13 With their chaplaincies, founders aimed to forge enduring connections with the living. The belief that certain sins could be expunged after death created strong bonds between the living and the dead. This relationship was mutually advantageous: the dead benefited from the suffrages of the living, while the living

  Bishop Simon bequeathed 50 livres tournois to have four Masses celebrated weekly and in perpetuity at the altar of Saint Louis (originally dedicated to Saint Marcel). Paris, Archives Nationales (AN), L 535; Guérard, Cartulaire, vol. 4, pp. 93-4. The frequency and duration of chaplaincies depended on an individual’s wealth and aspirations. On different types of foundations, see Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, ‘Les clauses religieuses dans les testaments du plat-pays lyonnais aux XIVe et XVe siècles’, Le Moyen Age, 78 (1972): pp. 287-323, especially pp. 312-15. 10   On the construction of Purgatory and its ‘spatialization’, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1984), pp. 154-208. 11   Ibid., pp. 306-10, 349-50. 12   In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, chaplains, not canons, typically celebrated private Masses in French cathedrals. The number of chaplains grew over time. At the end of the twelfth century, there were 57 chaplains at Notre-Dame. By the fourteenth century, the number of chaplaincies had increased to such a degree that approximately 100 chaplains were needed to celebrate all the Masses. See Jean Quéguiner, ‘Recherches sur les chapellenies au Moyen Age’, in Positions des thèses de l’Ecole des Chartes (1950), p. 98 and Robert Gane, Le Chapitre de Notre-Dame de Paris au XIVe siècle: étude sociale d’un groupe canonial (Saint-Etienne, 1999), pp. 41-2. 13   Philippe Ariès, L’homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977), pp. 192-5; André Vauchez, ‘Richesse spirituelle et matérielle du moyen âge’, Annales ESC, 25 (1970): pp. 1566-73. 9

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built up credit for the afterlife by performing ‘good works’ on behalf of the dead.14 The fate of the dead lay entirely in the hands of the living, since the dead were stripped of the ability to improve their condition.15 Elite patrons sought to exercise a measure of control over their future in the hereafter through their wills, a strategy that hinged on the cooperation of the living: the deceased’s executers had to carry out their wishes and the clergy had to fulfil the terms of the testament. Given that the soul was at stake, individuals making arrangements for the afterlife were understandably fraught with anxiety. Nothing could guarantee that they would be remembered as they wished to be remembered, or that such remembrance would be permanent. Medieval documents reveal the extent of these anxieties. The now redundant language of a fourteenth-century chaplaincy established at the Saint-Christophe chapel at Amiens Cathedral is instructive in this regard. Enguerrand d’Eudin (d. 1391), a knight and royal official, specified in his testament that Masses in his honour should be performed in this chapel ‘everyday, forever, in perpetuity’.16 The clerics at the cathedral of Laon responded to patronal concerns about fading from memory. In 1358, the dean and chapter at the cathedral declared that it was the task of the marguilliers, the cathedral’s lay officers, to ensure that chaplains fulfilled their obligations to the chaplaincy founders. Any chaplain found to have been derelict in his duties was to be fined 4 deniers or, if the marguilliers deemed it necessary, a greater amount.17 These examples bring into relief the apprehensions that patrons had about being forgotten and also exemplify how clerical communities reacted to these anxieties. With their provisions for private Masses and good works, chaplaincies helped assuage fears about receding from memory and purgatorial suffering. Assuming that a testator’s wishes were carried out, suffrages could create a commemorative presence for the dead in cathedrals and churches. Indeed, it was imperative to establish an enduring ‘presence’ in order to secure a place in the fallible memory of the living. However, although the multisensory spectacle of the private Mass recalled the individual, this ritual was fleeting. Recognizing the ephemerality of performed Masses, individuals sought to enhance their impact and found more permanent, material ways of securing their ‘presence’ within buildings. Equipping

14   On the reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead, see Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, ‘Introduction: placing the dead in late medieval and early modern Europe’, in Gordon and Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead, pp. 1-16. 15   Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, pp. 293-4. 16   ‘Chacun jour, à tousjours, perpétuellement’. My translation. Amiens, Archives Départementales de la Somme, Chapitre d’Amiens, Arm, I, l. 35, no. 17; Georges Durand, Monographie de l’église Notre-Dame, cathédrale d’Amiens (2 vols, Amiens, 1901-03), vol. 1, p. 45. 17   Paris, BnF, coll. Picardie, vol. 284, no. 78 [1358]. See also Nicole Bériou, ‘Les chapellenies dans la province ecclésiastique de Reims au XIVe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, 57 (1971): pp. 227-40, especially p. 228.

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cathedrals with chapels was a particularly apt response to the growing demand for effective and lasting commemoration. The Architectural Frame: Design and Patronage The favoured chapel in late medieval France was the standard lateral chapel, a type that appeared at Notre-Dame, Paris around 1228 and spread to other cathedrals, remaining dominant well into the fifteenth century.18 Standard lateral chapels are characterized by their architectural simplicity and their seriality. Builders ingeniously made use of the gaps between the buttresses, demolishing outer walls to the level of the formerets of the aisle vaults and pulling exterior pockets of space to the interior of the buildings (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). The buttresses, designed to channel the thrust of the high vaults, were made to serve a secondary function as chapel walls. Each spatial cell is pierced with an expansive, traceried window and capped with a rib vault, creating the impression of a luminescent canopy (Figure 5.3). Basins built into the thickness of the chapel walls reveal that the spaces were, from their inception, designed to accommodate Masses. The lofty arches connecting the chapels to the side aisles, closed off by gates, functioned as frames for the altars and divine services within. The stylistic cohesiveness of the chapels at particular cathedrals suggests that they formed part of a preconceived plan devised and administered by fabric committees, rather than falling under the control of individual donors. The process of chapel construction at any given site invariably spanned several decades, yet designs remained remarkably homogeneous. There are, of course, minor variations in the rendering of details, notably, tracery patterns and capitals, but the main architectural components are highly uniform. The alignment of the chapels’ outer walls, the standardized height of the windows and the repetition of elements like gables and niches produce a unity of design that belies the lengthy building process. The chapels at Rouen Cathedral were built over a period of about 30 years (c. 1260-90), those at Amiens Cathedral rose over the course of approximately 85 years (1292-1375) and work on the chapels at Notre-Dame, Paris lasted almost

  Chapels can be divided into two categories: standard and exceptional. Standard chapels appear in series and are similar in size, plan and elevation. Exceptional chapels are distinguished by their size, design or position within a building. See Marvin Trachtenberg, ‘On Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy as Model for Early Church Architecture’, in J. Guillaume (ed.), L’église dans l’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris, 1996), pp. 9-39. On fifteenthcentury ‘copies’ of Notre-Dame’s chapels, see Anne-Marie Sankovitch, ‘Intercession, Commemoration, and Display: The Parish Church as Archive in Late Medieval Paris’, in J. Guillaume (ed.), Demeures d’Eternité. Eglises et chapelles funéraires aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 2005), pp. 247-67. 18

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Interior, Rouen Cathedral

100 years (c. 1228-1320).19 The stability of forms over such protracted periods implies that fabric committees exercised strict control over chapel construction, with each generation harmonizing its structures with those built at earlier times. Lateral chapels were conceived in relation to each other, but also to the buildings onto which they were grafted, symbolically underscoring the Church’s responsibility for souls in the afterlife. For example, lateral chapels invariably rise to the same height as the side aisles of the cathedral to which they are attached and the capitals crowning the colonnettes framing the chapel entrances generally align with those of the cathedral aisle vaults (Figure 5.3). Furthermore, when chapel construction coincided with other building modifications, these typically corresponded to one another stylistically. The chapels in the straight choir bays of Notre-Dame, Paris were built in tandem with the extension of the transept and employed the same formal vocabulary (gables, pinnacles, unifying mullions and so forth). Similarly, the lace-like tracery and voided gables of the late-thirteenthcentury chapels at the cathedral of Rouen echo on a smaller scale the forms found

19   Based on the documentary and stylistic evidence, the chapels at Rouen Cathedral can be dated to 1260-90. On the chapels at Amiens Cathedral, see Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, pp. 40-52 and vol. 2, pp. 363ff. On the chapels at Notre-Dame, Paris, see Marcel Aubert, Notre Dame de Paris, sa place dans l’architecture du XIIe au XIVe siècles (Paris, 1920), pp. 137-67; Henry Kraus, ‘New Documents for Notre-Dame’s Early Chapels’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, 74 (1969): pp. 121-34; Dieter Kimpel, Die Querhausarme von Notre-Dame zu Paris und ihre Skulpturen (Bonn, 1971), pp. 31-43, 86-92.

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on the transept façades, which were remodelled at roughly the same time.20 These examples indicate that, although they served somewhat independent functions, the chapels were integrated elements of a larger whole. Their physical, integral qualities helped to emphasize the fact that the spiritual fates of individuals were tightly knit into the fabric of the clerical community. The dead, as noted above, relied upon the clergy to hasten their exit from Purgatory. Lateral chapels, prominently visible from both inside and outside the cathedrals, were potent reminders of the Church’s singular power to intervene on behalf of the dead.21 Fabric committees may have dictated the design of chapels, but the financial burden of building was sometimes shared, with individual donors generally receiving certain privileges, such as the right to decorate or be buried in the spaces. These rights to the chapels are what allowed patrons to secure a lasting ‘presence’ within the buildings. There is no documentary evidence attesting to tensions between individual donors and fabric committees. Their goals, however, were diametrically opposed. As noted above, the architectural uniformity of the chapels reveals that fabric committees valued formal cohesiveness. Individual patrons, on the other hand, sought to differentiate their chapels as a means of attracting attention, an issue that will be addressed below. It seems likely, therefore, that chapel patrons at times struggled against the constraints placed upon them by the corporate bodies that controlled the designs. The degree of corporate and individual funding varied from cathedral to cathedral. Of the 35 chapels grafted to Notre-Dame, Paris, only six are known to have been financed by individual patrons. Canon Gilbert de Saana (d. 1288) bequeathed 100 livres tournois to pay for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste-Sainte-MarieMadeleine chapel on the choir’s north side.22 Between 1296 and 1304, Bishop Simon Matifas de Bucy donated an astounding 600 livres parisis (during his life) and 100 livres tournois (as a bequest) for the construction of the three axial chapels, originally dedicated to Saints Marcel, Rigobert and Nicaise.23 An inscription dated 1316 names Canon Eudes of Sens (d. 1334) as the founder of the Saint-Pierre20   Work on the north transept façade of Rouen Cathedral began around 1281, coinciding with the completion of the nave chapels. The south transept façade dates to c. 1300. See Markus Schlicht, La cathédrale de Rouen vers 1300. Portail des Libraires, portail de la Calende, chapelle de la Vierge (Caen, 2005). 21   The exterior of lateral chapels was visible from within the canons’ precincts. On the accessibility of the canons’ precinct of Notre-Dame, see Cecilia Gaposhkin, ‘The King of France and the Queen of Heaven: The Iconography of the Porte Rouge of Notre-Dame of Paris’, Gesta, 39 (2000): pp. 58-72, especially p. 60, footnote 10. 22   Guérard, Cartulaire, vol. 4, pp. 37-8. 23   In addition to these sums, Bishop Simon forgave a loan of 200 livres tournois to the fabric. Paris, BnF, MS lat. 5185 CC, fo. 224, 22 June [1304]; Guérard, Cartulaire, vol. 4, p. 92. The chapel of Saint Marcel was rededicated to Saint Louis shortly after Louis’s canonization in 1297. See footnote 9. On the proliferation of chapels dedicated to Louis after his canonization, see Elizabeth Brown, ‘The Chapels and Cult of Saint-Louis at StDenis’, Mediaevalia, 10 (1984): pp. 279-331.

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Saint-Etienne chapel on the choir’s south side.24 Finally, in his testament, Cardinal Michel du Bec (d. 1318) left 600 livres parisis to the fabric, part of which financed a chapel dedicated to his name saint on the choir’s north side.25 At Amiens Cathedral, on the other hand, privately funded chapels abounded, accounting for at least seven of the building’s 12 chapels. Bishop Guillaume de Mâcon (d. 1308) initiated work on the series by financing the construction of the chapel of Sainte Marguerite in 1292, claiming the prestigious bay closest to the high altar on the building’s south side.26 Soon after, Bishop Guillaume initiated work on a chapel dedicated to Saint Louis (completed 1297–1302), the recently canonized king with whom he had had close ties.27 At roughly the same time, an anonymous group of woad merchants paid for the Saint-Nicolas chapel, while the wealthy woad merchant Drieu Malherbe (d. 1296) and his wife, Marie, sponsored the construction of the chapel of Sainte Agnès.28 In the second half of the fourteenth century, Henri Biaxpingnié financed the chapel of Saint Lambert and Cardinal Jean de la Grange, bishop of Amiens (d. 1402), provided funds for two chapels, one dedicated to Saint Jean Baptiste and the other to Saint Jean l’Evangéliste.29   The inscription, now lost, once appeared in the chapel window. See Aubert, NotreDame, p. 146. 25   The cardinal’s obituary mentions the foundation of a chaplaincy, not a chapel. Given the princely amount of the bequest, however, it seems likely that part of the funds went towards building the chapel. The cardinal, moreover, appeared as a donor in the chapel window, accompanied by an inscription identifying him as the chapel’s founder. Paris, BnF, MS lat. 5185 CC, fo. 265, 27 August [1318]; Guérard, Cartulaire, vol. 4, p. 138. On the stained glass donor portrait, see below. 26   Amiens, Arch. Dép. de la Somme (Chapitre de la cathédrale d’Amiens), G. 286; Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, p. 40; Jean Baron, Déscription de l’église cathédrale NotreDame d’Amiens, 1815–1900 (Amiens, 1900), p. 110. 27   Louis’s canonization in 1297 provides the chapel’s terminus post quem. A lost charter dated 1302 attests to Bishop Guillaume’s foundation and to the establishment of a chaplaincy at its altar by canon Etienne Gaydon. Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, p. 42. The bishop, who had been a royal chaplain, travelled to Rome in 1278 and 1281 to petition for Louis’s canonization. 28   On the Saint-Nicolas chapel, see below. Based on its stylistic affinities with the chapel of Sainte Marguerite, the chapel of Sainte Agnès may be dated to the late thirteenth century. On Drieu Malherbe, see Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, pp. 41-2. On mercantile patronage at the cathedral of Amiens, see Henry Kraus, Gold was the Mortar: The Economics of Cathedral Building (New York, 1979), pp. 40-59. 29   An inscription on a statue base inside the chapel of Saint Lambert records the name of the founder. The inscription does not provide a date, but the style of the script, combined with the chapel’s formal affinities with the adjacent chapel of Saint Christophe (securely dated 1358), suggest that it belongs to the second half of the fourteenth century. See Durand, Monographie, vol. 2, p. 391. A letter written by the cathedral chapter on 7 January 1375 congratulates Jean de la Grange for his elevation to the position of cardinal and thanks him for completing the two chapels. Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 516, fo. 57; Durand, Monographie, vol. 2, pp. 363-7. 24

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Shouldering the cost of building a chapel, however, did not give patrons exclusive rights to the spaces. Documents reveal that the altars in the chapels accommodated multiple foundations, which signals that patrons were willing to share the spaces. At Notre-Dame, Paris for instance, three chaplaincies were established in Bishop Simon’s chapel of Saint Rigobert between 1296 and 1313.30 Likewise, Bishop Guillaume’s chapel of Saint Louis at Amiens Cathedral housed two chaplaincies by 1305.31 Allowing chaplaincies to coexist at a single altar both responded to the increasing demand for personal commemoration and maximized revenues for clerical communities. With their lavish forms, Rayonnant chapels provided chaplaincy founders with appropriately dignified settings for their Masses, while the quasi-private character of the spaces enhanced the founders’ status. Visitors circulating through cathedrals were afforded visual access to the chapels, but only the founders, their families and the clerics who performed Masses in their honour could cross their threshold. Lateral chapels, though integrated into the larger context of the cathedral, were ultimately exclusionary. The spaces were separated from the more accessible sections of cathedrals, such as side aisles and ambulatories, by locked gates.32 Regrettably, no medieval gates have come down to us, the earliest extant examples being the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stone gates at Laon Cathedral, which replaced medieval originals.33 It is possible that the medieval chapel gates were visually permeable. If nothing else, as sites of passage, the gates would occasionally have been left open to allow the sanctioned few to enter and exit. Providing visitors with visual access to the chapels from side aisles and ambulatories facilitated the culling of intercessory prayers for the privileged dead, while simultaneously providing donors with a broad audience for self-representation.

30   One chaplaincy was founded in 1296 by Geoffroy de Gien, a canon of Notre-Dame. Paris, AN, LL 247, fo. 8; Kraus, ‘New Documents,’ p. 130. The same year, Gillette Arrode, a Paris burgess, founded another chaplaincy at the altar. Paris, AN, S 92, Aubert, NotreDame, p. 145. In 1313, Girard de Courlandon, archdeacon of Notre-Dame, established a third chaplaincy at the altar. Paris, AN, LL 247, fo. 7v. 31   One chaplaincy was founded by Canon Etienne Gaydon (1302), the other by the layman Jean Darc (1305). See Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, p. 42. 32   The 1316 testament of Eudes de Corbeil, a canon of Notre-Dame, contains a reference to the keys of the Sainte-Foy chapel. Guérard, Cartulaire, vol. 4, p. 117; Davis, ‘Splendor and Peril’, p. 45. 33   The stone gates at Laon Cathedral were built between 1555 and 1697. A document of 1410, however, reprimands several chaplains for not opening their chapels during a procession, which suggests that these gates replaced earlier examples. See Alain SaintDenis, Martine Plouvier, Cécile Souchon and Arnaud Timbert, Laon: La Cathédrale (Paris, 2002), p. 202.

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The Multimedia Ensemble The role of lateral chapels extended beyond their use for private Masses, since they served, for the privileged few, as repositories for commemorative and intercessory objects. The chapels have now largely been stripped of their contents, but fragments, inscriptions and post-medieval drawings and descriptions shed light on their original appearance. These chapels exuded opulence. Patrons equipped the spaces with costly objects like stained glass windows, sculptures and funerary monuments. These objects, as communicators of identity, status and virtue, allowed patrons to construct images of themselves as deserving of and even entitled to, suffrages. With their indicators of rank and wealth, the objects in the chapels overtly served aggrandizing functions, but the plethora of objects, taken with the foundations, may also be interpreted as a symptom of patrons’ anxieties about the hereafter.34 It is the accumulation of objects, together with the foundations for suffrages (the quantity of which was also important), that reveals these concerns. This accumulation implies that individual objects were considered insufficient to convey their intended meanings or perform their intended functions. The objects worked together and with the Masses to meet the intertwined imperatives of commemoration, intercession and social display. If ‘presence’ was only generated momentarily with the Mass, objects surmounted this shortcoming, offering the dead a permanence and tangibility that the performed Mass simply could not. The objects thus made up for the transience of the Masses, while at the same time intensifying the latter’s memorial function. Stained glass donor portraits are among the most common commemorative and intercessory devices found in lateral chapels, capturing for posterity the act and virtue of charity. One such portrait features in the Saint-Jean-de-la-Nef chapel on the north side of Rouen Cathedral. The panel, prominently located towards the bottom of the window, depicts a lay, female donor, probably a member of one of Rouen’s wealthy merchant families. She is depicted wearing a long green gown and a red cloak, her elevated status conveyed by her barbette and fillet. She is kneeling piously and offering a model of a window to an unseen figure on the right, possibly to a lost image of John the Evangelist, the chapel’s titular saint. Although the donor lacks identifying markers, members of her family would certainly have been aware of her donation and would thus have ‘recognized’ her in the donor panel. Her identity, moreover, was likely known to some of the clerics at the cathedral, notably those aware of her status as a benefactress and charged with caring for her soul. With this type of portrait, the ephemeral act of giving was commemorated in an enduring manner. Each donor appeared in his or her chapel performing an act of charity that was to be memorialized for all eternity or, at the very least, until the window was replaced. Depicting donors as pious and virtuous and therefore  

34

On this issue, see Sankovitch, ‘Intercession’, pp. 251-2.

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deserving of suffrages, such images seem to have been designed to provoke action from viewers, encouraging them to pray on the donors’ behalf. Given the expense of producing stained glass windows, though, they simultaneously demonstrated the patrons’ wealth. These dual functions of intercession and social display in part dictated the placement of these donor portraits in the lower registers of the chapel windows, a position that rendered them easily visible and legible to passers-by. Chapel patrons at other cathedrals exploited the communicative possibilities of stained glass more fully than the female donor at Rouen. At Amiens Cathedral, for instance, Bishop Guillaume de Mâcon, identified by an inscription, appeared as a donor in a panel (now lost) in the chapel of Sainte Marguerite that he financed in 1292.35 The bishop’s coat of arms featured in this lost panel, advertising his membership of elite society. Cardinal Michel du Bec, founder of the Saint-Michel chapel at Notre-Dame, Paris, also employed stained glass as a vehicle for social display.36 A seventeenth-century drawing in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, made for the antiquary and collector, Roger de Gaignières, conveys the richness of the cardinal’s lost donor panel.37 The cleric appears kneeling in a shallow interior space contained within a complex architectural framework, his identity and rank within the Church hierarchy communicated by an inscription at the bottom of the panel.38 With its cusped arch, articulated gable and profusion of finials and pinnacles, the panel draws on the elite vocabulary of forms used to herald the sanctity of the east end of Notre-Dame (Figure 5.2).39 The opulence of the fictive setting virtually negates the humility of the cardinal’s pose and simple blue robe. A vibrant, red cardinal’s hat, prominently displayed on the right, calls further attention to the patron’s elevated status, the red lozenges dressing the panel’s background resonating symbolically with this emblem of rank.40 Cardinal Michel gazes upwards and offers a carefully rendered model of a church to an unseen figure, possibly Saint Michel, to whom the chapel was dedicated. Complete with rose window, gable and flying buttresses, the miniature church rather overstates the cardinal’s contribution to the building. This lost panel reveals the lengths to which some patrons would go to convey their wealth and charity, depictions of which served both to aggrandize the individual   Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, p. 40.   On the stained glass at Notre-Dame, see Henry Kraus, ‘Notre-Dame’s Vanished Medieval Glass’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, 68 (1966): pp. 131-47. 37   Paris, BnF, Estampes Rés. Pe 11a Coll. Gaignières, fo. 247. 38   ‘Ecce capella quam fundavit Michael de becco cardinalis in honore beati Michaelis archangeli.’ (‘Behold the chapel which Cardinal Michel du Bec founded in honour of Saint Michael the Archangel.’) 39   Davis, ‘Splendor and Peril,’ pp. 44ff. 40   Charlotte Stanford correctly emphasizes the cardinal’s humble pose and robe, but does not discuss the counterbalancing effect of the inscription, the lavish setting and the cardinal’s hat, still less the interplay of these features as they combine to offset humility with status. See Charlotte Stanford, ‘The Body at the Funeral: Imagery and Commemoration at Notre Dame, Paris, About 1304-18,’ Art Bulletin, 89/4 (2007): pp. 657-73. 35

36

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and to encourage visitors to pray on their behalf. Only literate viewers who actually read the inscription would have learned that the cardinal’s contributions were in fact more modest than the image suggested. In addition to stained glass, wealthy patrons employed a variety of media to further their commemorative aspirations. At Notre-Dame, Paris, at least three donors were memorialized in over-life size statues perched on octagonal piers. These sculptures, known only from textual and graphic sources, once stood conspicuously outside the entrances to the donors’ chapels, drawing attention to the spaces and their patrons.41 Cardinal Michel and Bishop Simon were among the privileged individuals commemorated in this manner. The cardinal, donning the trappings of his office, the distinctive red robe and hat, appeared with his hands clasped in a gesture of piety and deference. Across the chapel entrance stood a pendant sculpture of his protector and the chapel’s titular saint, the Archangel Michael.42 Bishop Simon was also depicted with the attributes of his office.43 Equipped with a book, mitre and crozier, the bishop stood on the south side of the Saint-Nicaise chapel with his hand raised in a gesture of blessing. These statues, at the junction of the chapels and the outer ambulatory, created a presence for their donors outside that stained glass – tucked discreetly inside – could not. With their emphasis on rank, the statues were a potent expression of the exclusivity of the chapels that lay behind them. They constituted the threshold of accessible and restricted spaces, while also calling attention to the spaces and their patrons. The stone pier at the entrance of the Saint-Nicaise chapel physically and figuratively supported the image of Bishop Simon. Its broad abacus is elegantly carved with the inscription (Figure 5.4): Here is the image of Simon de Matifas de Bucy of blessed memory, from the diocese of Soissons, formerly bishop of Paris, by whom were first founded these three chapels where he lies in the year of grace 1296, and then all the others around the choir of this church. Pray for him.44

The reference to the donor’s rank reiterated for literate viewers the visual cues discussed above, text and image working together to convey identity and status. 41   In addition to the examples discussed below, a statue of Etienne de Suisy (d. 1311), archdeacon of Tournai and chancellor of France, once stood outside the chapel of Saint Etienne at Notre-Dame. See Françoise Baron, ‘Effigies sculptées à Notre-Dame de Paris aux XIVe et XVe siècles’, in F. Joubert and D. Sandron (eds), Pierre, lumière, couleur: Etude d’histoire de l’art du Moyen-Age en l’honneur d’Anne Prache (Paris, 1999), p. 331. 42   Paris, BnF, Estampes Rés. Pe 11a Coll. Gaignières, fo. 259. 43   Paris, BnF, Estampes Rés. Pe 11a Coll. Gaignières, fo. 149. 44   My translation and transcription: ‘Cy est le ymage de bonne memoire simon matifas de buci de le esvesche de soissons jadis esveques de paris par qi furent fondee premierement ces trois chapeles ou il gist en lan de grace m cc iiiixx et xvi et puis la fit toutes les autres environ le ceur de ceste esglise pries pour lui.’

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Inscription for donor statue of Simon Matifas de Bucy, Notre-Dame, Paris

The inscription’s insistence on Bishop Simon’s generous contributions to the cathedral, however, transcends issues of social display, revealing concerns for the afterlife. The bishop’s acts of charity, together with his endowment of perpetual Masses ‘for the health of his soul, his parents, friends and benefactors’, formed a strategy aimed at shortening purgatorial suffering.45 These proactive measures, though, were apparently considered inadequate to ensure rapid deliverance. To hasten release, the inscription calls on the help of the living, ending with the ubiquitous and formulaic ‘priez pour lui’.46 Not one of the commemorative and intercessory strategies employed in the chapels of Notre-Dame, then, was deemed sufficient in itself. Rather, the different media - text, image and performed Masses - combined in mutually reinforcing ways to create a perpetual visual and aural spectacle designed to prevent the benefactor from fading from memory. The tombs once housed in lateral chapels also enriched the viewer’s multisensory experience and advanced patrons’ desires for commemoration and salvation. Bishop Simon was among the donors interred in a chapel at NotreDame. His tomb, an elaborate ensemble of painting, sculpture and architecture,   ‘[P]ro salute anime sue, parentum, amicorum, et benefactorum suorum’. Paris, AN, L 535; Guérard, Cartulaire, vol. 4, pp. 93-4. 46   This phrase appears most frequently on tombs. Passers-by might have been motivated to pray for the bishop not for altruistic reasons but because such actions constituted ‘good works’ that were rewarded after death. See footnote 14. 45

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Figure 5.5

Effigy of Simon Matifas de Bucy, Notre-Dame, Paris

once graced the south wall of the chapel of Saint Nicaise. The tomb has been dismantled, but fragments and a drawing in the Gaignières collection provide insights into its appearance (Figure 5.5).47 A white marble effigy encrusted with brightly coloured stones, now located in the cathedral’s inner ambulatory, rested on a polychrome casket dressed with a series of quadrilobes.48 A trilobed niche crowned with a crocketed gable framed the effigy and an assembly of painted figures.49 A kneeling Bishop Simon, identified by two coats of arms and Saint Nicaise, the chapel’s titular saint, flanked the enthroned Virgin and Child.50 Above, two diminutive angels bore the bishop’s soul towards the Hand of God.   Paris, BnF, Estampes Rés. Pe 11a Coll. Gaignières, fo. 258. On the tomb’s restoration, see Jean-Marie Guillouët and Guillaume Kazerouni, ‘Le tombeau de Simon Matifas de Bucy: une nouvelle peinture médiévale à Notre-Dame de Paris’, Revue de l’Art, 159 (2008): pp. 5-43. 48   The effigy now rests on a modern base. The original casket was made of black marble and rose to a height of approximately 3 feet. See Antoine P.M. Gilbert, Description historique de la basilique métropolitaine de Paris et des curiosités de son trésor (Paris, 1821), p. 285. 49   The architectural elements were removed when the chapel of Saint Nicaise was remodelled in 1791. The painting, still in situ, was heavily restored in the nineteenth century. See Guillouët and Kazerouni, ‘Le tombeau’, pp. 37-8. 50   On the identity of the kneeling figures, see Stanford, ‘The Body at the Funeral’, pp. 664-5, footnote 47 and Guillouët and Kazerouni, ‘Le tombeau’, p. 38. 47

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In all three depictions on this funerary monument, Bishop Simon appears with the emblems of his social station.51 Even his naked soul dons the telltale mitre. These attributes not only emphasized the bishop’s status, they also encouraged viewers to pray for his soul by calling attention to his piety. The bishop’s heraldic devices were given pride of place on either side of the Virgin and Child’s throne. The sombre lion at the effigy’s feet, though a common tomb motif, resonates with the rearing lions on the bishop’s coats of arms. Rank was further stressed for the benefit of literate viewers by the Latin epitaph running along the tomb’s trilobed arch. Its content virtually replicates that of the French inscription on the pier outside the chapel (Figure 5.4).52 The fact that the epitaph is in Latin reveals that it was aimed primarily at a clerical audience, while serving as another indicator of the exclusivity of the space. None of the funerary portraits of Bishop Simon should be considered superfluous, as each emphasized a different, though sometimes ambiguous, state. With his closed eyes and folded hands, the recumbent bishop appears frozen in a posture of death, the cushion supporting his head evoking funeral paraphernalia. Yet his idealized body, untarnished by decay, alludes to his perfect reconstitution at the Last Judgement. This ambiguity of time and state is mirrored in the flawless permanence of the white marble, which stands in stark contrast to the impermanent body once contained in the casket below.53 The kneeling bishop on the tomb’s rear wall is similarly vague, presenting the deceased perpetually adoring the Virgin and Child in paradise and concurrently referring to his acts of veneration in life.54 Finally, it is unclear to the viewer whether the depiction of the bishop’s ascension into heaven describes an event or an aspiration. It is precisely this uncertainty that invites action - beneficial Masses and prayers - from the beholder. With its plethora of details, Bishop Simon’s tomb epitomizes the commemorative and intercessory potential of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century funerary monuments. Its placement in an exclusionary space both reflected and perpetuated the social hierarchy, thereby calling attention to the patron’s wealth and status - yet the fenestral character of the space allowed for the garnering of intercessory prayers from visitors looking in from the ambulatory. Given their advantageous location and design, it is perhaps unsurprising that individuals chose to locate their tombs inside lateral chapels. The ability to showcase tombs alongside other selfrepresentational objects helps account for the growing popularity of lateral chapels in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France.

51   As Stanford observed (‘The Body at the Funeral’, p. 672, footnote 46), the crozier on the effigy may be a later addition, as it does not appear in Gaignières’s drawing. 52   On the epitaph, see Hélène Verlet, Epitaphier du Vieux Paris (13 vols, Paris, 1995), vol. 10, pp. 116-17. 53   Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 95-6. 54   Stanford, ‘The Body at the Funeral’, p. 665.

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The exploitation and combination of different media for the commemoration of individuals, their friends and their kin was not unique to the chapels at NotreDame, Paris, but rather was part of a broader trend in later medieval France. The chapel of Sainte Marguerite at the cathedral of Amiens, founded by Bishop Guillaume de Mâcon, was a veritable multimedia ensemble. The bishop appeared as a donor in a stained glass panel along with his coat of arms and an inscription recording his donation.55 He was represented a second time in an over-life size statue prominently located on the chapel’s exterior wall (Figure 5.6). Upon his death in 1308, a funerary monument was placed inside the chapel. The tomb no longer exists, but a seventeenth-century text characterizes it as one of the richest and most beautiful in the cathedral.56 Made of enamelled copper, the monument contained an effigy and an image of the bishop’s soul at peace in the bosom of Abraham. The tomb was clad with episcopal emblems, heraldry and an epitaph, all of which showcased the patron’s identity and rank. Two decades after the bishop’s death, his nephew, Archdeacon Guillaume de Mâcon (d. 1328), was buried in the chapel, virtually transforming the space into a family mausoleum. The late-thirteenth-century chapel of Saint Nicolas on the south side of Amiens Cathedral also benefited multiple individuals, this time a group of local woad merchants (Figure 5.7). Chapels financed by corporate bodies served different functions than those funded by individuals: they were used as meeting places for guild members and were incorporated into the processions held on the feast days of the guilds’ patron saints.57 Despite these distinctive functions, the woad merchants at Amiens Cathedral employed similar commemorative strategies as individual patrons, drawing on text and imagery to memorialize their contributions to the building. Significantly, the sculptures on the Saint-Nicolas chapel face the mercantile district of the town, where the woad merchants conducted their daily business. Among the sculptures is a relief of two merchants flanking a large bag, which appears in the chapel’s central register. The merchants are offering their wares, used in the production of blue dye, to the statue of Saint Nicolas above (Nicolas being the protector of merchants and the chapel’s titular saint). This relief mirrors the function of stained glass donor portraits, clearly and permanently commemorating the transient act of donation. It captures for posterity the merchants’ benevolence, while simultaneously drawing attention to the material success that enabled them to make such gifts. The sculptures in the lower register of the Saint-Nicolas chapel reinforce the visual messages rendered above. Here, two merchants are seen kneeling and gazing upwards, their hands, now missing, originally clasped in a gesture of piety or deference. An inscription on the masonry behind the figures reads: ‘The good people from the towns around Amiens who sell woad have built this chapel with   See footnote 26.   Durand, Monographie, vol. 2, p. 414. 57   On guild activity at Amiens Cathedral, see ibid., vol. 1, pp. 44–5, 50 and vol. 2, pp. 384, 396, 417–18, 422; Kraus, Gold was the Mortar, pp. 39–59. 55 56

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Guillaume de Mâcon, Amiens Cathedral

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Figure 5.7

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Saint-Nicolas chapel, Amiens Cathedral

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their alms’.58 This inscription not only names the group of donors and their place of origin and refers to their generosity, but by mentioning their trade, it identifies them as participants in the town’s important textile industry, undoubtedly a point of pride for these men. Depicted alongside saints and high-ranking ecclesiastics, the reliefs conspicuously associate the wealthy merchants with figures of elevated status. Cardinal Jean de la Grange, bishop of Amiens from 1373 to 1375, employed a similar strategy when he commissioned the chapels of Saint Jean Baptiste and Saint Jean l’Evangeliste on the cathedral’s north flank.59 The sculptures, located between the chapels and on the adjacent Y-shaped pier (the ‘Beau Pilier’), present the cardinal in illustrious company (Figures 5.8 and 5.9).60 The statues, perched on decorated bases and set beneath intricate canopies, are hierarchically arranged in three rows and three registers. Holy figures occupy the upper register: the Virgin and Child (a nineteenth-century copy of the medieval original), Saint Jean Baptiste and Saint Firmin. Members of the royal family inhabit the central zone: King Charles V (1364–80), the dauphin Charles (1368–1422) and Louis I, duke of Orléans (1372–1407). Finally, royal councillors appear at the bottom: Cardinal La Grange, Bureau de la Rivière (d. 1400) and Jean de Vienne (1341–96). These figures had religious and political significance for the cardinal. The Virgin was the cathedral’s patroness, Saint Jean Baptiste was the chapel’s titular saint and Cardinal La Grange’s name saint and Saint Firmin was the first bishop of Amiens, whose lost relics were miraculously rediscovered in the seventh century.61 The remaining figures, identified by their coats of arms, were royalty or trusted members of the court, with whom Cardinal La Grange, as a royal preceptor, had strong ties.62 Named president of the Cour des Aides by Charles V, the cardinal had a particularly close relationship with the king and he chose to underscore this relationship in his chapels (Figure 5.9). Cardinal La Grange was integrated into a perpetual assembly of sacred and secular elites at Amiens Cathedral. By presenting the king among his successors and councillors, moreover, the cardinal   ‘Les bones gens des viles dentour amiens qui vendent waides ont faite chete capelle de leurs omonnes’. 59   These chapels were the last to be built along the nave of Amiens Cathedral. See footnote 29. 60   The style of the pier suggests that it is contemporary with Cardinal La Grange’s chapels. Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, p. 51. 61   On the legend of Saint Firmin, see Stephen Murray, A Gothic Sermon: Making a Contract with the Mother of God, Saint Mary of Amiens (Berkeley, 2004), pp. 41–4. 62   Bureau de la Rivière was a friend of Charles V. In 1367, he served as the king’s first chamberlain and, in 1374, Charles named him Royal Treasurer and gave him decisionmaking power over his (the king’s) children. Jean de Vienne was a knight whom Charles named Admiral of France in 1373. See Dany Sandron, ‘La fondation par le cardinal Jean de la Grande de deux chapelles à la cathédrale d’Amiens: une tradition épiscopale devenue manifeste politique à la gloire du roi Charles V’, in F. Joubert (ed.), L’artiste et le clerc: commandes artistiques des grands ecclésiastiques à la fin du Moyen Age (XIVe–XVIe siècles) (Paris, 2006), pp. 155–70. 58

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Figure 5.8

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Beau Pilier, Amiens Cathedral

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Figure 5.9

Charles V, Amiens Cathedral

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was unambiguously modelling his project on royal commissions, notably the Grands Degrés of the Palais de la Cité in Paris, where Philip IV (1285­­–1314) was depicted alongside his eldest son, Louis X (1314–16) and his chief minister, Enguerran de Marigny (1260–1315).63 The sculptures outside the chapels of Saint Jean Baptiste and Saint Jean l’Evangeliste were carefully orchestrated to commemorate and aggrandize the patron, with Cardinal La Grange appearing on the same axis as Charles V and the Virgin and Child (Figure 5.8). This juxtaposition highlighted the cardinal’s relationship with two supreme rulers, the king of France and the Queen of Heaven. Significantly, the statues were placed on the pier’s west side, making them visible from the parvis, the open space in front of the cathedral’s public entrance.64 On the one hand, the standing Virgin broadcasted the patron’s position as the cathedral’s spiritual leader. The statue of Charles V, on the other hand, boldly announced the cardinal’s political connections and called attention to his elevated position at the royal court. Cardinal La Grange’s associations with sacred and secular elites also found expression inside the chapels. A sculpture of the cardinal with Charles V appeared on the east wall of each space, showing both men kneeling deferentially before the chapels’ titular saints. The sculptures were removed during the chapels’ eighteenth-century renovation, but earlier descriptions reveal that the figures were of exceptional quality and identifiable by their heraldic devices.65 It is noteworthy that Cardinal La Grange always appeared in his chapels alongside Charles V, from whom he derived political power. The king’s presence was even invoked in the medium of stained glass, with royal emblems serving as a substitute for figural representations in both chapels.66 These emblems were placed alongside inscriptions that recorded the patron’s rank, devotion to local saints and generous foundations, all of which established the cardinal’s ‘presence’ in the cathedral and encouraged beneficial prayers.67 By emphasizing Charles V’s rank and piety, Cardinal La Grange’s chapels served the king as much as they advanced his personal agenda. In this regard, his actions are of a piece with those of his predecessor, Bishop Guillaume de Mâcon, who dedicated one of his chapels to his intimate, Louis IX (1214–70). A commemorative statue of Louis graces the exterior of Bishop Guillaume’s chapel. The sculpture of a prelate below, though lacking identifying markers, 63   Ibid., p. 163. On Philip IV’s additions to the royal palace, see Jean Guérout, ‘Le Palais de la Cité à Paris des origines à 1417: essai topographique et archéologique’, Paris et Île-de-France: Mémoires, 1 (1950): pp. 21–204; Mary Whitely, ‘Deux escaliers royaux du XIVe siècle: les “Grands Degrez” du Palais de la Cité et la “Grande Viz” du Louvre’, Bulletin monumental, 147 (1989): pp. 133–42. 64   The other sculptures were partially obscured by the church of Saint Firmin le Confesseur (now destroyed). See Sandron, ‘La fondation’, p. 160. 65   Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, pp. 50–1. 66   Ibid. 67   Ibid.

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in all likelihood represents the patron. Cardinal La Grange appropriated Bishop Guillaume’s referential strategy, but he took it a step further by multiplying the number of royal figures, including his peers and uniformly displaying clear indicators of identity. The cardinal’s provisions for the afterlife similarly built on past practices. In 1380, he obtained permission from Pope Clement VII (1378–94) to be buried in two places.68 His testament of 1402 expresses his wish to have his flesh interred at the Benedictine church of Saint Martial that he helped to establish in Avignon and to have his bones buried at the cathedral of Amiens.69 The will also instructs the cardinal’s executors to see to the completion of his tomb at the church of Saint Martial and to install his other tomb at Amiens Cathedral.70 Cardinal La Grange thus established a commemorative presence in two different buildings, both of which were of particular importance to him. The two tombs not only displayed the cardinal’s wealth, they also allowed him to accumulate suffrages by enlisting the spiritual services of two distinct communities. Unlike his episcopal precursors at Amiens and Notre-Dame, the cardinal chose not to situate his tomb at Amiens Cathedral in the lateral chapels he founded, opting instead to place it near the high altar. All that remains of the canopied structure is a white marble effigy, a casket dressed with weepers and a stone slab inscribed with an epitaph.71 The monument reprised key elements of earlier tombs. The effigy emphasized social station emblematically with a mitre and cardinal’s hat, while the inscription clearly identified the patron and ended with a demand for prayers. By having his tomb installed next to the high altar, Cardinal La Grange secured a commemorative presence in the most sacred part of the building. With this tomb and the chapels of Saint Jean Baptiste and Saint Jean l’Evangeliste, the cardinal established three topographically distinct loci for his perpetual commemoration at Amiens Cathedral.

  The cardinal needed papal permission because his plans entailed dividing his body. This practice became increasingly common in elite circles in the thirteenth century. See Elizabeth Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’, Viator, 12 (1981): pp. 221–70, especially pp. 238–40. On Cardinal La Grange’s desire to be buried in two places, see Anne McGee Morganstern, ‘The La Grange Tomb and Choir: A Monument of the Great Schism of the West’, Speculum, 48 (1973): pp. 52–69. 69   Paris, AN, X1A, 9807, fos 70v.–78r.; Sandron, ‘La fondation’, p.156. 70   Paris, AN X1A, 9807, fos 70v.–78r.; McGee Morganstern, ‘The La Grange Tomb and Choir’, p. 55, footnote 20. 71   The tomb was dismantled when the choir was renovated in 1751. Durand, Monographie, vol. 1, p. 25. 68

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Conclusion By the fourteenth century, cathedrals in northern France had been transformed, or were in the process of being transformed, to house rows of lateral chapels. To be sure, concerns about accommodating Masses, easing the circulation of people and reducing the cacophony of simultaneous services, are important explanations for the proliferation of chapels. These pragmatic concerns, however, are at best only part of the story. The chapels provided defined spaces in which patrons could manifest a permanent, material and conspicuous ‘presence’. The ubiquity of these chapels evidences how appropriate patrons found them as a means to fulfil the interconnected desires for intercession, commemoration and social display. Open to side aisles and ambulatories, the chapels allowed visitors visual and aural access to the objects and services within. Behind the visually permeable gates, the contents of the chapels enticed the senses of visitors, the interplay of media soliciting intercessory prayers and impressing the patron’s status upon the viewer. Despite the chapels’ sensual accessibility, physical access to them was the exclusive prerogative of elites, reflecting and reinforcing the social hierarchy. The fundamental purpose of Rayonnant chapels was to prompt thinking about the past, to arrest time, to block forgetting and to materialize that which was immaterial. After all, what could be more immaterial than ephemeral acts of charity and the decaying flesh of the deceased? With their varied objects and multisensory services, visible through and framed by lofty arches, the chapels did the work of memory. The objects in the spaces helped to fix specific versions of the past, while simultaneously subduing others. They presented particular and condensed aspects of the patrons as they had been in life, crystallizing for posterity their piety and charity, as well as their identity, wealth and rank. The ability of the chapels to accommodate varied forms of self-representation, as well as their capacity to house a multitude of objects and Masses, was key to their success. While lateral chapels effectively responded to individual desires for intercession and commemoration, the broader community of clerics at each cathedral also benefited from the alterations made to their buildings. Prominently located along the perimeter of cathedrals, the sweep of chapels showcased the power of the clergy in caring for the soul. The ‘dazzling luminosity’ of these chapels, to use Jean de Jandun’s words, boldly advertised the clergy’s official role as mediators between the dead in Purgatory and the living, who were called upon to remember them.

Chapter 6

Ritual Excommunication: 1 An ‘Ars Oblivionalis’? Christian Jaser

Ironically, it was a meeting of two declared mnemotechnicians that brought the idea of an art of forgetting to light for the first time in the Western tradition. As Cicero reported in his treatise ‘On the Ends of Goods and Evils’, the famous inventor of mnemotechnics, Simonides, offered to teach Themistocles the ‘ars memoriae’. Themistocles, likewise exceptionally gifted with a splendid memory, responded: ‘I would prefer to learn an “ars oblivionis”, an art of oblivion, because I am not able to forget what I would like to forget.’2 Twenty years ago, this paradoxical notion of an art of forgetting being as effectively applicable as the rhetorical art of memory was taken up by Umberto Eco in his strict semiotic analysis.3 According to Eco, a so-called ‘ars oblivionalis’ cannot be deduced from the classical model of the mnemonic arts. Defining memory as semiotics, Eco infers that, by definition, signs produce presence and not absence.4 Therefore, an ‘ars oblivionalis’, that is, a voluntary, elaborate technique of forgetting, is rendered impossible.5 Or, as Eco puts it laconically in the English title of his essay: ‘An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget it!’ Emanating from Eco’s oxymoron of an ‘ars oblivionalis’, this chapter will 1   Abbreviations used in this chapter are the following: ‘Friedberg’: Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2nd edn (2 vols, Leipzig, 1879–81). – ‘LexMA’: Lexikon des Mittelalters, ed. Robert-Henri Bautier et al. (10 vols, Munich, 1980–99). – ‘MGH’: Monumenta Germaniae Historica. – ‘PL’: Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. Jacques Paul Migne (221 vols, Paris, 1844–64). – ‘PRG’: Le pontifical romano-germanique du dixième siècle, ed. Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze (3 vols, Città del Vaticano, 1963– 72). The biblical references are numbered in accordance with the King James Authorised version. 2   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, Über die Ziele des menschlichen Handelns, ed. Olof Gigon and Laila Straume-Zimmermann (Munich, 1988), II, 104 (p. 160). See also Harald Weinrich, Lethe. Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich, 1997), p. 24. 3   For a discussion of Eco’s argumentation see Weinrich, p. 25 and Renate Lachmann, ‘Die Unlöschbarkeit der Zeichen: Das semiotische Unglück der Mnemonisten’, in Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann (eds.), Gedächtniskunst: Raum – Bild – Schrift. Studien zur Mnemotechnik (Frankfurt a.M., 1991), p. 111. 4   Umberto Eco, ‘An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget it!’, PMLA, 103/3 (May 1988): p. 258. 5   Ibid., p. 254.

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discuss a specifically medieval strategy for forgetting and producing absence: ritual excommunication. Firstly, the essay outlines the textual tradition of early and high medieval excommunication formularies and the main features of their performative implementation. Next, it reflects on the notion of an active, voluntary forgetting in the inventory of cursing formularies, especially with regard to the anticipated erasure from the Book of Life, in order to address excommunication as an imperative to forget. The following section examines the effect of excommunication as a threefold – social, spiritual and posthumous – liminality which placed the person concerned on the threshold between this life and the next. Based on these premises, the final part of the chapter discusses the paradox that the ritually forgotten excommunicant became an unforgettable protagonist. Though the majority of the material under examination is of French origin, examples from English, German and Italian sources are also included to widen the focus of the analysis.6 Ritual Excommunication: Textual Tradition and Performative Implementation This ‘first-class excommunication’, as Lester K. Little calls it, was staged as a public ritual, consisting of a mixture of verbal and gestural modes of communication.7 The sources often describe ritual excommunication as ‘anathema’, a term which originated – in the sense of a curse leading to social exclusion – in the Pauline letters.8 As a legally- and theologically-shaped practice of ecclesiastical discipline, ritual excommunication represented the sharpest weapon in the church’s arsenal of coercion, only used with regard to deadly sins and serious offences like murder, adultery, brigandage, arson, sacrilege, church burglary and mutilations, usually in response to the contumacious conduct of the excommunicant.9 Furthermore, it caused what the Council of Meaux-Paris in 846 called ‘aeternae mortis dampnatio’,

  In order to condense the chapter, printed sources are not quoted unless they are essential to the argument. In contrast, the original texts from manuscripts are given in the footnotes. 7   Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, NY, 1993), p. 32. See also Genevieve Steele Edwards, ‘Ritual Excommunication in Medieval France and England, 900–1200’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Stanford University, 1997). I thank Dr Edwards for kindly sending me parts of her dissertation. For a broader analysis of ritual excommunication see my Ecclesia maledicens. Rituelle und zeremonielle Exkommunikationsformen im Mittelalter (Tübingen, forthcoming 2013), chapter II. 8   For example, 1 Corinthians 16.22 and Galatians 1.9. See Walter Doskocil, Der Bann in der Urkirche: Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Munich, 1958), pp. 53–9; Kenneth Hein, Eucharist and Excommunication: A Study in Early Christian Doctrine and Discipline (Bern, 1973), pp. 104–105; Elizabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986), p. 7, n. 34. 9   A. Amanieu, ‘Anathème’, in Dictionnaire de droit canonique (7 vols, Paris, 1935), vol. 1, col. 513. 6

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the damnation to eternal death.10 On a transcendental level this meant that the excommunicant was deprived of the chance of achieving salvation. Beyond excommunication, anathema separated the person concerned, as Pope John VIII (872–82) put it in 872–73, not only from the fraternal society of fellow Christians, but also ‘from the body of Christ, that is, the church’.11 Nevertheless, sustained efforts to differentiate ‘excommunication’ from ‘anathema’ were quite rare in the early and high Middle Ages.12 Therefore, I will use the analytical term ‘ritual excommunication’ to signify the ultimate, high-end sanction of the church, that is, an orally and gesturally performed excommunication which had both social and spiritual consequences. Especially between the tenth and twelfth centuries, formularies concerning the staging of ritual excommunication were inscribed in liturgical manuscripts of monastic houses and episcopal churches, particularly in northern France and England.13 Approximately 50 of these local excommunication texts are extant today and they show a high level of variation in their inventory of cursing formulas.14 Given that these texts were constantly in danger of being erased or torn out by later readers who thought their presence in liturgical manuscripts inappropriate – another layer of forgetting – one may suppose that some formularies did not survive. One instance of this retroactive policy of forgetting with regard to the written remnants of the ecclesiastical cursing practice is the ‘Maledictio super iniustos’ of a twelfth-century lectionary of the collegiate church of Saint-Corneille in Compiègne, which was tentatively cut out but later, probably in the seventeenth century, sewn back in again. It was restored because the beginning of the treatise ‘Quid sit ecclesia’ had been cut out together with the excommunication formulary.15 This local thread of transmission was part of the phenomenon of feudal conflict in the period before the formation of bureaucratic procedures in church and state.16 Used particularly in the context of property disputes, ritual excommunication functioned as a tool of intervention in the complex and often conflictual relations

10   Die Konzilien der karolingischen Teilreiche 843–859, ed. Wilfried Hartmann, MGH Leges, Concilia, vol. 3 (Hannover, 1984), c. 56 (p. 111). 11   Epistolae Karolini Aevi, ed. Erich Caspar, MGH Epistolae, 7 (6 vols, Berlin, 1928), vol. 5, p. 280. Later Gratian integrated this decretal in his Decretum (C.3 q.4 c.12, Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 514). 12   See Vodola, p. 16 and Veronique Beaulande, Le malheur d’être exclu? Excommunication, réconciliation et société à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 2006), pp. 23–6. 13   Edwards, p. 17. 14   Ibid., p. 18. 15   Lectionary from Compiègne, Saint-Corneille (12th c.), Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS lat. 17304, fo. 74r. See Little, pp. 248–53. 16   On the relationship between interactive and bureaucratic modes of conflict processing, see Dominique Barthélemy, Chevaliers et miracles: la violence et le sacré dans la société féodale (Paris, 2004), p. 261.

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between ecclesiastical communities and the secular aristocracy.17 In general, feuds took place in a political and social context in which the protagonists shared the same values and paradigms.18 In this tight social network of neighbourhood and acquaintance, ritual excommunication as a ‘faide sacrale’, as ‘divine feudal action’, served to build up social pressure, thereby influencing public opinion and the local honour – and shame – economy.19 Like its complementary counterpart, the armed feud, excommunication was not aimed at a definitive cessation of conflict, but reflected the aspiration to negotiate a face-saving settlement, a gentlemen’s agreement: ‘Le dialogue n’est jamais interrompu longtemps’, as Dominique Barthélemy put it.20 In a feudal society whose actors oscillated constantly between friendship and enmity, cooperation and confrontation, ritual excommunication hardly ever implied irrevocable damnation, but rather served as a means of balancing the conflictual ‘score’ and as public leverage to initiate a compromise between the excommunicant and the ecclesiastical actors.21 In imminent or acute conflict situations, the latter’s arsenal consisted of several different, yet tightly interrelated, mechanisms: hagiographical ‘barbed-wire miracles’, sanction clauses in charters, liturgical calls for justice of religious communities (clamores), visionary literature and, finally, ritual excommunication.22 The reciprocal dynamic between the spiritual power of the churchmen on the one hand and the military power of secular rulers and local lords on the other hand was a key feature of the feudal ‘Spielregeln’ (‘playing by the rules’) analysed by Gerd Althoff and others.23 17   For the use of excommunication in the context of feudal conflict management, see Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 125–60 and Heinrich Fichtenau, Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts: Studien über Denkart und Existenz im einstigen Karolingerreich (Munich, 1992), pp. 512–19. 18   Barthélemy, pp. 80–81, 96. For a discussion of medieval feuding culture see Paul R. Hyams, Rancor & Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY, 2003), pp. 3–33. 19   Barthélemy, pp. 81, 92; Hyams, p. 96–123, 226. For the significance of public opinion and its emotional implications, see Hyams, pp. 11–12. 20   Barthélemy, pp. 16, 147. See also Barbara H. Rosenwein, Thomas Head and Sharon Farmer, ‘Monks and Their Enemies: A Comparative Approach’, Speculum, 66/3 (1991): p. 764. 21   Barthélemy, p. 79. 22   For the spiritual punishments in miracle stories see Alexander Murray, Excommunication and Conscience in the Middle Ages, The John Coffin Memorial Lecture, University of London, 13 February 1991 (London, 1991). For sanction clauses in charters see Jeffrey A. Bowman, ‘Do Neo-Romans Curse? Law, Land, and Ritual in the Midi (900– 1100)’, Viator, 28 (1997): pp. 1–32; Michel Zimmermann, Ecrire et lire en Catalogne (2 vols, Madrid, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 348–423. For liturgical clamores see Little, pp. 20–26. For visionary literature see, for example, Wilhelm Levison, ‘Die Politik in den Jenseitsvisionen des frühen Mittelalters’, in Max Kerner (ed.), Ideologie und Herrschaft im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1982), pp. 80–100. 23   See Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997).

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Aside from these local formularies, ritual excommunication was inscribed and increasingly condensed in the canonistic and liturgical literature of the church. Originating from Regino of Prüm’s early tenth-century work on ecclesiastical discipline, formularies of the ritual were diffused into the major canonical collections of Burchard of Worms (1008–12), Ivo of Chartres (after 1093) and Master Gratian (c. 1140), thereby gaining supra-local, virtually ‘official’ approval.24 The same tendency is manifest with regard to liturgical transmission. After Regino of Prüm’s formulas found their way into the Romano–Germanic pontifical from about 950, widely used in German and Italian episcopal churches, the ritual implementation was revised and juridically systematized by the canonist and liturgist William Durand the Elder, bishop of Mende (c. 1230–96), notably in his pontifical dating from 1293/95.25 In this form, it also became part of the pontifical compiled by Agostini Patrizi Piccolomini and Johannes Burckardt in 1485 and, finally, of the tridentine Roman pontifical of Pope Clement VIII (1592– 1605) from 1595/96, which remained formally in use until the second Vatican Council (1962–65).26 Ritual excommunication was normally promulgated during Sunday Mass, usually after the reading of the gospel, in the parish church or cathedral.27 Its implementation comprised six main elements. Firstly, the ‘narratio’: this section provided basic information about the ritual actors and the nature of their crime or misdeed, as well as some preliminary remarks on the legitimacy of the excommunication, mostly with reference to the biblical power to bind and loose according to Matthew 16.19.28

24   Regino of Prüm, De synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis, ed. F. G. A. Wasserschleben (Graz, 1964), lib. II, cc. 412–17 (pp. 369–75); Buchard of Worms, Decretum, PL, vol. 140, lib. XI, cc. 2–7 (pp. 856–60); Ivo of Chartres, Decretum, PL, vol. 161, lib. XIV, cc. 75–9 (cols 844–8); Master Gratian, Decretum, C.11 q.3 c.106 (Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 674: ‘Modus et forma excommunicationis’), C. 11 q.3 c.107 (Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 674: ‘De eodem’). 25   PRG, vol. 1, cc. LXXXV–XC (pp. 308–17): LXXXV. ‘Qualiter episcopus excommunicare infideles debeat’; LXXXVI. ‘Item alia excommunicationis allocutio’; LXXXVII. ‘Item alia excommunicatio’; LXXXVIII. ‘Item alia terribilior excommunicatio’; LXXXIX. ‘Excommunicatio brevis’; XC. ‘Excommunicatio Leonis papae’. For the manuscript diffusion and dating of this work, see PRG, vol. 3, pp. 3–57. Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, ed. by Michel Andrieu, Le Pontifical romain au Moyen-Age (4 vols, Città del Vaticano 1938–41), vol. 3, pp. 609–19 (‘Ordo excommunicandi et absolvendi’). 26   Il Pontificalis Liber d’Agostino Patrizi Piccolomini e Giovanni Burcardo (1485), ed. Manlio Sodi (Città del Vaticano, 2006), pp. 510–18 (‘Ordo excommunicandi et absolvendi’). See M. Klöckener, ‘Pontifikale’, in LexMA, vol. 7, col. 96. 27   Little, p. 34. 28   For the power to bind and loose see Ludwig Hödl, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Literatur und Theologie der Schlüsselgewalt (Münster, 1960).

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Secondly, the invocation of a divine ‘force field’ consisting of the Holy Trinity, apostles, patron saints and so on. Thereby, the ritual actors sought the legitimation and cooperation of divine authorities in order to accomplish the worldly and transcendental effects of excommunication. Thirdly, legal speech acts which the ritual actors pronounced as explicit performative utterances, such as ‘excommunicamus’ or ‘anathematizamus’. Once pronounced, these words executed the legal act of excommunication and created a new reality in the shape of the status transformation of the excommunicant in social and spiritual respects.29 Fourthly, curse formulas: generally, curses are speech formulas that imprecate harm and punishment on others, their belongings or on the curser himself.30 More abstractly, curses can be defined as a ‘highly effective medium of social control’ (Maximilian Oettinger), or, as Brenda Danet and Bryna Bogoch propose, as a genre which ‘attempts to control the behaviour of others, to invoke supernatural powers and, in certain cases, even to alter the forces of nature’.31 In the medieval excommunication formularies, the curse formulas are ‘second-order performative[s]’ which extract the spiritual effect of the speech act ‘anathematizamus’ in a long chain of separately cursed life circumstances, actions or body functions.32 Here, the ritual actors’ efforts to ensure their agency by calling upon biblical authority become particularly clear: they remembered the biblical canon, especially the curse formulas from Deuteronomy and the Psalms and applied them as divine speech acts for their oral proclamation.33 Alternatively, the optative construction of some Deuteronomy formulas (‘Maledictus sit’ – ‘May he be cursed’) was used as a framework for innovative additions.34 Furthermore, the fates of biblical anti-heroes like Dathan, Abiron, Ananias, Sapphira, Judas Iscariot, Herod, Pontius Pilate, Simon Magus and others were projected onto the

  For a definition of speech acts see John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. by J. O. Urmson and Martina Sbisà, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1976), pp. 1–11. 30   Franz Kiener, Das Wort als Waffe: Zur Psychologie der verbalen Aggression (Göttingen, 1983), p. 211. 31   Maximilan Oettinger, Der Fluch: Vernichtende Rede in sakralen Gesellschaften der jüdischen und christlichen Tradition (Konstanz, 2007), p. 1; Brenda Danet and Bryna Bogoch, ‘“Whoever Alters This, May God Turn His Face from Him on the Day of Judgment”: Curses in Anglo-Saxon Legal Documents’, The Journal of American Folklore, 105 (1992): p. 134. 32   Ibid., p. 144. 33   Most frequently cited were Deuteronomy 28 and Psalm 109. 34   See Deuteronomy 28.16–19. A fine example of such an innovative addition is extant in the excommunication formulary of the Norman abbey of Fécamp from the late tenth/early eleventh century (De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus […], ed. Edmond Martène, 2nd edn [4 vols, Antwerp, 1736], vol. 2, cols 911–12). 29

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excommunicant, as well as those of damned Roman persecutors of Christians, such as Nero, Decius, Valerian and Julian the Apostate.35 The ritual actors left no doubt that the excommunicant, provided that they died under the ban, would face damnation and punishment in the world to come. Their violent rhetoric anticipated that the person would be inescapably cast down into hell and tormented through countless cruel punishments.36 To sum up, by invoking divine powers, the curse formulas signified and effectuated the state of damnation of the excommunicated person, with respect to their temporal affairs as well as their prospects in the world to come. Sometimes even the audience was involved in the ritual process by acclaiming the validity of excommunication through a call and response pattern: ‘Excommunicatis et vos? Excommunicamus. Dampnatis et vos? Dampnamus.’37 Fifthly, gestural acts: with the oral proclamation of excommunication nearly at an end, there was a shift in medium towards a particular form of gestural performance. This shift is unsurprising if one accepts Jan-Dirk Müller’s view that the Middle Ages marked a ‘culture of visibility’, or if one follows JeanClaude Schmitt’s argument that medieval Christianity was ‘une religion du signe’ which conveyed and publicised religious power through symbolic objects and gestures.38 How the excommunication ritual was visualised in terms of symbolic communication was shown for the first time by Regino of Prüm: ‘Twelve priests should surround the bishop and hold burning candles in their hands which they should at the end of the anathema or excommunication throw down on the floor and on which they should trample with their feet’ (through which action the candles would be extinguished).39 Candles were an object of popular worship and custom and medieval Christians conceived candlelight as the light of life, that is, of spiritual life.40 As many formularies explain, therefore, the extinguished candle signified the spiritual extinction of the excommunicant. It is expressed in such terms in the   See, for example, the formulas from Fécamp (De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus, ed. Martène, vol. 2, col. 911). 36   See for example, the formula of the lectionary from Compiègne, Saint-Corneille, fo. 74r: ‘Cum diabolo et angelis eius habeant sortem et societatem in tartarei tormenti antro deputati et pereant in eternum.’ 37   Early thirteenth-century formulary of the abbey of Saint Bertin, BN, Paris, Nouvelles Acquisitions Latins 272, fo. 99v. 38   Jan-Dirk Müller, ‘Visualität, Geste, Schrift. Zu einem neuen Untersuchungsfeld der Mediävistik’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 122 (2003), p. 118; Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Raison de gestes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris, 1990), p. 57. 39   Regino of Prüm, lib. II, c. 413 (p. 372): ‘Debent autem XII sacerdotes episcopum circumstare, et lucernas ardentes in manibus tenere, quas in conclusione anathematis vel excommunicationis proiicere debent in terram, et pedibus conculcare.’ 40   Catherine Vincent, Fiat lux: lumière et luminaires dans la vie religieuse en Occident du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle (Paris 2004), esp. pp. 345–50. See also D. Postles, ‘Lamps, Lights and Layfolk: “Popular” Devotion Before the Black Death’, Journal of Medieval History, 25/2 (1999): pp. 97–114. 35

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early thirteenth-century formulary of the abbey of Saint Bertin (‘and just as this candle is extinguished, so may their souls be extinguished’) and in the so-called ‘excommunicatio terribilior’ of Regino of Prüm (‘And just as these lights, thrown down from our hands, are extinguished today, so may their light be extinguished in eternity’).41 Furthermore, the action of throwing the candles on the ground can be viewed as a distancing gesture, which fits well with the marginalising effects of excommunication and implies the meaning of damnation and separation. The aggressive gesture of stamping out the candles – especially in the ritual context of the Mass – visualised the loss of any individual hope for salvation. Altogether, the gestural programme of ritual excommunication reproduced and intensified the oral message of excommunication and cursing that preceded it. Sixthly and finally, the ‘escape clause’: the last section of nearly all formularies comprises a ‘nisi’-formula which suggests the reversibility of the just-implemented excommunication.42 If the excommunicant was willing to render satisfaction and perform proper penance, he or she could obtain absolution from the respective ritual actor, thereby immediately halting the worldly and divine effects of excommunication and returning to the status of an ordinary Christian.43 One has to stress, therefore, that ritual excommunication always left open the possibility of reconciliation. Excommunication as an Imperative to Forget: Erasure from the Book of Life The preceding analysis of the formulaic inventory shows that ritual excommunication was characterised by a rhetoric of separation, exclusion and deletion. Through curse formulas, the notion of an active, voluntary forgetting was explicitly conveyed. Four excommunication formularies of the tenth to twelfth centuries, from the Norman monasteries of Lyre and Jumièges and the bishoprics of Rochester and, probably, Sens, cite the ‘cursing psalm’ 109, thereby establishing the idea of the excommunicants being forgotten in this world: ‘Their memory shall be erased from 41   Formulary of the abbey of Saint Bertin, fo. 100r: ‘et sicut extinguitur candela ista sic extinguantur anime eorum’; Regino of Prüm, lib. II, c. 416 (p. 375): ‘Et sicut hae lucernae de manibus nostris proiectae hodie extinguuntur, sic eorum lucerna in aeternum extinguatur.’ 42   See, for example, the ‘escape clause’ in a twelfth-century diurnal from Amiens (BN, Paris, MS latin 13221, fo. 105v: ‘nisi ad emendacionem venerint et satisfacionem fecerint’). For the notion of the ‘escape clause’, see Little, p. 13. 43   See Sarah Hamilton, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Evidence for Rites for the Reconciliation of Excommunicants’, in Wilfried Hartmann (ed.), Recht und Gericht in Kirche und Welt um 900 (München, 2007), pp. 169–96. For the notion of ‘satisfaction’, see John Bossy, ‘Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation: Papers Read at the 2002 Summer Meeting and the 2003 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 106–18.

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earth.’44 Other texts extend forgetting into eternity. According to an excommunication formulary ascribed to Pope Leo VII (936–39) from 937 and later included in the Romano-Germanic pontifical, obstinate excommunicants would be ‘left to eternal oblivion’ and ‘as chaff before the wind’.45 Likewise, two formularies from the priory of Saint Fraumbourg at Senlis and the abbey of Saint Martial at Limoges, dating from the tenth and eleventh century respectively, provide for the effacement of the excommunicants’ memoria ‘for ever and ever’.46 A pontifical of the twelfth or thirteenth century, probably from Clairvaux, addresses the gesture of extinguishing candles as an act of forgetting: ‘As these candles are extinguished, the memory and name of the excommunicant shall be extinguished from the Book of Life.’47 Two French and three English excommunication formularies dating from the tenth to the twelfth centuries link eschatological oblivion to practices of heavenly bookkeeping. Mostly, these formulas echo psalm 69, verse 28: ‘Let them be blotted out of the book of the living and not be written with the righteous.’48 This ‘liber viventium’ or ‘vitae’ functions, like the burning or extinguished candle, as a material symbol which substantiates the eschatological-imaginary fact of attaining   Psalm 109.15: ‘dispereat de terra memoria eorum.’ 1. Lyre (second half of twelfth century), Bibliothèque municipale, Rouen, MS A.425, fo. 2v (edited in: De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus, ed. Martène, vol. 2, cols 910–11): ‘deleantur de terra viventium, nec ultra fiat memoria eorum.’ – 2. Jumièges (twelfth century), BM, Rouen, MS A.293, fos 148v–149r (edited in: ibid., cols 405–6): ‘et dispereat de terra memoria eorum.’ – 3. Rochester (first quarter of twelfth century), Corpus Christi College, Parker Library, Cambridge, MS 303, p. 338, ed. E.M. Treharne, ‘A Unique Old English Formula for Excommunication from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303’, Anglo-Saxon England, 24 (1995), p. 210: ‘dispereat cum Iuda traditore memoria eorum de terra iuuentium (corr. from MS: uiuentium).’ – 4. Miscellaneous manuscript, probably from Sens (c. tenth century or later), BN, Paris, MS latin 1568, fo. 126r: ‘sed cito pereat de terra memoria eorum.’ 45   PRG, vol. 1, p. 317 (XC. ): ‘[...] eternae oblivioni traditi, tanquam pulvis ante faciem venti fiant’ [Psalm 35.5]. For the problematic transmission of this supposed letter of Pope Leo VII, see Little, pp. 38–9 and Edwards, pp. 54–6. 46   Saint-Martial, Limoges (tenth century), BN, Paris, MS latin 5/II, fo. 220r–220v (ed. Little, p. 261): ‘sic extinguatur memoria eorum in secula [seculorum, written in Greek]’; Senlis, Saint-Fraumbourg (tenth or eleventh century), Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 1190, fo. 5v: ‘sic extinguatur memoria eorum ante viventem in secula seculorum.’ 47   Clairvaux (?) (twelfth or thirteenth century), Bibliothèque municipale, Troyes, MS 2272, fos 60r–60v: ‘Et sicut iste candele extinguuntur, ita extinguatur memoria et nomen suum de libro vite.’ 48   The formula ‘deleantur de libro viventium’ is extant in the following excommunication formularies: 1. BN, Paris, MS lat. 1568 (miscellaneous manuscript probably from Sens), fo. 126r. – 2. Senlis, Saint-Fraumbourg, Bibl. Ste. Gen., Paris, MS 1190, fo. 5v (there only: ‘deleantur de libro’). – 3. Abingdon (twelfth century), BN, Paris, MS latin 1792, fo. 191r. The complete psalm verse 69.28 (‘deleantur de libro viventium et cum iustis non scribantur’) appears in two formularies. – 4. Worcester (1096–1112), Corpus Christi College, Parker Library, Cambridge, MS 146, fo. 329r. – 5. Darley, Derbyshire, St. Helen (twelfth century), ibid., MS 422, p. 14. 44

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or losing salvation. Whereas the notion of a ‘book of fate’ and a ‘book of works’ was already known to ancient cultures, the Book of Life in terms of a list of the citizens of heavenly Jerusalem is a genuine ‘Biblical-Christian metaphor’.49 In this context, the idea emerged of a single book that documented the ‘exclusivity of salvation interests in the phase of apocalyptic expectancy’.50 According to the Book of Revelation, this book has been kept by God since the beginning of the world.51 However, at the end of time, this ‘absolute memory’ will no longer correspond with the reality of human sinfulness.52 The Book of Revelation adds that during the Last Judgement the Book of Life will be revised and irrevocably ratified according to the works of every individual: ‘And the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the Book of Life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.’53 The adjustment of different register systems, therefore, generates an updated list containing only the names of the redeemed – the impure sinners will be ‘cast into the lake of fire’.54 The judgement vision of the Book of Revelation thus presents damnation as an eschatological ‘ars oblivionalis’, bound to the medium of script and the pragmatic technique of list-keeping. In the afterlife, the material signs will be erased from the Book of Life, thus delivering the person concerned to final and irreversible forgetting. This procedure leaves no semiotic traces and allows no remembrance of the ‘having been forgotten’, or, as Hans Blumenberg put it, the damned will be ‘as having never been’.55 Here, a fundamental law of bureaucracy – and even of memoria – unfolds, freely adapted from Descartes: ‘Inscriptus, ergo sum’.56 All in all, one wonders whether the topic of forgetting with regard to the excommunication formularies could not be subsumed under the familiar notion of damnatio memoriae. During the imperial period of Roman Antiquity, the public and private images of a disgraced prince or a person convicted of lèse majesté were destroyed and the person’s name was erased from inscriptions and official records.57 However, the analogy between this sanction and the ecclesiastical 49   See Leo Koep, ‘Buch IV. (himmlisch)’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt (25 vols, Stuttgart, 1954–), vol. 2, col. 725 and Leo Koep, Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur altchristlichen Bildersprache (Bonn, 1952), pp. 31–6. 50   Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt a.M., 1986), p. 23. 51   Revelation 17.8. See Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich, 2003), pp. 152–3. 52   Koep, Das himmlische Buch, p. 33. 53   Revelation 20.12. 54   Revelation 20.15. See also Koep, Das himmlische Buch, pp. 32–3. 55   Blumenberg, p. 23. 56   Ibid., p. 24. 57   Friedrich Vittinghoff, Der Staatsfeind in der römischen Kaiserzeit: Untersuchungen zur ‘damnatio memoriae’ (Berlin, 1936), pp. 13, 18.

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measures of the Middle Ages is rather misleading. As Friedrich Vittinghoff has stated, the Roman damnatio memoriae dealt with state crimes and attacks on the political community, without being bound in any way to the sacral sphere.58 In contrast, the medieval erasure from the Book of Life was first and foremost a spiritual sanction, promulgated through clerical power and translated – admittedly, on condition of further contumacy – into an eschatological certainty. Given these peculiar characteristics, it must be considered as an imperative to forget sui generis. Producing Liminalities: The Social, Spiritual and Posthumous Effects of Excommunication Ritual excommunication significantly transformed the situation of the named malefactors: they were excluded from the community of the faithful and the clerical mediation of salvation, until they did proper satisfaction and penance. In other words, the ritual transferred the excommunicant to a liminal state of, as Victor Turner called it, ‘betwixt and between’, which suspended normal routines of everyday life.59 Using the model of Arnold van Gennep, the rites of passage involved in excommunication can be distinguished into three phases. These are: firstly, separation, the ritual proclamation of excommunication; secondly, liminality, the phase of being excommunicated; and thirdly, incorporation, the reintegration of the excommunicant into the Christian community.60 During the second phase (liminality), the person concerned is placed on a threshold which implies, according to Mary Douglas, the endangering of themselves and others.61 It was precisely the liminal status of the excommunicant that increasingly attracted the attention of canon lawyers, theologians and preachers in the high Middle Ages. As these writers sought to formalize and standardize the effects of excommunication in their glosses and commentaries, from the twelfth century onwards, the liminal status of the excommunicant became a frequently-used narrative motif in the ever-growing corpus of miracles (miracula), marvels (mirabilia) and exemplary tales (exempla).62 In particular, exempla, short narrative texts with a didactic tendency, were the ‘mass media’ of the Middle Ages, directly linked to the

  Ibid., p. 49.   Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York, 1995), pp. 108–9. 60   Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago, 1960), pp. 10–11. See also Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York, 1997), p. 36. 61   Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London, 2002), pp. 119–21. 62   See Vodola, especially pp. 44–111; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les revenants: les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (Paris, 1994), pp. 77–8. 58 59

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new preaching techniques of the mendicants.63 With regard to excommunication, these narratives served to define, for the excommunicants and their social neighbourhood alike, proper behaviour patterns and propagated excommunicants’ dangerous liminality, thereby fulfilling the task which was previously performed by the long curse formularies of the early and high medieval excommunication ritual. Moreover, the dynamics of excommunication as a rite of passage fit well into the overall fascination of exemplary literature with transformation and the rules that govern change, brilliantly studied by Caroline Walker Bynum.64 Situated between the speech acts of excommunication and absolution as boundaries to normality, the exempla stress the uniqueness of the liminal phase through images of transubstantial metamorphosis and bodily shape-shifting. By closely examining this phase, three distinct dimensions of liminality emerge: social, spiritual and posthumous. Firstly, a social liminality: apart from being excluded from all religious acts within the church, the excommunicant stayed within the community, but was actively avoided in everyday life, being cut off from daily social interaction as well as from commonplace rites of incorporation.65 Within canonistic and theological discourses, this avoidance mechanism was reduced to a catchy mnemonic: ‘Os, orare, vale, communio, mensa negatur’ [Kiss, prayer, greeting, community and table shall be denied].66 To impress this claim upon the respective social neighbourhood, excommunication was brought to public knowledge through ritual implementation and, moreover, charged with metaphors of contagion, impurity and disease that should be quite familiar to any scholar of the medieval discourse on heresy.67 In the eleventh century, when the legal rule that associating with an excommunicant would result similarly in excommunication reached general acceptance, Bernold of Constance

63   Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 254. See also E. Rauner, ‘Exempel, Exemplum’, in LexMA, vol. 4, col. 161. 64   Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf’, Speculum, 73 (1998): p. 1013. 65   For the social effects of excommunication see Beaulande, pp. 41–7. Clearly, this exclusion from religious life also had social implications. See John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, Past & Present, 100 (1983): pp. 29–61. 66   See the interpretation of the mnemonic in Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. Burkhard Neunheuser (Graz, 1985), q.21, art. 1 (pp. 71–2). 67   See R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1350 (Oxford, 1998), especially pp. 60–65; R.I. Moore, ‘Heresy as Disease’, in Willem Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (eds), The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages (11th – 13th c.): Proceedings of the International Conference, Louvain, May 13–16, 1973 (Leuven 1976), pp. 1–11; Thomas Scharff, ‘Die Körper der Ketzer im hochmittelalterlichen Häresiediskurs’, in Clemens Wischermann and Stefan Haas (eds), Körper mit Geschichte: Der menschliche Körper als Ort der Selbst- und Weltdeutung (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 133–49. For the modern relevance of metaphors of disease, see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London, 1979).

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warned in his treatise De excommunicatis vitandis against such dangerous contact: only avoidance of excommunicants guaranteed immunity from contagion.68 Reading the Swabian Appendix also compiled by Bernold, a canon from Constance Cathedral wrote a frequently-used proverb in the margins of the codex: ‘One mangy pig contaminates the whole flock.’69 In the collection of exempla compiled by the Dominican Stephen of Bourbon in the mid-thirteenth century, excommunication was imagined as the devil’s ‘mousetrap’.70 In one exemplum, when a Cistercian cardinal named ‘Corrardus’, possibly Conrad of Urach, met a demoniac during a legatine mission in Germany, the devil revealed through his medium that there was hardly anything as lucrative to him as a parish community which neglected to observe excommunication: if one parishioner was caught in this mousetrap, the other parishioners would follow suit.71 However, some mitigation of this devilish rule was introduced by popes and councils from the last quarter of the eleventh century. The canon ‘Quoniam multos’ (1078) of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) declared that the wife, children, dependants and servants of an excommunicated lord could associate with him without incurring excommunication, unless their advice had contributed to his crime. The 1078 canon also decreed that excommunication was generally only contagious at first hand.72 Nevertheless, theologians and canon lawyers continued to pressure local communities to avoid excommunicants. This aim was accomplished principally through the metaphor of leprosy, which was used as an emblematic icon of the danger of contagion.73 As Thomas of Chobham noted in his Summa confessorum (c.1215), ‘Major excommunication, also called anathema, is quasi-leprosy.’74 Similar projections of disease and pollution are revealed in the canonistic commentaries of the fifteenth-century Spanish theologian Juan of Torquemada, where excommunication is described as ‘spiritual leprosy’ and

  Bernold von Konstanz, De excommunicatis vitandis, ed. Doris Stöckly, MGH Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui, 15 (Hannover, 2000), pp. 83–4. 69   Vodola, p. 26, n. 124. 70   For the ‘Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus’ of Stephen of Bourbon (compiled 1250–61), see Andrea L. Winkler, ‘The Excommunicated Castle: Clerical Power and the Natural World’, in Anne J. Duggan, Joan Greatrex and Brenda Bolton (eds), Omnia disce: Medieval Studies in Memory of Leonard Boyle, O.P. (Aldershot, 2005), p. 233. 71   Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIIIe siècle, ed. Albert Lecoy de la Marche (Paris, 1877), c. 307 (p. 259). 72   Friedberg, vol. 1, cols 672–3 (C.11 q.3 c.103). See also Vodola, pp. 24–7. 73   On leprosy and contagion in the Middle Ages, see François-Olivier Touati, ‘Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval Minds and Societies’, in Lawrence I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk (eds), Contagion: Perspectives from PreModern Societies (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 161–83. 74   Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield (Louvain, 1968), Art. VI, Dist. I, qu. 4a (p. 248). 68

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excommunicants are equated with ‘lepers, even dogs and pigs’.75 One could counter that these are only metaphors, but, as in the discourse on heresy, the ideological blurring of boundaries between the spiritually and physically sick and between man and animal served to create the social reality of avoidance.76 Secondly, a spiritual liminality: in Stephen of Bourbon’s collection, there is one exemplum that, with different spatial and temporal settings, also appears in hagiographical texts.77 It encodes the spiritual dimension of excommunication by means of a simple before-and-after logic. The core narrative is the following: due to lay indifference towards excommunication, a saint decides to demonstrate its effects through a simple example. He takes a loaf of white bread in his hands and says (in the case of the ‘sanctus abbas’ in Stephen’s exemplum): ‘Dear Bread, even though you do not deserve it, I have to show through you the truth of our faith and the cursedness of the souls of those who do not respect excommunication. I excommunicate you!’ The bread immediately turns black and its interior appears black, musty and corrupted, but after absolution it reverts to its former condition.78 What happens here is an inversion of the Eucharist miracles becoming prominent in the thirteenth century.79 Instead of salvation, in this context clerical speech acts cause short-term diabolicity, or, in Stephen’s words, ‘Excommunication contaminates souls and, due to cursedness, turns them black, a devilish colour.’80 Spiritual liminality is even more apparent in the next example in Stephen of Bourbon’s collection: ‘Anathema delivers to Satan: as soon as a person is excommunicated, he is delivered to Satan.’81 A canon of Gratian’s Decretum attributed to Augustine had already linked the motif of delivery, derived from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, to ecclesiastical excommunication: the latter produces absence from the community of the church, and because the devil is located ‘outside the church’, in contrast to Christ, who is located within the church, the excommunicant is delivered to Satan.82 Consequently, canonists like Huguccio, Laurentius Hispanus and William Lyndwood defined the excommunicant as a ‘limb

75   Juan de Torquemada, Repertorium super toto decreto (Lyon, 1519–20), ad C.11 q.3 c.33 (s.v. Nihil). 76   See Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, ‘Die “widernatürliche Sünde” in der theologischen Pest- und Leprametaphorik des 13. Jahrhunderts’, Forum Homosexualität und Literatur, 21 (1994): p. 8, and Scharff, ‘Die Körper’, pp. 140–41. 77   For the diffusion of this narrative, see Frederic C. Tubach, Index exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Teligious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1969), no. 754, p. 62. 78   Anecdotes historiques, Lecoy de la Marche, c. 308 (pp. 259–60). 79   See Bynum, pp. 1009–10; Peter Browe, Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters (Breslau, 1938). 80   Anecdotes historiques, Lecoy de la Marche, c. 308 (p. 259). 81   Ibid., c. 309 (p. 260). 82   1 Corinthians 5.5; Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 653 (C.11 q.3 c.32).

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of the devil’.83 Through this appropriation into the realm of the diabolical, the person concerned was exposed to afflictions, physical injury and death. Supplementing a statement of Peter the Lombard, the Gemma ecclesiastica of Gerald of Wales asserted: ‘The devil has a major power to rage against the body and soul of the excommunicant.’84 Alongside ‘evil diseases, imminent incarceration by enemies and many calamities of body, soul and possessions’, Stephen of Bourbon also anticipated the sudden, violent death of the excommunicant.85 In another exemplum, as two excommunicants and three other people try to cross a bridge over the river Loire, a ship collides with the bridge. Only the excommunicants perish in the floods, admittedly not without a pinch of fatalistic commitment.86 On the one hand the object of diabolical machinations, on the other hand constituting an aspect of satanic power, the excommunicant was imagined to stand, in a distinctive way, on the threshold between this life and the next. Thirdly, a posthumous liminality. If the excommunicant missed the chance to be reintegrated while still living and died without prior absolution, a spatial exclusion took place which indicated the excommunicant’s everlasting absence. The excommunication formularies prescribed that the corpse of such an individual be buried outside the cemetery in unholy ground.87 The clearest demarcation line is drawn in a rather late piece of evidence, when the synod of Tournai in 1481 decreed that the minimum distance between the excommunicant’s place of burial and the cemetery should be 20 feet.88 Earlier on, the Flores historiarum of Roger of Wendover (d.1236) reported that, in 1229, at the behest of a priest, an excommunicated usurer was buried at a parting of the ways outside the village – a procedure heavily contested

83   Huguccio, Summa super decretis, ad C.11 q.3 c.32 (edited in: Josephus Zeliauskas, De excommunicatione vitiata apud glossatores [1140–1350] [Zürich, 1967], p. 78*); Laurentius Hispanus, Glossa Palatina, ad C.11 q.3 c.32 (ed. in ibid., p. 180*). For William Lyndwood’s appraisal of the excommunicant as ‘limb of the devil’ see R.H. Helmholz, The Spirit of the Classical Canon Law (Athens, GA, 1996), p. 375. 84   Giraldi Cambrensis opera, ed. John S. Brewer (8 vols, London, 1862), vol. 2, c. LIII (p. 158): ‘Datur etiam diabolo potestas major in corpus excommunicati et animam saeviendi, qui gratia Dei illi subtrahitur’; Peter the Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 3rd edn (2 vols, Grottaferrata, 1971–81), vol. 2, lib. IV, dist. XVIII, c. 6, no. 6 (p. 362). 85   Anecdotes historiques, Lecoy de la Marche, c. 310 (p. 261): ‘Multi eciam contumaces et diu excommunicacionem sustinentes, divino judicio hoc faciente, sepe duris infirmitatibus opprimuntur et afficiuntur, vel in carceribus hostium affliguntur, et multis calamitatibus in presenti, in anima et corpore et rebus, atteruntur.’ 86   Ibid., c. 313 (p. 263). 87   Letter of Pope Leo I to Rusticus of Narbonne, PL, vol. 54, ep. 167 (cols 1205–06); Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 654 (C.11 q.3 c.37); Friedberg, vol. 2, col. 553 (X.3.28.12). 88   Concilia Germaniae, ed. Joseph Hartzheim and Johann Friedrich Hartzheim (8 vols, repr. Aalen 1970–96), vol. 5, c.5 (pp. 529–30).

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by the bereaved wife and sons.89 In the excommunication formularies, the burial of an excommunicant was frequently designated by the biblical phrase ‘burial of an ass’.90 Other excommunication formularies anticipated that the corpse ‘shall be as dung upon the face of the earth’ (Jeremiah 16.4) or ‘shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth’ (Deuteronomy 28.26).91 Significantly, these passages occur precisely in those excommunication formularies which also contain formulas regarding mundane or eschatological forgetting. Apparently, the social person, the soul and the dead body of the excommunicant constituted a triad prone to being forgotten completely. Likewise, the church denied excommunicants the right to all funerary services and posthumous rites of passage: therefore, they were excluded from the liturgical commemoration of the dead and from intercessory prayer.92 Thus, for excommunicants the church withdrew from the ‘role of middle man’ that it played in all exchanges between the living and the dead.93 However, as Jean-Claude Schmitt has shown, the Christian commemoration of the dead was marked by ambivalence: on the one hand, it represented a form of collective remembrance, on the other hand, it functioned as a social technique of forgetting.94 Schmitt points out that medieval memoria actually tended to separate the living from the dead and to attempt to ‘cool down’ the painful remembrance of the bereaved.95 To use an expression of Paul Ricoeur, memoria aimed to create the ‘appeasement of memory’.96 Correspondingly, the regular course of Masses and prayers took place with ever-increasing time-lags – three days, seven days, one month, one year after death – and the services themselves also became increasingly brief. Thus, the process of commemoration and the framing of remembrance were supposed to facilitate forgetting.97 Contrary to most deceased Christians, the deceased excommunicant could not be subjected to these temporally sequenced techniques. If one also considers the separate burial place, the deceased excommunicant was clearly treated differently from other deceased Christians.98

89   Roger of Wendover, The Flowers of History, ed. Henry G. Hewlett (3 vols, London, 1886–89), vol. 2, p. 380. 90   For example, Regino of Prüm, lib. II, c. 416 (p. 375): ‘sepultura asini sepeliantur.’ See Jeremiah 22.19: ‘sepultura asini sepelietur.’ 91   For the former, see Regino of Prüm, lib. II, c. 416 (p. 375); for the latter, see, for example, 1. PRG, vol. 1, p. 317 (c. XC. ): ‘sintque cadavera eorum in escam cunctis volatilibus caeli et bestiis agri.’ 92   See Franz Kober, Der Kirchenbann nach den Grundsätzen des canonischen Rechts (Tübingen, 1857), p. 243. 93   See Geary, Living with the Dead, p. 90 and Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 136. 94   Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 18. 95   Ibid., p. 17. 96   Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, 2006), p. 412. 97   Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 17. See also Weinrich, p. 41. 98   Schmitt, Les revenants, pp. 16–18.

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Against this background, it is unsurprising that the medieval imagination attributed various abnormalities to the corpse of the excommunicant. The theme of fear and uneasiness runs through the exemplary narratives in relation to the opening up of graves. For example, the bones of an excommunicant illegally buried in consecrated ground shook so heavily that his gravemate was forced to seek help from the living.99 In another exemplum, an excommunicated woman’s corpse is ‘buried’ in a tree and harassed by a group of stray dogs, whereupon her fellow parishioners decide to bury her deeply, with a large stone on top of the grave – but to no avail, the corpse is still attacked.100 The wrongful burial of an excommunicant created the idea of the mobility of the corpse within the tomb, if one follows the story that the bishop of Querzy told during the synod of Limoges in 1031. Despite the bishop’s refusal, the corpse of an excommunicated knight was buried in consecrated ground. The next morning, his nude body was found lying on the earth far away from the untouched tomb, whereupon his fellow knights reburied him under a heavy weight of earth and stones. The next day, however, they found him anew thrown out of his tomb and, several reburials later, they decided to inter him away from the cemetery. On hearing this story, the Limoges synod applauded it as a divine confirmation of the ecclesiastical authority to exclude the excommunicant from a Christian burial.101 Other narratives imagined the body of the excommunicant amidst boiling hot, fetid water in the opened grave, where the corpse was still ‘fresh’ and uncorrupted.102 This is important, because from the perspective of early modern Western commentators, the link between excommunication and incorruptibility was, rather pejoratively, considered as an exclusive feature of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, this notion is deeply rooted in the religious culture of Russians and Greeks alike.103 But the theme of the incorruptibility of the excommunicant’s corpse also circulated in the historiography and exemplary literature of the Western   Le speculum laicorum: edition d’une collection d’exempla, composée en Angleterre à la fin du XIIIe siècle, ed. J. Th. Welter (Paris, 1914), cap. XXXIV, c. 280 (p. 57). 100   Anecdotes historiques, Lecoy de la Marche, c. 314 (pp. 263–4). The laying down of stone was a common defence measure against revenants. See Claude Lecouteux, Geschichte der Gespenster und Wiedergänger im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1987), p. 30; Nancy Caciola, ‘Wraiths, revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture’, Past & Present, 152 (1996): p. 20. 101   Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, ed. Giovanni Domenico Mansi, 53 vols (Florence, 1759–1927), vol. 19, col. 541. 102   Le Speculum Laicorum, cap. XXXIV, c. 281 (pp. 57–8); Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 12630 (probably from the monastery of Ranshofen, early twelfth century), fo. 70r. 103   See Jean Dumont Baron de Carlscroon, Nouveau voyage du Levant [...] (La Haye, 1694), lettre XXII, p. 346. Augustin Calmet, Traité sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires [...] (Paris, 1751), vol. 2, p. viii. For Russia, see Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1992), p. 92. Regarding Greek Orthodoxy, see W. Speyer, ‘Fluch’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 7 (Stuttgart, 1969), col. 1249. 99

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Middle Ages.104 Adam of Bremen included it in his History of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen of about 1080: ‘As is reported, Libentius had condemned pirates devastating the bishopric with the sword of anathema. One of these died in Norway, whose body had not decayed even 70 years after his death.’105 In the fourteenth century, the Italian novelist Franco Sacchetti treated this preservation of the body as a known fact: ‘On the one hand, we say that the corpse of an excommunicant remains intact and does not decay; on the other hand, we say that an incorruptible corpse is a saintly one.’106 Sacchetti was on the right track: in terms of their incorruptibility, the excommunicant was similar to the saint, whose incorruptible, sweet-smelling corpse is a constant theme of hagiography.107 Both were distinguished from the majority of Christians, regarding whom Genesis (3.19) states: ‘For dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.’108 The special status of the bodies of the deceased excommunicant and the saint was due to the fact that both were charged with otherworldly energy: the saint was an agent of divine power, a ‘vir Dei’ (‘man of God’) and the cursed excommunicant was, as we have already seen, a ‘limb of the devil’.109 Incorruptibility also implied another dimension: Thomas of Cantimpré stated in his Bonum universale de apibus (1256–63), that there was a basic connection between flesh and vitality: thus corpses, until they decayed, still possessed a certain vitality.110 The consecrated soil of the cemetery, denied to the excommunicant, putatively accelerated decomposition: for example, the soil of the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris was reputed to reduce a corpse to bones in just nine days.111 This idea no doubt accentuated the notion of the incorruptibility of the excommunicant’s corpse. The Excommunicant: An Unforgettable Protagonist The posthumous fate of excommunicants, therefore, was distinguished in three ways. Firstly, they were buried outside the cemetery in unholy ground; secondly, Christian rites of passage were denied to them; thirdly, their corpses were credited with incorruptibility and consequently with continuing vitality. Due to these   See Murray, p. 21.   Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, ed. Bernhard Schmeidler, MGH, Script. rer. germ., 3rd edn (Hannover, 1917), lib. II, c.33(31) (p. 94). 106   Franco Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, ed. Valerio Marucci (Rome, 1996), Novella CLVII (p. 511). 107   Ibid. See also Arnold Angenendt, ‘Corpus incorruptum. Eine Leitidee der mittelalterlichen Reliquienverehrung’, Saeculum. Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte, 42 (1991), pp. 320–48. 108   See Schmitt, Les revenants, pp. 228–9. 109   Ibid., pp. 69–74. 110   See the paraphrase in Caciola, p. 32. 111   Philippe Ariès, Geschichte des Todes, trans. Hans-Horst Henschen and Una Pfau, 6th ed. (Munich, 1993), p. 78. Also see Caciola, p. 33. 104 105

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factors, the deceased excommunicant became, as Peter Brown put it, ‘a very special dead’ and a predestined revenant.112 Indeed, the excommunicant formed part of the invasion of ghosts which, according to Jean-Claude Schmitt, spread explosively into the marvel and exemplary literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.113 This was closely linked to the twelfth-century ‘birth of purgatory’ that accentuated the obligations of the living to the dead.114 The majority of Christian revenants appeared as supplicants on their own behalf. More precisely, by returning to the realm of the living and by transcending the boundary between life and death, the excommunicated revenant aimed to obtain a spiritual service, absolution.115 Nevertheless, the excommunicated revenant only rarely appears as an honest, humbly suppliant ghost.116 Much more often, the excommunicated revenant resembles the dangerous dead of the Scandinavian sagas and seeks absolution by harassment and physical violence.117 Among the 12 ghost stories written in about 1400 by an anonymous monk of the Cistercian abbey of Byland, Yorkshire, there is one narrative, allegedly set at the time of King Richard II of England (1377– 99), that details the long route to renormalizing the excommunicated revenant and bringing him, through a fourfold metamorphosis, to absolution.118 Initially, the revenant appears in the shape of an incandescent raven ambushing and physically injuring a tailor named Snowball.119 The figure of the raven incarnates the dangerous diabolicity of an excommunicant who in this phase is furthest away from absolution. Thereupon, the revenant, transforming into a dog with a necklace, tells Snowball to go to a priest, request his absolution and commission 180 masses for his soul.120 If Snowball does this, his injury will be healed; otherwise, ‘his flesh would rot, his skin would shrivel and be loosened from the body’.121 Clearly, an offer one cannot refuse and an offer that links Snowball’s physical healing to the revenant’s spiritual healing. After fulfilling the blackmailer’s demands, Snowball goes to a second meeting with the revenant who appears at first as a goat   Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saint: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1982), p. 76. 113   Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 253. 114   See the classic study of Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981). 115   Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 169. Cf. Mireille Othenin-Girard, ‘Helfer und Gespenster: Die Toten und der Tauschhandel mit den Lebenden’, in Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (eds), Kulturelle Reformation. Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600 (Göttingen, 1999), pp. 177–8. 116   See an example in Walter Map, De nugis curialium, Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. Montague R. James (Oxford, 1983), dist. II, c. 30 (p. 206). 117   See Schmitt, Les revenants, pp. 103, 226–7. 118   For the ghost stories of the Byland monk see Schmitt, Les revenants, pp. 168–73; Lecouteux, pp. 153–160; Simpson, pp. 394–400. 119   ‘Twelve Medieval Ghost-Stories’, ed. Montague R. James, English Historical Review, 37 (1922): pp. 413–22, no. 2 (p. 415). 120   Ibid. 121   Ibid., pp. 415–6. 112

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before metamorphosing into a tall, ugly and emaciated dead body and assuring the tailor that he has obtained the requested absolution.122 To summarise, this story shows a linear narrative of progress: from excommunication to absolution, from dangerousness to harmlessness, from diabolicity to humanity. In other cases, absolution also resulted in a bodily transformation, but one with ‘normal’ biological implications. The incorruptible body of the pirate in Adam of Bremen’s chronicle finally returned to dust after his absolution.123 Likewise, the corpses of excommunicants that were found amidst boiling hot water eventually decomposed, signalling the effectiveness of ecclesiastical absolution and, implicitly, its divine confirmation.124 In the revenant narratives, the normalising effect of absolution is imagined as an eventual ‘resting in peace’: Walter Map’s humble ghost goes stante pede, accompanied by a great train of people, back to his burial place and climbs into the grave, which immediately closes over him – a fine closure, for both his reassurance and that of others.125 Conclusion In general, revenant narratives and exempla reflect the dynamics of medieval conflict processing, leaving the way open to resolution through an absolution post mortem. From the eleventh century, charters and chronicles indicate frequent negotiations between kin groups and clerical actors concerning the posthumous absolution of an excommunicant and, consequently, the location of their burial place.126 Influenced by the new notion of penance, the possibility of an absolution post mortem was finally sanctioned by the decretal ‘A nobis’ (1199) of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), later included in the Liber Extra.127 This legal mitigation was subject to the excommunicant having shown clear signs of repentance and contrition prior to death.128 Concomitantly, Innocent III obliged the excommunicant’s heirs to give the Church proper satisfaction in the place of the deceased.129   Ibid. and p. 417.   Adam of Bremen, p. 94. 124   See Le Speculum laicorum, cap. XXXIV, c. 281 (pp. 57–8); Munich, BSB, Clm 12630, fo. 70r. 125   ‘Twelve Medieval Ghost-Stories’, nos 6 (p. 419) and 9 (p. 420); Walter Map, dist. II, c. 30 (p. 206). 126   See Geary, Living with the Dead, pp. 141–2, 149–50. For late medieval negotiations see Beaulande, pp. 220–21. 127   For the new notion of penance and its incorporation into ghost stories, see C.S. Watkins, ‘Sin, Penance and Purgatory in the Anglo-Norman Realm: The Evidence of Visions and Ghost Stories’, Past & Present, 175 (2002): p. 25. 128   Friedberg, vol. 2, cols 899–900 (X.5.39.28). See Vodola, pp. 38–9, 156. 129   Friedberg, vol. 2, col. 900 (X.5.39.28). 122 123

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In line with these legal requirements, the revenant narratives were constructed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the performative speech acts framing the liminal phase of excommunication. Both the ritual act of excommunication and absolution were presented as rhetorics of binding and loosing, effecting on the one hand social, spiritual and posthumous liminalities and on the other hand reintegration and normalization. Thereby, the ritual passage across the boundary line between an ordinary Christian life and the liminal status of an excommunicant initiated a phase of manifest abnormality, ambivalently defined by images of transubstantiation and metamorphosis. The excommunicant was rendered diabolical, yet his or her liminality led to contrition – altogether, there was a period of change which was governed by the clerical ability to bring about, ultimately, the excommunicant’s salvation.130 In consequence, when excommunicants were imagined in exempla or ghost stories as revenants requesting absolution, their liminal status and ability to change extended beyond physical death, thereby transcending the techniques of forgetting of the excommunication formularies. The irreversible absence imagined in the formulas was superseded by a narrative hyperpresence, which assigned excommunicants the role of a literally unforgettable protagonist. Through these stories, a negotiation space was outlined which not only reflected contemporary social and legal practices, but also accentuated the role of excommunication as an instrument of conflict management. Ritual excommunication reveals a functional dialectic of forgetting and remembering which oscillated between this life and the next, normality and anomaly, the power to bind and the benefit of being loosened. It threatened the excommunicant with oblivion in both the mundane and the eschatological senses and thereby created an unforgettable character, in order to gain a belated absolution from the former social environment. Therefore, one may conclude that the rigidity of the ‘ars oblivionalis’ contained in the formulaic inventory of ritual excommunication masks the potential of re-remembering. In other words: ritual excommunication implies, as Ricoeur called it, a constantly negotiable ‘backup forgetting’.131

  See Bynum, p. 1013; Winkler, p. 243.   Ricoeur, p. 414.

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PART III Memory, Reading and Performance

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Chapter 7

The Speculum Maius, Between Thesaurus and Lieu de Mémoire Mary Franklin-Brown

Sometime around 1244, Vincent of Beauvais opened his preface to the Speculum maius by citing three obstacles to his contemporaries’ mastery of available knowledge: ‘multitudo librorum et temporis brevitas memoriae quoque labilitas’ [‘the multitude of books, the brevity of time, and the unreliability of the memory’].1 Of these barriers to knowledge, the first has been much discussed by scholars,2 and   Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, Prologue, chapter 1. I cite the text of the prologue from Anna-Dorothee Von den Brincken’s edition, ‘Geschichtsbetrachtung bei Vincenz von Beauvais. Die “Apologia Actoris” zum Speculum Maius’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 34 (1978): pp. 410–99. Readers should be aware that multiple redactions of the prologue survive, with different chapter divisions; Serge Lusignan has edited one of the earlier redactions of the text in Préface au Speculum maius de Vincent de Beauvais: réfraction et diffraction (Montréal and Paris, 1979). Both editions offer texts far superior to that given in the last printing of the entire encyclopedia (Speculum quadruplex sive speculum maius (4 vols, Douai, 1624)). Unfortunately, there exists no more recent edition of the entire Speculum maius, and the Douai edition, now available in facsimile (Graz, 1965), remains the only widely-available source for the main text of the encyclopedia. Accordingly, my references for any portion of the encyclopedia other than the prologue correspond to the book and chapter numbers of the Douai edition. All English translations in the present chapter are my own unless otherwise indicated. Monique Paulmier-Foucart, with the collaboration of M.-C. Duchenne, has published a French translation of the prologue in Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir du monde (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 147–73. This book provides an invaluable introduction to the intellectual context and contents of the Speculum maius as a whole, while Von den Brincken and Lusignan’s editions of the prologue are each accompanied by rich analyses and contextualization. 2   For a discussion of the expansion of learning as a motivation for the Speculum maius, see, most recently, Part I of Paulmier-Foucart’s Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir and Chapter 1 of my Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (Chicago, 2012). Much of the scholarship on the Speculum maius has been published as articles and conference proceedings, rather than monographs. Several anthologies have been devoted to Vincent of Beauvais, among them Monique Paulmier-Foucart, Serge Lusignan and Alain Nadeau (eds), Vincent de Beauvais: intentions et réceptions d’une œuvre encyclopédique au moyen âge (Saint-Laurent and Paris, 1990); and Serge Lusignan and Monique PaulmierFoucart (eds), Lector et compilator: Vincent de Beauvais, frère prêcheur, un intellectuel et son milieu au XIIIe siècle (Montréal and Nancy, 1997). Ann M. Blair has recently studied 1

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the second requires no explanation. The third may seem equally self-evident at first glance, but the contributors to this volume amply demonstrate the polysemia of the term memoria. What precisely is this memory whose instability justified (at least to Vincent’s mind) the devotion of a quarter century of scholarly labour and more than three million words of writing to create a text that would remedy its failings?3 The fact that the word ‘thesaurus’ [‘treasure house’] was both one of the possible titles for encyclopedic texts in the Middle Ages, and a common medieval metaphor for the well-stocked memory would seem to link Vincent’s memoria to the medieval practice of memory, which has been extensively studied by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers.4 If the memoria cited in Vincent’s prologue is of this kind, then the Speculum maius would seem to serve as a supplement to the individual’s memory: a single, real, concrete place where readers could seek text that they could not locate in their own, imaginary treasure house. It would be in no way remarkable for Vincent to have felt the need for such a memory supplement: over the course of the scholastic period, the translation and renewed circulation of old books and the writing of new ones – the multitudo librorum to which he refers – had created a potential intellectual storehouse so expansive that the entirety of its contents could no longer be known and recalled by individuals of anything less than extraordinary talents. Nevertheless, Vincent’s acknowledgement of the changes taking place in his intellectual milieu may suggest that the memory he wished to shore up was not only any given individual’s personal store, but also the collective memory of an intellectual community whose rapid transformation was raising at least some vague awareness that texts from the past belonged to a cultural heritage at risk of subsiding into obscurity. Later in the prologue, Vincent would lament that certain edifying texts had been almost entirely forgotten and would cite the preservation of such texts as another motivation for compiling his encyclopedia.5 From this perspective, the Speculum maius may be understood as the abode of a different sort of memory: its tomes may constitute the kind of ‘place’ evoked by Pierre Nora’s now commonly-cited lieu de mémoire.6 the problem of “too much to know” over a broader historical span, but focusing particularly on the early modern period; see Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, 2010). 3   Vincent seems to have worked on the Speculum maius c. 1235–60. It is worth noting that, in that time, he also published a brief summary of the historical portion of the Speculum maius under the suggestive title of Memoriale. 4   Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966) and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990). On classical and medieval references to the memory as a ‘thesaurus’, see the latter, pp. 33–5. The best known ‘thesaurus’ of the scholastic period is in fact an Old French text, the Livres dou tresor of Brunetto Latini (c. 1260–65). 5   Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, Prologue, chapter 2. 6   Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (7 vols, Paris, 1984–92). There is an English translation of select essays by Arthur Goldhammer, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (3 vols, New York, 1996–98).

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In this chapter, therefore, I should like to suggest that the relationship between the scholastic encyclopedia7 and memory is best understood when memoria is defined in two ways: as a store cultivated by each individual scholar, according to the medieval practice that enabled the scholar to enter the literary community, and also as something at once more fugitive and more modern, the remnants of a lost collective store that survive in a concrete place, which itself eventually becomes a symbol. In order to make this argument, I propose to situate Vincent’s text between two other encyclopedias widely known in their time: Hrabanus Maurus’s De rerum naturis (sometimes known as the De universo), compiled 842–6,8 and the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, compiled by Diderot, d’Alembert and a number of other writers in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.9 This last choice for comparison may come as a surprise, but in purely chronological terms, Vincent’s encyclopedia is not significantly closer to the De rerum naturis than to the Encyclopédie. Four centuries separate it 7   I elaborate upon the notion of the ‘scholastic encyclopedia’ and the relationship between scholasticism and encyclopedism in Chapter 1 of my Reading the World. For medieval encyclopedism in general, particularly helpful recent studies are Christel Meier, ‘Grundzüge der mittelalterlichen Enzyklopädik: Zu Inhalten, Formen und Funktionen einer problematischen Gattung’, in Ludger Grenzmann and Karl Stackmann (eds), Literatur und Laienbildung im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 467–503; Christel Meier, ‘Über den Zusammenhang von Erkenntnistheorie und enzyklopädischem Ordo in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 36 (2002): pp. 171–92; and Bernard Ribémont, De natura rerum, études sur les encyclopédies médiévales (Orléans, 1995). 8   The most recent print edition of this text (under the title De universo) is that of the Patrologia Latina, vol. 111, cols 9–613, which reproduces the text of the fifteenth-century edition of Adolf Rusch. William Schipper is preparing a new edition, forthcoming in the Brepols series Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis. I cite from the online version (http://www.mun.ca/rabanus, website now disabled) of the latter edition. On Hrabanus’s encyclopedia, see especially Elisabeth Heize, Hrabanus Maurus Enzyklopädie ‘De rerum naturis’. Untersuchungen zu den Quellen und zur Methode der Kompilation (Munich, 1969) and Guglielmo Cavallo (ed.), Rabano ‘De rerum naturis’, Codex Casinensis 132 / Archivio dell’Abbazia di Montecassino (Pavone Canavese, 1994) (a facsimile accompanied by scholarly studies). 9   Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (17 vols of text and 11 vols of illustrations, Paris, 1751–72). An online edition, fully searchable, is now available from the University of Chicago, ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2010 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed.), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. The Encyclopédie has received much scholarly attention in recent years. For a closer reading of the text itself, with a consideration of its philosophical underpinnings, see especially Chapter 1 of Daniel Brewer’s The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing (Cambridge, 1993). Recent studies of the Encyclopédie have been collected in Robert Morrissey and Philippe Roger (eds), L’encyclopédie: du réseau au livre et du livre au réseau (Paris, 2001) and Daniel Brewer and Julie Candler Hayes (eds), Using the Encyclopédie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading (Oxford, 2002).

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from the earlier text, five from the later. One may argue that the De rerum naturis and the Speculum maius are more closely related by the simple virtue of being ‘medieval’, but if Anglophones habitually refer to the ‘Middle Ages’ in the plural, that is because they constitute not one period, but several. The De rerum naturis is Carolingian, the Speculum maius, scholastic. Enlightenment writers, for their part, may well share more with the scholastic encyclopedist than they care to acknowledge. It is just such shared traits that, I believe, justify speaking of the lieu de mémoire (a phenomenon that Nora would reserve for modernity) when analyzing a text compiled during the century that preceded the Renaissance. Between Hrabanus and Vincent, between Vincent and Diderot, there are both continuities and ruptures, and so this triad of texts will allow us to trace the shifting relationship between memorial and encyclopedic practice from the ninth to the eighteenth century. I shall begin with a brief look at the earliest and latest of these texts. The prologue to the De rerum naturis attributes a pre-existing, private memorial storehouse to the reader. The encyclopedia is intended to facilitate access to that storehouse: its fragmentary references to various other texts will recall to the reader’s mind his earlier experience of reading them in full. While the Carolingian encyclopedia thus presupposes the kind of memorial practice developed in rhetorical training, the Enlightenment encyclopedia both eliminates the mnemonic component from the discipline of rhetoric and characterizes the entire Middle Ages as a period of forgetfulness. The Encyclopédie is destined by its authors to be a monument to its own, ephemeral age; for future generations, it becomes a lieu de mémoire. Having thus sketched out the relationship of the Carolingian and Enlightenment encyclopedias to memoria, I shall return to the Speculum maius and consider, first, what sort of memoria the experience of reading this encyclopedia necessarily engages and, then, whether this text also served as a symbolic repository of collective memory. From Thesaurus to Lieu de Mémoire: The Carolingian and Enlightenment Encyclopedias Hrabanus states his purpose clearly in the two prefaces to the De rerum naturis. In one, addressed to a certain Haimon, a former classmate now labouring in a new bishopric, Hrabanus writes that he has decided to put together a book ‘quo haberes ob commemorationem in paucis breuiter annotatum quod ante in multorum codicum amplitudine et facunda oratorum locutione dissertum copiose legisti’ [‘by which you would have, noted down briefly and in a few words, as a reminder, what at an earlier time you read at length, in the fullness of many codices and the elegant speech of eloquent orators’].10 From the modern point of view, this is an odd conception of the encyclopedia, for it presupposes that Haimon already knows what he is about to read. The idea that he knows more than what is in the encyclopedia  

10

Hrabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis, Preface 2.

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may also come as a surprise, but medieval schoolchildren were taught to cultivate their memory for texts during their studies of rhetoric, a discipline that defined the literary and intellectual culture of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Children learned to picture in their mind’s eye real or imaginary places, loci memoriae, in which striking images representing facts, ideas or even individual words could be stored for later retrieval.11 Such a method allowed individuals to tuck away in their memories quantities of information that, from our perspective, appear mindboggling. The resulting memorial storehouse made possible not only the delivery of an argument or sermon from memory, but also the spontaneous exposition of text in lectures, enriched rhetorical invention when writing and (especially when the text in question was scriptural) personal contemplation. All these activities could be best carried out without the disruptive and time-consuming activity of rifling through diverse books in search of quotations or references. Hrabanus’s text is meant to function as a point of access to Haimon’s personal memorial treasury: it is, as Carruthers has put it, ‘a promptbook for memoria’.12 The encyclopedia initiates a meditation upon recollected texts, which will serve as the raw material for Haimon’s rhetorical inventio in sermons and other discourses while also enriching his own spiritual life: Tu autem, electe domine et episcoporum charissime, acceptis his quae tibi transmisi, utere eis ut decet, et tam tibi quam illis qui sub tuo regimine sunt constituti utile esse, permitte, quatinus tuum bonum studium multis proueniat ad spiritalem profectum, et fiat tam tibi quam illis spiritale exercitium, atque caelestis gaudii incrementum [...]13 [Now, excellent lord and dearest of bishops, having accepted these things that I have sent to you, use them as is fitting, and allow them to be of use as much to yourself as to those who are placed under your direction, in order that your good zeal in many things should lead to spiritual growth, and may it be as much to you as to others a spiritual exercise and an augmentation of heavenly joy [...]] This emphasis upon the spiritual utility of the book (which offers both literal and mystical interpretations of the objects in the world) makes possible the conflation of sapientia [wisdom] and scientia [knowledge], a conflation evident in the other Preface, addressed to King Louis the German. Here Hrabanus offers a long quotation from the Book of Wisdom that describes the mingling of sapientia and scientia to form a ‘thesaurus ... hominibus’ [‘treasure house … for men’].14 Such references reveal that the exercise of memory was neither purely individual nor merely   Among surviving ancient texts, the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 86–82 BCE) provides the most complete and explicit description of memory practice, see 3.16–24. The treatise was much read in the Middle Ages. For a summary and analysis, see Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 4–17. 12   Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 176. 13   Hrabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis, Preface 2. The same phrase appears in Preface 1. 14   Wisdom 7.7–21. 11

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intellectual: it established an exchange between authors, commentators and readers or listeners, a process of community-building that Carruthers has characterized as the ‘socializing’ of literature,15 and it fulfilled religious and ethical functions. In fact, memoria was frequently linked to the cardinal virtue of prudence.16 Thus, as Carruthers has argued, medieval culture was profoundly memorial.17 In contrast, we find in the prefatory material of the Enlightenment encyclopedia no acknowledgement of such memorial practice. Nor is memory mentioned in the entry on rhetoric. The author of this entry cites Cicero’s De oratore, but rather than giving the Ciceronian division of rhetoric into five parts (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and pronuntiatio), he claims that rhetoric is divided into only four parts: invention, disposition, elocution and pronunciation.18 It is perhaps not coincidental that, as memory disappears from rhetoric, so the Middle Ages, a period when rhetoric shaped so much of intellectual endeavour, comes to be perceived as a time of forgetfulness. In his ‘Discours préliminaire’, d’Alembert claims that the ‘chefs-d’œuvre’ of the Ancients were ‘forgotten’ for 12 centuries, until the invention of the printing press and the patronage of the Medicis and François Ier brought them back to light. However, d’Alembert does not idealize the Renaissance either. Rather, in a complex passage that needs to be cited at length, he criticizes its reliance upon the memory of texts: L’esprit humain se trouvoit, au sortir de la barbarie dans une espece d’enfance, avide d’accumuler des idées, et incapable pourtant d’en acquérir d’abord un certain ordre par l’espece d’engourdissement où les facultés de l’ame avoient été si long-tems. De toutes ces facultés, la mémoire fut celle que l’on cultiva d’abord, parce qu’elle est la plus facile à satisfaire, et que les connoissances qu’on obtient par son secours, sont celles qui peuvent le plus aisément être entassées. On ne commença donc point par étudier la Nature, ainsi que les premiers hommes avoient dû faire; on joüissoit d’un secours dont ils étoient dépourvûs, celui des Ouvrages des Anciens, que la générosité des Grands et l’Impression commençoient à rendre communs: on croyoit n’avoir qu’à lire pour devenir savant; et il est bien plus aisé de lire que de voir. Ainsi, on dévora sans distinction tout ce que les Anciens nous avoient laissé dans chaque genre: on les traduisit, on les commenta; et par une espece de reconnoissance on se mit à les adorer sans connoître à beaucoup près ce qu’ils valoient.19

  Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 12.   In their explanations of the role that memorial practice played in prudence, scholastic writers such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas synthesized the practices described in the Ad Herennium and other rhetorical treatises with the psychology of Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia. See Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 57–78. 17   Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 8. 18   Encyclopédie, vol. 14, fo. 250r. 19   Ibid., vol. 1, p. xx. 15 16

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[The human mind found itself, at the moment when it emerged from the barbarian state, in a kind of childhood, avid to collect ideas and yet incapable of first acquiring a certain order, on account of the sort of torpor in which its faculties had so long remained. Of all these faculties, memory was first to be cultivated, because it is the easiest to satisfy, and because the knowledge that is obtained through it is of the kind the can be the most readily amassed. Hence men did not begin, as the first men must have done, by studying Nature; they had an aid that the first men had lacked, in the form of the works of Ancient writers, which the generosity of great men and printing began to make available. They thought that they had only to read in order to become learned, and it is indeed easier to read than to see. Thus they devoured without distinction all that the Ancients had left us in each genre; they translated them, they commented upon them, and by a kind of gratitude they began to adore them without very well understanding what they were worth.]

The practice of memorizing, citing and commenting upon earlier texts is here dissociated from the acquisition of knowledge, which, in accordance with the prejudices of the time, is thought to derive principally from the observation of phenomena (Buffon, for example, castigated the Renaissance naturalist Aldrovandi for writing texts that were merely a ‘hotchpotch’ of citations from earlier writers).20 The radical revision of scientific paradigms that had taken place between 1650 and 1750 necessitated a similar revision of the role of the encyclopedia and its relation to, on the one hand, a body of knowledge and, on the other, the individual reader. The encyclopedia, no longer a repository of textual authorities that readers were likely already to have encountered during their education, became a first source of information for the uninitiated. D’Alembert refers to readers ‘desirant de s’instruire sur la signification d’un mot’ [‘wishing to inform themselves about the meaning of a word’],21 that is, the book is a tool that allows readers to begin educating themselves – a common modern notion of what the encyclopedia should 20   Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulaire (Paris, 1749), vol. 1, pp. 31–3. The relationship between certain kinds of memory and particular textual practices, such as citation and compilation, is too complex to be elaborated here. For an explanation of the compilation practice by which medieval encyclopedias were created and its consequences for medieval ways of reading and thinking, see M.B. Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in J.J.G. Alexander and M.T. Gibson (eds), Medieval Learning and Literature, Essays presented to Richard William Hunt (Oxford, 1976), pp. 115–41; Alastair Minnis, ‘Late Medieval Discussions of Compilatio and the Rôle of the Compilator’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 101 (1979): pp. 385–421; Alastair Minnis, ‘Nolens auctor sed compilator reputari: The Late-Medieval Discourse of Compilation’, in Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan (eds), La méthode critique au Moyen Age (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 47–63; and my Reading the World, Part III. Blair gives a useful overview of the kinds of criticisms that were leveled at compilations in the early modern period; see Too Much to Know, pp. 351–6. 21   Encyclopédie, vol. 1, p. xxxvi.

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be and one that excludes the act of recollection from the experience of reading the encyclopedic text. Eventually (and here I am thinking about more recent developments), the encyclopedia, if it serves as a memory aid at all, does not jog the memory, but rather replaces it. Many of my students seem to believe that they do not have to learn anything (in the sense of ‘remembering’ it) because whatever they need to know they can look up in five seconds in Wikipedia. Hence a complete dissociation of ‘knowledge’ from individual human memory, as information (this is perhaps a more precise term than ‘knowledge’) is stocked in electronic form. The use of the word ‘memory’ in relation to the electronic devices that store and retrieve this information is a pure catachresis, like the ‘leg’ of a table. To return to the eighteenth century, the encyclopedists’ ultimate goals, cited at the very beginning of Diderot’s entry on ‘encyclopédie’, are to reveal the relationship between different branches of knowledge for the benefit of their contemporaries and, at the same time, to transmit that knowledge to future generations.22 In this latter goal the encyclopedia, though it does not engage the reader in the memorial practice taught by rhetoricians, nevertheless becomes a kind of memorial, a role that is implicit when Diderot moves on to justify his haste in completing the project. An encyclopedia or dictionary must, he declares, be completed within a ‘certain interval of time’ from the moment of its inception: Si l’on employoit à un dictionnaire universel et raisonné les longues années que l’étendue de son objet semble exiger, il arriveroit par les révolutions, qui ne sont guere moins rapides dans les Sciences, et sur-tout dans les Arts, que dans la langue, que ce dictionnaire seroit celui d’un siecle passé, de même qu’un vocabulaire qui s’exécuteroit lentement, ne pourroit être que celui d’un regne qui ne seroit plus. Les opinions vieillissent, et disparoissent comme les mots; l’intérêt que l’on prenoit à certaines inventions, s’affoiblit de jour en jour, et s’éteint; si le travail tire en longueur, on se sera étendu sur des choses momentanées, dont il ne sera déjà plus question; on n’aura rien dit sur d’autres, dont la place sera passée [...]. 23 [If one spent on a universal and reasoned dictionary the long years which the scope of its object seems to require, it would transpire, because of the revolutions that are no less rapid in the Sciences and especially in the Arts, than in the language, that this dictionary would be that of a past century, in the same way that a lexicon that was written slowly could only be that of a past reign. Opinions grow old and vanish like words and the interest excited by certain inventions weakens from day to day and is extinguished. If the work is drawn out, one will have elaborated upon passing things which will already no longer be of interest and one will have said nothing about others whose place will have passed [...].] This modern concept of ‘revolutions’ in language, ‘revolutions’ in learning, necessarily creates the notion of the obsolete. The only way to reconcile the intimation here that the Encyclopédie will soon become obsolete with Diderot’s

   

22 23

Ibid., vol. 5, fo. 635r. Ibid., vol. 5, fo. 636r.

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earlier claim that encyclopedists must transmit knowledge to new generations is by understanding the encyclopedia as a record, a memorial to past thought. Diderot’s frank admission that the contents of the Encyclopédie will one day be obsolete is the viewpoint of the modern thinker, living in a milieu where change occurs rapidly. According to Pierre Nora, this acceleration of change has brought about the transition from a memorial society to one that relies upon historical analysis. Nora would probably identify the Middle Ages as a memorial society, but he is not thinking of the rhetorical acceptation of the term. Rather, he means by ‘memory’ a collective sense of heritage, always present and living, which is to be contrasted with history, an imperfect representation of what is recognized as belonging to the past. In a society dominated by history, memory ceases to be lived but continues to cling to certain entities (texts, symbols, monuments) and it is these concretions of memory that Nora calls ‘places’ – a term borrowed from Yates but put to a rather different use. The loci memoriae, even when they constituted real places, external to the mind, were to be stored in the mind. Lieux de mémoire, on the other hand, are real, external places that become the final refuge for a memory that human minds have, in effect, entirely forgotten. Their role in the constitution of communities is also different from that of medieval memoria: whereas medieval memory practice created literary communities by making the past (ancient authors) present (to interpreters and listeners) and by bringing together those who used similar texts in similar ways, lieux de mémoire contribute to the constitution of present communities through their symbolic function. They bear a meaning upon which a given community can agree, a meaning that contributes to the definition of the community itself and that, like the borders of such communities, is mutable within history.24 Archives, libraries and dictionaries are not least among Nora’s places of memory: ‘Ce que nous appelons mémoire est, en fait, la constitution gigantesque et vertigineuse du stock matériel de ce dont il est impossible de nous souvenir’ [‘What we call memory is in fact a gigantic and breathtaking effort to store the material vestiges of what we cannot possibly remember’].25 If archives and libraries can constitute lieux de mémoire, then so too can encyclopedias. Although Diderot himself never uses the term ‘memorial’ (as if even this sort of reference to memory is unacceptable) and although the Encyclopédie is not among the lieux de mémoire treated in Nora’s anthology, it is remarkable how well Nora’s concept harmonizes with Diderot’s description of the encyclopedic project. The Encyclopédie was created with the ‘will to remember’ that Nora believes necessary for the creation of a genuine lieu de mémoire (as opposed to just an ‘object worthy of remembrance’), but it is no simple memorial, for its symbolic   On the representational function of the lieux de mémoire, see Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, pp. xxxv–xxxvii (Realms of Memory, vol. 1, pp. 15–16). 25   Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, p. xxvi (translation from Realms of Memory, vol. 1, p. 8). For an explanation of the terms ‘memory’ and ‘history’, see Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, pp. xvii–xx (Realms of Memory, vol. 1, pp. 8–14). 24

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significance has changed over time (this symbolic mutability, too, must define the lieu de mémoire).26 The Encyclopédie has long been taken as paradigmatic of Enlightenment modes of thought and as such its symbolic value has shifted with shifting perceptions of the Enlightenment itself. The Encyclopédie’s preservation of obsolete information as a lieu de mémoire is quite different from Hrabanus’s treatment of texts from an earlier time as a positive contribution to the individual’s present contemplation and invention. For the Carolingian, the chronological remoteness of the texts cited is not relevant to the encyclopedic project and has nothing to do with its relation to memory. Since the memory in question is that of an individual reader, the texts may be understood as being of the past (and hence available for recollection) only in so far as that individual read them at some past time, and the whole point of recollection is to make them present again. With the Enlightenment encyclopedia, this situation is inverted. The encyclopedia is conceived as a collective project undertaken at a specific historical moment. All texts can be placed on a universal timeline, and the texts included in the encyclopedia are understood to define a single point on that line. Once that point has been passed, the entire book becomes a repository of collective memory. Between Thesaurus and Lieu de Mémoire: The Scholastic Encyclopedia Where, between the conceptions of the encyclopedia as thesaurus and as lieu de mémoire, may we locate the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais? It is certainly true that this text, with a length of three and a quarter million words, cannot represent the contents of any individual’s readerly memory in the way that the De rerum naturis seems to do. It does not even represent Vincent’s own memory, for he was obliged to accept the help of other Dominican or Cistercian brothers in collecting extracts.27 The Speculum maius’s excessive length would seem to indicate an initial dissociation of knowledge from any sort of individual memory. Nevertheless, Vincent, following earlier medieval tradition, justifies his encyclopedia as a tool for contemplation: Ipsa namque mens plerumque paululum a prefatis cogitationum et affectionum fecibus se erigens, et in specula rationis – ut potest – assurgens, quasi de quodam eminenti loco totius mundi magnitudinem uno ictu considerat, infinita loca diversis creature generibus repleta intra se continentem. Evum quoque totius mundi videlicet a principio usque nunc uno quodam aspectu nihilominus conspicit, ibique tempora omnia per diversas generationum successiones rerum mutationes continentia quasi sub quadam linea comprehendit, et inde 26   On these two criteria for identifying lieux de mémoire, see Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, pp. xxxiv–xxxv (Realms of Memory, vol. 1, pp. 14–15). 27   Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, Prologue, chapter 10.

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saltem intuitu fidei ad cogitandum utcumque creatoris ipsius magnitudinem, pulchritudinem atque perpetuitatem ascendit.28 [For truly the mind itself, raising itself a degree out of the aforementioned impurities of thought and sentiment, and mounting as it may into the watchtower of reason, as if into a prominent place, considers the greatness of all the world in one stroke, with its infinite regions filled with diverse kinds of creatures. The mind also admires with a single glance the age of all the world, that is, from the beginning to the present, and thereupon it grasps all the ages through the different successions of generations and the mutations of things, as if upon a single line. Thence (at least, in a certain way) it ascends through the perception of faith into a reflection, to be achieved by whatever means possible, upon the greatness, beauty and perpetuity of the creator himself.]

After gathering up the contents of the encyclopedia (and here it is implicit that this gathering – unlike the initial composition of the book – must take place in the reader’s memory), the mind goes on to transcend the matter of the encyclopedia by redirecting itself towards the Creator. Vincent captures this movement with a particularly felicitous (if not entirely new) pun: contemplation (‘speculatio’) involves the ascent into a watchtower (‘specula’). Despite superficial similarities, this passage must be contrasted with d’Alembert’s characterization of encyclopedic order as a map that allows the philosopher to travel through and between different areas of knowledge: [L’ordre encyclopédique] consiste à [...] rassembler [nos connoissances] dans le plus petit espace possible, et à placer, pour ainsi dire, le Philosophe au-dessus de ce vaste labyrinthe dans un point de vûe fort élevé d’où il puisse appercevoir à la fois les Sciences et les Arts principaux; voir d’un coup d’œil les objets de ses spéculations, et les opérations qu’il peut faire sur ces objets; distinguer les branches générales des connoissances humaines, les points qui les séparent ou qui les unissent; et entrevoir même quelquefois les routes secretes qui les rapprochent. C’est une espece de Mappemonde qui doit montrer les principaux pays, leur position et leur dépendance mutuelle, le chemin en ligne droite qu’il y a de l’un à l’autre [...]29 [[Encyclopedic order] consists in […] bringing together [our knowledge] in the smallest possible space and in placing, so to speak, the Philosopher above this vast labyrinth in a very elevated position, whence he can see at one and the same time the Sciences and the principal Arts, see at a glance the object of his speculations and the operations that he can perform on these objects, distinguish the general branches of human knowledge, the points that separate or unify   Ibid., Prologue, chapter 6.   Encyclopédie, vol. 1, p. xv.

28 29

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Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture them, and even sometimes glimpse the secret paths that bring them together. It is a kind of Mappemonde that must show the principal countries, their position and mutual dependence, the straight road that connects them [...]]

In d’Alembert’s description, although an initial elevation of the mind is necessary to see all branches of knowledge at once, this overview merely facilitates a return to the individual objects of knowledge, performing upon them the ‘operations’ whose possibility the philosopher has perceived. ‘Speculation’ appears here in the plural because it is linked to those individual objects. The word no longer denotes contemplation, as it had done in medieval Latin, and Vincent’s wordplay is entirely absent. Therefore, the philosopher never transcends the encyclopedia and never assumes an attitude of contemplation that would engage memorial practice. Vincent’s characterization of the encyclopedia as a tool for contemplation therefore allies him with Hrabanus and the older encyclopedic tradition, rather than with the eighteenth-century Encyclopédie. On the other hand, Vincent’s methods for giving the reader access to his material are innovative: while remaining in tenuous continuity with medieval practices, they nudge the encyclopedia closer to modernity and farther from the individual memory cultivation of the Middle Ages. Like other medieval encyclopedists, Vincent organized his text according to a global paradigm that had significance to his contemporaries (in this case, sacred history). The division of this narrative into small units allowed him to assign to each volume and book a particular category of subjects. The encyclopedia as it left his hands had three parts: a Speculum naturale, which takes the events recounted in the first book of Genesis as the framework for a treatment of natural history; a Speculum doctrinale, which describes the virtues and vices, the liberal and mechanical arts and the practical and theoretical sciences as the means by which humankind compensates for the deficiencies of its fallen state; and a Speculum historiale, which recounts political, ecclesiastical and literary history from the fall of man to Vincent’s own day and concludes with a brief description of the end of time.30 Much of this material had found its way into earlier encyclopedias and historical compilations, but the sheer scope of the Speculum maius was unprecedented. Similarly without precedent was the paratextual material (rubrics, tables, indices) that Vincent proposed. Each book of the encyclopedia was to open with a table of chapter titles, and analytical tables, probably alphabetical, were to be appended to the entire work (these tables were eventually compiled for the Speculum historiale, although not by Vincent himself). When, in 1244, he proposed 30   Readers may find a detailed description of these three parts, including an identification of the major source texts, in Paulmier-Foucart, Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir, pp. 44–104. In the late thirteenth century, a Speculum morale (treating the virtues and vices, sin and grace) was compiled and inserted into the encyclopedia between the Doctrinale and the Historiale. Although few manuscripts of this apocryphal speculum survive, it was included in the Douai edition of the text, where it occupies vol. 3.

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them, alphabetical tools of this kind were recent inventions and still in the process of development. The work of Richard and Mary Rouse in particular has shed light on this period of innovation in scholarly technologies. The biblical concordance was created at the Dominican house on the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris in the 1230s, but not perfected until the 1270s, while the subject index of the Bible appeared in the second quarter of the thirteenth century and the index of Patristic writings in about 1260.31 Vincent felt the need to incorporate these new technologies because of the size of the encyclopedia; he expected his readers to wish to locate passages on specific subjects without reading – much less memorizing – the whole text from beginning to end. The inclusion of tables would make it easy for the reader instead to identify the book and chapter needed, ‘ne forte casso labore singulas revolvendo paginas in incertum vagari incipiat’ [‘lest perchance, with pointless labour turning the pages one by one, he should begin to wander indefinitely’].32 Vincent’s image of the reader flipping hopelessly through a manuscript is not his own invention. It appears in Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Didascalicon, a twelfthcentury text that had greatly influenced the encyclopedist. But Hugh had not used the image to justify having recourse to tables or other such paraphernalia, which were, if not wholly unknown, then at least extremely rare in the twelfth century. Hugh was urging the mastery of the seven liberal arts, a mastery that would involve significant memorial exercise. He cites as examples those ancients who studied the seven liberal arts with such zeal: [...] ut plane omnes ita in memoria tenerent, ut, quascunque scripturas deinde ad manum sumpsissent, quascumque quaestiones solvendas aut comprobandas proposuissent, ex his regulas et rationes ad definiendum id de quo ambigeretur folia librorum revolvendo non quaererent, sed statim singula corde parata haberent.33 [[...] that they had them completely in memory, so that whatever writings they subsequently took in hand or whatever questions they proposed for solution or proof, they did not thumb the pages of books to hunt for rules and reasons which

  Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, ‘Concordances et Index’, in Henri-Jean Martin and Jean Vezin (eds), Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit (Paris, 1990), pp. 219–28. See also Richard Rouse, ‘L’évolution des attitudes envers l’autorité écrite: le développement des instruments de travail au XIIIe siècle’, 1976, in Geneviève Hasenohr and Jean Longère (eds), Culture et travail intellectuel dans l’occident médiéval (Paris, 1981), pp. 113–44. 32   Vincent of Beauvais, introduction to table of chapter titles of the Speculum maius, cited from Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 18465, fo. 6r.–v. by Paulmier-Foucart and Lusignan, ‘Vincent de Beauvais et l’Histoire du Speculum maius’, Journal des Savants, 1990: pp. 97–124 (p. 105 n. 23). 33   Hugh of Saint-Victor, Didascalicon, De Studio Legendi, a Critical Text (Washington, DC, 1939), book 3, chapter 3. Translation by Jerome Taylor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, a Medieval Guide to the Arts (New York), p. 87. 31

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the liberal arts might afford for the resolution of a doubtful matter, but at once had the particulars ready by heart.]

Thus the language in which Vincent expresses an innovation that would appear to minimize the role of memory in giving access to the encyclopedia simultaneously evokes the older pedagogy and practice of memory. This verbal superposition may be understood to indicate either continuity or rupture with older memorial practice. Carruthers argues for continuity between memorial practice and technological innovation in the thirteenth century and explains the development of indexing systems in this way. It is not impossible that medieval readers, once they had become familiar with Vincent’s text, would have returned to the tables of chapter titles as an aid for recollection, as Carruthers suggests for other sorts of indexes.34 Yet Vincent’s recycling of Hugh’s formulation radically changes its application. Moreover, it would be nearly impossible to use the alphabetical table as an aid to recollection. The arbitrariness of an alphabetical list of all the topics treated in the Speculum historiale renders it intolerable for reading. It is purely a reference tool for those whose knowledge of the encyclopedia’s organization is inadequate to guide them through the text, a way for the greatest number of readers to locate specific information as quickly as possible. In this way, Vincent’s call for alphabetical indexes could be seen to anticipate the Enlightenment encyclopedia, despite the inversion that the Encyclopédie represents, with the various conceptual links between entries indicated only through paratextual material (the description of the encyclopedic tree in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ and the infamous renvois at the end of each entry), while the global organization is purely alphabetical (hence the subtitle Dictionnaire raisonné). In the eighteenth century, the ease of locating information triumphs over the logical connections between different pieces of information, and the reader is not called upon to rely upon his or her recollection of the relationships between subjects in order to use the text. D’Alembert explains the rejection of conceptual ordering principles in the ‘Discours préliminaire’: Si nous eussions traité de chaque Science séparément et dans un discours suivi, conforme à l’ordre des idées, et non à celui des mots, la forme de cet Ouvrage eût été encore moins commode pour le plus grand nombre de nos lecteurs, qui n’y auroient rien trouvé qu’avec peine [...]35 [If we had treated each Science separately and in a continuous discourse, according to the order of ideas, and not that of words, the form of this Work would have been even less convenient for the great majority of our readers, who would have found nothing without difficulty [...]]   Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 100.   Encyclopédie, vol. 1, p. xxxvi.

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Thus the organization of the Encyclopédie, like the alphabetical tables of the Speculum maius, facilitates access by the uninitiated, by those with no experience of either the text itself or the matter it treats – in other words, no pre-existent memorial treasury. Thus far, I have concentrated on the practice of reading the Speculum maius, as Vincent foresaw it. The scholastic encyclopedist was, however, not entirely preoccupied by practicalities: he also devoted considerable thought to the larger role that his encyclopedia was to play in the intellectual culture of his day. He seems to have had a sense that cultural memory was retreating in the face of changes to his intellectual milieu, and he intended the Speculum maius to serve as a response to that situation. We must now consider the precise nature of that response. Ever fascinated by history, compiler of the Speculum historiale, did Vincent write ‘history’ as Nora conceives it, or did he respond to the threat that the past would be lost by memorializing it? This question cannot be answered without first distinguishing between what Nora means when he refers to ‘history’ and Vincent’s concept of historia (which shaped not only the Speculum historiale, but the entire Speculum maius in its sweep from Creation to the last days). In the Middle Ages, the term historia had several meanings. Because Isidore of Seville had traced its etymology to the Greek historin, ‘to see or know’, it was closely associated with eyewitness accounts and then, by extension, with the narrative of ‘res gestae’, historical events.36 Rhetoricians thus classed historia as one of three kinds of narratio, opposing it to argumentum, which recounts events that did not happen, but could have done, and fabula, which recounts events that are impossible.37 It was also because of historia’s association with things done and witnessed that the term could refer to a particular kind of biblical interpretation, the literal explanation that must, according to medieval exegetes, precede any spiritual or allegorical interpretations. The theological understanding of historia had a profound influence upon medieval historiographers, who understood their task as establishing a true, ordered representation of the events, a representation that would allow readers to discern God’s providential work in creation.38 The truth imperative led medieval historiographers to engage in a critique of their sources, at least when those sources contradicted each other, but this analytical work was different in kind and effect from the analytical work that,   See Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, book 1, chapter 41 (ed. W.M. Lindsay (2 vols, Oxford, 1911)). Vincent cites Isidore’s etymology of historia in Speculum maius, vol. 2, book 3, chapter 127. 37   See Vincent’s discussion of rhetorical historia in Speculum maius, vol. 2, book 3, chapter 127, which repeats Isidore of Seville’s distinction between the three types of narrative in Etymologiae, book 1, chapter 44. 38   The aims of medieval historiographers in general are summarized by Marinus M. Woesthuis in ‘Vincent of Beauvais and Helinand of Froidmont’, in Lusignan and PaulmierFoucart (eds), Lector et compilator, pp. 233–47, especially pp. 241–2. 36

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for Nora, distinguishes history from memory. History in Nora’s sense is at odds with memory. While memory has both sacred and symbolic components and is ‘un lien vécu au présent éternel’ [‘a bond tying us to the eternal present’], history is a non-religious, non-symbolic activity that creates representations recognized as incomplete or inadequate while delegitimizing the lived past. ‘A l’horizon des sociétés d’histoire, aux limites d’un monde complètement historisé, il y aurait désacralisation ultime et définitive’ [‘What looms on the horizon of every historical society, at the limit of a completely historicized world, is presumably a final, definitive disenchantment’].39 There was no such disenchantment in medieval historiography: the lived past maintained its legitimacy and even acceded to a higher order by revealing God’s providence, the bond that tied the remotest of ancient events to the present and the future renovatio. Hence medieval historiography was closer to memory than to history in Nora’s paradigm. When the Prologue to the Speculum maius does betray an awareness that historical change initiates the loss of cultural heritage, a conception of history closer to that of Nora, the books under discussion are works of ecclesiastical history. The encyclopedist does not speak of these texts as testimony to past ages, but rather as being valuable for the edification of the soul.40 They are, in other words, valuable as a contribution to readers’ present spiritual development and growth in wisdom. Moreover, it is not in the context of the ‘march of history’ that Vincent cites the multiplication of knowledge and resulting neglect of certain books. Instead, he reworks a passage from the Book of Daniel describing the last days, when the wise (‘docti’) will shine as the firmament: ‘Tu autem, Daniel, claude sermones, et signa librum usque ad tempus statutum; plurimi pertransibunt, et multiplex erit scientia’ [‘But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased’].41 (The opposition of wisdom and knowledge in this particular biblical quotation suggests that Vincent, unlike Hrabanus, was not entirely sure that all knowledge contributes to spiritual growth.) The eschatological flavour that the allusion to Daniel lends to Vincent’s prologue places the Speculum maius on an entirely different timeline to that of the Encyclopédie. And Vincent’s insistence upon the present utility of past texts, his will to keep them alive, is precisely the attitude of the memorialist. Where a proponent of history (in Nora’s sense) would analyze such texts as evidence of past events or cultural paradigms, a memorialist incorporates them into his or her present experience. Therefore, though Vincent does seem to perceive at least a glimmer of the destructive history that Nora will elaborate, he does not respond by writing such history. There are moments in the Speculum maius when the text does appear to be functioning as a memorial. Much of the ecclesiastical history is to be found in the Speculum historiale, which is laid out in roughly chronological order, with   Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, pp. xix–xx (Realms of Memory, vol. 1, p. 3).   Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, Prologue, chapter 2. 41   Daniel 12.3–4. Translation from the Authorized Version. 39 40

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extracts from the major Latin poets and devotional writers inserted at the relevant points. Vincent’s reticence, his general unwillingness to offer the kind of analysis of these small literary anthologies that would demonstrate their appurtenance to the specific historical moment he is describing and their difference from the kind of texts written in his own time, make of them something rather different from the poetic extracts that a historian of today may choose to deploy. History, in the Speculum historiale, is a principle of order, but not of analysis; it continues in an uninterrupted line right up to Vincent’s own present and so it does not distance the texts cited from the reader as does a modern history of medieval literature.42 These texts that Vincent may or may not have rescued from oblivion could be understood as fragments of living memory. The other two Specula offer a few, subtle hints that they also serve as a memorial, though of a rather different kind. I will cite just one example. It has been observed that, although the treatment of law in the Speculum doctrinale is perfectly up to date, the treatment of architecture in the same volume follows that of Isidore of Seville, giving a description of Roman construction very much at odds with the Gothic building work being completed all over France during Vincent’s lifetime.43 Vincent probably could not find any satisfactory treatise on contemporary architecture, and his unwillingness to eliminate the subject from his exhaustive treatment of all the arts must have led him to use the only source he could find. But there is no reason for us to suppose that he was blind: the contrast between the structures described by Isidore and those that surrounded Vincent must have been as obvious to him as it is to us. Even at the moment of its compilation, the Speculum doctrinale may have been, among other things, a memorial to past learning in the arts and sciences, just as the Speculum historiale was a memorial to Latin writing and the Speculum naturale to natural history as a discipline and literary genre. Yet every memorial does not a lieu de mémoire make. Lieux de mémoire are consecrated by the history that unfolds after their constitution as memorials. In order for us to decide whether the Speculum maius is a lieu de mémoire, we must go beyond what Vincent intended, to study the symbolic significance of the Speculum maius in the centuries after its compilation. For the encyclopedia   On Vincent’s exploitation of historia in particular, see, in addition to Woesthius, Monique Paulmier-Foucart, ‘Ecrire l’histoire au XIIIe siècle: Vincent de Beauvais et Helinand de Froidmont’, Annales de l’Est, 5th series, 33 (1981): pp. 49–70 and ‘Ordre encyclopédique et organisation de la matière dans le Speculum maius de Vincent de Beauvais’, in Annie Becq (ed.), L’encyclopédisme (Paris, 1991), pp. 201–26; Serge Lusignan, ‘Le temps de l’homme au temps de monseigneur saint Louis: le Speculum historiale et les Grandes Chroniques de France’, in Paulmier-Foucart and Nadeau (eds), Vincent de Beauvais: intentions et réceptions, pp. 495–505; and Chapter 2 of my Reading the World. 43   Paulmier-Foucart, Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir, p. 65. Law is treated in the Speculum maius, vol. 2, books 7–10; architecture in vol. 2, book 11, chapters 13–24. The Roman house is described in chapters 18–20. 42

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would need to do more than simply provide a wealth of diverse, obscure and sometimes bizarre information (a purpose it served brilliantly right up through the seventeenth century): it would need to represent something. And while the history of the reception of the Speculum maius remains to be written,44 there are indications that the encyclopedia possessed a symbolic significance that changed with the shifting borders of religious and intellectual communities. Vincent was a Dominican, and for his brothers in the Order from the thirteenth century to the end of the Middle Ages (and beyond), his encyclopedia was considered one of their Order’s crowning achievements, along with no lesser works than Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica. Dominicans and those associated with them referred to the Speculum maius, with earnest hyperbole, as ‘a remarkable work, renowned all over the earth, from generation to generation’ and to its compiler as ‘speculator omnis materie scibilis’ [‘observer of all knowable matter’].45 But the Speculum’s role as a symbol of scholasticism and of the Order of the Preachers would make it an object of ridicule by such humanists and reformers as Erasmus and Philippe de Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde. At the end of the sixteenth century, in his satiric Tableau des differens de la religion, the latter would comment disdainfully: Il appert par expérience que ce n’est pas mal fait de proposer au peuple certaines sornettes comme de diverses reliques des plumes de l’ange Gabriel, de la lance de saint Michel dont il renversa le dragon par terre et de l’haleine du bœuf et de l’asne qui reschaufferent nostre Seigneur, lorqu’il estoit encore en la creche, et du souffle du saint Esprit serré dans une belle petite phiole [...] et autres semblables plaisans comptes de la cicogne, dont les bons livres catholiques, comme Gestas Romanorum, Vitas Patrum, Speculum historiale, les histoires de Lipomanus et les légendes dorées sont farcies comme un chien de pulces.46 [It appears from experience that it’s not a bad idea to offer folks certain twaddle about the diverse relics of the feathers of the angel Gabriel, of Saint Michael’s lance, with which he finished off the dragon, and of the respiration of the cow and   On the reception of the Speculum maius, see the brief treatments in Gregory Guzman, ‘The Testimony of Medieval Dominicans Concerning Vincent of Beauvais’, in Lusignan and Paulmier-Foucart (eds), Lector et compilator, pp. 303–26; Jean Schneider, ‘Vincent de Beauvais à l’épreuve des siècles’, in the same volume, pp. 22–46; and PaulmierFoucart, Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir, pp. 105–15. My summary here largely follows Schneider and Paulmier-Foucart. 45   The first quotation is from Etienne de Salhanac and Bernard Gui, De quatuor in quibus deus Praedicatorum ordinem insignivit (c. 1277–1307); the second from the Dominican Tree of Jesse painted by Hans Holbein the Elder (1460–1524). Both are cited in Paulmier-Foucart, Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir, p. 21. 46   Philippe de Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, Tableau des differens de la religion (Leiden, 1605), vol. 2, p. 311, cited in Paulmier-Foucart, Vincent de Beauvais et le grand miroir, p. 106. 44

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the ass that warmed our Lord when he was still in the manger, and of the breath of the Holy Ghost corked up in a pretty little phial [...] and similar pleasing old wives’ tales with which good Catholic books, such as the Gestas Romanorum, Vitas Patrum, Speculum historiale, the histories of Lipomanus and the Golden Legend are riddled like a dog with fleas.]

Initially, one may have the impression that the early modern satirist would rather forget the Speculum historiale and other texts of its kind, but such oblivion would not serve his rhetorical strategy at all. Instead, the Speculum historiale has become something of a cautionary lieu de mémoire, a useful representation of the contagious credulity that should not be allowed to infect true religion – or public rhetoric. This kind of invective against the Speculum maius was short-lived; the text was last reprinted in 1623 and, by the Enlightenment, the Speculum maius ceased to be mentioned by writers in France. The situation would change again in the early nineteenth century, when, with the burgeoning interest in the classification of the sciences, a few scholars seem to have idealized the Speculum maius (inaccurately) as an original attempt at such classification. Thus Valentin Parisot, in an 1827 notice for Michaud’s Bibliographie universelle, could characterize Vincent as a ‘penseur profond, novateur réservé, et savant ingénieux’ [‘profound thinker, wise innovator and ingenious savant’] in a ‘siècle barbare’ [‘barbarous age’].47 Profundity, innovation, ingenuity: the Speculum maius reflects back Parisot’s own values. Several generations later, the symbolic import of Vincent’s encyclopedia would change again, as the art historians Adolphe Napoléon Didron (1806–67) and Emile Mâle (1862–1954) took the Speculum maius as the essential clue to solving the mysteries of the Gothic edifices that dot the European landscape, edifices that, like the Speculum maius itself, had been transformed into lieux de mémoire even as their original meaning had subsided into obscurity.48 Yet in their method of confronting scholastic images with scholastic texts, in their insistence that the former can only be understood through a study of the latter, these scholars also heralded a new, historicizing analysis of texts and images that would oppose memory. The Speculum maius falls midway between the De rerum naturis and the Encyclopédie in terms of not only chronology, but also the relationship between encyclopedism and memory. In his description of contemplation, Vincent shows that he shares Hrabanus’s conception of the encyclopedia as a cue for recollection, invention and contemplation guided by rhetorical paradigms, a conception absent from the Enlightenment encyclopedia. But the Speculum maius is too large. It exceeds the bounds of individual memory and becomes a repository for the long and variegated memory of an intellectual community. By the same token, the memorial ‘sites’ that, according to rhetorical practice, had been viewed in the mind’s eye, are transformed into a purely external reality, a physical site, a set of manuscript   Cited by Schneider, ‘Vincent de Beauvais à l’épreuve des siècles’, p. 31.   Adolphe Napoléon Didron, Histoire de Dieu (Paris, 1843) and Emile Mâle, L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (Paris, 1898). 47 48

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volumes into which all this memory has been laboriously transcribed and through which only tables and indices permit the reader to navigate successfully. In this sense, though there are many differences between the Speculum maius and the Encyclopédie, the former anticipates the latter, accommodating itself to the needs of a reader whose personal memory is virtually blank, supplementing, even perhaps replacing, the individual memory. Vincent, who knew too well the multitude of books, the brevity of time and the unreliability of memory, would have felt the need for such a new memorial treasury. The success of his innovative experiment is clear: the treasury that Vincent fashioned has survived the demise of medieval literary and intellectual culture. As the most exhaustive surviving compilation of classical and medieval texts, the Speculum maius has become what Vincent may have foreseen only vaguely, but the Enlightenment encyclopedists perceived more clearly: a memorial to an age of intellectual transformation. Poised on the brink of modernity, the Speculum maius is a lieu de mémoire to which clings a memoryhistory of the kind that we have ceased to write.

Chapter 8

The Memory of Roman Law in an Illuminated Manuscript of Justinian’s Digest1 Joanna Frońska

Since the publications of Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers, medieval art historians have been searching for common mechanisms of creation for both ‘abstract’ mental mnemonic tools and ‘real’ physical images on the walls of churches or in the pages of manuscripts.2 In the last of these areas, the category of marginalia has particularly attracted their attention.3 The various types of marginal pictures, from simple signs like maniculae (pointing human hands) to elaborate scenes or even drolleries, were employed in the context of a heuristics of reading and the mnemonic effectiveness of the visual. This chapter will focus on the relationship between the memory of the reader and the textual illustration of an exceptional copy of the Digestum vetus of Justinian in the collection of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kórnik, ms. 824. Firstly, my aim will be to demonstrate the specificity of the marginal images introduced in this manuscript as a conscious emendation of its content and to interpret their possible function as mnemonic signs to capture the reader’s attention. In the second section, I will shift from the problem of the cognitive perception of these images to their role in shaping the readers understanding of Roman Law. I will attempt to explain why certain passages and laws were privileged for memorization more than others and were marked by illustrations or other visual signs. Finally, focusing on the

1   The manuscript discussed in this chapter, Biblioteka Kórnicka 824 (hereafter ‘BK 824’), was the subject of my PhD dissertation, ‘Fonctions et usages des images dans les manuscrits juridiques. Le Digestum Vetus de Justinien de la Bibliothèque de Kórnik, BK 824’ (CESCM, Poitiers/ Warsaw University, 2007). 2   Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990); Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998). 3   See Sylvia Huot, ‘Visualisation and Memory: The Illustration of Troubadour Lyric in a Thirteenth-Century Manuscript’, Gesta, 31 (1992): pp. 11–12 and Susan Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 250–53; for a more nuanced opinion, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, ‘The Study of Marginal Imagery: Past, Present, and Future’, Studies in Iconography, 18 (1997): pp. 40–43.

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illustrations, I will try to ‘reconstruct’ the ‘image’ of the Roman legislation that was intended to enter the readers’ memories. The Digestum vetus is the first part of the collection of laws promulgated during different periods of Roman history and compiled in 50 books by lawyers appointed by Emperor Justinian in 533. After sinking into oblivion for a few hundred years, the compilation was rediscovered at the end of the eleventh century and, with Justinian’s Code, became the ‘ordinary’ reading for university students throughout the Middle Ages.4 The Kórnik manuscript belongs to the large family of such student books. Produced in Italy at the end of the twelfth century, it exhibits all the characteristics of early university book production.5 Its illumination was probably carried out in Paris between about 1230 and 1240.6 It is the work of four artists who, following written instructions,7 shared the task of introducing 20 historiated and four decorated initials along with 238 marginal images. Probably at the same time, the glossa ordinaria of Accursius was added to the manuscript, a new exegetical apparatus that instantly became the indispensable and authoritative device for any university reader of Roman law.8 The coincidence between the production of the illustrations and that of the gloss is even more striking when we realize that the illustrations, competing with the commentary for space in the margins, 4   In the Middle Ages the 50-book Digest was separated into three volumes: vetus, infortiatum and novum. 5   The Kórnik Digest follows the standards in production of legal manuscripts, noticeable already around the mid-twelfth century: a double-column format and text divisions consisting of rubricated books (libri), titles (tituli) and laws (leges) with inscriptiones beginning with an initial in red or blue. It is also distinctive for its inclusion of several pre-accursian glosses, both interlinear and marginal. Gero Dolezalek roughly dated the manuscript to the end of the twelfth century in his Verziechnis der Handschriften zum römischen Recht bis 1600 (4 vols, Frankfurt, 1972), vol. 1 (Kórnik), a dating with which I concur. For further discussion of the dating of the manuscript, see my ‘Fonctions et usages’, pp. 34–52. 6   The main artist, Master A, can be identified with the Master of the Albenga Psalter (see Anna de Floriani, Miniature parigine del Duecento: il Salterio di Albenga e altri manoscritti (Genoa, 1990)). Master B, who worked with an apprentice, is perhaps the illuminator of the Lewis Psalter (Philadelphia, Free Library), ms. E 185. The work of Master C, the only non-Parisian contributor, seems similar to that of the English artist of the Huntingfield Psalter (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library), M. 43. For a more detailed analysis, see my ‘Supplément ou commentaire? Les enjeux de l’illustration textuelle dans le Digestum vetus de Justinien (Bibliothèque de Kórnik, ms. 824)’, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, 70 (2008): pp. 63–89. 7   The instructions are still visible in some bas-de-pages. They are transcribed in my ‘Pomiędzy tekstem i obrazem. Dyrektywy dla miniaturzystów w Digestach Justyniana’, Ikonotheka (2005): pp. 1–21 (with a summary in French). 8   The first version of the glossa ordinaria was ready in the 1220s, but Accursius (c. 1182–1263) never ceased amending and adding to his commentary. See Frank Sotermeer, Utrumque ius in peciis. Aspetti della produzione libraria a Bologna fra due e trecento (Milan, 1997), p. 45.

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seem to establish a relationship with the text that can be defined as parallel or supplementary to, but independent of, the discourse of the gloss. Even if regarded as marginal or additional, these images are designed to give an account of the normative text itself, occasionally providing its legal interpretation. The idea of illustrating individual passages or laws that were singled out within a longer text was not unusual in medieval law books. The images of the Kórnik Digest appear to be a development of numerous drawings found in Roman and Canon Law manuscripts from the second half of the twelfth century onwards.9 Yet such drawings were usually made by scribes or readers, rarely by professional illuminators, and seem to be linked to a reading practice broadly used in the legal university milieu. Were they related to basic memory training, or to some pedagogical purpose, or did they rather reflect the more individual interests of readers? To address these questions, I propose to study the meaning and function of a selection of the images that animate the margins of the Kórnik Digest. The impact of these images on the reader’s memory can be studied from at least two points of view. The first envisages the illustrations as aide-mémoire devices and concerns the ways in which the book was used, while the second focuses upon the images as responses to specific legal problems and examines them as constructions of the image of Roman Law. This second perspective approaches memory by placing it in the context of a reconstruction of the remote past of ancient Rome according to the ‘present’ interests of medieval readers. A marginal image is a tool specifically designed to highlight selected passages of the text. Whether it is a simple manicula or a more elaborate narrative picture relating to a legal case quoted in the text, it functions to fix the reader’s attention on the chosen fragment. Usually, an isolated word or expression is transposed into its visual equivalent. In this way, the relationship between the text and the image follows a system of correspondence very similar to the one usually used in   These marginal drawings have been the subject of some occasional references: see Susan L’Engle and Robert Gibbs, Illuminating the Law: Legal Manuscripts in Cambridge Collections (London, 2001), pp. 105–10 (Cat. No. 1) and Barbara Morel, ‘L’image du châtiment dans les manuscrits de droit romain à la fin du Moyen Age’, in Utilis est lapis in structura. Mélanges offerts à Léon Pressouyre (Paris, 2000), pp. 265–7. Since this paper was first presented in 2007, two further essays dedicated to marginal images in law books have been published: Susan L’Engle, ‘The Pro-active Reader: Learning to Learn the Law’, Medieval Manuscripts, Their Makers and Users: A Special Issue of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 51–76; and Joanna Fronska, ‘Turning the Pages of Legal Manuscripts: Reading and Remembering the Law’, in Meaning in Motion: The Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art, ed. Nino Zchomelidse and Giovanni Freni (Princeton, NJ, 2011), pp. 191–214. Similar drawings can be found in other manuscripts containing legal or administrative records: see Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1993), pp. 280–83 and Michael Camille, ‘At the Edge of the Law: An Illustrated Register of Writs in the Pierpont Morgan Library’, in Nicholas Rogers (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, 1993), pp. 1–14. 9

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glossed books. The use of reference signs, added in the Kórnik Digest by one of its medieval readers, probably still in the thirteenth century, further strengthens this impression and suggests at least a mode of perception, if not the original function of the images.10 The illustrated word or expression is never random. It usually appears to be a technical term explained in a definition, as in the case of the word familia,11 or a keyword evoking a general question which is usually discussed in the text by means of a casuistic situation (Figures 8.7 and 8.8) or an example (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). In this way, these associative images not only appear to function in a way analogous to marginal glosses or notabilia (short notes repeating key terms in the margins), but they seem to reveal the same purpose as the mental notae already recommended by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100) in order to mark the passages meant to be remembered.12 ‘Non est inutile, iis, quae difficilius haereant, aliquas apponere notas, quarum recordatio commoneat et quasi excitet memoriam, (nemo etiam fere tam infelix, ut, quod cuique loco signum destinaverit, nesciat, ut sit excitandus ad hoc, quo ad remedium utitur).’13 For Quintilian these notae could take the form of either an associative sign, for example an anchor to mark a problem regarding navigation, or a simple keyword directly taken from the text. Similarly, the relationship between a physical image and the illustrated text fragment can be literal or metonymic. For example, a damaged vessel is represented in the Kórnik Digest in order both to indicate a ‘vas qui integrum non sit’14 (‘a vessel which is not intact’) and to refer to a problem of   BK 824, fos 67v., 226, 228.   ‘Familie* appellatione; omnes qui in ser | vitio sunt; continentur. etiam liberi homines. | qui ei bona fide serviunt. vel alieni. | Accipi eos quoque qui in potestate eius sunt’ (‘The term “household” includes all who are in a condition of servitude to him, be they freemen in the honest belief that they are his slaves, or, in fact, the slaves of another and also those who are in his parental power’), D. 21, 1, 25, 2. Latin passages of the Digest are transcribed directly from the manuscript (with an asterisk replacing any reference sign); all English translations are quoted from The Digest of Justinian, trans. Alan Watson (4 vols, Philadelphia, 1985). All references to Civil and Canon Law sources are given in the standardized abbreviated form (for example ‘D’ for Digest, followed by the book, title, law and paragraph number): see Robert Feenstra and Guido Rossi, Index abreviationum et de modo citandi fontes, Ius Romanum Medii Aevi, Pars I/1a–d (Milan, 1961), pp. 25–118. 12   On the medieval reception of Quintilian, see John O. Ward, ‘Quintilian and the Rhetorical Revolution of the Middle Ages’, Rhetorica, 13 (1995): pp. 231–84. 13   ‘It is useful to place marks (notae) against those passages that prove especially difficult, the remembrance of which will refresh and excite the memory; for almost no one could be so dull as to be unable to recollect a mark (signum) which he had chosen for a particular passage’ (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, XI, II, 28–9), M. Fabi Quintiliani Institutio oratoria, ed. E. Bonneli (Leipzig, 1854), p. 206; trans. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 107. 14   The full passage states ‘Sed si vas michi vendideris ita ut affirmares integrum; si integrum id non sit; etiam id quod eo nomine perdiderim prestabis michi’ (D. 19, 1, 6, 4) 10 11

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latent defects. A ring is placed in the margin of f. 203 to signal an object given as an earnest deposit (‘arrha’).15 Sometimes, however, the mechanisms of visualization are much more complex. Playing upon sounds, etymologies and other associations generated by the meanings of particular words, such images appear to have been elaborated on the same basis as the ornaments of the language (metonymy, homophony or allegory). In this way they seem to share the same principles of creation as the mnemonic images recommended by medieval authors such as John of Garland, Hugh of Saint Cher and Thomas Bradwardine, extensively studied by Mary Carruthers.16 One of the most striking examples is the image in the margin of f. 30. It plays with words as in a rebus game: two hands holding pieces of broken rope refer to a ‘broken’ transaction and more precisely to the verb rumpo of the phrase ‘qui fidem licite transactionis rupit’ (‘a person who breaks faith in respect of a lawful transactio’).17 Another word-focused illustration painted on f. 44 goes even further by amplifying the significance of a term singled out from its original context. The phrase reads ‘licet enim pena ad heredem non │ transeat. at tamen quod turpiter aut sce│lere quesitum est; ut est et rescriptum. ad │ compendium heredis non debet pe[r]tinere.’18 The illustrated word is turpis (dishonourable, disgraceful) and the associated image represents a man raising his clothes to expose his penis (Figure 8.1). According to the technical terminology of Roman Law, turpis or turpiter means ‘immoral’, as in the expression condicio turpis (a condition the fulfilment of which involves an act violating a moral norm). We can presume that an association is made here between disgraceful behaviour and the dubious means used by the deceased to acquire the fortune left to his heirs.19 Finally, some images seem to play with allegorical symbolism, sometimes even altering the primary meaning of the allegory or making it more nuanced. This is the case with the illustration of a man fleeing a hare or rabbit on f. 225, which was carefully designed, as shown by the instruction to the artist still partially visible in the lower margin, ‘lep[us] h[om]o de insequit …’ (‘the man [flees] from the hare pursuing him …’) (Figure 8.2). This traditional symbol of cowardice was used here in its second sense inspired by the excessive sexuality of the animal in question.20 It evokes the behaviour of a slave who ‘circa fana bachari soleret’ (‘indulged in (‘But if you sell me a vessel that you declare is sound, and it is unsound, you will be held responsible to me also for what I lose on this account’). 15   The relevant passage is D. 19, 1, 11, 6. 16   Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 125–36. 17   D. 2, 15, 16. 18   ‘For although a penalty does not pass to the heir, yet what has been obtained dishonourably or criminally ought not to benefit him, and this has been provided by rescript’ (D. 4, 2, 16, 2). 19   A similar image is represented on fo. 246. and refers to the expression turpissimam vitam (‘a very shameful life’) (D. 23, 2, 43, 5–7). 20   The topos associating a hare or a rabbit with an excessive sexuality derives from Aristotle and was spread by the writings of Pliny: see ‘Lièvre (lepus)’, in Xavier R. Mariño

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Figure 8.1

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Biblioteka Kórnika 824, fo. 44. Illustration of the term ‘turpis’

Bacchanalian revels around the shrines’) and points out the word ‘luxuria’ in the response given by the jurisconsultus Vivianus: ‘etiamsi per luxuriam | id factum est vitium; tamen esse; vi | cium animi non corporis.’21 As we have observed, this method of illustration was similar but not identical to Quintilian’s mental annotations, or more generally to the imagines rerum of ancient mnemonic traditions designed to help orators to memorize the contents of their speeches. First of all, the approach to the material designed for the purpose of memorization/recollection was slightly different. The material was no longer an oration, but rather a long and complicated text copied in a book meant to be a personal tool during the university career of a lawyer. The function of the marginal images can be better understood in the context of this new more bookish type of literacy emerging in the universities at least from the mid-twelfth century. But how did the pictures actually work? Their character and distribution in the Kórnik manuscript suggest that, as indicators, they provided a quick aid to locating particular material copied in the book, as well as being a visual reminder of the contents of the text during reading. In other words, they might have served to classify the material stored in the book in a similar way to how mental imagines were supposed to classify the material stored in one’s memory and help one to recall it at an appropriate time. A text produced in the late fourteenth-century legal university milieu of Toulouse gives us an insight into the way a book could have been used as a support for memory. This short treatise, De modo studendi, by a certain Martinus Garcia offers, among other advice for law students, the following comments on memory:

Ferro, Symboles animaux. Un dictionnaire des représentations et croyances en Occident (Paris, 1996), pp. 200–202. 21   ‘Even though this be the consequence of excess and thus a defect, it is still a mental, not a physical, defect’ (D. 21, 1, 1, 10).

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Figure 8.2

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Biblioteka Kórnika 824, f. 225. A man fleeing a rabbit

Ad memoriam eciam pertinet videre et signare mentem teneri in (quo libri loco) sunt leges situate seu note doctorum, quando vult retinere, quoniam multociens evenit quod de primo lex non recordatur, sed bene recordatur in quo libri loco existit. [It pertains to memory to see and mark in order to keep in mind (in which place in the book) the laws or commentaries of doctors are placed, if you want to remember them, because it often happens that you do not immediately recall a (particular) law, but you remember very well where it was situated in the book.]22

Martinus recommends here that students retain in their memory the places where particular laws or glosses were written in order to be able to find them again if necessary. This is why he advises students not to change their reference books: Item est utile ad memoriam libros non mutare, set semper eosdem retinere quoniam mutacio librorum mutat memoriam (et ipsum ledit, dum enim in uno libro legem certo loco memorie comendetur, in alio noviter habito bono modo non potest radicari). [It is useful for the memory not to change books, but always to keep the same ones, because changing books changes memory and destroys it; while in one

  Martinus Garcia, legum doctor, De modo studendi (1398), Toulouse BM 377, fos 11–12, ed. Marcel Fournier, ‘Une règle de travail et de conduite pour les étudiants en droit au XIVe siècle, publiée à l’occasion du sixième centenaire de l’université de Montpellier’, Revue internationale de l’enseignement, 19 (1890): p. 522. [trans. Aut.]. 22

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book a law is put into memory in a certain place, in a different one you will not be able easily to ‘root’ it well.]23

Thus he evokes a topos handed down from Quintilian to Hugh of Saint-Victor, according to which the association of a particular text with its place on the page was supposed to stimulate its recollection.24 Martinus’s advice, however, seems to relate to two interests on the part of a potential reader. It refers to a page design as a device both for helping one to ‘impress’ a given text fragment in one’s memory and for finding it again in the book. Such an approach involves the use of a manuscript not only for the purpose of learning, but also as a source of reference to already known material. The functions of indicating and distinguishing and that of memorizing/recalling meet in a praxis of legal reading. In this context the use of images as indicators of laws or as marks stimulating memory becomes more evident.25 By marking some deliberately-chosen laws, the images of the Kórnik Digest introduced a new ‘order’ virtually independent of the traditional arrangement of the text (only the historiated initials were adapted to the standard articulation system). Such an approach seems to have been the result of a very specific, pointed reading and understanding of Roman Law. By what principles were the choices about illustration made here? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to understand the place of the Digest in the development of civil law in medieval France. As a university-approved text armed with the authority of the Roman past, the Digest was perceived as the universal norm by the scholars studying and commenting on law. To them, Roman Law was a realm of the universally constant ius (law), while the current legal practice did not reveal more then a variable factum (deed). Already during the first half of the thirteenth century, however, this norm started to serve as a model for actual legislation. The lawyers of Bologna and later those of Orléans began to discuss the so-called questiones ex facto emergentes.26   Ibid.   ‘Hugh of Saint-Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis gestorum’, ed. W.M. Green, Speculum, 18 (1943): p. 490, verses 19–30; and Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 376–7. 25   A late medieval case of a rhetorician Jacques Legrand shows that even a distinction between the function of mental images known from the Rhetorica ad Herrenium, or another similar source, and miniatures physically present in manuscripts was not always obvious. In his Livre des bonnes moeurs we read: ‘les anciens quant ilz vouloient aucune chose recorder et impectorer, ilz mectoient en leurs livres diverses couleurs et diverses figures a celle fin que la diversite et la difference leur donnast meilleur souvenance’ (‘When the ancients wanted to remember and to get something by heart, they enhanced their books with different colours and figures so as to strengthen the memory through diversity and difference’). See Jacques Legrand, Archiloge Sophie. Livre des bonnes meurs, ed. E. Beltran (Paris 1986), trans. Brigitte Buettner, ‘Profane Illumination, Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society’, The Art Bulletin, 74 (1992): p. 79. 26   The expression questiones ex facto emergentes comes from a law of the Codex (C. 6. 42. 32) and refers to the cases emerging from the ius proprium, that is, from the 23 24

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The authors of the first French coutumiers (custumals), such as the Poines de la duché d’Orliens (1235–55), the Livre de Jostice et de Plet (c. 1250–60), the Conseil à un ami (1255–56), the Etablissements de Saint Louis (1246–70), or the Coutumes de Beauvaisis (c. 1280), not only imitated the structure of Justinian’s texts, but borrowed the Roman rules, casus (cases) and judicial solutions in order to reinforce, complete or even alter the custom.27 The examination of textual fragments illustrated by marginal images in the Kórnik Digest reveals that the illustrations were not simply designed as a series of short cuts to the legal cases, or as equivalents of ‘notabilium’ glosses. Understood within the intellectual climate described above, the images appear to reflect a re-evaluation of the Roman norm very similar to that of the near-contemporary lawyers involved in composing the first French collections of the customary law. In fact, when the images mark a particular law, they usually tend to highlight its importance as a rule worth remembering because of its applicability to contemporary jurisdiction, or at least, as one which is not in conflict with customary practice and which allows the two legal systems to be brought closer together. It was above all the restitution of civil law that interested the authors of the thirteenth-century custumals. Although some laws concerning a judicial procedure or a legislative power of the prince are illustrated in the Kórnik Digest,28 the interest in the law of obligations predominates. However, not all types of contracts drew the same attention. The usury and marriage laws, being subject to ecclesiastical legislation and practically absent from the coutumiers, feudal, urban or customary law. See Manilio Bellomo, ‘Factum et ius. Itinerari di ricerca tra le certezze e i dubbi del pensiero giuridico medievale’, Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune, 6 (1996): pp. 21–46, Medioevo edito e inedito, 2, p. 66. 27   The custom (coutume) in the medieval legal system used in northern France (the so-called pays de droit coutumiers) was an oral legal usage accepted by the population of a given territory. Beginning at the end of the twelfth century in Normandy, the customs of various regions began to be recorded in writing. These private, regional compilations are known as ‘custumals’. Although the custumals aimed to codify earlier legal usage legitimized by tradition, they were in fact indebted to Roman Law by using its terminology and textual structure and by adopting and assimilating some of its legal solutions. On the dependence of the French coutumiers on the Roman model, see Pierre Petot, ‘Pierre de Fontaine et le droit romain’, in Etudes d’histoire du droit canonique dédiées à Gabriel Le Bras (2 vols, Paris, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 955–64; Germain Sicard, ‘Observations sur quelques chapitres du Livre de Jostice et Plet concernant le droit des obligations’, in Etudes d’histoire du droit privé offertes à Pierre Petot (Paris, 1959), pp. 519–32; Philip Van Wetter, ‘Le droit romain et Beaumanoir’, in Mélanges Fitting (2 vols, Montpellier, 1908), pp. 533–82; and Robert Jacob, ‘Les coutumiers du XIIIe siècle ont-ils connu la coutume?’, in La coutume au village dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne. Actes des XXes Journées Internationales d’Histoire de l’Abbaye de Flaran, 1998, ed. Mireille Mousnier and Jacques Poumarède (Toulouse, 2001), pp. 103–19. 28   There are four books concerned with judicial procedure and law making: D. 1, De iustitia et iure (nine images), D. 2, De iurisdictione omnium iudicium (17 images), D. 3, De postulando (eight images) and D. 5, De iudicis (12 images).

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inspired only a few indication signs. On the other hand, contracts such as loan, deposit, rent, custody and sale, as well as mandatory or societas commitments, are the subjects of the majority of the images.29 The function of illustration appears to be similar to that of a commentary. Not only does the image single out a particular law and signal it visually in the margin, but it also often proposes a more contemporary reading of that law. This mechanism is exemplified by two similar images illustrating a common rule concerning contracts of loan (commodatum) and custody (depositum). The rule states that a thing (res) given back in a worse state than it had been in when it was taken in possession by a contracting party is not considered to have been returned. The illustrations interpreting the two laws relating to loan and custody represent, respectively, a man holding the reins of a horse (Figure 8.3, fo. 146) and a man giving a horse’s reins to another man30 (Figure 8.4, fo. 174). Such visual similarity is not random: it functions as a reminder and cross-reference indicator that provokes the reader-viewer to confront the laws juxtaposed in this way.31 However, the reference also seems to appeal to a broader context beyond Justinian’s text. In both cases the object (res) of the contract is made concrete. It is a horse. The images amplify the textual message in order to lend it precision and perhaps to make it more relevant for the reader. The same law is included three times in the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir, and in each case the object of the transaction appears to be a horse.32 This strategy of marking a law by a visually updated image is particularly clear on fo. 146 (Figure 8.3). The horse is shown here with a saddle and reins,   Books 12–21 are focused on obligations and various types of contracts. They are illustrated by 122 images, with an additional 23 in book 4 (De in integrum restitutionibus) and seven and six images, respectively, in book 7, concerning the usufruct and in book 8, dealing with servitudes. In books 22, De usuris, 23, De sponsalibus and 24, De donationibus inter virum et uxorem, there are only 5 pictures. 30   In this case, it would be instructive to compare the illustrated fragments of text: fo. 146: ‘Si reddita quidem sit res commodata; sed deterior facta reddatur, non videtur reddita’(‘If the thing lent is indeed returned but returned in worse condition, it is understood not to have been returned at all’) (D. 13, 6, 3, 1) and f.. 174: ‘Si res deposita deterior reddatur; quasi non reddatur agi depositi potest’ (‘If a deposit is returned in a worse condition, the action on deposit can be brought as if it has not been given back’) (D. 16, 3, 1, 16). 31   Similar correspondence occurs between a few more images in the Kórnik Digest. An image of a man holding a stick refers to laws concerning the blind (fo. 143, 193v, 226), a woman pointing to a text signifies those dealing with women (fff 19, 30v, 170), houses on fire mark cases of burned buildings (fo. 194, 201) and a fisherman in a boat refers to a type of sale called ‘cum quasi alea emitur’ (‘similar to throwing dice’), when a net of fish is bought before the fish have actually been caught (ff. 191, 203). The function of these images seems to imitate the mechanism of allegationes, the glosses providing crossreferences within the Corpus Iuris. 32   Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ed. Amédée Salmon (3 vols, Paris, 1899, rep. 1970), chapters 28 and 36. 29

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Figure 8.3

Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 146. Loan of a horse

Figure 8.4

Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 174. Deposit of a horse

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which suggests that the animal is intended for riding. The presentation of such a horse (identified as a ronci de service) to a senior was one of the obligations of a vassal described in the French coutumiers of the thirteenth century,33 but derived from an older customary practice. By insisting on the use of the animal for riding, the image refers the reader to a case mentioned on a subsequent page (fo. 146v.). The law in question develops restrictions concerning a loan (commodatum) and gives an example of a horse taken to war without the approval of its owner (‘Sed interdum et mortis damnum ad eum qui commodatum rogavit pertinet. Nam si equum tibi commodavero ut ad villam adduceres. tu ad bellum duxeris; commodati teneberis’).34 A similar case was pondered by Philippe de Beaumanoir when he approached the problem of a horse given back by a senior to his vassal (‘mes se je

  Les etablissements de Saint Louis accompagnés des textes primitifs et de textes dérivés, ed. Paul Viollet (4 vols, Paris, 1881), l. 1, chapter 135 (vol. 2, pp. 253–56). 34   ‘Furthermore, there are occasions when loss arising from death falls on the borrower. So if I lend you a horse for you to take it to a farm, and you take it into war, you will be liable in the action on loan for use’. D. 13, 6, 5, 7. 33

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l’ai servi de ronci sain et il l’afole tant comme il le tient et il le me renvoie, je ne sui pas tenu a reprendre loi, ainçois doi estre quites de servir’).35 The images focused on indicating the ‘useful’ laws and, on updating the text, can often inform us about the medieval understanding of Roman Law and about the ways in which it was used. One of the clearest examples concerns a depiction of the term ‘usufructus’ (‘usufruct’) by referring to a case of cut wood illustrated by a man cutting down the branches of a tree (Figure 8.5, fo. 80v.).36 The image is not concerned with how the rights to the usufruct were transferred, nor with the fact that according to Roman Law this benefice was almost exclusively viewed as a mortis causa liberality. It explores instead the essence of this right to use the property of someone else, focusing on the appropriation of fruits. The Roman legal concept itself is given here a nuanced or even reversed sense. The image seems to follow the interpretation suggested by the glossators, or later customary law compilers, who used to assimilate usufruct and a life annuity (rente viagère). The term itself was no longer perceived as referring to a right to the property of someone else, but, as Paul Ourliac and Jehan De Malafosse explain, as signifying a form of possession that although it excludes an abusus, puts the tenant in the position of the owner.37 Any annuitant of property or land could be termed usufructuarius; a vassal also could be a usufructuarius, because originally the vassal’s benefice was considered as held only temporarily. An inscription-titulus written next to the image identifies the user of the branches as a rusticus, or commoner and suggests a more contemporary reading of the scene. In fact, the usufructuary rights concerning the use of trees were, according to Roman Law, quite in line with the medieval practice concerning commoners. The illustrated paragraph explains that the ususfructuarius was not allowed to cut trees, but could take the branches to build vine stakes or take the wood of trees broken by the wind.38 Analogically, the medieval commoner tenant had a right of ‘ramage’, that is, to collect the branches to build an enclosure. He could also use the ‘bois vert gisant ou arrachés par auraige ou fortune de vent’ (‘fresh wood found on the ground or broken by a storm or wind’), as the Coutumier general informs us.39 35   ‘But if I have supplied him with a sound farm horse and he injures it while he has it in his possession and then sends it back to me, I am not obliged to take it back and I must be considered to have fulfilled my obligation’. De Beaumanoir, chapter 28, 796 [The Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir, trans. F.R.P. Akehurst (Philadelphia, 1992]. 36   According to Roman Law, ususfructus was the right for one person to enjoy the fruits of a thing, while the same thing was owned by another person. It was usually established by testament, by which an heir was obliged to give to another person the usufruct of an inherited thing. Generally, the rights to the usufruct were limited by the lifetime of the person who had acquired them (see D. 8, 1 and D. 45, 1, 38, 12). 37   Paul Ourliac and Jehan De Malafosse, Histoire du droit privé, II: Les Biens (Paris, 1961), p. 392. 38   D. 7, 1, 10–12. 39   Roland Bechmann, Des arbres et des hommes: la forêt au moyen-âge (Paris, 1984), pp. 271–2.

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Figure 8.5

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Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 80v. Man cutting down the branches of a tree

Figure 8.6 Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 3. Justinian

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In all the cases discussed above, the choice of text was reinforced by the visual updating strategy. The images tended to contextualize the illustrated legal case and to make it conform to a new social situation. In this way their purpose was somewhere in between that of a gloss, which comments on the text proper, and a translationparaphrase, which adapts it. The images seem to have functioned as a bridge between the ‘present’ of the reader and the ‘past’ of the text compiled by Justinian’s lawyers and to make this past be ‘re-presented’ in the temporal and visual sense. In other words, the Roman past was designed to be remembered in a permanent relationship with the ‘present’ of the reader. The interrelationship between the contemporary and the historical past is particularly evident with regard to the images of judicial or legislative power. The illustration at the beginning of book 1, De iusticia et iure, is one of the most evocative examples. Following the tradition of placing an image of the author on the frontispiece of the book, it represents Justinian in the upper register and, in the lower part of the initial, a scholar reading one of five books laid out on a desk. This auto-referential detail points to the five volumes of the medieval division of the Corpus Iuris Civilis (Figure 8.6).40 The updating goes even further. The image of Justinian combines several elements, including a tall chair, an imperial diademcrown surmounted by three balls and a sceptre and a globe, both topped with crosses, that seem to have been inspired by Frederick II’s seal as King of the Romans, dated 1216–18.41 If this was the case, the visual distinction of the historic initiator of the compilation of the Digest would have been enhanced by the evocation of the image of the contemporary emperor.42 However, the programme of illustrations does not attempt to affirm the ‘potestas imperialis’ (‘imperial power’). The famous maxim, ‘quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem’ (‘a decision given by the emperor has the force of a statute’), adapted by all the thirteenth-century French coutumiers to define royal legislative power, is illustrated by an image of a king giving a long rod to a group of people in a gesture indebted to feudal ritual (fo. 7).43

40   The medieval Corpus Iuris Civilis includes three volumes of the Digest, the Code and the Volumen, composed of the Institutiones, the Authenticum and the last three books of the Code, with the Libri Feudorum sometimes appended. 41   See the reproduction in Milano e Lombardia in età comunale, secoli XI–XIII, Milano Palazzo Reale 15 avr.–11 juil. 1993 (Milan, 1993), no. 157. 42   Frederick II was Holy Roman Emperor only in 1220–50. If the illuminator working in about the 1230s–1240s really used his image, he would have associated it with Frederick’s current function and title. In any case, both Frederick’s seal and the initial in BK 824 depict traditional imperial insigna: see Percy Ernst Schramm, Die Deutchen Kaiser und Könige in Bildern ihrer zeit 751–1190 (Munich, 1983), pp. 141–5. 43   The maxim is cited at D. 1, 4, 1. For its use in customary law, see Albert Rigaudière, ‘Princeps legibus solutus est (Dig. I, 3, 31) et quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem (Dig. I, 4, 1 et Inst. I, 2, 6): à travers trois coutumiers du XIIIe siècle’, in Hommages à Gérard Boulvert (Nice, 1987), pp. 427–51.

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Figure 8.7

Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 13. A proconsul receiving gifts.

Figure 8.8

Biblioteka Kórnicka 824, fo. 14v. A poor woman in front of a judge

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The contemporary significance of the Roman norm is also conveyed by two images concerning the offices of magistrates responsible for administering justice. The first case concerns the question of whether a proconsul is allowed to receive gifts or gratifications from plaintiffs. The text states: ‘non vero in totum exscenis abstinere deb | ebit proconsul § Sed modum addicere. Ut | neque modo se in totum abstineat. | neque avare modum exseniorum exce | bat.’44 The image formulates a visual, immediately perceptible answer: the magistrate accepts a jar from one man and refuses a bag full of money offered by another plaintiff (Figure 8.7). In this way, the image seems to refer to title 18 of the same book, which explains that a person charged with dispensing justice should not accept anything but perishable goods, like wine or meat, to be consumed within a few days.45 It also evokes a rule common to all the customary law collections. The Livres de Jostice et de Plet paraphrases the Digest by stating that a judge is allowed to accept only small gifts, like meat or drink.46 In the same way, Philippe de Beaumanoir authorizes a bailiff to ‘prendre vins et viandes, et non pas outrageusement […], mes choses prestes comme a boire et a mangier a la journee, si comme vin en pos ou en baris, ou viandes prestes a envoier en la cuisine’.47 The next image concerning the administration of justice juxtaposes a judge and a woman wearing a ripped, frequently-repaired coat conveying her poor condition. She leans against her staff and her chin rests on her wrist in the gesture recognized as a sign of sorrow (Figure 8.8, fo. 14v.).48 According to the Digest, the person who dispenses justice must not follow his emotions and ‘... when trying cases he must not go off like a firework at those whom he thinks wicked, nor be moved to tears by the entreaties of those who have fallen upon evil days.’ (‘cognoscendo neque | excandescere adversus eos quos malos | putat; neque precibus calamitosorum su | orum illacrimari oportet.’).49 This fragment, focused on the equity of judgement, was faithfully paraphrased in the Livres de Jostice et de Plet50 and similar ideas were

44   ‘A proconsul is not absolutely obliged to decline gifts, but he should aim for a middle way, neither sulkily holding back completely, nor greedily going beyond a reasonable level with regard to gifts’ (D. 1, 16, 6). 45   D. 1, 18, 18. 46   Li livres de Jostice et de Plet, publié pour la première fois d’après le manuscrit unique de la Bibliothèque Nationale, ed. Louis N. Rapetti (Paris, 1850), l. 1, 21 § 2. 47   ‘[the lord excuses him from this part of his oath to the extent of] accepting wine and food  ; and not in outrageous manner […], but things ready to eat and drink on the same day, such as wine in jugs or firkins [baris], or meat ready to send to the kitchen.’ Beaumanoir, chapter 1, 29. 48   François Garnier, Le langage de l’image au Moyen Age, I: Signification et symbolique (Paris, 1982), pp. 181–3. 49   D. 1, 18, 19, pr. - 1. 50   Li livres de Jostice et de Plet, l. 1, 21 § 6.

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expressed in the Conseil à un ami51 and by Philippe de Beaumanoir.52 In all these customary law texts, however, the Roman magistrate, a proconsul or praetor, became a bailiff or a provost, that is, a medieval judge. The images in the Kórnik Digest are not so categorical. The clothes of the plaintiffs are visually updated, while the judge is usually distinguished only by his circular hat, or pileus, which later became the hat of a university lawyer (Figures 8.7 and 8.8). However, his costume, similar to that of biblical figures, or even to a Roman toga, creates a temporal distance. The question that arises is whether this ‘antique-style’ garment was supposed to provide a link or parallel with the venerable past, in order to allow the readers to identify themselves with the iudici or iurisconsulti romani. The ‘visual concept’ of updating interlaces here with a certain degree of ‘historical’ distance. It seems not only to contribute to a notion of ‘compatibility’ or ‘concordance’ between Roman Law and the medieval customary laws, but also to highlight the idea of the continuity or even non-temporality of the law.53 The marginal images in the Kórnik Digest form a series of ‘visual glosses’ intended to guide the reader-viewer. The illustrations focus the reader-viewers’ attention on particular passages of the text and stimulate their capacity to remember what they read – but they also function as a system of double reference. The images refer the reader-viewer to the laws singled out in the normative text by a literal or metaphorical association, they mark the corresponding opinions or rules by means of visual similarity and, finally, they signal the legal solutions, which are analogical to or applicable in customary law. In this way, the selection criteria of the illustrated subjects in the Kórnik Digest and their visual interpretation, seem to anticipate the principles of selective adaptation of Roman Law by the first French coutumiers. Such an updating approach to the text could obviously work as an aid to its comprehension and memorization – the old law is memorable because it is assimilated with current legislation. As a very specific reading reflecting very particular interests, however, this visual strategy seems above all to reflect a strong intention to unify these two legal systems. From this perspective the images may be seen as signs marking a ‘ductus’54 imposed on a reading of the Digest, which conducts readers through the text, shaping their memory and influencing their perception of what they read.

51   Le conseil de Pierre de Fontaines ou traité de l’ancienne jurisprudence française, ed. M.A.J. Marnier (Paris, 1846), chapter 21. 52   Beaumanoir, chapter 1, 30. 53   See Robert Jacob’s opinion about the ‘distance’ created by the legal images which in fact makes their temporality ‘au-dehors du temps historique et du temps réel’ (‘outside of historical time and real time’): ‘Peindre le droit ou l’imaginaire du juriste’, in Le Moyen Age en lumière, ed. J. Dalarun (Paris, 2002), p. 223. 54   On the rhetorical category of ductus to which I allude here, see Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, pp. 77–81.

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Chapter 9

‘Quant j’eus tout recordé par ordre’: Memory and Performance on Display in the Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit and Remede de Fortune Kate Maxwell

Et par maniere de memoire Tout le fait de li et l’ystoire Si com je l’ay devant escript, Estoit en mon cuer en escript Par vray certain entendement Mieus .c. foys et plus proprement Que clers ne le porroit escripre De main en parchemin ne en cire. [...] Et quant j’eus tout recordé par ordre [...] (Guillaume de Machaut, Remede de Fortune, ll. 2939–46, 2965)1 [And by memory, everything she did and all that took place just as I have written it here, was written securely in my heart one hundred times better and more exactly than a scribe could write it on parchment or wax. ... And when I had recalled everything properly ...]

The above quotation outlines the thought processes involved in the first-person narrator’s notation of something which he has just heard spoken. It succinctly alludes to the concepts which will here be discussed in relation to two of Machaut’s

1   All quotations from the Remede de Fortune will be taken from Guillaume de Machaut, Le jugement du Roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, ed. and trans. James I. Wimsatt and William M. Kibler (Athens, 1988). Quotations from and references to the Voir Dit will be taken from Guillaume de Machaut, Le livre du Voir Dit, ed. Paul Imbs (Paris, 1999), with an introduction by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet. All translations into English are my own.

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works: the Voir Dit and the Remede de Fortune as they are presented in the three of the six manuscripts which appear to contain Machaut’s ‘complete works’.2 In this contribution to the understanding of the multi-faceted concept of memory under scrutiny in this volume, I am interested in the technique of memory that would be involved in the various stages in the transmission of a manuscript’s contents from creator to receiver. As the works under consideration are transmitted in more than one manuscript, I have chosen to regard each codex as a performance, that is, a unique interpretation in which different individuals take part. This concept of performance stems from the contemporary music philosopher Christopher Small’s coining of the active verb ‘to music’, which he defines thus: To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance. That means not only to perform, but also to listen, to provide material for a performance – what we call composing – to prepare for a performance – what we call practising 2   Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–77) is generally considered to be a Reims-based composer, even though much of the first portion of his long life was spent travelling in the service of various branches of the house of France. He is believed to have been born in Reims and certainly died there as a canon in the cathedral, having settled there some years previously. The well-known single-author manuscript collections, which apparently contain all of Machaut’s musical and poetic works available to their compilers, have the following catalogue numbers and sigla:

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1586 (manuscript C, c. 1350); Private collection of Elizabeth J. and James E. Ferrell, currently held in Cambridge,Corpus Christi College, Parker Library, without shelfmark (manuscript Ferrell-Vg, c. 1370); Paris, BnF, fr. 1585 (manuscript B, c. 1370); Paris, BnF, fr. 1584 (manuscript A, c. 1370); Paris, BnF, fr. 9221 (manuscript E, c. 1390); Paris, BnF, fr. 22545–6 (manuscript F-G, c. 1390: a single manuscript currently bound in two volumes). The dates of compilation are taken from François Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France, trans. Ursule Molinaro and Bruce Benderson (London, 1978), pp. 26–7 and ‘Les manuscrits enluminés de Guillaume de Machaut: essai de chronologie’ in Guillaume de Machaut: colloque-table ronde organisé par l’Université de Reims, Reims, 19–22 avril 1978 (Paris, 1982), pp. 117–33. Avril’s research forms the basis of the seminal work and starting-point for Machaut studies by Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York, 1995). The Remede de Fortune (c. 1345–49) and the Voir Dit (c. 1360–65) are both transmitted in the three later manuscripts, A, E and F-G. The other three manuscripts contain the Remede, but were apparently produced too early to transmit the late Voir Dit. The term ‘work’ is commonly used when referring to Machaut’s oeuvre, although it is problematic. For a full discussion of its use, see Kate Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the mise en page of Medieval French Sung Verse’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2009), pp. 27–30.

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or rehearsing – or any other activity which can affect the nature of the human encounter. [...] To music is to pay attention in any way to a musical performance, at whatever level or quality of attention [...].3

This definition can, I believe, be usefully applied to manuscript creation, reception and transmission, in order to enhance our understanding of the varying presentation of the same works in different manuscripts.4 The roles involved in manuscript performance include those of the authorperformer, who in this case is the same individual invoked (albeit differently) in all the manuscripts, the scribal-performers (among whom I include illuminators and miniaturists) and the reader-performers (of all eras). Each of these uses his or her memory in constructing, transmitting or receiving the work, and it is the play of memory in this subtle process of transmission (or even possibly of interchange in the Middle Ages) that I will examine here in two of Machaut’s musical-poetic works, the Remede de Fortune and the Voir Dit. There are, therefore, two principal types of memory under discussion here. Firstly, there is that of individuals, be they fictional characters in the tales or those involved in the production of the manuscripts under discussion. Secondly, there is the more abstract concept of the memory preserved within the manuscripts, the memory which is ‘on display’ and which offers us valuable clues as to the transmission of the two works. The quotation opening this chapter comes from the Remede de Fortune, where it forms part of the narrative related by the first-person narrator, called Guillaume. In the Remede, the narrator is a poet and composer, but also a lover – or at least a would-be lover, since he lacks the refinements necessary to woo his lady successfully. The plot is simple, but interwoven with the act of creation of lyric poetry and music in each of the formes fixes popular at the time: inspired by devotion to the lady, Guillaume writes a lay, which somehow comes into her possession.5 She commands him to read it and then asks him who wrote it. He flees rather than answering this all-too-leading question and enters a walled garden, where he writes a complainte against Fortune and falls into a trance. He is roused from his torpor by Hope, who instructs him through discourse and music (a 3   Christopher Small, ‘Musicking – A Means of Performing and Listening. A Lecture’, Music Education Research, 1 (1999): pp. 9–21 (p. 12). 4   For a more detailed discussion of the concept of manuscript performance see Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, Chapter 1. 5   In the oeuvre of Guillaume de Machaut, the term ‘lay’ (‘lai’) denotes a 12-stanza poem, often set to music, in which each stanza has a unique structure and rhyme scheme except for the first and last, which share the same. If the lay is set to music, these two stanzas usually share music, although it is generally transposed for the last stanza. Most of Machaut’s lays are set to music and most (though by no means all) of these settings are monophonic. Machaut’s treatment of the lay is, however, an important turning point in the form’s history. For a summary of research into the lay and Machaut’s role in its development, see Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, pp. 93–5.

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chanson royale and a baladelle) how to become a worthy lover and woo his lady. After his tuition, Guillaume composes a ballade in his joy and returns to his lady, who now accepts him as her lover. A banquet is taking place and he takes part in the entertainment by singing a chanson balladée, or virelay. After the festivities, the lover departs for home singing a rondelet. Alas, he soon has doubts about his lady’s constancy and accuses her of looking favourably on others. Although they are later reconciled, the lady is not as reassuring as she could be and so the tale ends on a note of uncertainty. It is worth bearing in mind when discussing the Remede de Fortune that Machaut wrote it in his late forties, an age which, at the time, was far from young. In addition, Machaut was (presumably!) unaware of the fact that he would go on to live – and compose music and poetry – for another quarter-century. The Remede seems to have been written not long before the compilation of the earliest complete-works manuscript, C, which was most likely patronized by the house of Luxembourg, the Remede (which may do homage to Bonne of Luxembourg) taking centre stage in this manuscript.6 Although C is not one of the manuscripts under consideration here as it does not contain the Voir Dit, I mention it because, had Machaut not been exceptionally long-lived for his time, this manuscript and especially the Remede would have provided a full compilation of the poetcomposer’s works. For the Remede, like the complete-works manuscripts, contains a kind of catalogue of the author’s musical and lyric capabilities, since it features within the narrative one of each of the musico-poetic formes fixes. In Machaut’s narrative construction of the Remede, the increasing aptitude of the lover Guillaume at the hands of Hope is in stark contrast to the order of difficulty of the formes fixes in the tale. Whereas Guillaume the lover begins by failing in the basics of courtly love, Machaut the poet-composer opens with the most challenging of the formes fixes, the lay. As Guillaume the lover becomes more educated and adept, Machaut the poet-composer works his way through the formes fixes in descending order of difficulty, so that the triumphant lover departs from the banquet singing the simplest rondelet. Left on his own without Hope or music, Guillaume the lover flounders in his suit at the end of the tale. Similarly, at the end of the tale, Machaut the poetcomposer claims to sign his name in an anagram – yet the text in question does not in fact reveal his name, only an approximation: a ‘solution’ which is very close to, but does not match exactly, the various spellings of ‘Guillaume de Machaut’. It is an ingenious manipulation, setting to work our memories as reader-performers. We are asked to recall and are left in no doubt as to who the author is, yet he also leaves us frustrated. By the end of the tale, therefore, the reader-performers who have failed to ‘solve’ the anagram are, like the lover who pursued his suit   For more discussion of Bonne of Luxembourg, particularly the possibility of her patronage of this manuscript being transferred to another member of her family following her untimely death in 1349 (the year before her husband became Jean II of France), see Wimsatt and Kibler, pp. 33–4. 6

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beyond Hope’s teaching, left in ambiguity; the author-performer, on the other hand, remains in the ascendant.7 Thus we can see that the very construction of the tale, with its didactic overtones contained in the teachings of Hope and in the order of the lyric insertions, together with the inclusion of the anagram, relies on the memory of the reader-performer, which is manipulated by the author. As for the manuscript presentations of the Remede, it can be seen from the opening miniatures in each manuscript that the iconographic presentation of the author and/or the first-person narrator differs between the manuscripts and that the reader-performers must exercise their memories to a greater or lesser extent in order to interpret the miniatures within the context of the manuscripts and the tale. In manuscript A (c. 1370), which was produced at the end of Machaut’s life (and perhaps in some way under his supervision), the opening miniature contains two figures seen in discussion. One is young and standing, listening to the other who is old, seated and situated higher in the frame. While the younger figure reappears in subsequent miniatures and is identifiable as the character Guillaume the lover, there is no older character in the Remede, nor does this figure reappear in subsequent miniatures. Sylvia Huot has suggested that this older figure is Machaut the poet-composer, portrayed instructing his younger personage.8 If this is the case, then he is portrayed with a symbol of learning usually reserved for the learned metaphorical character Grammatica: the switch.9 There is surely at play in this miniature an intrigue similar to that found in the anagram: we as reader-performers may seek the author and yet what we find does not quite match our expectations. Rather, it surpasses them: by finding only a near-naming we are reminded who set the anagram; by finding Grammatica we are not allowed to forget the learned attributes of the author-performer. The memorial activity required of the reader-performer in the opening miniatures of the other two manuscripts is less subtle. The Remede’s opening miniature in Manuscript E, produced some two decades after Machaut’s death, is the only one illustrating this tale. It portrays a male figure in a garden, surely a reference to the greater part of the story, which will take place in the walled garden which the reader-performer is asked to recall. Manuscript F-G, on the other hand, although contemporary with manuscript E, follows manuscript A in not portraying a scene from the story in its opening miniature. Instead, it shows a clerical figure seated behind a raised lectern, reading (or singing) from a book to a group of people seated below who are responding to him actively. This scene of interactive learning does not involve any characters from the tale, nor even any reference to the setting of the story. In portraying the didactic nature of the tale, the   The work of Laurence de Looze has much influenced my thinking here; on this point in particular see especially ‘“Pseudo-autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune’, L’Esprit Créateur 33/4 (1993): pp. 73–86. 8   Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book (Ithaca, 1987), p. 279. 9   It is my pleasure to thank Domenic Leo for pointing this out to me (personal communication). 7

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opening miniature in manuscript F-G has moved the focus from the education of Guillaume the lover to the education of the reader-performer. Here, the link shown in the tale between education, learning and memory is on display. It is not just in iconography that the presentation of the Remede in manuscript E stands apart from that of A and F-G. E is physically the largest of the completeworks manuscripts and its text is generally laid out in three columns rather than the two found in A and F-G. In addition, while in A and F-G the music within the Remede is also contained within two columns, in E it is allowed to flow freely across the columns in a single colourful flourish. In a work with as many carefullyplaced musical interpolations as the Remede, this must have taken a great deal of planning. Indeed, the lack of miniatures in E’s Remede ensures that it is surely the music which provides the principal visual interest for the reader-performer. Out of the three manuscripts considered here, it is E which, by its musical presentation, is also the most visually appealing and thus also the most appealing to the readerperformer’s memory.10 A closer inspection of the music suggests that its visual appearance was indeed of primary concern to the compilers of manuscript E. This is especially apparent in the rondeau, which contains an unexpected feature in its musical presentation. In manuscript E (fo. 35v.), the rondeau presentation contains a highly abbreviated and unusually small line of text below the final staff of music which contains the second portion of the otherwise untexted tenor part. While an educated guess at its significance could be made from this manuscript alone, a glance at manuscripts A (fo. 78v.) and F-G (fo. 62v.) confirms that this line of text is in fact the second stanza of the rondeau text, which, even in manuscript E, would usually be presented as a separate stanza after the music. Rather than dismiss this anomaly as an ‘error’ in the presentation of manuscript E, I would suggest that, although most likely unplanned, this aspect of the presentation of the rondeau does not prevent a reader-performer from reconstructing the work, either orally or silently, if he or she so wishes, with only slightly more difficulty than that required in reading the same text in manuscripts A or F-G. Indeed, even without entering into hypothetical ‘what if’ scenarios regarding what kind of action would be taken in similar situations in the other manuscripts, here we can say with conviction that manuscript E allows such a reconstruction by the reader-performer without marring the beauty of the page layout. Before moving on to the Voir Dit, it is worth considering how the readerperformer reconstructs the music from the manuscripts, perhaps alone, perhaps quietly, perhaps memorizing at the same time.11 While this cerebral reconstruction is by no means the only way to perform music contained in luxury illuminated   For evidence that a manuscript’s visual appearance could aid memorization see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990, repr. 2004), pp. 9, 93–5. Also see Part I of this volume, ‘Memory and Images’. 11   For a summary of this process when reading text from a manuscript, see Carruthers, p. 186. There is surely no reason why the same would not be true of music. 10

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manuscripts, the well-known image of singers gathered around a manuscript is more likely to hold true for rotuli, or other less-formal presentations, than for the manuscripts under consideration here, as shall be seen from examples in the Voir Dit. Nevertheless, there is one group of reader-performers who would generally have received the music in written form, including illuminated manuscripts, with the intention of reproducing it again in written form: the scribal-performers. Here I do not intend to challenge the idea that manuscripts were copied from exemplars, but I would like to offer a more nuanced view of the process, taking the mnemonic aspects of the page layout into account. For, in the case of all three manuscripts here, the relationship of syllables to notes shows that the text scribe, whose work was usually done first, was aware of how much space to leave for the music.12 While this could be done entirely by sight, we must remember that scribalperformers were professionals, highly educated (and therefore with memories trained to remarkable levels by today’s standards) and capable of great subtlety and skill. Therefore, it is my proposition that, whether they were copying directly from an exemplar (or several) or from ‘the book of memory’, the scribes involved in the act of notating the music and text were also engaged in a performance, probably silent, but in accomplishing which they were nevertheless aware of the sonic value of their task, the sounding nature of the music they were notating. If the Remede de Fortune displays imaginative combinations of lyrical, musical and narrative poetry, then the Voir Dit takes this to extremes. Mixing not only music and poetry, the Voir Dit is a story which is set in motion by, and indeed played out through, a series of letters between the first-person protagonist and his young female admirer, Toute Belle. As with the lovers in the Remede, the relationship waxes and wanes, ending on a note of doubtful reconciliation. Whereas the allegorical nature of the Remede is clear from the outset through its use of personification, in the Voir Dit this is certainly not the case and the story makes extensive claims to be true, not least in its title. The lover-protagonist is once again a poet-composer, but in the Voir Dit he is elderly and indeed ailing, albeit revived by a letter and poem from Toute Belle. Although opinion on the ‘true’ nature of the Voir Dit has veered from one extreme to the other since the resurgence in Machaut scholarship in the nineteenth century, careful analysis by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and R. Barton Palmer of the interpolated exchange of lovers’ letters and the historical events and characters to which they relate seems to have settled the debate at least for the moment. For my purposes here, then, I agree with their findings: the story is at least broadly true, albeit undoubtedly embellished.13   For a discussion of music overlay in the Machaut manuscripts see Lawrence Earp, ‘Scribal Practice, Manuscript Production and the Transmission of Music in Late Medieval France’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1983), pp. 177–86. 13   Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit, ed. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York 1998), ‘Introduction’. That it has taken such time for the debate to reach even this settlement is surely testimony to Machaut’s skill as a writer. 12

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If we accept at least the broad truth of the Voir Dit, especially the fact that it is set in contemporary mid- to late-fourteenth-century France, then it is reasonable to assume that the minutiae of the story (the details of letter-writing, the presence of secretaries, the role of the messengers, the protagonists’ day-to-day activities and so on), while not necessarily being historical fact, are at least in keeping with this broad patina of ‘truth’. In this light, an analysis of the transmission of the written communications between the lovers – letters, poetry and music – shows the great extent to which memory and speech were relied upon even when the written word was the focus of the exchange. Let us begin with the characters in the story, who can be broadly classified according to their roles within the manuscript performance. We have the authorperformer, Guillaume, who, although using his first name throughout the text, is nevertheless referred to as ‘Machaut’ in a hairline inscription (an artists’ instruction) next to one of the miniatures in manuscript F-G.14 This occurrence, despite being unique in the manuscripts, surely shows that the compilers of the manuscripts equated Machaut the poet-composer with Guillaume the lover in the Voir Dit (most likely in a way that they did not for the other dits). It is also strikingly reminiscent of the well-known inscription at the head of the index to manuscript A, a scribal rubric that also invokes the name of the poet-composer: ‘Vesci l’ordennance que G. de Machaut vuelt qu’il ait en son livre’ (‘here is the order which G. de Machaut wishes his book to have’).15 Another way in which the author-performer manifests his dual appearance in the Voir Dit is through the anagram, which, like that of the Remede, does not have a satisfactory ‘solution’. The anagram in the Voir Dit differs from that in the Remede, however, in that the later work claims that it also conceals an unknown element – or at least, unknown to reader-performers today – that is, it claims also to include the name of Toute Belle. Whether the reader-performers of the time were in any doubt as to her identity is certainly questionable, for concern over gossip about the relationship is a theme which appears in some later letters in the tale. The essential difference from the Remede, however, is that in the Voir Dit the author’s name is easily found in the anagram; it is Toute Belle’s name which remains elusive. Thus the seemingly ‘unsolvable’ anagram may well be a deliberate ploy, like that in the Remede, to remind the reader who has control over the text and indeed over our reception of it. Latter-day gossip-hunters, keen to know which young noblewoman got herself mixed up with a lovelorn old poet, remain disappointed: we must accept that here Machaut, as ever, has the last laugh.16

  Manuscript F-G, fo. 173r. The inscription is described, transcribed and translated in Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 179, n. 176. 15   Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’, pp. 51–83. For a full discussion of the authority (or identity) invoked by this rubric, see Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, Chapter 1. 16   For a discussion of the various solutions proposed over the years (at least until 1998), see Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxix–xl, n. 5. For a discussion 14

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In addition to the author-performer, we also have a reader-performer, Toute Belle. (She is also likely to have been the author-performer, and Guillaume a readerperformer, of her letters, and poems; however, here I will concentrate on her as a reader-performer of Machaut.) She is, in fact, a reader-performer extraordinaire: at the start of the tale she is already a ‘fan’ of Machaut’s work, particularly his music, and she is herself an acclaimed singer. She is familiar enough with Machaut’s oeuvre to be able to chide him (letter 32) for sending her music which she already knows. In the story she receives Machaut’s work not through luxury manuscripts but through letters and she repeatedly solicits new music from him so that she can learn it. Her repeated use of the verb savoir in her letters implies not only great familiarity, but memorization. She does not, however, learn the music exclusively from written notation, although she does make use of it as an aide-mémoire. She either learns it orally from a secretary (or messenger) who has himself learnt it orally from the composer, or, on the rare occasions when they are together, she learns it directly from Guillaume himself with the help of his secretary’s notation: Quand j’eus ma balade finee, Ma douce dame desiree Dist: ‘C’est bien fait, se Dieus me gart.’ Adonc par son tresdoulz regart Me commanda qu’elle l’eüst Par quoi sa bouche la leüst, Car, en cas qu’elle la liroit, Assez mieulz l’en entenderoit. Et je le fis moult volentiers Et du cuer; mais endeme[n]tiers Que mes escrivains [l’escrisoit], [Ma douce dame] la lisoit, Si qu’elle en sot une partie Ains que de la fust departie. (ll. 2361–74) [When I had finished my ballade, my sweet lady said, ‘God protect me, that is well composed.’ And with her sweet look she asked me to give it to her so that she could read it out loud, for, in reading it, she could hear and learn it better. I did this willingly but she, meantime, while my secretary was still writing it, began to read it, so that she had already learnt some of it before she left that place.]

When, towards the end of the tale, Toute Belle finally receives a manuscript copy of the work-in-progress, she already knows the music.17 of the presentation of the anagram in manuscript E, which contains a different anagram from the other manuscripts, see Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, pp. 192–5. 17   Toute Belle’s learning method here is entirely in keeping with that described by both Hugh of Saint Victor and Jacques Legrand. See Carruthers, p. 9 and Appendix A.

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This brings us to the third important character in the Voir Dit for this study of transmission: Machaut’s secretary. Along with the other secretaries and messengers in the work – both lovers use secretaries to write the letters – he provides a rare glimpse of a scribal performer in action. In the above scenario, Guillaume calls on him to notate a work which has already been spontaneously composed. The notation takes place after the composition is complete, with a view to being reproduced elsewhere by the secretary or other scribes: rare evidence of a standard textual composition procedure also being used for music.18 Since Toute Belle was able to memorize it there and then, so too, we can assume, was the highly-trained secretary, who, when coming to transcribe it again, would then have had both a written and a memorized ‘copy’ at his disposal. Additionally, we must bear in mind that Toute Belle initiated the writing of the Voir Dit and, according to the opening of the tale, desired that everything about her love affair with Guillaume be preserved in writing. Also, Machaut the poet-composer was by this time well-known and highly regarded by a wide range of patrons (and presumably also their courts) and he was keen to preserve his works in his ‘livre ou je mets toutes mes choses’ (‘book where I keep all of my works’). The secretary’s notation of this work, therefore, is symptomatic not only of Toute Belle’s method of learning works she admired, but also of Machaut’s preoccupation, unusual for the time, with the written preservation of his work, a concern to which it seems we owe the large number of single-author, complete-works manuscripts which survive today. Thus the manuscript copies not only provide the opportunity for other reader-performers, then as now, to come to know Machaut’s works and to be able to learn and recreate them alone; they also demonstrate Machaut’s apparent awareness of the value of the written artefact in preserving the work beyond the lifetime of its creator.19 Now that we have seen a little of the role of memory and the transmission of music in the story of the Voir Dit, we can compare this to the manuscript presentations. As with the Remede de Fortune, the manuscripts fall into two groups, with E once again standing apart from A and F-G. Whereas A and F-G have extended sequences of miniatures (30 and 37 respectively), E again has far fewer (four). Here too, however, what E may lack in iconography, it makes up for in the virtuosity of its mise en page. Maintaining its habitual three-column format for narrative text, E once again punctuates this with music which is written across the whole folio. The lovers’ correspondence likewise stretches across the columns and is additionally written in a cursive hand. This not only gives it a very

  For the textual procedure, see Carruthers, pp. 194–5.   Today, the Machaut manuscripts themselves certainly stand as a memorial to the composer, although who exactly is behind that memorial is impossible to know. Machaut does seem to have had a strong concept of his works’ posterity, as well as their status as a memorial to him, as seen in the Prologue and opening miniatures to manuscript A. For a full discussion of this topic, see Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, pp. 28–9 (Machaut’s ‘Prologue’), Chapter 4 (the Mass) and Chapter 5 (the Voir Dit). 18 19

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distinctive appearance, but also adds a degree of verisimilitude to the contents of the page: the letters are written in a letter hand. In manuscripts A and F-G the two-column format employed for the Remede is maintained and the lovers’ letters are written as prose within the columns, distinguishable from the surrounding narrative poetry by their full justification as opposed to left alignment. What is perhaps more remarkable in A and F-G, however, is the fact that no music whatsoever is transmitted within their presentations of the Voir Dit. Instead of musical notation, the rubric ‘et y a chant’ (‘with music’) is employed, indicating that the music can be found in the music section of the manuscript.20 This is a complete departure from the presentation of the Remede in both manuscripts, yet it is one which is anticipated in the text of the Voir Dit itself, implying that when Machaut wrote this section he already had a ‘complete-works’ transmission format in mind: (Des autres choses vous diray Se diligemment les querés, Sans faillir vous les trouverés Aveuques les choses notees Et es balades non chantees; Dont j’ay mainte pensee eü Que chascuns na mie sceü, Car cilz qui vuet tel chose faire Penser li faut ou contrefaire.) (ll. 521–9.) [I tell you that you will without fail find the other pieces if you look carefully among those set to music and the ballades which have no music and with which I have been much preoccupied (which not everyone has been aware of), for those who would like to make such pieces must think carefully or else pretend.]

A further way in which the manuscripts differ in their presentation and which has potential consequences for the use of memory in their production is in the distribution of variants across the whole text, particularly the 46 prose letters. In total, E has the greatest number of variant readings across all parts of the tale and for the music at least has been shown to relate to more than one source.21 E’s textual variants, however, are especially frequent in the letters.22 This is in 20   There is only one inconsistency in this pattern and it appears in both manuscripts. The rondel ‘Se mes cuers’ is labelled as having music when it does not, whereas the rondel ‘Sans cuer, dolens’ is not labelled as having music when it does. 21   Margaret Bent, ‘The Machaut Manuscripts Vg, B and E’, Musica Disciplina, 37 (1983): pp. 53–82. 22   It is worth noting in passing that one important set of variants in manuscript E occurs in the anagram passage, although the text which is designated is no more ‘solvable’ than that in A and F-G. See Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, Chapter 5.

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contrast to manuscript F-G, whose textual variants occur evenly across the letters, narrative and lyrics, and A, which displays comparatively few variants in the letters. The fact that the difference between the manuscripts is most pronounced for the prose letters is interesting, for the Voir Dit is the only one of Machaut’s works to incorporate letters into its structure. In addition to the internal evidence from the story, this divergence may therefore be able to shed new light on the transmission processes of the three manuscripts. Instead of dismissing manuscript E with its high number of variants as being a less reliable source than A or F-G, I would like to consider the possibility that memory played an important part in its production. If, as is believed to be the norm, manuscript copying took place primarily by sight and exemplar, then for the Voir Dit we would expect an even distribution of variants across all components of the text as is the case for manuscript F-G. 23 The fact that there are fewer than expected variants in the letters in A is in itself interesting, since manuscript A may have been produced within Machaut’s milieu in Reims; it was certainly produced within his lifetime. It is therefore tempting to speculate on whether the manuscript’s compilers had access to the actual letters exchanged. Manuscript E, on the other hand, with its marked increase in variants in the prose letters, seems to lean towards memory playing a greater part in its production, since it is easier to memorize verse than prose (thus, variants appear in the material that was more difficult to memorize).24 The transmission history of manuscript E has puzzled scholars, who see the codex as a rather careless amalgam of several exemplars.25 If the scribal performers’ memories are taken into account, from Machaut’s secretary in the Voir Dit to those working some 30 years later on manuscript E, or, in other words, if we do not accept the need for direct manuscript-to-manuscript transmission at all times, then E’s variants become a natural part of that process. The level of planning involved in the remarkable layout of manuscript E would certainly have required great familiarity with the works. In addition, manuscript E is the only complete-works manuscript to have a known patron: Jean, Duke of   This assumption about manuscript copying is behind the arguments which pervade all discussions of the relationships between the Machaut manuscripts and is especially evident throughout Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’ and Bent, ‘The Machaut Manuscripts’, as well as in the various editing practices involved in modern editions of Machaut’s works. 24   By the same token, it could be argued that it is easier to introduce variants, particularly unintentional ones, into prose than verse, due to its lack of a fixed structure. This is, in fact, the other side of the same coin: the meter, rhythm and rhyme of poetry all contribute to its being easier to memorize; by contrast, the lack of these in prose gives a scribe less of a structure on which to build his mnemonic processes, which in turn leads to a greater number of variants. Indeed, it is the very ‘written’ nature of the Voir Dit, based on actual letters of which half were presumably composed by Toute Belle and not by Machaut himself, which lends itself to such variations. For a full discussion, see Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, pp. 210–17. 25   For a list of references to discussions of the musical and textual provenances of manuscript E see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 93, n. 25. 23

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Berry (1340–1416, son of Bonne of Luxembourg and Jean II of France), whose library already contained copies of individual works by Machaut at the time of E’s production.26 Therefore for E it is easy to imagine the transmission and production processes of copying and memorization working together in an informed atelier. In conclusion, I wish to come full circle and return to the opening miniatures from the Remede de Fortune. In manuscript E the single miniature features a solitary courtly lover, with no indication of authorship or identity. For the most silent performer throughout manuscript E, in its miniatures, its page layout and its transmission, is indeed the author-performer. Manuscript A invokes the author in its opening rubric, claiming to reflect his intentions. Both A and F-G manifest his presence in their miniatures and through their representation of the music, which allows relatively little freedom of interpretation for scribal- and reader-performers. The posthumous manuscript F-G seems to display veneration for the remembered author, whereas manuscript E gives more weight than its fellows to the memories of the other performers: the readers and the scribes. Thus we see that all three manuscripts have indeed been ‘recordés par ordre’, in that they have involved accurate recall, although in different ways and with very different implications for late medieval and post-medieval reader-performers, whose reception of the tale is manipulated by each mise en page, in which memory is ever present. It is the manuscripts’ varying invitations to their reader-performers, in this case you and me, to take part in and to bring our own appreciation to these works, which does much to keep them alive and relevant today.

 

26

Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’, pp. 120–21, especially p. 121, n. 225.

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Chapter 10

Acrostics as Copyright Protection in the Franco–Italian Epic: Implications for Memory Theory John F. Levy

Medievalists are all interested in memory, although this means something different to each specialization. Historians might concentrate, as does Clanchy, on the replacement of orally transmitted memory by literacy and the keeping of written records, or as McKitterick does on the ways societies construct and remember their pasts, or as Yates and Carruthers do on the artificial memory (ars memorativa or mnemotechniques) of the literate class.1 In part, literary study of the Old French chansons de geste shares many of these same concerns, although, not surprisingly, it has its own domains. The present essay examines generally the question of how Old French chansons de geste were transmitted. It asks: if chansons de geste were transmitted orally, were they memorized verbatim? Or were they, by another account, improvised or recomposed during each performance by jongleurs, the travelling minstrels who practised their entertainments along the various European, and especially French, pilgrimage routes through the piazzas, churches and monastic atria of northern Italian cities? And, if so, what part, if any, does memory play during composition in performance?2 Specifically, the focus here is centred on what may be a new piece of evidence of the oral transmission of Old French epics, namely, an author’s acrostic signature embedded in a Franco–Italian poem from the mid-fourteenth century and on what it may tell us about the role of memory in epic performance. For a work that might pass for an Old French epic and one which was unquestionably composed in writing by a non-oral, that is, literate, poet, the date of the mid-fourteenth century seems surprisingly late since, by that time, the vogue for chansons de geste had largely passed. Equally surprising is the fact that 1   M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066­–1307 (2nd rev. edn, Oxford, 1993); Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004); Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966); Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990, 2nd rev. edn 2008). 2   Paula Leverage, Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de geste (Amsterdam, 2010) is an indispensable recent study.

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the writer, Niccolò da Verona (or Nicolas de Vérone) was an Italian, and yet he was the author of several Old French works in a variety of genres:3 firstly, a roman d’antiquité, the Pharsale, consisting of a 3166-verse reworking of a few chapters of Li Fet des Romains, which was in turn mostly an Old French rifacimento of Lucan’s Pharsalia;4 secondly, a comparatively lengthy (6116-line) continuation of the Old French Carolingian epic L’Entree d’Espagne, known, until recently, as La Prise de Pampelune, now rechristened as the Continuazione dell’Entrée d’Espagne; and thirdly, a brief (994-line) Passion of Christ.5 Of Niccolò we know only that he was a highly literate court poet, dedicating his Pharsale to the Marquis of Este, Niccolò I, at the court of Ferrara, and he was, in any case, definitely not an illiterate oral poet. Nor could we say that the Pharsale is ‘oral-derived’, to use Foley’s term, since it had no clearly identifiable antecedents in the oral tradition.6 As for the antecedent for the other long narrative attributed to him, the Continuazine dell’Entrée d’Espagne, it was unquestionably an Old French epic (chanson de geste) but not an oral or ‘oral-derived’ work, as far as we know. As I have intimated, there are several curious facts about Niccolò’s literary production. First, he chose to write in French, though both he and his audience were Italian. This in itself is such a curiosity that we would do well to spend a few moments examining the circumstances. There exists a not inconsiderable body of literature in a linguistic form that has been called variously Franco– Italian, Franco–Venetian or Franco–Lombardo.7 What has long been understood about this ‘language’ is that it was never used for social intercourse (that is, it   René Specht, Recherches sur Nicolas de Vérone. Contribution à l’étude de la littérature franco–italienne du quatorzième siècle (Berne, 1982). 4   L.-F. Flûtre and K. Sneyders de Vogel (eds), Li fet des Romains (2 vols, Paris, vol. 1, n.d. [= 1935?], vol. 2, 1938). 5   Franca Di Ninni, (ed.), Niccolò da Verona. Opere: Pharsale. Continuazione dell’Entrée d’Espagne. Passion (Venice, 1992). Earlier edition: Hermann Wahle, (ed.), Die Pharsale des Nicolas von Verona (Marburg, 1888). Di Ninni is the source of all quotes from Niccolò in this chapter. 6   John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epics (Berkeley, 1990), p. 5. 7   Franco–lombardo and francese di Lombardia were terms preferred by Lorenzo Renzi, ‘Il francese come lingua letteraria e il franco–lombardo. L’epica carolingia nel Veneto’, in Storia della cultura veneta (Vincenza, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 563–89. Also see Günther Holtus, Henning Krauss and Peter Wunderli (eds), Testi, cotesti e contesti de franco–italiano (Tübingen, 1989); Günther Holtus, ‘L’état actuel des recherches sur le franco–italien: corpus de textes et description linguistique’, in François Suard (ed.), La chanson de geste: écriture, intertextualités, translations, Littérales, 14 (Nanterre, 1994), pp. 147–71; Günther Holtus and Peter Wunderli, Les épopées romanes. Franco–italien et épopée franco–italienne in Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, (Heidelberg, 2005); and three works by Leslie Zarker Morgan, ‘Evidence of Oral Interference in Franco–Italian’, Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne de Linguistique, 30 (1985): pp. 407–14; ‘Text and Non-Text: For a Standard Lemmatization 3

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was never a natural, spoken language) and that it represented an exclusively literary Mischsprache, an admixture or hybrid of Old Northern Gallo-Romance (Old French) along with substantial elements from northern Italian dialects as well as a small number of forms from Old Southern Gallo-Romance (Old Occitan).8 And although we may provide a name for this ‘language’, we cannot speak of a ‘Franco–Italian audience’ as did Menéndez Pidal when he mistakenly referred to the Venice IV version of the Chanson de Roland as a ‘texto destinado a ser cantado ante un público franco–italiano’ [‘a text destined to be sung before a Franco– Italian audience’].9 Second, Niccolò composed all his works – the historical, the epic and the hagiographical – in what we might call Old French epic format: laisses or stanzas of unequal length which are monorimed, that is, each laisse is in a single rime or assonanced rime. Furthermore, Niccolò’s works use, with a handful of exceptions, the alexandrine or 12-syllable verse which is broken into two equal hemistichs or half lines. For the most part, this verse form was reserved for epics (chansons de geste), but we have a few instances where it is used in versified romances, historical verse narratives or archaic hagiographical works. It is also used in many versions of the Old French Roman d’Alexandre (whence this metrical form derives its name), which might have been better suited for rimed octosyllabic couplets, particularly in the light of the fact that the Roman de Troie, the Roman de Thebes and the Roman d’Eneas – the most important other works in the genre roman d’antiquité also called matière de Rome – all employ octosyllabic verse exclusively.10 On the other hand, the most recent survey of Franco–Italian epics includes Niccolò’s Pharsale and the present study will follow this trend primarily because of the formal similarities just mentioned between this poem and chansons de geste.11 However, before we build an argument that assumes that the Pharsale is a chanson de geste, the reader needs to know that there is at least one formal characteristic of Old French epic poems that the Pharsale does not share with other poems in this genre.

of Franco–Italian’, in Holtus, Krauss and Wunderli, Testi, pp. 209–22; ‘La Geste Francor’: Chansons de geste of Ms. Marc. Fr. XIII (= 256) (2 vols, Tempe, 2009). 8   Current views are that Old Occitan plays a very limited role in the admixture. See Holtus and Wunderli, Les épopées, p. 72. 9   Ramón Menéndez Pidal, ‘Sobre las variantes del códice rolandiano V4 de Venecia’, Cultura Neolatina, 21 (1961): p. 10. 10   Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, 1999) believes that the octo(syllabic) verse was particularly suited to oral performance and memorization. 11   Holtus and Wunderli, for example, have expanded the Franco–Italian corpus to include certain manuscripts (prose and verse) of the Roman d’Alexandre and the Roman de Troie (Les épopées, p. 159) as well as the Pharsale. Also see Christine Jacob-Hugon, L’œuvre jongleresque de Jean Bodel. L’art de séduire un public (Paris, 1998), p. 75: ‘Le Roman d’Alexandre se présente donc comme une chanson de geste’.

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Most Old French epics make use of a linking technique called ‘enchaînement’: the chaining together of stanzas through the repetition or recurrence of the names (nouns, nominal phrases, personal names, titles and epithets), predicates (verbs and verbal phrases) or events which appear first in the last few lines of one laisse and again in the first eight lines of the following laisse.12 Although Niccolò does use this technique in his Continuazione dell’Entrée d’Espagne, it is extremely rare – at best accidental – in the Pharsale. The reason for this is clear: while Niccolò has opted to use the metrics and stanzaic forms of a chanson de geste, the model text (Li Fet des Romains) that he is translating into a rimed poem is a prose text which does not make use of linking repetitions at the beginnings or endings of paragraphs or chapters. Despite this deviation from epic practice, the overall effect of the metrics and monorimed stanzaic arrangement leaves the reader and, we assume, also a late medieval listener, with the impression that this is a kind of epic song. Having voiced this reservation about the epic credentials of the Pharsale, we need next to provide some background about a fundamental division between, on the one hand, scholars who believe that chansons de geste were composed by jongleurs and oral poets and, on the other hand, those who believe that an illiterate class of street performers could not have produced masterpieces like the Chanson de Roland. The chansons de geste have only survived in manuscript form and, according to some, very exceptionally as fragments in the Spanish romancero or oral ballad tradition, although students of the chanson de geste have argued almost continually since the late nineteenth century over the relationship of the Late Latin cantilenae and Spanish ballads to an oral epic tradition.13 In general, even the most sceptical of the ‘individualists’, as the opponents of ‘orally composed’ literature are known, grudgingly admit that there was an oral tradition – parallel to or antecedent to what has been preserved, usually in the form of legends – but they deny that the epic which has come down to us was either ‘oral derived’ or the last stage of an orally composed and transmitted traditional poem. In a sense, those of us who believe in a closer relationship between the epic as we know it and an earlier oral epic tradition must base some of our belief on our intuitions and a leap of faith. We believe that we see or sense a connection between the fossilized remains preserved in manuscripts and the oral performance of a once-living tradition. Our oralist ‘dogma’ has particular difficulty establishing any direct connection between the written tradition and a putative oral tradition. In one sense – the sense in which the past cannot be recovered – we cannot know for certain that a written poem came from the oral tradition, because we have no reliable witness to the transcriptive act.14 Lacking a time machine, we are forced   Jean Rychner, La chanson de geste, essai sur l’art épique des jongleurs (Geneva, 1955), pp. 74–89. 13   Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y orígenes de las literaturas románicas (Madrid, 1957), pp. 367–8. 14   For a discussion of the ways in which chansons de geste were, or may have been, transcribed, see Joseph J. Duggan, ‘Prolégomènes à une pragmatique textuelle de la 12

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to rely on statistical and probabilistic arguments which, although they make up the firm basis for the ‘hard science’ of high-energy physics, are somehow too abstract or irrelevant for humanistic disciplines, according to the sceptics. In addition to statistically-based reasoning, we may examine historical and literary evidence, but only through the sieve of carefully reasoned arguments. At the end of the day, the oralist position has always lacked any clear or overwhelming evidence of a connection between a written poem and an antecedent oral tradition. From the first third of the nineteenth century, early anthropologists began to visit deepest central Asia, at times in disguise (for example, Arminius Vambéry), or simply as observers (Wilhelm Radloff). They subsequently published the records of their visits, including their accounts of oral epic performances, resulting in a vast amount of data which in the twentieth century stimulated later scholars to undertake voyages of rediscovery (Parry and Lord to the Balkans,15 Reichl to central Asia), followed up by decades of academic reflection and study.16 And parallel to the central Asian excursions, there were proto-ethnographic visits to Egypt: Lane (who also dressed in Arab garb) gave us his account ‘Public Recitations of Romances’, an excellent description of an early nineteenth-century Hilali performance and, in many ways, a worthy precursor to the 1987 ethnopoetic study of an Hilali oral epic poet by Susan Slyomovics.17 Further, there were large numbers of collectors of specimens of oral literature in Africa, a reflection of an intensive European involvement in that continent. The result was the creation of multiple ethnological and anthropological schools in Germany, France and England. The story is long to tell, but the consequences are well known: classical scholars and medievalists in their quest to understand the most fundamental European narrative monuments (Homer, the Nibelungenlied, the Chanson de Roland, the Tale of Prince Igor’s Campaign, to chanson de geste’, in Salvatore Luongo (ed.), L’épopée romane au moyen âge et aux temps modernes (Naples, 2001), pp. 411–32. 15   The classic account of the Parry-Lord collaboration and of their theory of oral composition is: Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 24 (Cambridge, MA, 1960). 16   Arminius Vambéry, Voyages d’un Faux Derviche dans l’Asie Centrale de Téhéran à Khiva, Bokhara & Samarcand par le grand désert turkoman (Paris, 1867); Hermann Vámbéry, Das Türkenvolk in seinen ethnologischen und ethnographischen Beziehungen (Leipzig, 1885); Herrmann Vámbéry, Cagataische Sprachstudien enthaltend gtrammatikalischen Umriss, Chrestomathie und Wörterbuch der Cagataischen Sprache (Leipzig, 1867); Wilhelm Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der Türkischen Stämme (8 vols, Saint Petersburg, 1866–99); also see Radloff’s travel memoir, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus dem Tagebuche eines Reisenden Linguisten (2 vols, Leipzig, 1884); Karl Reichl, Turkic Oral Epic Poetry: Traditions, Forms, Poetic Structure (New York, 1992); Karl Reichl, Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Heroic Poetry, (Ithaca, NY, 2000). 17   Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the years 1833–1835 (London, 1896; repr. London, 1986), chapters 21–3; Susan Slyomovics, The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance (Berkeley, 1987).

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name just a few) found parallels in these early ethnographic accounts that persuaded them that there were homologues everywhere: this or that tribe had an oral tradition that resembled some basic European narratives which lacked a persuasively traceable pedigree. Finally, to deal with the presence of variants recorded in manuscripts, this earliest school adopted the Lachmannian method of treating manuscript variability, which had developed in the context of biblical scholarship. Against the romantic belief that heroic poetry arose among the people through the agency of illiterate singers and simultaneous with the rise of scientific disciplines like Romance Philology and linguistics, a positivist countercurrent argued that the earlier view was speculative, unscientific and unsusceptible to proof. It was suggested that if we only had manuscript witnesses to a poem, while the Lachmannian method of classifying and editing manuscripts was useful, that method would be subordinated to the scholar’s judgement of which among a manuscript family was the ‘best’ manuscript, supposedly because that manuscript would be judged closest to the writer’s original. By the end of the nineteenth century, there had occurred in France a major ideological split into two philological camps. The first was centred around Gaston Paris, who brought the early fruits of German scholarship stimulated by the romantic fascination with folkloric and popular origins for much of medieval literature.18 The second was centred on his student Joseph Bédier, who, having brilliantly incorporated a positivist strain into philology, rejected the dominant Germanic model, starting more or less in the period of the Franco–Prussian War and its aftermath. In his epic studies, undertaken from the first decade of the twentieth century to the late 1920s, Bédier demonstrated the connections of the Old French epic to a literate class of churchmen and to the pilgrimage routes that led from France towards Santiago de Compostela, Rome and the Holy Land.19 These opposing views of master and student hardened and evolved into two irreconcilable camps, with the individualists obtaining and keeping the upper hand while the oralists sought solace in the anthropological and ethnographic discoveries outside their central discipline of French medieval literature. To explain the implications of this split in the study of the French epic in the most oversimplified way, Gaston Paris had traced the origins of the Old French national epic of Roland back to the time of Charlemagne, which implies that the first singers would have sung on the battlefield the first fragments of the future Chanson de Roland in a Germanic Frankish dialect. In contrast to this, Bédier viewed the Chanson de Roland and the other Old French epic songs, as arising only in the late eleventh or twelfth century, at a time when there was no question of Frankish or Germanic tribal songs circulating in France: the songs were, he said, first written in French and, in so saying, he reclaimed the French national 18   Gaston Paris, L’histoire poétique de Charlemagne (Paris, 1865; 2nd edn rev. by Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer, 1905). 19   Joseph Bédier, Les légendes épiques (4 vols, Paris, 1908–13; 2nd rev. edn 1914–21; 3rd rev. edn 1926).

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epic for France. A French high school textbook of 1935 summarizes thus: G. Paris, following Wolf, Herder, Lachmann and the Grimm brothers, believed: qu’à l’imitation des Germains, les Francs20 célébraient leurs ancêtres et leurs capitaines, de leur vivant ou au lendemain de leur mort, dans de courtes compositions lyriques; c’était de ces cantilènes, d’origine germanique, d’essence populaire [que] serait sortie, à la suite d’une évolution longue de plusieurs siècles, l’épopée.21 [that in imitation of the Germanic tribes, the Franks celebrated their ancestors and their military leaders, while still alive or immediately following their death, with short lyrical compositions; it was from these short panegyrics, of Germanic origin and of a popular nature, that the epic would arise during a developmental stage lasting several centuries].

Bédier would later establish that ‘la Chanson de Roland est-elle bien française dans sa formation et libre de toute influence étrangère’ [‘the Song of Roland is perfectly French in its formation and free from all foreign influence’].22 The present essay shares the oralist view that epic poetry and specifically the chanson de geste, was born and grew as a traditional poetry; it was passed on, changed and elaborated by jongleurs, singers of tales. If the poetry refers to jongleurs, as it sometimes does, it does not, generally, promote the notion that jongleurs are fictitious beings or lowly street hawkers of an inferior brand of literature. On the other hand, this traditional art found practitioners among literate writers, who composed their work fully conscious both of their debt to this tradition and of the fact that they could integrate techniques and themes from orature and from literature. Niccolò was just such an artist: he could choose subject matter from a variety of literary sources and, at the same time, he chose for all his poetry a compositional style that had lived chiefly in oral tradition. Literature is exceedingly complex and hard – if not impossible – to use as data in support of a historical, anthropological or philosophical argument. For example, one of the complications in proving a credible relationship between the surviving written artefacts and the earlier tradition they may have come from is found in the nature of fictional narrative. Once a literary composer enters the realm of fictional literature, he inevitably makes use of the tools of literature, including such practices as projecting a mirage of or deception about his source(s).23 And as a fictionalist, the author has at his disposal a seemingly inexhaustible supply of topoi, ‘literary 20   Note that ‘Francs’ here means something like ‘future Frenchmen’ and not Frankish – that is, Germanic, – tribesmen. 21   La chanson de Roland, extraits, ed. André Cordier (Paris, 1935), p. 8. 22   Ibid., p. 10. 23   Roger Dragonetti, Le mirage des sources: l’art du faux dans le roman médiéval (Paris, 1987).

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commonplaces’, defined and best described by E.R. Curtius.24 The topoi serve a variety of purposes: they link a work intertextually to its literary precursors and to its genre; they provide a conventional shorthand for conveying certain notions; and they are ready-made, convenient for a rapid, perhaps extemporaneous, style of composition or delivery.25 If one accepts Curtius’s view, however, and identifies a phrase or image as a topos, one accepts at the same time that it ceases to function descriptively or referentially with respect to the everyday world in the way that references might be used in ordinary speech. Instead, a topos creates a space of fictionality into which the reader/listener must enter willingly. Of relevance to this discussion, some topoi serve as ‘asides’ to the reader (or listener), parenthetical remarks with a pragmatic function, attempting to put the reader/listener into some special frame of mind or some relationship to the narrator, or to cast the reader as a would-be audience member, thereby creating a ‘fiction of orality’.26 An example of this pragmatic type of topos in Niccolò’s Pharsale would be ‘Oy avés en peis e en silance’ (l. 923) [‘you have listened in peace and silence’] where, clearly, this passage and the work as a whole, was written well in advance of a performance, if there ever was one. It is paralleled by the Old French epic topos (or formula) of the author beseeching an audience to hold their peace: ‘Or escoutiés en peis – car escoutier se doit’ [‘Now listen quietly, because listen you must’] (Passion, l. 23).27 When used by a literate author for a hypothetical audience, such apostrophes are unmistakable ‘fictions of orality’. With this intricate picture in mind, let us return to the chansons de geste, the main focus of the present inquiry: these epic poems abound in unflattering remarks about jongleurs who are blamed for mangling and ruining good stories and for falsifying history.28 However, those scholars, for example, Willi Hirdt, who take the radically sceptical view that these references constitute a jongleur topos, see no reason to connect these stereotyped passages with any real life referent, and this view seems reasonable for most of the Italian poems in ottava

  Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953) [German original 1948]. 25   Thus, in another context, topoi could be viewed as ‘formulas’ or even ‘oral formulas’, analytical terms developed in the context of oral or oral-derived literature. 26   For various ways that an oral (or literate) author can frame or insert asides, see Lee Haring, ‘Framing in Oral Narrative’, Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 18 (2004): pp. 229–45; for ‘fiction of orality’ see Simon Gaunt, Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature (London, 2001). 27   Interestingly, Niccolò never uses this epic address formula in his Continuazione dell’Entrée d’Espagne, his only work universally considered a chanson de geste. 28   Documented in Edmond Faral, Les jongleurs en France au Moyen Age (Paris, 1910; reprinted 1971), pp. 67, 178–86; also see Manfred Gsteiger, ‘Note sur les préambules des chansons de geste’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 2 (1968): pp. 213–20. 24

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rima Hirdt is primarily concerned with.29 Some analysts – most notably Edward Heinemann – while focused on the aesthetics and lyricism of the jongleur style, seem convinced that the subtleties of the narratives preclude their having been composed extemporaneously by jongleurs practising a traditional jongleuresque art of the type described by Rychner based on his encounter with Milman Parry’s work. This is perhaps because these sceptics are persuaded that what we learn from the Serbo-Croatian ‘living laboratory’ – the survival of an archaic oral epic into the first half of the twentieth century, observed and described by Parry and his student Albert B. Lord – cannot be transposed into a medieval French setting,30 or because they find the detailed analyses of poetic repetitions unconvincing as evidence of Parry-Lord oral-formulaic practice in Old French.31 Is it possible however that, in this long scholarly engagement with oral literatures and their connections to our ancestral western literatures, somehow we have missed some piece of historical evidence pointing to an interface or linkage between the oral and the written record?32 It is my belief that the Pharsale of Niccolò da Verona, while by some accounts a roman d’antiquité but one composed in jongleuresque epic metres and rimed stanzas, bears a unique witness to a connection between written epic and oral epic and conceivably to a practice akin to what Lord was describing in 1960. In his introduction to the Pharsale, Niccolò offers his view of his subject matter and, following that, his justification (the par qoy) for his work of versifying the narrative:33

  Willi Hirdt, Studien zum epischen Prolog. Die Eingang in der erzählenden Versdichtung Italiens (Munich, 1975), p. 158. In his conclusion, Hirdt (p. 318) declares his work to be a contribution to one domain of topos study defined by Curtius: the Exordium topos. Leverage treats formulas more as literary artefacts, that is, topoi, than as ‘oral traces’ (p. 50). 30   Edward A. Heinemann, L’art métrique de la chanson de geste. Essai sur la musicalité du récit (Geneva, 1993); see also Rudy S. Spraycar, ‘The Chanson de Roland: an oral poem?’, Olifant, 4/1 (1976): pp. 63–74. 31   Edward A. Heinemann, ‘Formulas, Motifs and the Song of Roland’, Olifant 1 (1973): pp. 23–31 [= review of Joseph J. Duggan, The ‘Song of Roland’: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft (Berkeley, 1973)]. Note Duggan’s recent contribution in support of the oral-formulaic theory where he concludes that one case of what had long been assumed to be a scribal error can be viewed as a case of ‘Homer nods’, that is, a jongleur’s error. Joseph J. Duggan, ‘Chanson de Guillaume l. 103, Oral Composition and Textual Criticism’, Olifant, 23 (2003): pp. 9–24. See now Leverage, pp. 45–50 for the most recent appraisal. 32   Leverage, while presenting the problem in a novel fashion, ‘disassociate[s] memory from the mode of production and emphasize[s] the audience’s memory’ (p. 16): that is, she limits herself to reception, thereby evading the question of how memory might affect oral composition and transmission. 33   Text from Di Ninni. The Pharsale is found in a single manuscript, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, Senebier MS fr. 81. Translations throughout are 29

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Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture Savés par qoy ay mis en rime de France Ceste fere bataille e la dure acontance: Qe li zantis de cuer,34 qand vont por strançe stance, Maintes fois por aprendre ardimant e sciance, Des zonses trespasees vont feisant demandance. L’en li conte de Hector e de sa convenance, De Porus, d’Alixandre e de lour asemblance, De Zarlle, de Roland et de cil de Maiance E des autres autors ond ne faiz recontance, Pour ce qe rimé sont selong lour proveance. (ll. 18–27) Do you know why I have put into French rime The story of this fierce battle and the harsh account? Because those [people] of refined taste, when travelling in strange lands, Often, to learn about hardy deeds and (to gain) knowledge, Ask to hear about things of the past. Some tell them of Hector and his [lineage], Of Porus, of Alexander and of those of Mainz And of other matters into which I will not delve, Because they are rimed as befits them. (ll. 18–27)

If we had expected an explanation for his choice of French over Italian, we are disappointed; rather, he explains his choice of subject matter, saying that while there are many stories of Charlemagne, Roland, Alexander and King Porus and about the Mainz clan (of epic traitors), ‘there are none about the Feit des Romeins’ (Deeds of the Romans). We should note that here Niccolò equates the epic tales of Alexander and Charlemagne; to put it another way, we infer once again that our author views this work as epic, not as forming part of the Matière d’Antiquité in opposition to the Matière de France, a distinction that heretofore has been regularly maintained by students of the chanson de geste. It should not surprise us, then, if no students of the French epic until now have thought to include consideration of my own and, given the almost unique character of the passages reproduced here, will undoubtedly be controversial. 34   Di Ninni (p. 193) notes that Specht had proposed cuer < CORTE(M) rather than < CORE(M) and rejects his reading with this reason: ‘sembra, in questo contesto, fuori luogo. Va, però, detto che cuer è sempre ‘cuore’ nei tre manoscritti’ [‘[Specht’s conjecture] seems, in this context, out of place. Needless to say, cuer always means ‘heart’ in the three manuscripts’], ‘three’ referring to the manuscripts for the Pharsale, the Continuazione dell’Entrée d’Espagne and the Passion. Thus, I translate ‘zantis de cuer’ as ‘[people] of refined taste’ thus sidestepping the issue raised by the literal translation ‘noble of heart’ versus ‘courtly’.

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this poem and its peculiarities when attempting to analyze what an epic author or chanteur de geste might have had in mind in terms of an audience, or as a suitable venue or occasion for recitation of his work by others. Niccolò next turns to why the story should be in verse: Mes dou feit des Romeins ne pooit por certance Nul conter bien a pont tot la droite sentance, Se tote foi n’avoit l’autor en sa prexance, Pour ce q’il n’est rimé par nulle concordance, E home civauçant auroit trou destorbance A lire por zamin le feit en comunance. Or le vous veul rimer por tele destinance: Qe cil qe por ma rime l’aura en remembrance Le pora dir sens livre e sens nulle pesance E de falir l’istoire ja non aura dotance. (ll. 28–37) But concerning the Deeds of the Romans, with any certainty None can tell exactly the entire truth of the matter Unless he had the author in his presence Because it is not rimed by any method (or ‘in any order’), And men riding horseback would have too much trouble Reading the [heroic] deeds on the road to fellow travellers. Now I wish to rime for you for the following purpose: That he who through my rime remembers it Will be able to recite it without a book and without any difficulty And would have no fear of falsifying the story. (ll. 28–37)

To summarize: the stories are in rime in order that they may be remembered correctly and retold while travelling on horseback where reading a book would be out of the question. Niccolò has thus given us a powerful motivation for believing that he used rime in order to facilitate remembering the narrative exactly. He also reveals his belief that this kind of epic story is precisely the kind that gets told or ‘chanted’ along pilgrimage or traveller routes. Further, since we know that this story already existed in a prose format – Li Fet des Romains from which he got the story – he seems to be telling us very clearly that prose texts cannot be remembered correctly, precisely because they are not rimed. This passage seems to be unique as an explicit statement of the belief that rime makes memorization –‘remembrance’ – possible in a way that prose cannot. We may nevertheless wonder: did Niccolò really believe that his story would be memorized and retold along the road? Or is this simply a topos? If it is a topos, it does not fit the usual meaning of ‘commonplace’ because his image of people on horseback being unable to read

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to satisfy their hunger for heroic tales is unique: it does not occur in any other chanson de geste or any other medieval French literary genre known to me. But there is, further, a powerful piece of evidence that he believed that the work would be memorized surreptitiously. Towards the middle of the poem, we find these verses: E ce qe çe vous cont dou feit des Romanois Nicholais le rima dou pais Veronois Por amor son seignor, de Ferare marchois: E cil fu Nicholais, la flor des Estenois, Corant mil e troicent ans e qarante trois. Und pri li giugleors qe cantent orendrois Qe de ce ne se vantent, e feront cum cortois. Qar dit le proverbe, cum vous oi avois: Qi d’altruy drais se vest, se desvest mante fois; Und chascun deit vestir suen cors de ses hernois S’il ne vout qe les giens facent de lu gabois. E qi le vout canter si doit doner le lois A cil qi le rima, soit zentil ou borçois. (ll. 1933­­–45) And that which I am telling you of the Deeds of the Romans, Niccolò rimed it, he of the Veronese lands Out of love for his lord, the Marquis of Ferrara, And this man [also] was Niccolò, the flower of the Este In the year one thousand three hundred years and forty-three. Wherefore I pray that the jongleurs who sing nowadays Boast not of this work as if their own, and acting thus they would behave decently Because the proverb says, as you have heard: He who wears another’s clothes often finds himself naked35 Wherefore everyone must adorn himself with his own outfit If he does not wish others to make fun of him. And whosoever would sing it should give credit To the one who rimed it, be he noble or burgher. (ll. 1933–45)

He thus ‘signs’ the work, identifying himself, his patron, the place and date and then he singles out jongleurs, implying that they commonly steal one another’s work and asking that they refrain from doing so and thereby respect his authorial   The proverb, not attested in the standard references on medieval proverbs, appears to refer to Phaedrus’ Aesopic fable of the ‘Graculus superbus et Pavo’ (Ben Edwin Perry (ed. and trans.), Babrius and Phaedrus (Cambridge, MA, 1965), pp. 194–5 [= Phaedrus, Book I, fable 3]), found in numerous later medieval Latin versions. 35

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rights. We are still left with the question: is this another topos? If these lines were to stand alone as the sole basis for stating that Niccolò was seriously concerned with a jongleuresque practice of plagiarism, we might be left mired in ambiguity. For example, the line ‘chascun deit vestir suen cors de ses hernois’ contains a possible literary allusion suggested by the opening sentence of an article by François Suard: ‘Un personnage épique, le plus souvent un héros masculin, revêt un harnois ou un accoutrement qui n’est pas le sien; ainsi travesti, il peut côtoyer sans danger ses adversaires et prendre sur eux un avantage’ [my italics]. [‘An epic character, often a male hero, dons armour or a shield which is not his; thus disguised, he may advance without risk towards his adversaries and gain an advantage over them’].36 Suard proceeds immediately to attribute this style of portrayal to ‘sarcasme épique’.37 With this in mind, we could doubt whether, of themselves, the words in our passage are anything but a sophisticated fictionalized allusion and we might well dismiss the rest of the passage as yet another literary allusion or a topos. After all, jongleurs typically deprecate other jongleurs’ work as lies or falsifications and suggest that, to boot, they are poorly performed,38 although, significantly, the claim that jongleurs steal others’ work is much rarer.39 But our author went much further and left a nice piece of proof that he was seriously concerned with his literary property rights (that is, the equivalent of a modern copyright) for, in addition to these signature verses, he left a duplicate copy of these same verses encrypted in an acrostic40 formed by the 94 first letters of laisses 3–96:

  François Suard, ‘Le motif du déguisement dans quelques chansons du cycle de Guillaume d’Orange’, Olifant 7/4 (1980): p. 343. 37   Ibid., p. 343. 38   Faral, pp. 67, 178–86. 39   Graindor de Douai in the Bataille Loquifer, ll. 3040–52, in Monica Barnett (ed.), La bataille Loquifer (Oxford, 1975), p. 113, taken from Bibliothèque nationale de France fr 1448. I wish to thank Joe Duggan for reminding me of this unique reference, for which see his account: Joseph J. Duggan, ‘The Interface Between Oral and Written Transmission of the Cantar de mio Cid’, La Corónica, 33 (2005): pp. 51–63. Also, Faral (pp. 182–3) gives a second example where the jongleur, in the preamble to a fragment of Doon de Nanteuil, boasts of having stolen a ‘molt riche piece’ [‘a very nice chunk’] of another jongleur’s work, a statement that Paul Meyer, Romania, 13 (1884): p. 13, declares worthy of note ‘pour les origines de la propriété littéraire’. 40   See John F. Levy, review of Specht, Romance Philology, 46 (1992), pp. 89–91, where, after noticing the acrostic, I failed to explore its many ramifications. Limited comments are found in: Antonio Viscardi, Letteratura Franco–italiana (Modena, 1941), pp. 93–4; Wahle, p. vi; Vicenzo Crescini, ‘Di una data importante nella storia della epica franco–italiana’, Atti del R. Ist. Veneto, sect. 7, v. 7: 1150–74 (1895) [repr. in Romania Fragmenta (Torino, 1932) pp. 328–50]; and Specht, p. 126. For acrostics in early printed works, see Cynthia J. Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1995). 36

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Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture NICOLAIS LE RIMA DO PAIS VERONOIS POR AMOR SUEN SEGNOR DE FERARE MARCOIS CORANT MIL E TROI CENT ANS E QARANTE TROIS.

Acrostics of various kinds, including signature acrostics, were common in antiquity and are found in biblical, antique and medieval Latin verse, as well as in vernacular poetry. Branca states that acrostics may have first been used in sibylline language as a ‘marchio di proprietà’ [‘a proprietary mark’], becoming more frequent in Hellenistic literature whence they passed into Latin and Byzantine literary traditions.41 He finishes with the remark: ‘La documentazione, relativamente larga in un periodo non molto ampio, rivela che tali artifici dovettero raggiungere una qualche diffusione e una certa moda letteraria proprio all fine del secolo XIII e nella prima metà del XIV, specialmente nell’ambiente letterario fiorentino’.42 [‘The documentation, relatively extensive for a short period of time, reveals that such artifices must have received some degree of diffusion and a certain amount of literary stylishness precisely at the end of the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth, especially in Florentine literary circles’.] Of course, Branca had Boccaccio in mind in this passage; however, cases where the poet left two nearly identical copies of his ‘signature’ in this manner are quite unusual. The most notable instance is precisely Boccaccio’s three sonnets which serve as an introduction to his Amorosa Visione. These acrostic sonnets are comprised of the initial letters of all of the terzine of the poem proper and, additionally, they contain a verse which identifies Boccaccio as the author. As for which came first, Amorosa Visione or Niccolò’s Pharsale, we have no way to know; Branca dates Boccaccio’s work to between 1342 and the beginning of 1343.43 Crescini did not venture so far as to assert definitively that Boccaccio was the model and Niccolò the imitator: ‘Nicolò volle che le indicazioni del nome, del signore, della data, non potessero, in alcuna guisa, sparire dal suo poema; e le ribadì con l’acrostico bizzarro, che un po’ ci fa rammentare l’Amorosa Visione boccaccesca’.44 [‘Niccolò wanted to keep the indications of his name, of that of his patron and of the date, from disappearing from his poem and he attempted this with this bizarre acrostic which reminds us a little of Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione’]. Boccaccio, unlike Niccolò da Verona, alerts his reader to the relationship between the sonnets and the poem proper with this introductory explanation: ‘Nelli tre infrascritti sonetti si contengono per ordine tutte le lettere principali de’ rittimi della infrascritta Amorosa Visione. E però che in quelli il nome dell’autore si contiene, altrimenti non si cura di porlo’.45 [‘In the three sonnets below are found all of the first letters of each tercet in the 41   Vittore Branca (ed.), Amorosa Visione in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 3 (Verona, 1974) [original edition 1944]. 42   Ibid., p. 553. 43   Ibid., p. 6. 44   Crescini, Di una data, p. 336. 45   Branca (ed.), Amorosa Visione, p. 23.

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following poem, Amorosa Visione. And since [these sonnets] contain the author’s name, no effort has been made to name him elsewhere’.] Sylvia Huot argues that Boccaccio’s narrative grew out of the acrostic sonnets, which were composed first and formed the frame for the entire work and, although he identifies himself in those sonnets, this auto-identifying act is of far less importance than their function of setting out the thematic framework for the poem.46 Thus, while this case bears a superficial resemblance to Niccolò’s acrostic, it is on an entirely different scale as acrostics go and it is not primarily a ‘signature’ acrostic. Anyone reading Amorosa Visione would consider this a virtuoso performance intended to call attention to itself and what it asserts about its author and thus very different from what Niccolò was attempting when he hid the second copy of his signature. In contrast to Boccaccio, Niccolò had placed the letters of the acrostic at varying and unpredictable lengths from one another: the intervals between the 94 laisses average 26.7 lines, ranging from the smallest laisse of 12 lines to the largest at 60 lines, with a standard deviation of 10.26 lines. Most instances of signature acrostics are immediately visible on the written or printed page, whereas Niccolò’s acrostic – spread out irregularly – could escape the notice of any but the most attentive reader. Wahle appears to have been the first to notice the acrostic in 1888. Jean Senebier, the librarian who had prepared the catalogue for the Bibliothèque de la Ville et République de Genève in 1779, described the Pharsale as an addition to a manuscript containing a history or chronicle of France; however, he confessed that he could not ascertain who the author was, which I interpret to mean that he had found neither the signature verses nor the acrostic and, just possibly, that he had not read the poem at all.47 Furthermore, in the case of the Pharsale and in contrast to Boccaccio’s acrostic, we cannot decide between the two possibilities for the point at which he put the acrostic together: on the one hand, he might have composed the signature verses early on, composed the stanzas in order and embedded the signature verses at an appropriate point later on; the alternative, not beyond Niccolò’s skill as a versifier, would have been that he wrote the whole, then rewrote the first lines or words of the laisses in question to accommodate his signature.48 In either case, for the acrostic to have worked as ‘copyright’ or as a guard against unwarranted copying, Niccolò had to depend on the fixity or immutability of the first letter of each laisse. He must have believed that a jongleur would 46   Sylvia Huot, ‘Poetic Ambiguity and Reader Response in Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione’, Modern Philology, 83 (1985): pp. 109–22. 47   Jean Senebier, Catalogue raisonné des manuscrits conservés dans la Bibliothèque de la Ville et République de Genève (Geneva, 1779), pp. 353–4. Bertoni states that the manuscript is ‘imparfaitement décrit par Senebier’: Giulio Bertoni, ‘Sur le texte de la ‘Pharsale’ de Nicolas de Vérone’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 32 (1908): p. 564. 48   We should keep in mind that the Amorosa Visione exists in two textually-different recensions, each of which maintains its letter-for-letter correspondence of the beginning letter for each tercet to the acrostic sonnets.

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memorize his poem word-for-word or, alternatively, that a copyist would copy the poem exactly, but what do we know about the fixedness or stability of the first line and first word of each laisse? One could argue that the first verse of the epic laisse was especially protected from being altered because of its marked function as a ‘vers d’intonation’, a verse that is often marked syntactically by epic inversion and is consequently more memorable.49 Thus both an illiterate singer and a literate writer imitating the oral genre might have depended on the first letter (or phoneme) of a laisse to be exceptionally stable. Despite this theoretical possibility, we find that a quick survey of first lines for the different versions of the Chanson de Roland or the different families of the Charroi de Nimes (notably the A, C and D families) shows just enough variability to cast some doubt on the viability of such an argument. In the case of Gui de Nanteuil, we have the interesting case of a northern Old French manuscript (M) compared with a Franco–Italian manuscript (V5) with the following results: out of 193 corresponding laisses, 32 initials are different.50 On the other hand, the two side-by-side versions (MS B1 and R) of the Aymeri de Narbonne show minimal variation in this respect: out of 122 laisses, four have different laisse initials, plus one case from C/Q.51 Unfortunately, there appears to be no study of first lines of laisses for all the manuscripts of even a single epic, much less for the entire corpus of chansons de geste. As to whether Niccolò intended the acrostic trap for oral or literate falsifiers, we may analyze his reasoning as follows. Since the quoted verses single out the giugleors qi cantent orendrois, ‘jongleurs who sing nowadays’, we may choose to believe they were the true and sole intended targets. Furthermore, since acrostics were common in written works, an unscrupulous writer intent on stealing Niccolò’s authorial rights would have known about the existence of signature acrostics and might have changed key words or word order at the beginnings of some or all of the 94 laisses if he had spotted the acrostic. An oral poet, however, in all likelihood illiterate and in any case not concerned with the codicological aspect of the work, would not have known of the existence of acrostics, nor have suspected their presence here and, if intent on purloining Niccolò’s work, would have omitted only the signature verses (ll. 1934–6). Or at least that would have been Niccolò’s intent. It is conceivable, even reasonable, that Niccolò knew of Boccaccio’s acrostic and decided to make an acrostic that, far from being readily accessible to any reader as was Boccaccio’s, would have been nearly invisible even to a reader or copyist. The fact that he concocted a very nearly invisible acrostic unfortunately vitiates our ability to assert with any certainty that Niccolò’s acrostic could only have been intended for illiterate singers, leaving up to the analyst the choice of one, the other, or even both.     51   49 50

Rychner, p. 72. Gui de Nanteuil, ed. James R. McCormack (Geneva, 1970). Aymeri de Narbonne, ed. Hélène Gallé (Paris, 2007).

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It is ironic that there is no evidence that Niccolò’s Pharsale was ever reproduced either in writing by copyists or orally by illiterate epic singers: his enormous effort at copy-protecting his literary product likely went for naught.52 If Niccolò believed that giugleors appropriated verbatim others’ works, he must have witnessed their lengthy performances of epic narratives but have assumed that they memorized their models with some mnemonic technique similar to one commonly used by literate people. He must also have believed that they memorized long compositions – epic poems – word-for-word after, perhaps, a single performance. Why else go to such extraordinary lengths to encrypt his authorial rights? At this point, we must also ask ourselves: is it conceivable, as I postulate that Niccolò thought, that long epic poems could be learned verbatim, or nearly so, by an ordinary jongleur after a single hearing? And if so, how likely was this? Such prodigious feats of memory could generally be performed only by those who had been trained in special mnemonic techniques such as those described by Paolo Rossi, Frances Yates, Mary Carruthers and now Leverage,53 but is it reasonable to conclude that all, most, or even any of the members of the jongleur profession possessed these skills?54 We discard the possibility that a ‘prodigious savant’ could have learned the poem in a single hearing, since we have no historical evidence or other means to distinguish prodigious savants from other people in medieval times. Based on Treffert, we conclude that there could not have been dozens – let alone hundreds – of such prodigious savants working as jongleurs all at the same time in southern France and northern Italy in the period from the late 1200s until about 1350.55 Therefore, the minstrels or jongleurs clearly must have learned the songs using some mnemonic technique which might have seemed, to a contemporary, like the equivalent of memorization, but one which need not have produced letter-perfect copies, as might have been the case with true prodigious savants. Most modern writers concerned with oral epics, whether medieval or modern, assert that oral poets have exceptional memory skills by comparison with modern   While it is easy to visualize the intended copy protection now, it is hard to imagine how Niccolò might, in practice, have asserted his rights had he actually observed a jongleur reciting his work while omitting the signature verses. Perhaps he believed that a jongleur, having stolen the work ‘orally’, would have had his work transcribed into a book without Niccolò’s signature verses but with the acrostic intact. 53   Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, trans. Stephen Clucas (Chicago, 2000) [1st Italian edn 1960]. Leverage speaks of literate ‘clerical authors of the chansons de geste who would have been acquainted with treatises on memory and mnemonics’ (p. 131). 54   David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford, 1995) and earlier Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context (Cambridge, 1977), are both, in their separate ways, useful for understanding the role memory plays in ‘orature’, or oral literature. 55   Darold A. Treffert, ‘The Savant Syndrome. An Extraordinary Condition: A Synopsis: Past, Present, Future’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biol Sci, [London] 364:pp. 522–7 (May 27, 2009). 52

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literate people; however, such claims are rarely substantiated by research or field tests (such as those devised by Parry and Lord) and often look more like logical inferences than conclusions drawn from ethnographic data. Ruth Finnegan states: ‘... it is indeed memorization rather than simultaneous composition/performance that is involved’ in describing a group process where oral poets collaborate, edit and change, all without writing.56 She then quotes a pair of Africanists from their brief introduction to a collection of Somali poetry: ‘[some poets] are endowed with such powers of memory that they can learn a poem by heart after hearing it only once’.57 Unfortunately, the quoted brief introduction contains no ethnographic description or evidence in support of this assertion.58 Finnegan then presents two versions of the Sunjata epic performed by the same griot from Gambia, stating: ‘The most striking point to emerge from a comparison of the two is their close similarity’.59 At the conclusion of the side-by-side documentation, however, she states: ‘In these extracts, there is certainly not word-for-word identity throughout. But there is much more verbal and line-for-line repetition than one might expect from the Yugoslav analogy’.60 Such remarks, which seem to contradict each other, do not help to clarify the issue of the interplay of memory and improvisation. To gain some perspective, it may be helpful to examine what we know or believe about how long oral narratives were transmitted. Any theory about orallytransmitted narratives positions itself somewhere between the two poles of memorization and improvisation.61 For an example of the first, we have hieratic or ritualized texts (such as the Vedas)62 which are carefully – perhaps ritually – memorized and never improvised. For the second, we have epic texts (such as the Mahabharata) which are subject to enormous variation because the technique for transmission is likely built on a recreation and extensive improvisation by   Finnegan, p. 74.   Ibid., p. 74. 58   B.W. Andrzejewski and I.M. Lewis, Somali Poetry: An Introduction (Oxford, 1964), p. 45. 59   Finnegan, p. 76. 60   Ibid., p. 78. 61   After Finnegan’s early attempts, we have Foley, Traditional and John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance, (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1995) who develop much more sophisticated models. For how memory works in recording literature or history, see Rubin; Clanchy. For some specifically Old French examples, see Joseph J. Duggan, ‘Performance and Transmission, Aural and Ocular Reception in the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Literature of France’, Romance Philology, 43/1 (1989): pp. 49–58, as well as Duggan, Interface and Duggan, Chanson de Guillaume. 62   Of course, the Vedic texts also have numerous variants: see Maurice Bloomfield, Franklin Edgerton and Murray Barnson Emeneau (eds), Vedic Variants: A Study of the Variant Readings in the Repeated Mantras of the Veda (3 vols, Philadelphia, 1930–34). For a more recent treatment, see Jack Goody, Chapter 4, ‘Oral Composition and Oral Transmission: The Case of the Vedas’, in The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987). 56 57

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a professional who knows the ‘formulaic technique’, rather than on an exactly memorized, fixed text.63 Such texts are typically preserved in a profusion of varying recensions of extremely different lengths. This bipartite division is clearly an oversimplification of what is probably more like a continuum. As continuing evidence of the memorization of a ritualized text, there is the most intriguing case of the blind biwa-hoshi of Japan64 described by Rutledge, where the Heike monogatari epics are memorized at the snail’s pace of seven to 25 syllables a day ‘by apprentices who begin as young children with an oral master’.65 In this case, an epic narrative is treated by its transmitters as if it were a hieratic or religious text, not surprising since the biwa-hoshi are Buddhist monks. On those occasions when Rutledge explained the meaning of the verses to his biwa-hoshi master, Inokawa Koji kengyo (to whom Rutledge had apprenticed himself during the period 1978– 80), the master sometimes expressed surprise, suggesting that, perhaps for a long time, the texts, or parts of the text, were not fully understood by their transmitters.66 That epic texts may be overlain with a religious patina would not surprise a student of Old French literature, where the earliest epics and saints’ lives share a common form – the assonanced laisse – and both were probably produced by jongleurs.67 As we read a work like the Chanson de Roland, we cannot help but be struck by the number of religious images and prayers. And there is the thirteenthcentury Penitential of Thomas Cabham (or Thomas of Chobham), Summa confessorum, dated circa 1215, exempting those jongleurs who sing of princely deeds or saints’ lives from a general condemnation of the class of histriones.68

63   H. Munro Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick, The Growth of Literature (3 vols, Cambridge, 1932–40), characterize the differences thus: ‘In the Rig-Veda we find memorization in the strictest form, whereas very great freedom seems to have been allowed in the Mahabharata’ (vol. 2, p. 603). 64   The biwa-hoshi may be familiar to readers through Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoïchi’ in his 1904 collection of tales, Kwaidan, or from Kobayashi’s similarly-named 1964 movie. 65   Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), p. 63. 66   Eric Rutledge, personal communication and Eric Rutledge, ‘Orality and Textual Variance in the Heike Monogatari: Part One, The Phrase and its Formulaic Nature’ in Heike Biwa — Katari to Ongaku [Heike Biwa — Recitation and Music], ed. Yuko Kamisango (Tokyo, 1993) pp. 340–60. 67   Alison Goddard Elliott, Saints and Heroes: Latin and Old French Hagiographic Poetry (dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1977), revised and published (posthumously) as: Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints. (Hanover/ London, 1997) and ‘The Vie de saint Alexis: Oral versus Written Style’, in VIII Congreso de la Société Rencesvals, ed. M. de Riquer (Pamplona, 1981), pp. 137–48. Also, Leverage, pp. 29–45. 68   John W. Baldwin, ‘The Image of the Jongleur in Northern France around 1200’, Speculum, 97 (2002): pp. 635–63.

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It seems clear that these poems were created and transmitted by professional singers who required a long tutelage in the art of epic composition (along the lines described by Lord) and, we assume, an intimate relationship between the master and apprentice. Such a student would be more likely to affirm his relationship and indebtedness to his master than to misappropriate the master’s work and claim it for his own.69 On the other hand, a jongleur trained in this way on hearing a rival jongleur’s performance, might – later, perhaps much later – be able to perform the entire story as if it were his own. We know from Parry and Lord’s experiences that the length of the performance is elastic, depending not so much on the jongleur’s memory as on the context of the performance – entailing audience receptivity or its lack – and on his skill in improvisation. However, we have learned from Parry and Lord that, despite the illusion of having learned the song from a single hearing – an illusion often shared by the Bosnian guslar (singer of tales) himself – the singer of tales in fact would recreate the song in performance. However, to the casual or untrained observer, the jongleur might seem to hear a work and memorize it and so it might have seemed to Niccolò of Verona. Is there any historical justification in believing that Niccolò might have observed oral epic singers? Much of what we know about actual performance of street singers from medieval times to the present seems to be associated with observations about blind singers. About a century before Niccolò flourished, the Bolognese juridical writer Odofredo (d. 1265) wrote about blind singers making money by singing about Roland and Oliver in the piazza of Bologna. These same singers were expelled from Bologna in 1288, suggesting to Faral that they had been extremely successful.70 We know that there were blind cantastorie in Ferrara a century or so after our Niccolò: ‘vers 1435 encore, l’aveugle Niccolo d’Arezzo chantait à Florence pour le petit peuple de Roland et d’autres paladins’.71 And, from another source on nineteenth-century Sicilian street singers, ‘si ricordi, per chi lo sappia, che i violinisti ambulanti, i cantastorie sono in Sicilia ciechi, ‘orvicicati’, quasi tutti’ [‘those who know about such matters will recall that almost all the wandering musicians and minstrels in Sicily are blind, called ‘orvi-cicati’ in Sicilian dialect’].72 Not much is known about the specifics of how these blind street singers undertook their apprenticeship. Caro Baroja, despite his ethnographic and sociological training and anthropological vocation, sheds little light on the nature of the apprenticeship in his book-length ‘essay’ on the blind streetsingers’ broadside ballads and chapbooks (libros de cordel) of Spain, known also as ‘arte

  Finnegan gives multiple examples of poets acknowledging their masters or sources.   Faral, p. 261. 71   Paul Zumthor, La Lettre et la voix. De la ‘littérature’ médiévale (Paris, 1987), pp. 63–4. 72   Giuseppe Pitrè, ‘Le tradizioni cavalleresche popolari en Sicilia’, Romania, 13 (1884): pp. 315–98. See especially the section ‘I cantastorie in Italia’, pp. 384–91. 69 70

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de ciego’ [‘the blindman’s art’] and ‘romances de ciegos’ [‘blindmen’s ballads’].73 He does mention one case in 1495 of a 12-year old blind child, Lope, ciego, who was apprenticed by his family to a blind master for four years to learn prayers; indeed, Caro Baroja finds numerous literary references to ciegos rezadores.74 In the absence of any detailed accounts of the training of street singers, we may suppose that they, like the biwa-hoshi – themselves blind – had long tutelages with their blind masters, or we may prefer to think of them as singers of tales, also trained over a lengthy apprenticeship.75 Though we may believe that the singers Niccolò observed were probably blind and fitted the pattern of lengthy tutelage, he must have had a different model in mind: he must have believed that cantimbanchi or cantastorie – whether blind or illiterate – could hear and ‘possess’ that is, memorize or reproduce word-for-word, the work of rivals, after only a single hearing and, believing this, he sought to protect his authorial rights against such an appropriation by laying this ingenious trap. 76 As a learned writer he would have been unfamiliar with jongleuresque techniques, described here by Joseph J. Duggan: [T]he performer either generates a work for the first time or re-generates it on the basis of his memory of previous performances – whether they be his own or someone else’s – but in any case typically modifies it to some degree in the course of the performance. Memory plays an important role in oral composition. Even if the performance is an improvisation and the work is being performed for the first time, memory of the technique of standard phrases and scenes and of performances of other works will come into play as he recalls his prior conceptualization of the plot, calls upon models of the type of tale he is telling, and brings to mind other features that he knows are appropriate for it and that his listeners identify as genre characteristics. But the word-for-word memory of a text that is ‘learned by heart’ plays no role in the process of oral composition.77

If Niccolò had suspected this about jongleur technique and performances, he doubtless would not have relied on his acrostic trap. While Niccolò apparently devised his acrostic to defend his work from appropriation by jongleurs – and not, like Boccaccio, to show off his virtuosity – we are left with some unanswered questions. We still cannot say for sure whether   Julio Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la Literatura de Cordel (Madrid, 1969).   Ibid., pp. 46, 60. 75   Lord, Singer, pp. 13–29. Lord’s negative view of blind singers (Singer, p. 19) contrasts with those of Caro Baroja and Paul Zumthor, La presenza della voce. Introduzione alla poesia orale (Bologna, 1984). 76   Lord (Singer, p. 327) recounts Parry’s test of Avdo Međedović’s ability to ‘learn’ a song which he had never heard before based on a sketchy summary of the main points and main characters of a plot made up by Parry. 77   Duggan, ‘Performance’, p. 49. 73 74

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the jongleurs of his time memorized their poems as did the Japanese biwa-hoshi or, instead, composed them extemporaneously using the compositional tools of motif and formula as described above by Duggan. Since we may suppose that they were often illiterate, semi-lettered or blind, we may set aside a third possibility, that they could have been familiar with the mnemonic tools, the artes memorativas, described from classical antiquity on into at least the Renaissance in a variety of Latin writings discussed by Rossi, Yates and Carruthers. Nor can we seriously entertain a fourth possibility, that there was a sizeable group of prodigious savants who chose the profession of jongleur. Similarly, we can only speculate about the circumstances of how an orally-transmitted work would end up on parchment. We do know that, in the case of the biwa-hoshi, the blind bards who memorized the Heike Monogatari during a long tutelage, textual variation and contamination observable in this oral tradition resembles precisely the kinds of contamination that we associate with copying written documents,78 suggesting the possibility that medieval textual errors heretofore assumed to be a product of scribal copying could also have arisen or been transmitted in oral performance. And thus, even if Niccolò had observed blind jongleurs who memorized their texts word-for-word as did the biwa-hoshi, the resulting textual tradition was prone to error production which would have marred the protective functioning of the acrostic. Summary Conclusion Based on its stanzaic and metrical aspect and his way of characterizing it, Niccolò da Verona’s Pharsale – a rimed version of an Old French prose translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia couched in a hybrid language called Franco–Italian – appears to conform roughly to his idea of a chanson de geste. In the middle of the poem, Niccolò, after identifying himself, his patron and the date of the poem, complains that giugleors, that is, jongleurs, steal other poets’ work without acknowledging their authorship and, in an extraordinary move, he has encrypted his signature verses as an acrostic to make sure that even if his three signature lines are removed by a thieving performer, his ‘signature’, like a hidden copyright mark, would still be retrievable in the event he wanted to prove his authorship. What lies behind this way of asserting literary authorship, we hypothesize, is Niccolò’s interpretation of something he could have observed, namely, giugleors being able to ‘memorize’ a poem after hearing it, possibly on a single occasion. While such feats of memory are not impossible, without evidence in the form of a carefully controlled experiment, we suspect that a word-for-word, perfect memorization of a lengthy epic under such circumstances is highly unlikely. We feel it more likely that Niccolò observed something akin to the recomposition-in-performance documented by Parry and Lord, Radloff, Reichl, Slyomovics and others. Unfortunately, we cannot rule out the possibility that Niccolò was employing the giugleors as a ‘fiction of orality’ and  

78

Rutledge, pp. 340–60.

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that his true aim was to foil literate copyists intent on stealing his work. What we can say is that, from what we know of how variants arise in a text (oral or written), it is unlikely that his acrostic would have survived intact, whether memorized or recomposed in performance, and even if a scribal copyist had chosen to copy his book, there is still a certain amount of instability or variability in ‘copies’. Nevertheless, we suspect that Niccolò had in mind the model of a literate person who knew an ars memorativa of the type described by Yates, Carruthers and others and, in theory at least, this style of memorization, although it would take considerable time to accomplish, might have produced a nearly unchanged text – one which would have preserved his acrostic.79

79   An important new work on Niccolò da Verona was recently published: Chloé Lelong, œuvres de Nicolas de Vérone. Intertextualité et création dans la littérature épique franco-italienne du XIVe siècle (Paris, 2011).

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PART IV Royal and Aristocratic Memory and Commemoration

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Chapter 11

Changes of Aristocratic Identity: Remarriage and Remembrance in Europe 900–12001 Elisabeth van Houts

Around 1080 Adela, daughter of count Robert the Frisian (d. 1093) and Gertrude of Saxony, left Flanders to marry Cnut IV, king of Denmark (1080–86). During the next six years Adela bore him twin daughters, Ingertha and Cecilia and one son, Charles.2 On 10 July 1086 her family life was shattered by the murder of her husband in Odense. Cnut IV’s violent death resulted in civil war from which Adela escaped.3 Leaving the two little girls behind, she returned with her baby son Charles to her father in Flanders. Back home she led a quiet life attending festive occasions and overseeing her son’s education. But by the time he was seven and presumably old enough to move on to an exclusively male environment, Adela married for the second time and left him behind in Flanders, where ultimately he became Count Charles the Good who was murdered in Bruges in 1127.4 Her new home in southern Italy, 2000 miles south of where she was born, was that of her second husband Roger Borsa (1085–1111), son of Robert Guiscard (d. 1085), the Norman conqueror of southern Italy. In May 1092, a few months after the wedding, we catch a first glimpse of her new life alongside Roger witnessing a charter for the abbey at Cava.5 She bore Roger Borsa three boys, of whom Louis and Guiscard died before they reached puberty and only the youngest William 1   The present paper emerged from various previous incarnations, as Keynote Lecture, University of Liverpool (April 2002) and then as lectures at Exeter (March 2003), Aberystwyth (October 2003), London (February 2004) and Norwich (July 2006). 2   For a reconstruction of Adela’s life story, see The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders by Galbert of Bruges, trans. James B. Ross (New York, 1960), pp. 13–14. 3   For Adela in Denmark, see [Aelnoth] Gesta Swenomagi regis et filiorum eius et pasio gloriosissimi Canuti regis et martyris, chapter 8, ed. M.C. Gertz, in Vitae sanctorum Danorum (Copenhagen, 1908–12), p. 93; Galberti Brugensis, De multro traditione, et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandiarum, ed. Jeff Rider (Turnhout, 1994), c. 68, p. 120; Walteri archidiaconi Teruanensis vita comitis Flandrie et vita domini Ioannis Morinensis episcopi, ed. Jeff Rider (Turnhout, 2006), cc. 2–3, pp. 29–30. 4   The story of Charles the Good’s murder is told by Galbert of Bruges and Walter of Thérouanne (for editions see footnote 3). 5   Ferdinand Chalandon, Histoire de la domination normande en Italie et en Sicile, 2 vols (Paris, 1907), vol. 1, pp. 298–9.

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survived into adulthood. After Roger’s death in 1111 she acted as regent for her son until she herself died four years later. Both sons, Charles in Flanders and William in Apulia, became rulers and died within one year of each other. The story of Adela’s life in Flanders, Denmark and southern Italy is not unique. Many aristocratic women married young abroad and returned home as widows before, after an interval, being married off again.6 This development of marriage arrangements at the top level of society between geographically disparate families accentuated the fact that it was usually the women who moved home, not the men.7 The cycle of marriage, motherhood and widowhood could in theory be repeated as long as the women remained fertile and were able to bear children. Once they reached the age of 40 and the menopause loomed, few widows remarried and most stayed in the place where their last husband had died.8 The cycle of marriage, motherhood and widowhood raises many issues, three of which I shall be addressing here in particular. Firstly, that of identity: how did multiple marriages, especially to foreigners, affect the women’s sense of identity as it was characterized by name-giving and titles? Adela’s identity as daughter or sister in Flanders was clearly different from that of Adela as wife, mother and widow in Denmark and Italy. Did her status as queen in Denmark have any impact on her later life as countess in Italy? Secondly, gender: how did women cope with their new in-laws, male and female? The issue of gender is particularly relevant with regard to the care of and responsibility for the various sets of children that were involved. Did Adela in Italy keep in touch with her children in Denmark and Flanders? Who looked after them and what arrangements for their care were put in place? And thirdly, there is the issue of memory. How did women deal with their role as custodians of family traditions in such culturally diverse surroundings? After remarriage, of which family were they the custodians of memory? And to   Relatively little research has been carried out on a Europe-wide scale into the fate of migrating aristocratic women. For some introductory reading mostly for the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London, 1993), pp. 230–32; Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Intermarriage in eleventh-century England’, in David Crouch and Kathleen Thompson (eds), Normandy and its Neighbours, 900–1250: Essays for David Bates (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 237–70. Also see Miriam G. Büttner, ‘The Education of Queens in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003). 7   The classic study of marriage arrangements remains Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983); and see the perceptive comments in Lisa M. Bitel, Women in Early Medieval Europe 400–1000 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 178–9. 8   The most striking indication that reaching the age of 40 was a turning point for women is the English Rotuli de dominabus et pueris et puellis de xii comitatibus, ed. John .H. Round (London, 1913) from the 1180s, which for tax purposes lists all widows, heiresses and wards. Women up to the age of approximately 40 are listed with their precise age; all others are listed only as ‘old’ or with ages in round figures (50, 60 and so on). For a commentary, see Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the TwelfthCentury Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester, 2003), pp. 165–93. 6

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whom did they pass on which family history? Most of my material will concern women, but I will not forget the men. Identity I will begin with the question of identity, by which I mean a person’s social identity. Social identities are constructs of selves in the Middle Ages and now.9 How did a medieval aristocratic woman construct a view of herself and how did others construct a view of her? Aristocratic women were identified first of all as daughters and the higher the rank of her parents, the more pride a woman could take in her birth. The higher her rank, the higher would be her value as a marriage partner. Thus Adela’s paternal grandmother, Countess Adela of Flanders (d. 1079), never let anyone forget that she was the daughter of King Robert the Pious of France (996– 1031). Her royal origins were exploited by herself, her husband Count Baldwin V (1035–67) and her children. As a result of Countess Adela’s royal status and family connections her husband Baldwin became the guardian of her nephew King Philip I (1060–1108), while her daughter Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, had her royal descent recorded in her own documents and epitaphium.10 Royal or imperial descent was a crucial factor in the self-image of aristocratic women and its knowledge was handed down through many generations, as is illustrated by the many women and indeed men, who in the central Middle Ages cited descent from Charlemagne.11 Unlike the identity as wife or widow, the identity as daughter never changed. One had only one father and one mother. Circumstances in life might change to the extent that it was sometimes sensible to avoid mentioning one’s origin, or to be less explicit – and I will return to this matter in the final section on memory – but when we discuss identity we have to stress that one’s birth family ties remained the prime indicator of one’s identity. Although the identity determined by birth remained of crucial importance, marriage provided women with a new identity. When women married foreign husbands they often received a new first name, which meant that they received in a sense a new label to fit their new persona. The Scandinavian/Norman Gerloc (d. 940s) became Adela in Aquitaine; the Norman Emma (d. 1052) upon marrying the English King Æthelred became Ælfthryth; Gunhild (d. 1036), her daughter by her second husband King Cnut, was renamed Kunigunde in Germany; the Russian princess Eupraxia/Praxedis became Adelheid in Germany; and in 1183 Theresia   On identity in the Middle Ages, see The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (Abingdon, 2001), especially the introduction to the section ‘Identities: selves and others’ on pp. 7–13. 10   On Matilda, see Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Matilda of Flanders’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) (henceforth ‘ODNB’), s.v. 11   On the importance of Carolingian descent, see Régine Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIe–Xe siècle): essai d’anthropologie sociale (Paris, 1995). 9

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of Portugal took the name Matilda when she married count Philip of Flanders.12 Clearly the new name was meant to help them fit into their new linguistic and social environment and perhaps also to help them forget their previous attachments.13 For the in-laws, unfamiliarity with strange-sounding names was the main linguistic reason for a change of name, as one German chronicler in the Chronicon Gozecense tells us when he mentions how Hylaria changed into Oda, because Hylaria sounded too Latinate.14 The other reason for a change of name was a dynastic one. The new consort had to fit into an existing line of consorts who all bore one of a selection of ancestral names, such as Ælfthryth in Anglo-Saxon and Matilda in Norman England, or Adelheid in Germany. In fact, although most evidence of name changes comes from women upon marriage, some men’s names were changed for similarly dynastic reasons but not because of marriage. Guy Geoffrey of Aquitaine (d. 1086) took up the countship after his brothers had died by taking on his eldest brother’s name William and Petronilla, queen of Aragon (d. 1174), named her son Ramon Alfonso (later King Alfonso II (1162–96)) for dynastic reasons too.15 Interestingly, in these cases it seems to have been specifically mothers who renamed their sons. The giving and changing of first names for linguistic and therefore cultural, reasons as well as for political and dynastic reasons illustrates the extent to which individual members of the family had to conform to the demands of the family tradition. This matter underlines the close links between the identity of an individual and that individual’s place in the memorial traditions of the new family to which they were joined by marriage. Once renamed after widowhood the woman did not normally revert to her birth name unless she returned home. I have yet to find evidence for any widow taking on a third name after remarriage, even after moving to a new language zone. Closely related to issues of identity and first name is that of social rank. A married woman derived her status from that of her husband, whose rank and title she would normally adopt so that she would become, for example, countess or queen. In her capacity as spouse she would appear in documents bearing the 12   The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni (henceforth ‘GND’), ed. Elisabeth van Houts (2 vols, Oxford, 1992–95), vol. 1, pp. 80–81 (Gerloc); Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 8 n. 7, 9, 11–12 (Emma); Claudia Zey, ‘Frauen und Töchter der salischen Herrscher. Zum Wandel salischer Heiratspolitik’, in Tilman Struve (ed.), Die Salier, das Reich und der Niederrhein (Cologne, 2008), p. 57 and GND, vol. 2, p. 21 n. 7 (Gunhild); Zey, p. 77 (Eupraxia/Praxedis (Adelheid)); David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (Harlow, 1992), p. 73 (Theresia). 13   This point is raised by Büttner, pp. 50–2. 14   As quoted in ibid., p. 50. 15   Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making 843–1180 (Oxford, 1985), p. 176 (Guy Geoffrey/William VIII). For Ramon Alfonso, see Peter Linehan, ‘Spain in the Twelfth Century,’ in David E. Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith (eds), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 483; see also Büttner, p. 51, n. 88.

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appropriate title. Sometimes more elaborate descriptions would both indicate her precise relationship as spouse and refer to her origin, as in the description of Adela of France, countess of Flanders, whom we encountered earlier as regalis comitissa. The change of first name seems to have been permanent for those who remarried, but titles would change, unless one was a queen or an empress. The Empress Matilda (d. 1167) is an interesting example of a woman who for most of her life was known by her most prestigious title, even though she had never actually received the imperial crown. As Marjorie Chibnall has shown, Matilda took on the imperial title after her return to Normandy in 1126 and kept it from then onwards.16 After her marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou in 1128, she occasionally appeared as countess of Anjou, but during her campaign for the English throne she used her imperial title alongside that of her status as the previous king’s daughter and that of her rank at the time as domina Anglorum. Documentary and narrative sources are remarkably similar in their use of women’s titles, including what we now would call anachronistic ones. This is particularly clear in the case of queens. In England, Adeliza of Louvain, widow of King Henry I (1100–35), continued to be addressed as queen even after her remarriage to the royal butler William d’Aubigni. Her presence in England makes her position as dowager queen self-evident and explains the public recognition of this rank for the rest of her life.17 But what about that other royal widow Isabelle of Angoulême, widow of King John (d. 1216), who by all accounts had led a pretty miserable life as royal consort? Even though she quickly returned to France where she married Hugh of Lusignan, for the next 30 years she still continued to be styled regina Anglorum in documents and chronicles on both sides of the Channel.18 In France too remarried queens seem to have kept their royal title. Anna of Kiev, widow of King Henry I (d. 1060), who married the king’s cousin Ralph of Vermandois after his death and Adelaide of Maurienne, widow of Louis VI (d. 1137) and subsequently wife of Mathieu de Montmorency, were both referred to as queens until they died. Much more curious is the evidence that widowed potential queens used the title of queen: they were women who never made it to that position due to the premature death of their crown prince husbands. For example, Judith of Flanders, widow of Tostig (d. 1066), earl of Northumbria and rival of his brother Harold (d. 1066) for the English throne, was known as queen of England in Germany. Contemporary evidence for the brothers’ rivalry is implicit, yet confirmation comes from sources 16   Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (Oxford, 1991), pp. 33, 70; also see Amalie Fössel, Die Königin im mittelalterlichen Reich (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 106–7. 17   Laura Wertheimer, ‘Adeliza of Louvain and Anglo-Norman Queenship’, Haskins Society Journal, 7 (1995): pp. 101–15 and Kathleen Thompson, ‘Queen Adeliza and the Lotharingian Connection’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 140 (2002): pp. 57–64. 18   Nicholas Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême: John’s Jezebel’, in Stephen Church (ed.), King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), p.206.

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connected with Judith’s second marriage. As spouse of Duke Welf IV of Bavaria she left her possessions to the abbey of Weingarten, where she entered the records as a wealthy widowed queen of England.19 The case of Constance of France is less ambiguous. Constance married Eustace (d. 1153), elder son of King Stephen of England (1135–54) and after his premature death she married Count Raymond V of Toulouse. In several cartulary copies of Toulouse documents she can be found as Queen Constance, a reminder surely of her expectations of becoming queen in her first marriage.20 The two examples above may explain a rather puzzling case from Flanders. The late twelfth-century chronicler Lambert of Ardres and his contemporaries consistently refer to Matilda/Theresia (of Portugal), the second wife of Count Philip of Flanders (1168–91), as queen. It has been suggested that this is ‘an adroit way of pointing out her prestige [as royal daughter]’, but a simpler solution would be that on an earlier occasion she had been promised in marriage to a crown prince, a marriage that may have fallen through.21 Again the link between the woman’s identity derived from a high ranking position at one stage in her life and the continuous reminder of that identity in later life is striking. Is it too farfetched to attribute to the women themselves some form of agency which perpetuated the use of a title they may never even have borne? If the answer is yes, the women must have fostered the memory of the would-be title before they passed it on to their children and to the clergy responsible for drawing up the documents that mention these titles. For one group of women, heiresses, the personal identity as daughter prevailed over all other identities. Although a female heir who had inherited land lost her legal capacity to act upon her marriage, when her husband took on all legal obligations as lord of the land, the knowledge that she was the vehicle through which any claim to the land was channelled still continued to give her some power. Needless to say, it depended entirely on the woman’s character and her circumstances as to whether she was able to turn this knowledge and power to her own advantage or that of her friends. Adelaide I of Aumale (d. 1086/90), the halfsister of William the Conqueror (d. 1087), became countess of Aumale as a result

  Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Judith of Flanders’, ODNB, s.v.   Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Nuns and Goldsmiths: The History of St. Radegund’s Priory in Cambridge’, in David Abulafia, Michael Franklin and Miri Rubin (eds), Church and City 1000–1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 75–7. 21   Karin S. Nicholas, ‘Countesses as Rulers in Flanders’, in Theodore Evergates (ed.), Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 125. It is perhaps significant that Robert of Torigni, the well informed abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, does not refer to Matilda/Theresia as queen when under the year 1184 he mentions how King Henry II arranged her marriage to Philip (‘The Chronicle of Robert of Torigni’, ed. Richard Howlett, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, Volume 4, ed. Richard Howlett (London, 1889), p. 310). 19 20

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of her first marriage to Enguerrand of Aumale (d. 1054).22 After Enguerrand’s death in battle, she kept the county and title through two subsequent marriages to Lambert of Lens (d. before 1065/70) and Odo of Champagne (d. after 1118). Her daughter by her first husband, Adelaide II (d. after 1100), was the rightful heiress to Aumale, but as we shall see later, Adelaide II’s younger half-brother, Etienne, son of Adelaide I and her third husband Odo of Champagne, successfully ousted her from her inheritance. Gender Gender is the analytical tool that allows us to explore and understand the social, not the biological, role of the two sexes. It is particularly fruitful as a means to think about the cooperation between men and women and how they were (or were not) conditioned by their social roles in society. Admittedly, women bore children and men could not, but how did gender affect remarriage and in particular how did it affect the various sets of children involved in remarriages? The question that intrigues me most relates to responsibility for the children involved, especially those who were minors. As we shall see, much has been written on the legal aspects of wardship, but little attention has been paid to the practicalities of childcare in the case of remarriage.23 Most women who remarried did so after widowhood rather than divorce, although divorce may have been more common than is generally accepted. In the case of a divorce, it was normally the woman who departed and left all her children with her former husband. Thus when, in 1152, Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204) divorced King Louis VII of France (d. 1180) she had to leave behind their two daughters Marie and Adelicia. A century earlier, Almodis de la Marche divorced twice before she married a third time.24 First she left her son Hugh as a three-year old with his father Uc/Hugh in Lusignan. The next time round her three children, two boys and a girl, stayed with her husband Pons of Toulouse, a fourth child having died very young. In these and other divorce cases which involved children, the father as legal protector exercised his natural right over the children. There seems to have been no discussion in any of these cases that the children might go with their mother. Since the mothers’ remarriages coincided more or less with the divorces, leaving behind the children was the price they had to pay for being able to remarry. Eleanor had already met Henry of Anjou before the divorce was granted and remarriage was on the cards, while Almodis eloped with her third husband Ramon Berengar I of Barcelona and consequently literally abandoned 22   Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Les femmes dans l’histoire du duché de Normandie’, Tabularia ‘Etudes’, 2 (2002): pp. 26–9. 23   For works on wardship, see footnote 26 below. 24   Martin Aurell, Les noces du comte: mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris, 1995), pp. 259–80.

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her Toulouse children. In the cases of Eleanor and Almodis, at least some of the children involved were what we now call teenagers and had reached marriageable age. Although still vulnerable, they were not infants any more. When remarriage occurred after a childless marriage and widowhood, ‘what to do with the kids’ posed no problem. The Empress Matilda, Countess Constance and Queen Adeliza of Louvain had all worried about a lack of offspring during their marriages, but their childlessness did not seem to discourage new marriage partners, as all three widows remarried and went on to have children with their new spouses. But, if there were children involved, particularly minors, a new marriage posed potentially serious political, social and economic problems. These problems concerned wardship in the legal sense, also called feudal wardship, when a child’s body and their income from land was assigned to a guardian who would (in theory at least) look after the child’s interests. Since land could be held from more than one lord, several lords in fact could claim rights of wardship. In cases of substantial inheritances, it was the king who normally decided who should be the guardian. Much scholarship exists on feudal wardship from the late twelfth century onwards, particularly in England and the legal aspects have been addressed.25 For England we have Henry I’s coronation charter, which promised that wardship would be assigned to the widow or other suitable kin: ‘a wife or other relative who might have a better right’.26 The reference here is surely to the legal side of the issue, namely the fact that the widow would act as the legal representative of the children and would receive the income from their land. Normally she would pay a fine to enter into her position: both the fine and the income attached to wardship were lucrative to lord and king. The increasing litigation and legislation surrounding wardship can be explained by the financial advantages associated with it. The very fact that Henry I made promises to protect the widow’s right as guardian strongly suggests that her position was vulnerable and could not be taken for granted. He also explicitly stated that his guarantees only lasted ‘as long as she shall keep her body lawful’, that is, remained a widow and had no sexual relations and thus no children illegitimately.27 Remarriage, it seems, would change the situation: the woman might lose control 25   See, for example, Noël J. Menuge, ‘A Few Home Truths: The Medieval Mother as Guardian in Romance and Law’, in Noël J. Menuge (ed.), Medieval women and the Law (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 77–103. For the legal aspects, see Susan S. Walker, ‘Widow and Ward: The Feudal Law of Child Custody in Medieval England’, in S.M. Stuart (ed.), Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 159–72 and Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 371–2. For the thirteenth century, when royal control tightened, see Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217–1327 (Princeton, NJ, 1988). 26   The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I, ed. and trans. A.J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1925), p. 278, clause 4.1: ‘… siue uxor siue alius propinquarius qui iustius esse debeat’. 27   Ibid., p. 278 clause 4 ‘... dum corpus suum legitime seruauerit ...’.

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over her children. This is certainly the implication of the statement in the Dialogue of the Exchequer of the 1170s to the effect that normally a widow planning a remarriage would abandon the children of a previous union.28 The question arises as to what extent not being a guardian any longer meant loss of legal control and income, as well as having to physically abandon the children themselves. Two English queens, born 200 years apart, were mothers who did leave their children behind. The most famous pre-conquest case in England is that of Queen Emma, widow of king Æthelred (d. 1016), who left her three children with her brother Duke Richard II (996–1026) in Normandy when she married Æthelred’s successor Cnut (1017–35). Their son Harthacnut from then on took precedence over Emma’s older sons by Æthelred. Thus it was convenient for Emma at the time of her second marriage to temporarily ‘forget’ her older children.29 Two centuries later Queen Isabelle of England, heiress of Angoulême, left four of her five children by King John in England when she returned to France as a widow.30 In her case the situation was complicated because her eldest son, now Henry III, had been taken away from her as a four or five year old, an exceptional action by John that went against the norm that mothers looked after their sons at least until the age of seven or eight.31 Isabelle may not have known her children very well and this, coupled with her unhappiness during her marriage, may not have made the choice to leave them behind too difficult. For Henry, heir and successor to the English throne, there was no choice either. England was his home and future, so that is where he stayed. For the Continent, no documents concerning wardship exist as they do for England, as a result of weaker territorial rulership at princely or royal level.32 In eleventh-century Normandy either the mother or the lord could act as guardian.33 In Champagne there was never any doubt about maternal wardship rights or indeed maternal care, as Theodore Evergates underlined in his monumental study of the county’s aristocracy.34 Recent research for the Périgord has highlighted   Richard fitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario: The Dialogue of the Exchequer, ed. and trans. Emily Amt and Constitutio domus Regis: Disposition of the King’s Household, ed. and trans. Stephen Church (Oxford, 2007), pp. 172–3. 29   Stafford, pp. 221–2 and p. 235 where a parallel is drawn with Gisela, wife of Emperor Conrad II of Germany (d. 1039). Upon her remarriage, Gisela had to swear an oath that she would never support her sons by her first husband Ernst of Swabia. 30   Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême’, p. 206. 31   Ibid., pp. 198, 206, 210. 32   According to Shulamith Shahar, in France and Catalonia women could act as guardians for sons who inherited fiefs. See Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London, 1983), pp. 141–2. 33   Green, p. 372 and Emily Zack Tabuteau, Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law (Chapel Hill, 1988), p. 61. 34   Theodore Evergates, The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100–1300 (Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 98–100. 28

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interesting arrangements amongst Christian and Jewish communities. Amongst the Jews a widowed mother would be guided by a small committee of Jewish men who would ensure that she guarded her children in good Jewish fashion.35 In most cases, even where guardians who were not the mother had been appointed, the evidence suggests that it was still the mother who looked after the children. The norm, therefore, seems to have been continuation of maternal care and there does not seem to have been great fear that a new husband might usurp the rights of his stepchildren. When this was not the case, political circumstances rather than customs can usually provide an explanation. Most other widows who remarried and left some or all of their children behind acted presumably with their children’s best interests in mind. Many of the children were heirs to property and their removal with their mothers would have endangered any claim they may have had to future lands and income. In the two cases of divorce mentioned earlier, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Almodis de la Marche, the women left their children for precisely this reason. In the absence of any son by Louis VII, Eleanor’s daughters by him could be seen as heiresses to the French throne, even though there had never been a female ruler in her own right. Similarly, Almodis produced two sets of heirs to her Lusignan and Toulouse husbands. The widowhood of Adela of Flanders as queen of Denmark, however, showed the perils of the time. After King Cnut of Denmark’s murder in 1086 she took her son (and heir) Charles with her, probably following an earlier order of her husband. The political situation at the time was one of civil war between several royal brothers.36 Cnut had been killed in an uprising caused by one of them, Olaf (1086– 95), who succeeded to the throne. From Olaf’s point of view it was convenient that Adela disappeared from the scene with her son Charles, as he was a potential rival to the throne. When Adela remarried and moved to southern Italy, she left Charles in Flanders, where he was in a much better position to return one day to Denmark if necessary. That marriage into a Scandinavian family was perhaps felt to be particularly dangerous is revealed by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, who equated marriage there with dangerous exile, something not to be recommended at all.37 In the case of Adelaide I of Aumale, after widowhood she probably looked after her two daughters Adelaide II and Judith under the protection of her second husband’s brother Count Eustace II of Boulogne. Her second daughter Judith married Earl   Rebecca L. Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Aldershot, 2006), p. 89; see also the comments of Elma Brenner, ‘Review of Winer, Women’, in AlMasāq, 21 (2009): pp. 331–3. 36   I. Skovgaard-Petersen, ‘The Making of the Danish Kingdom’, in Knut Helle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 178–9. 37   The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Bertin, ed. Charles H. Talbot, in Analecta Monastica: Textes et études sur la vie des moines au moyen âge, ed. Marie M. Lebreton and others (Rome, 1955), p. 41; Goscelin of St. Bertin. The Book of Encouragement and Consolation (Liber confortatorius), trans. Monika Otter (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 41–2. 35

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Waltheof (d. 1075) probably around the time of Adelaide I’s third marriage and thereby was no longer her mother’s responsibility. The precise whereabouts of the elder daughter Adelaide II at that time are unknown. She resurfaced 30 years later to claim her Aumale inheritance (see below). Whether these women abandoned the care of their children voluntarily or against their will, it does not follow that they no longer had any contact with them. Out of sight did not necessarily mean out of mind, even if this appears to be the case, because we find so few traces of contact. When in 1196 Eleanor of Aquitaine set aside a sum of money for her granddaughter Alice, the daughter of Adelicia (her second child by Louis VII, who had married Henry of Blois), she remembered Adelicia as her most beloved daughter. No trace of contact between mother and daughter has survived except for this touching reference.38 Several centuries earlier, Queen Adelaide of Italy (d. 999) had left her daughter Emma in northern Italy when she married Otto I (d. 973) by whom she had two more children. Surviving letters from Emma, who as wife of King Lothar of France found herself in dire circumstances and pleaded to her mother for help, testify to contact between them, though it is difficult to identify degrees of affection, not least because the author of the letters was Gerbert of Reims writing on Emma’s behalf.39 In 1066 the remarkable Almodis de la Marche returned to Toulouse, the land she had left 15 years earlier, to attend the wedding of her only daughter, also Almodis, to Peire de Substantion, Count of Melgueil. We know of her presence on that occasion due to a series of charters issued there. By then Almodis’s second husband Pons (the father of her daughter) had died and her elder son Guilhelm IV of Toulouse had been responsible for his sister’s marriage. Guilhelm IV and his twin brother Raymond witnessed the charters for the monasteries of Saint-Gilles and Moissac together with their mother.40 Two Anglo–Norman examples from the Warenne family also suggest that contacts between mothers and children continued long after the mother’s remarriage. When, after the death of her husband Robert of Beaumont in 1118, Isabel/Elisabeth of Vermandois married William II of Warenne, she kept in touch with her Beaumont children to such extent that in charters the Beaumont and Warenne children were described as each other’s siblings.41 Isabel’s Beaumont   Nicholas Vincent, ‘Patronage, Politics and Piety in the Charters of Eleanor of Aquitaine’, in Martin Aurell and Noël-Yves Tonnerre (eds), Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et héritages (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 24, 27, 57 (no. 66). 39   Die Briefsammlung Gerberts von Reims, ed. Fritz Weigle (Berlin, 1966), nos 74 (dated 986), 97 (dated 986/7), 128 (dated 988); The Letters of Gerbert with his Papal Privileges as Sylvester II, trans. Harriet Pratt Lattin (New York, 1961), where the numbering of the letters is different: nos 81, 100 and 137 respectively. 40   Aurell, Les noces du comte, p. 276; for the brothers as twins and Guilhelm as the eldest and thus successor to his father’s lands, see p. 260 n. 2. 41   David Crouch, The Beaumont Twins: The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 211–12; Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Warenne View 38

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sons were by then grown up, but nevertheless the language of kinship suggests that relations between the two sets of children were fostered, no doubt by the mother. Isabel’s daughter-in-law Ada of Bellême/Ponthieu similarly linked her children by two marriages. By her first marriage to William III of Warenne she had a single daughter, Isabel, the famous Warenne heiress, to whom I will return below, who was a minor when William III died. After Ada’s marriage to Earl Patrick of Salisbury she had four sons by him. The second son, Patrick, described as ‘Patricio, adhuc puer filio comitis Patricii’ (‘Patrick, still a boy, son of Earl Patrick’), featured among the witnesses in a charter issued by the younger Isabel just after she had first been widowed without children.42 Now the cynic might point out, correctly, that Patrick was there as a potential claimant to the Warenne lands. Even so, the fact that Isabel’s half-brother was present at a seemingly young age strongly implies continued contact between his mother Ada and her daughter Isabel. These examples testify to ongoing contact between remarried women (widowed or divorced) and their sons and daughters of previous unions, to their continued interest in their sons and daughters and to a manifestation of the women’s multiple identities derived from different husbands. There was another category of children that (re)married women might be responsible for, their husbands’ children by concubines. Both Almodis de la Marche and Adela of Flanders took their husbands’ sons under their wings. Almodis formally adopted Pere, the eldest son of her third husband Raymond-Berengar of Barcelona (by his first wife or concubine). This was a political measure taken, no doubt, to make Pere feel included amongst Almodis’s children by Raymond. This turned out to be in vain, for ultimately Pere, passed over by his half-siblings, murdered his stepmother in 1071.43 The fate of Adela of Flanders in Apulia was not so dramatic. A series of charters for the abbey of Cava, dating from 1105 when Count Roger was still alive, allows us to trace Adela’s curious protection of Maria, the (former) concubine of her husband and their son William, later count of Lucera.44 At Adela’s request, the count provided the concubine and her husband Johannes with land and newly constructed houses at Salerno. Unfortunately, we will never know the story that lies behind Adela’s intriguing gesture. But what does this information mean for the role of women as guardians of family memory? How did they juggle the responsibility for this task with regard to more than one family? Having discussed remarriage from the point of view of identity and gender I will now address the final theme of memory.

of the Past, 1066–1203’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 26 (2003): p. 105. 42   Early Yorkshire Charters Volume VIII: The Honour of Warenne, ed. Charles T. Clay (Leeds, 1949), no. 111, pp. 158–9 and plate xxi. 43   Aurell, Les noces du comte, pp. 278, 279. On adoption in the Middle Ages, see L’adoption: droits et pratiques, ed. Didier Lett and Christopher Lucken [a special issue of] Médiévales, 35 (1998). 44   Chalandon, pp. 311–12.

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Memory Memory is the result of a ‘digestive’ process whereby past deeds are churned up and presented in the light of present circumstances. Within historical studies there has recently been increasing attention regarding how exactly memorial processes take place and influence the representation of the past.45 Historians have considered how memories are formed and passed on and how men and women collaborate in this process. In this chapter I shall look primarily at how remarriage affected the role of women as custodians of family traditions. How did they balance the requirements of the various families? Which of the many kin groups took precedence, the birth group, the first set of in-laws, or the second or the third? Could women fulfil their custodial tasks concurrently? Did political circumstances simply dictate which family tradition at any one time was the most dominant one? Commemoration of deceased husbands was the most easily performed duty and is the one for which we find the most unambiguous information. Throughout their lives queens remembered their first husbands. Queen Adeliza of Louvain, Countess Constance, the French queens Anna of Kiev and Adelaide of Maurienne and the Empress Matilda presumably remembered their first husbands not least because they continued to use the titles connected with their first marriage (see discussion above). For some of them we have additional information. Adeliza commissioned a (now lost) life of Henry I, while the Empress brought back from Germany a chronicle of German kings, although this only briefly touched on Henry V.46 She kept some of his crowns and other German jewellery throughout her life, probably not only for their intrinsic monetary value.47 As we have seen, the would-be queens of England, Tostig’s widow Judith and Eustace’s widow Countess Constance, harboured the memory of their never to be realized status of queen together with a collection of mementos. Judith possessed several precious Old English manuscripts and relics of Saint Oswald from her time in England which she bequeathed to the abbey of Weingarten.48 Throughout her life Constance used a seal which she brought 45   See, for example, Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900­–1200 (Basingstoke, 1999); Elisabeth van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past, 700–1300 (Harlow, 2001); Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004); Michael Borgolte, Cosimo D. Fonseca and Hubert Houben (eds), Memoria: Ricordare e dimenticare nella cultura del medioevo. Memoria: Erinnern und Vergessen in der Kultur des Mittelalters (Bologna–Berlin, 2005); Jeroen. Deploige, Brigitte Meijns and Renée Nip (eds), Herinnering in geschrift en praktijk in religieuze gemeenschappen uit de Lage Landen, 1000–1500 (Brussels, 2009). Also see the historiography discussed in the Introduction to this volume. 46   Geffrei Gaimar. Estoire des Engleis – History of the English, ed. and trans. Ian Short (Oxford, 2009), lines 6484–6490 and Appendix lines A2–3 (pp. 350–51, 354–5); Chibnall, p. 26. 47   Chibnall, p. 189. 48   van Houts, ‘Judith of Flanders’ ODNB, s.v.

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back from England which is strikingly similar to the seal of that other would-be queen of England the Empress Matilda.49 The similarity can be explained by the fact that both seals were probably derived from the seal of Queen Edith-Matilda II (Matilda of Scotland) and perhaps also that of Queen Adeliza. As a direct result of Constance’s aborted queenly career, therefore, her Toulouse offspring took over her ‘English’ seal which they used for the rest of the Middle Ages. Women’s custodial role with respect to family traditions can also be illustrated in the context of remarriages. Some aristocratic women used their birth family history to cement a link between their various broods of children. I have already referred to Isabel/Elisabeth of Vermandois (d. after 1138), firstly married to Robert of Beaumont and then to William II of Warenne. As David Crouch has pointed out, both sets of her children, deeply aware of their mother’s illustrious Carolingian descent, used her Vermandois heraldic arms on their weapons.50 Surely Isabel/ Elisabeth herself passed on her knowledge and ancestral pride to her children, no doubt instilled in her by her mother Adela. She had become a rich heiress (of Vermandois) after the rebellion by her brother Odo and had been married off to a royal (landless) prince, Hugh, son of King Henry I of France. Isabel herself was so fertile that she had at least seven children with Robert of Beaumont and another five from her Warenne marriage. That heiresses were aware of the importance of marriage, remarriage and the production of heirs is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of Isabel/ Elisabeth’s granddaughter, another Isabel of Warenne, who was the richest and most famous heiress of her time.51 Isabel’s first marriage was to King Stephen’s second son William of Blois, who died in 1159 during King Henry II’s expedition to take Toulouse. William and Isabel’s marriage was childless and throughout the five years of her widowhood Isabel acted as countess of Warenne in her own right. It is during this period (1159–64) that we have to place the charter referred to above in which Isabel and her half-brother Patrick are mentioned together. In the early 1160s Isabel was wooed by King Henry II’s younger brother William of Anjou, but this engagement was forbidden by Archbishop Thomas Becket on the grounds of consanguinity. Apparently, William of Anjou was so affected by this blow that he returned to his mother the Empress Matilda in Rouen where, according to the Latin poet of the Draco Normannicus, he died of heartbreak.52 King Henry II then produced an otherwise forgotten half-brother Hamelin, the illegitimate son of Count Geoffrey of Anjou, who married Isabel in 1164. Isabel’s second marriage to Hamelin produced an extraordinary change in the pattern of the commemoration of ancestors as recorded in the Warenne charters. Whereas until the 1160s the   van Houts, ‘Nuns and Goldsmiths’, p. 77, n. 83.   Crouch, The Beaumont Twins, pp. 211–12. 51   For what follows, see van Houts, ‘The Warenne View of the Past’: pp. 106–7. 52   The ‘Draco Normannicus’ of Etienne de Rouen, ed. Richard Howlett, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, Volume II, ed. Richard Howlett (London, 1887), p. 676, lines 440–52. 49 50

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commemoration of ancestors is brief and restricted to one or two names, from the moment Hamelin appears as count of Warenne the number of names increases greatly. Not only do the names stretch vertically right back to the conquest ‘founders’ of the dynasty, William I of Warenne and his Flemish wife Gundrada, they also expand horizontally by including the counts of Anjou. Hamelin’s father is mentioned by name and identified as the count of Warenne’s father, his mother is mentioned but unfortunately anonymously and there are many general references to the counts of Anjou. The incorporation of Hamelin’s paternal ancestry into the Warenne heritage is a brilliant gendered example of how an illegitimate virtually landless young man, whose father was a count and whose half-brother was king, literally inserted himself and his ancestors into his wife’s family history. Childlessness clearly caused heiresses enormous distress for personal and dynastic reasons. The preoccupation with ancestors and the selection of their deeds in the service of present circumstances and in order to justify future choices is illustrated graphically in the case of Adelaide I Aumale – the mother whom we encountered earlier on who had three children by three husbands – and her eldest daughter Adelaide II, the childless heiress of Aumale. We can trace the history of Aumale in the late eleventh century through two documents, A and B, which record the foundation history of the abbey of Saint Martin d’Auchy near Aumale.53 Version A presents a history of the foundation which confirms the dynastic right of Adelaide I’s youngest child Etienne, son by her third husband Odo of Champagne, whereas version B represents virtually the same story but is written in order to prove Adelaide II’s case as heir to Aumale. Both versions agree that the church of Saint Martin was founded by a vir nobilis Guerenfridus during the reign of Duke Richard II (996–1026) of Normandy and they contain a list of gifts by Adelaide I, her daughter Judith, her son-in-law Earl Waltheof and several local Norman lords. Version A, in favour of the son Etienne, confirms the gifts of his parents, the very noble Adelaide, sister of Duke William and her husband Odo, but indicates only vaguely how Adelaide I was related to Guerenfridus. Version B, on the other hand, details with great precision Adelaide II’s descent from Guerenfridus and the root of her claim to his rights. Her father Enguerrand II of Ponthieu, the first husband of Adelaide I, was the son of a woman called Bertha, daughter of Guerenfridus (thus Adelaide II was Guerenfridus’s great-granddaughter). Moreover, this version (B) explicitly describes Adelaide II as comitissa, daughter of Adelaide I nobilissima comitissa and successor to the imperium of Aumale. Thus Adelaide II presents herself as heiress in a direct line from her grandmother Bertha, an heiress herself, through whom Aumale came down to her. The question is how these two documents with conflicting claims relate to one another. For various reasons version A must date from c. 1090 around the time that Etienne (son of Odo) had succeeded as count of Aumale after the death of his 53   See Pierre Bauduin, La première Normandie (Xe–XIe siècles): sur les frontières de la haute Normandie: identité et construction d’une principauté (Caen, 2004), pp. 299–300 and van Houts, ‘Les femmes’, pp. 23–7.

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mother Adelaide I between 1086 and 1089. A charter of Duke Robert Curthose (1087–1106) of July 1096 reveals Etienne donating Aumale estates to the cathedral of Beauvais with the consent of his (half-) sister Adelaide II. The charter was issued just before the departure of Duke Robert and Etienne to the Holy Land. It seems very likely that, in version B of the Saint Martin d’Auchy document, Adelaide II took advantage of her half-brother’s absence on crusade to claim her inheritance at last. That she did not act as regent for her brother but rather acted in her own right is suggested by the history of the family’s English lands. Etienne had been allowed to go on crusade as penance for his share in the revolt against William Rufus, while his father Odo was thrown into prison. The honour of Holderness was taken away from them and given to Arnulf of Montgomery who held it until 1102.54 It is quite possible that the Aumale lands too were taken away from Etienne and handed back to Adelaide in her own right. How and why Aumale turned up in Etienne’s hands again at the latest by 1104 is unclear. The most probable scenario is that Adelaide II had died by then and, being childless, left her younger brother as heir. The point of the Aumale story is that the right of Adelaide I to Aumale derived from her first husband and she took this right with her to her two later husbands by whom she had other children, who were all potential claimants to the land. There is no doubt that her eldest daughter had the strongest claim, even though in practice the county went first of all to Adelaide’s third husband and then to her youngest son. It was only during his absence on crusade that Adelaide II had a chance to exercise her claim.55 That she did so by documenting precisely her blood link to her Aumale ancestors is a striking illustration of how well women could be informed about their ancestors and how assertive they could be in using this knowledge to have a record made for posterity. This same family in England produced another set of documented family histories that reflect a mixing and sharing of ancestors as a result of remarriage. The English material is especially interesting because of the amalgamation of Old English, Norman and Scottish elements in post conquest England and because it provides us with a cluster of ancestral texts originating from the friendship of three young men who had grown up together. They provide an interesting gender angle on the topic of remarriage and ancestors. On several occasions I have briefly referred to Judith, the daughter of Adelaide I of Aumale who married Earl Waltheof, earl of Huntingdon and Northamptonshire, the only English aristocrat who was killed for treason by William the Conqueror in 1076.56 As his niece, 54   Barbara English, The Lords of Holderness 1086–1260: A Study in Feudal Society (2nd edn, Hull, 1991), pp. 9–12 (Odo), 13–14 (Arnulf), 14–16 (Etienne). 55   There is no mention of Adelaide’s position at this point in time in ibid., p. 15. 56   ‘Vita et passio Waldevi comitis’, in Vita quorundum Anglo-Saxonum. Original Lives of Anglo-Saxons and Others, Who Lived Before the Conquest, ed. John A. Giles (London, 1854), pp. 18–19. For Waltheof, see Chris P. Lewis, ‘Waltheof, earl of Northumbria (c. 1050–1076)’, ODNB, s.v.; F.S. Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof of Northumbria,’ Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th series, 30 (1952): pp. 149–215.

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Judith was able to persuade King William not to marry her off to Simon I of Senlis (d. 1111/13) after Waltheof’s death, but instead to allow her to remain a widow.57 Simon then married her eldest daughter Maud. By Simon, Maud had three children of whom the youngest Waltheof, named after his grandfather, is better known as Saint Waldef, abbot of Melrose (1148–59).58 In about 1111 Maud became a widow, but within a few years she married David, later king of Scotland (1124–53), by whom she had one more son Henry.59 It is important to remember that as a result of her own parentage and her marriages, Maud’s two sets of children had a mixed ethnic ancestry. They were Norman through Adelaide I and Judith, Old English through Earl Waltheof and David (who was the son of Saint Margaret, herself a royal princess of Old English stock) and Scottish because David’s father was King Malcolm III of Scotland (d. 1093). Maud’s sons Saint Waldef and Henry were educated together at the court of King David of Scotland, where in their late teens they met with a young man of full English ancestry, Ailred, better known as the monk-author Ailred of Rievaulx.60 Between them, the three young men possessed more English than continental blood. All three were fully aware of their ancestry, judging by their later reminiscences about their childhood. We have Ailred’s own autobiographical remarks, snippets of information about Henry and a biography of Saint Waldef by Joscelin of Furness, who recorded Waldef’s own words. Although one must take into account the passage of time and the problem of distortion, it is nevertheless intriguing how this trio’s friendship inculcated them with historical interest, ethnic awareness and linguistic skills partly brought to them through their parents. Henry’s father King David was the co-dedicatee of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, which was commissioned by David’s sister Queen Matilda II, while Ailred of Rievaulx wrote several historical works emphasizing the fusion of the Old English and Scottish royal families with the Norman kings.61 How strongly Ailred was attached to King David and his son Henry, his former patron and childhood friend respectively, is suggested by his

57   Matthew Strickland, ‘Senlis, Simon (I) de [Simon de St Liz], Earl of Northampton and Earl of Huntingdon (d. 1111x1113)’, ODNB, s.v. 58   Derek Baker, ‘Waldef [Waltheof] (c. 1095–1159), Abbot of Melrose,’ ODNB, s.v. 59   G.W.S. Barrow, ‘David I (c. 1085–1153), King of Scots,’ ODNB, s.v. 60   The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel, ed. and trans. F.M. Powicke (London, 1950), pp. xxxix–x, 2–3; D.N. Bell, ‘Ailred of Rievaulx (1110–1167)’, ODNB, s.v. 61   William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. Roger A.B. Mynors, Rodney M. Thomson and Michael Winterbottom (2 vols, Oxford, 1998–99), vol. 1, pp. 2–5 (letter to David), 6–9 (history commissioned by Queen Matilda II). For the historical works of Ailred of Rievaulx, see Genealogia regum Anglorum, ed. J.P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 195 (henceforth ‘PL 195’), cols 711–38, the Vita regis Edwardi, ed. Migne, PL 195, cols 737–90; De bello Standardo, ed. Migne, PL 195, cols 701–12.

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frequent loving reminiscences about them.62 The text itself was dedicated to Henry of Anjou, son of the Empress Matilda, who in late 1153 had been recognized by King Stephen as his heir and successor.63 In the Vita regis Edwardi, also dedicated to the later King Henry II, Ailred saw him as the cornerstone of the two walls that represented the English and Norman gentes.64 After the death in 1152 of his friend Henry, son of King David of Scotland and of King David himself in 1153, Ailred kept in close contact with Waldef, known throughout his life as ‘the queen’s son’, who like himself had become a Cistercian monk.65 The formation of the three young men’s friendship and interest in their ancestry is testimony to the strong influence of mothers and fathers at a time of intense political and ethnic acculturation in post-conquest England. Remarriage within an aristocracy that itself consisted of various ethnic allegiances and motherhood that involved groups of children by fathers of different ethnic backgrounds, laid the basis for the fostering of various memorial traditions predicated on the ancestral and historical interests of men and women. Conclusion By way of conclusion I would like to return to Adela of Flanders with whom this chapter began. She played a role in the commemoration of the families of both her husbands in Denmark and Italy. In 1095, nine years after King Cnut IV’s murder in 1086, when Adela had been in Italy for at least three years, Cnut’s body was translated and attempts were begun to have him canonized. His cult was approved almost immediately after the accession of Pope Pascal II (1099–1118) in August 1099 and the new tomb at Odense (Denmark) was inaugurated on 19 April 1100. According to the English hagiographer Ælnoth who wrote the king’s life in 1122, Queen Adela (note her title) sent money and gifts from Italy to decorate Cnut’s relics.66 The origin of the cult is usually situated in Denmark and, as far as is known, neither Adela nor her son Charles had any hand in it.67 This seems remarkable because of all actors in the cult Adela and Pope Pascal were the ones who had the   Especially in the Genealogia, cols 714 and 736–7.   Genealogia, cols 711–12, 716, 736–7; in col. 737 Ailred rejoices in Henry as heir to England (‘Anglicae gaudemus haeredem’), a reference that allows us to date the text to between late 1153 and October 1154 when Stephen died. 64   Vita regis Edwardi, cols 738–9. 65   Life of Ailred, ed. and trans. Powicke, p. xxxix, note 3. 66   [Aelnoth] Gesta Swenomagi regis, chapter 35, ed. Gertz, p. 133; see also other references to Adela in related hagiographical material at pp. 139–40. An earlier anonymous life of Cnut IV, Passio sancti Knuti regis et martyris, had been written in 1095–8: see pp. 62–76. 67   Erich Hoffmann, ‘Knut der Heilige und die Wende der dänischen Geschichte im 11. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, 218 (1974): pp. 529–70. For a comparative 62 63

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closest connections, having met each other several times in southern Italy.68 We also know that within one year of the start of Cnut’s cult, in the winter of 1096/97, Count Robert II of Flanders visited his sister Adela in Apulia on his way to the Holy Land, where he perhaps travelled with Adela’s son Charles, who, as we know from the latter’s biographer Walther of Thérouanne, made a journey to the Holy Land at some stage.69 The visit was too short and Adela begged her brother (and son?) to stay for the winter, but to no avail, as the party of crusaders moved on.70 It is tempting to suggest that this meeting may have stimulated Adela – as former queen of Denmark – to seek papal support for her first husband’s sanctity, if only to increase the chances of her eldest son Charles of returning as king to Denmark. We should not underestimate Adela’s capacity to exploit her queenly status. Her rank as a (widowed) queen had no doubt been an important consideration by Roger Borsa of Apulia (1085–1111), son of Robert Guiscard (d. 1085), the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, in seeking to marry her. Adela’s own awareness of her status as queen at the time of her remarriage is illustrated by an anecdote told by a monk of Saint-Thierry near Reims.71 When Adela and her brother Count Robert II received hospitality at Saint-Thierry en route from Flanders to Italy, the monks did their utmost to change the modest cell into a place fit for a queen. In return for this Queen Adela, again note her use of the royal title, gratefully gave them some property in Flanders. In Apulia, from Count Roger Borsa’s vantage point, marrying a former queen added enormously to his prestige and also gave him the edge over both his half-brother Bohemund I, prince of Antioch (1098–1111), whose wife was a French princess named Constance and his uncle Roger I of Sicily (1072–1101), who had married a series of noble women (Norman and Italian), none of whom was a queen. The marriage of Roger Borsa and Adela begs one question above any other. Does it signal any royal aspirations by Roger himself? I believe it does and the evidence lies in a well known but largely under-exploited poem, The Gesta Roberti Guiscardi written by William of Apulia.72 This epic poem about Robert Guiscard perspective also see Erich Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige bei den Angelsachsen und den skandinavischen Völkern: Königsheiliger und Königshaus (Neumünster, 1975). 68   This is my assumption on the basis of meetings between Roger Borsa and Paschal II in southern Italy. See Graham A. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Harlow, 2000), pp. 226–7 (Toria 1093, Amalfi 1100, ? Benevento 1101). 69   Walteri archidiaconi Teruanensis, ed. Rider, c. 3, p. 30. 70   Gesta Francorum Iherusalem expugnantium, in Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, Volume 3 (Paris, 1866), chapter 4, p. 493.  71   Ex Adalgisi monachi s. Theodorici prope Remos libro De Miraculis s. Theoderici abbatis, in Recueil des Historiens de France, Volume 14, ed. Michel Brial (new edn, Paris, 1877), p. 141. 72   Guillaume de Pouille, La geste de Robert Guiscard, ed. and trans. Marguerite Mathieu (Palermo, 1961).

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written in the mid- to late 1090s in southern Italy by an otherwise unidentified William has always puzzled historians. Dedicated to Roger Borsa, with a request for a reward and co-dedicated in an awkward manner to Pope Urban II (d. 1099), the poem sits oddly amongst its much more traditional rival prose narratives by Amato of Montecassino and Geoffrey Malaterra.73 The most obvious comparative poem to the Gesta Roberti Wiscardi is the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio written by Guy of Ponthieu (near Flanders) for William the Conqueror in c. 1067.74 Might Adela of Flanders/Denmark have had a hand in the commissioning of the poem about the career of her father-in-law Robert Guiscard? After all, the period of composition coincides with the years between Adela’s arrival as Roger’s wife and the birth of her two youngest children, aptly named Guiscard and William, names which, incidentally, fit nicely with the protagonists of the two conquest poems for Robert Guiscard and William the Conqueror.75 The suggestion of Adela’s involvement may seem wildly speculative because she herself is not mentioned in the poem at all. However, her mother-in-law, the redoubtable Sickelgaita, features frequently. If, as Patricia Skinner has argued, Sickelgaita may be seen as the co-author of Amato’s chronicle, might Adela have been an inspiration for the panegyric on Robert Guiscard?76 This is pure speculation, but it would provide a plausible answer for the similarities between these two epic Latin poems on two Norman conquerors, one of England and one of Sicily. Adela may have known the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio on William the Conqueror, who was after all her maternal uncle (the husband of her aunt Matilda, her father Robert’s sister). The Gesta Roberti Guiscardi uses the history of Robert Guiscard and Pope Gregory VII more or less as a metaphor for that of Adela’s husband Roger Borsa and Pope Urban II. If we bear in mind that late in Robert’s life rumours circulated that in 1080 the pope had promised him the crown (of the Holy Roman Empire), we may see the poem’s historical narrative as a template for Roger Borsa’s wish to become king (of the Norman realm).77 And would Roger’s status as king not be a fitting rank for Adela, herself a former queen? If, as I suggest, Adela used her time in Italy to promote the cult of her first husband Cnut IV of Denmark in order to advance the chances of her son Charles to become king, she may also have used her queenly patronage to bring a royal title within reach   Ibid., pp. 98–99 (lines vi–xiii).   The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy Bishop of Amiens, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow (Oxford, 1999). 75   Romoaldi annales, ed. W. Arndt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, SS 19, p. 412 s. a. 1091. 76   Patricia Skinner, ‘“Halt! Be Men”: Sikelgaita of Salerno, Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy,’ Gender and History, 12 (2000): pp. 622–41 and Patricia Skinner, Women in Medieval Italian Society 500–1100 (Harlow, 2001), pp. 134–6. 77   Guillaume de Pouille, pp. 204–5, lines 31–2 (‘Romani regni sibi promisisse coronam | Papa ferebatur, ...’); The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E.R.A. Sewter (Harmondsworth, 1969), Book I, chapter 13, p. 63 73 74

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of her second husband Roger Borsa. Cults and poems were age-old gendered tools for women, including queens, to bolster their identity. Adela’s story, amongst others, vividly illustrates the ways in which medieval aristocratic women lived with various simultaneous identities, each of which carried its own memories. I have attempted to show how remarriage and remembrance, in the form of multiple memories, coexisted. Men and women were perfectly capable of adapting and exploiting parallel identities and juggling the memorial traditions that came with them.

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Chapter 12

Longchamp and Lourcine: The Role of Female Abbeys in the Construction of Capetian Memory (Late Thirteenth Century to Mid-Fourteenth Century)1 Anne-Hélène Allirot Translated from the French by Lewis Beer

Medieval women had an ambiguous relationship with memory. The so-called ‘arts of memory’ were not written with them in mind and as a rule they did not have access to mnemonic processes.2 They could, however, be accorded the status of privileged witnesses. In this respect they were seen as following the example set by the Virgin Mary – who in Luke 2 is said to hold the words of her son in her heart – and by the other two Marys who first witnessed Jesus’ resurrection and were charged with reporting it (and, by extension, ensuring that it was written down). Women, traditionally responsible for the oral transmission of family histories, came to be seen as ‘guardians of memory’.3 They contributed to the accumulation of lineage records and dynastic memories in ways that the monks who were officially responsible for keeping such records could not. Having learnt of the great deeds of their ancestors in early childhood, these women would in turn pass this knowledge on to younger children. Women were seen as having a privileged bond with the sacred, especially with regard to the commemoration of 1   This paper is a translation from Anne-Hélène Allirot, ‘Longchamp et Lourcine. Deux abbayes féminines et royales dans la construction de la mémoire capétienne (fin XIIIe – Ie moitié du XIVe siècle)’, Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, 94 (2008): pp. 23–38. 2   Colette Beaune and Elodie Lequain, ‘Femmes et histoire en France au XVe siècle: Gabrielle de la Tour et ses contemporaines’, Médiévales, 38 (2000): pp. 111–36; Frances Yates, Les arts de mémoire (Paris, 1975); Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992). 3   Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 7–11; Georges Duby, Dames du XIIe siècle, tome 2: Le souvenir des aïeules (Paris, 1995), pp. 55–60; Georges Balandier, Anthropo-logiques (Paris, 1974); Claude Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’: crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Age, (2 vols, Paris, 1991), vol. 1, p. 344.

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the dead; from the high Middle Ages onwards, women served as mediators of the sacred in aristocratic families, often by establishing foundations of Masses or by making donations to monastic institutions.4 In France, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the daughters of the last Capetians were not permitted to wield royal power, but they witnessed the succession of French kings. It was their duty to pass on this history, for instance by sustaining the cult of their grandfather Saint Louis, a king of France who was revered more in spiritual than in political terms.5 Of course these princesses enjoyed associations with religious establishments connected to royal power, such as the Sainte Chapelle or the Abbey of Saint Denis, but monasteries founded more recently offered them greater scope for direct and active participation. The growth and spread, throughout France, of abbeys associated with the new order of Saint Clare, owed a great deal to these Capetian princesses.6 Longchamp and Lourcine, founded at the end of the thirteenth century, are two fascinating examples: the first was built just to the west of Paris, close to Saint-Cloud, the other, just to the southeast, in the locality of Lourcine.7 I propose to examine the formulation of the Capetian dynastic memory, developed by the king in collaboration with the women of his family and entrusted 4   Patrick Corbet, Les saints ottoniens. Sainteté dynastique, sainteté royale et sainteté féminine autour de l’an mil (Sigmaringen, 1986), p. 263; Patrick J. Geary, Mémoire et oubli à la fin du premier millénaire, trans. Jean-Pierre Ricard, (Paris, 1996), pp. 88– 118; Régine Le Jan, Femmes, pouvoir et société dans le haut Moyen Age, (Paris, 2001); Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, ‘Femmes et patrimoines dans le haut Moyen Age occidental. Nouvelles approches’, Hypothèses 2004, travaux de l’école doctorale de l’université Paris I-Sorbonne: pp. 323–33. 5   Anne-Hélène Allirot, ‘Filiae regis Francorum: princesses royales, mémoire de saint Louis et conscience dynastique (de 1270 à la fin du XIVe siècle)’ (unpublished thèse de doctorat, Colette Beaune (dir.), Université Paris X-Nanterre, 2007). 6   The Clarisses were founded by Saint Clare of Assisi (1194–1253). She wrote the rule of the order between 1247 and 1253. It was the first to be written by a woman for other women, according to Maria Pia Alberzoni, Chiara e il papato (Milan, 1995), p. 64. From the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, many members of the royal family founded abbeys of the Order of Saint Clare. They usually adopted the rule Isabelle gave to Longchamp, or the very similar one promulgated by Urban IV. Micheline de Fontette, Les religieuses à l’âge classique du droit canon, recherches sur les structures juridiques des branches féminines des ordres (Paris, 1967), pp. 145–51; ‘Clarisses’, in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, tome XII (Paris, 1953), cols 958–65. 7   On Lourcine, see Jean-Pierre Willesme, ‘Les Cordelières de la rue de Lourcine des origines à l’implantation du nouvel hôpital Broca’, Paris et Ile-de-France. Mémoires publiés par la fédération de sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris et de l’Ile-deFrance, 43 (1992): pp. 207–48; F. Théobald, ‘Les Cordelières de Saint-Marcel-lez-Paris’, Etudes franciscaines, 20 (1908): pp. 561–621; on Longchamp, see Gertrud Mlynarczyk, Ein Franziskanerinnenkloster im 15. Jahrhundert. Edition und Analyse von Besitzinventaren aus der Abtei Longchamp (Bonn, 1987).

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to the nuns, at a time when a female branch of the Franciscan Order was establishing itself. Longchamp and Lourcine evidently took special care in maintaining records and the collections in the Archives Nationales de France, particularly the series L and S, offer a rich fund of documentation. We can learn much about the origins of these two abbeys, and about the first few decades of their operation, from the registers and the lists of foundations of Masses that have been preserved. These documents are supplemented by inventories of the goods at Longchamp, from the end of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century.8 Remembering the Founders: Saint Louis and His Family The commemoration of royal founders began with the recording of those essential processes which initated the foundation of the abbey: the acquisition of land and the laying of the first stone marked the beginning of both a material and a memorial construction.9 For Longchamp, and especially for Lourcine, this was a complex process involving the participation of a group of women closely related to the king. Isabelle of France’s desire to found an abbey in Longchamp, close to SaintCloud, was fulfilled in the 1250s with the financial and political support of her brother, King Louis IX.10 In April 1255, the king’s chaplain, Brother Mathieu,   Longchamp: Paris, Bibl. nat. de France, fr. 11662: ‘Livre capitulaire de Longchamp, registre des religieuses reçues à l’abbaye de Longchamp depuis sa fondation jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe s., précédé d’un calendrier, bulle de Léon X, liste des anniversaires, ordinaire, copie de la charte de fondation et de divers privilèges; Arch. nat. L 1020, 1021, 1026, 1027, 1029: ordres monastiques, Longchamp’; see ‘Cartulaire de l’abbaye Notre-Dame de Longchamp (Centre historique des Archives nationales de Paris, L 1021, n° 41, fragment d’original’, in cartulaire-Répertoire des cartulaires médiévaux et modernes, Paul Bertrand (dir.), (Orléans, 2006). The fifteenth century inventories are edited by Gertrud Mlynarczyk (inventories 1448, 1467 and 1483-Arch. nat. L 1028, n° 5, 7, 9). The IRHT in Paris has transcriptions of those parts of the inventories concerned with the abbey’s books. Lourcine, Arch. nat. L 1050–51: ‘ordres monastiques, Cordelières de Paris (1284–1772)’ and ‘S 4675–85: biens des établissements religieux, Cordelières rue de Lourcine.’ 9   Dominique Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’église au Moyen Age (v. 800–v. 1200) (Paris, 2006), pp. 549–74. 10   Isabelle (1225–70) was the daughter of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile. See Albert Garreau, Bienheureuse Isabelle de France, soeur de saint Louis (Paris, 1955); Gilles Mauger, La bienheureuse Isabelle, soeur de saint Louis (Paris, 1982); both these studies are more hagiographical than historical. Sean L. Field has recently done some very precise and interesting work on Isabelle see ‘The Princess, the Abbess, and the Friars: Isabelle of France (1225–1270) and the Course of Thirteenth-Century Religious History’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2002); The Writings of Agnès of Harcourt. The Life of Isabelle of France and the Letter on Louis IX and Longchamp (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2003); Isabelle of France. Capetian Sanctity and Franciscan Identity in the 8

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requisitioned – on behalf of Isabelle – four arpents of land situated in a place known as the ‘Oranger’, in the censive of Sainte Geneviève.11 However, in the following month the same Mathieu requisitioned another four arpents in the forest of Suresnes, in the censive of Jean de Flamand – this time in the name of the king alone.12 The abbey was probably built between 1256 and 1259, the latter being the date of the arrival of the first nuns. On 20 November 1261, Urban IV granted permission to bring nuns from Reims to Longchamp.13 In 1269, the king gave 30 more arpents of forest to the abbey. Isabelle and her brother died in 1270, the former on 23 February and the latter on 25 August. The surviving records at Longchamp attest unequivocally to Isabelle’s involvement with the abbey, as Sean Field has minutely demonstrated in his analysis of Agnès of Harcourt’s writings.14 In a letter dated 4 December 1282, the abbess of Longchamp described the ceremony in which the first stones were laid down. Louis IX himself placed the first stone, Marguerite of Provence the second, their son Louis the third and Isabelle the fourth; three doves are said to have appeared as a divine blessing upon this undertaking.15 According to this document, the ceremony was organized in such a way as to emphasize the involvement of the royal family in both the foundation of the abbey and its divinely sanctioned status. Agnès of Harcourt offered a slightly different account in the Vie d’Isabelle de France, a hagiographical text written – at the latest – three years after the abovecited letter.16 Saint Louis’s sister is there spoken of as the sole initiator of the project, as well as the sole financier, paying for the abbey with her own dowry: a cost, says Agnès, of 30,000 livres. It is said that Isabelle chose to make Louis IX ‘chevetin’

Thirteenth Century (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2006); Anne-Hélène Allirot, ‘Isabelle de France, sœur de saint Louis: la vierge savante. Etude de la Vie d’Isabelle de France écrite par Agnès d’Harcourt’ and ‘Edition de la Vie d’Isabelle de France par Agnès d’Harcourt’, Médiévales, 48 (spring 2005): pp. 55–75 and 76–98. 11   Arch. nat. L 1020, n° 1: ‘(avril 1255). Réquisition par le frère Mathieu, chapelain du roi, de Simon Duval Grimon de Saint-Cloud de quatre arpents de terre assis au lieu appelé l’Oranger en la censive de Sainte-Geneviève, avec une mention hors teneur pro dominam Ysabellam.’ 12   Arch. nat. L 1020, n° 2: ‘(mai 1255). Acquisition par le frère Mathieu, chanoine de la chapelle du roi, pour et au nom du roi, de Henri de Montmartre et Marguerite sa femme de quatre arpents de terre au bois de Suresnes de la censive de Jean de Flamand.’. 13   Paris, Bibl. nat. de France, fr. 24950, p. 103–4; Field (ed.), The Princess, p. 405; among the first 20 nuns, some came from the abbey of Saint Elisabeth in Reims, which was founded in 1237 in memory of Elisabeth of Hungary. 14   Agnès of Harcourt was abbess of Longchamp 1264–75 and 1281–87; she died in 1291; Field, The Writings, p. 6. 15   Paris, Bibl. nat. de France, fr. 11662, fos 40–41v: lettre sur Louis IX et Longchamp; Field (ed.), The Writings, pp. 46–9 and Isabelle of France, p. 203 n. 16. 16   Field, The Writings, pp. 9–10.

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[‘captain’] of her enterprise, delegating the administrative duties to him.17 In fact, the dowry granted by Louis VIII to his daughter, according to his will, amounted to only 20,000 livres.18 It seems that the abbess wanted to emphasize the princess’s participation in this foundation, alongside that of the king.19 By the mid-fourteenth century, only a register of donations made by the kings of France to Longchamp still mentioned Saint Louis as founder: ‘Monseigneur saint Looys qui fu roys de France qui funda nostre eglise’ [‘My lord Saint Louis, who was king of France and founded our church’].20 From now on, in the inventories, the nuns called the princess ‘nostre mere’ [‘our mother’]. The re-evaluation of Isabelle’s role was made possible by the passage of time, which made it easier to accept her unconventional behaviour (namely the bestowal of her dowry on the abbey and her decision to live a chaste life nearby, without entering the order). At Longchamp, the sanctity of the Capetian dynasty was thus conceived of in specifically feminized terms. The abbey of Lourcine provides some interesting points of comparison. It was founded later, after the deaths of Isabelle and Saint Louis, and seems to have resulted from a convergence of interests – shared by the king, the queens and princesses and their followers – which sought the propagation of the rule Isabelle had established in Longchamp. This rule, unlike that of Saint Clare, permitted the nuns to inherit and retain property as a community; there was no mention of poverty here.21 Gillette de Sens, a nun at Longchamp and former governess of Saint Louis’s daughter (Isabelle, queen of Navarre) wanted to establish a small community of Clarisses near Troyes, in La Chapelle-Saint-Luc. Queen Isabelle asked her husband, Thibaud V, to give Gillette a house and its outbuildings, which he did in 1270, shortly before departing for the crusades alongside his father-in-law.22 It was Galien of Pisa, canon of Saint Omer, who actually financed the Parisian foundation: in his will of 1287, recently studied by Ghislain Brunel, he claimed to have installed an abbey at Lourcine.23 Galien, who had close links to the   ‘Edition de la Vie d’Isabelle’, Allirot, pp. 85–6, § 23–5; see Mlynarczyk, Ein Franziskanerinnenkloster, p. 35. 18   Arch. nat. J 403, n° 2 et 2bis: ‘testament de Louis VIII, juin 1225.’ A. Teulet (ed.), Layettes du trésor des chartes, II (Paris, 1866), pp. 54–5, n° 1710: ‘Item, donamus et legamus Elisabet karissime filie nostre viginti milia librarum.’ 19   Jean de Joinville writes: ‘L’abbaïe des Cordelieres de Saint Clou, que sa seur ma dame Ysabiau fonda par son otroi’; Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1998), p. 344, § 691. 20   Arch. nat. L 1026, n° 1. 21   Field, Isabelle of France, pp. 61–94. 22   Théobald, ‘Les Cordelières de Saint-Marcel-lez-Paris’, pp. 561–621. 23   Ghislain Brunel, ‘Un Italien en France au XIIIe siècle: Galien de Pise, chanoine de Saint-Omer et fondateur du couvent des Cordelières de Lourcine à Paris, d’après son testament de 1287’, in Histoire d’archives: recueil d’articles offerts à Lucie Favier par ses collègues et amis (Paris, 1997), pp. 249–76, especially p. 254. 17

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Franciscans and to Philippe III’s confessor, acted with the support and protection of the dowager queen Marguerite of Provence, the widow of Saint Louis and mother of Isabelle of Navarre.24 As early as 1288, the papacy confirmed the new foundation, in response to petitions from three queens of France: Marguerite of Provence, Marie of Brabant and Jeanne of Navarre.25 It was Queen Marguerite and her confessor Guillaume of Saint-Pathus who had the nuns moved from Troyes to Paris, probably at the beginning of 1289.26 Thus the process of installing the Clarisses in Lourcine required the participation of at least four queens and princesses, as well as the Franciscans who served an intermediary and protective role in dealings with the king and the pope. The installation at Lourcine was commemorated in a manner very different to the one at Longchamp. A register of foundations of anniversary Masses shows that the nuns honoured Gillette de Sens, Thibaud of Navarre, Marguerite of Provence (who is identified as the ‘fondatrice’ [‘foundress’]) and her daughter, Blanche of Cerda. A requiem Mass was planned in honour of Galien of Pisa; he was not granted the title of ‘fondateur’ and this honour was later bestowed on Saint Louis.27 A letter by François Courtot, dated 13 January 1674 and preserved in the files of the abbey, introduces the king as the ‘fondateur du dit monastère’ [‘founder of the said monastery’].28 In each case, the legend of foundation coalesces around a guardian figure: Isabelle for Longchamp, Saint Louis for Lourcine. I will now go on to explore two further methods by which these guardians were commemorated: first, through the preservation of relics; second, through offices of worship. The relics of Saint Louis and his sister, enshrined in the two abbeys, served a number of different purposes. Firstly, they played the traditional role of sacred objects, depositories of the saint’s virtus, an essential feature of any place of worship. In this case, however, they also had a dynastic significance, materializing   See Xavier de La Selle, Le service des âmes à la cour: confesseurs et aumôniers des rois de France du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Paris, 1995), p. 310, notice 2. 25   Arch. nat. L 1050, n° 3 (1288, 5 mars. Rome, palais du Latran); Les actes pontificaux originaux des Archives nationales de Paris, tome II: 1261–1304, ed. Bernard Barbiche (Vatican, 1978), p. 309, n° 1795; Arch. nat. L 1050, n° 9 (21 décembre 1291). Papal bull of Nicholas IV:  ‘et charissimarum in Christo filiarum nostrarum Margaretae, Mariae et Joannae, illustrium reginarum Franciae, nobis extitit humiliter supplicatum et praedictorum regis et magistri Galieni piam actionem et laudabile desiderium in hac parte apostolici favoris presidio benigne prosequi curaremus’. 26   Willesme, ‘Les Cordelières de la rue de Lourcine’. 27   Arch. nat. L 1051, n° 1 : ‘(1284, septembre) Lettres du roi Philippe le Hardi approuvant la fondation de Galien de Pise’. 28   This document can be found in a modern registry which contains a list of the abbesses since 1275: Arch. nat. LL 1652, p. 65–6. François Courtot (d. 1705) was born in Vézelay. A theologian, he joined the Franciscans in Auxerre. He then became Provincial Superior and later Definitor General of his order. Hoefer (ed.), Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris, 1855), vol. 11, cols 240–41. 24

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as they did the abbeys’ close, organic links with the Capetians. From the fourteenth century on, according to the inventories, the nuns of Longchamp preserved these relics in the sacristy. The princess was not yet officially canonized – she would be beatified only in 1521 – but the nuns of Longchamp clearly regarded their foundress as a saint.29 Items that had belonged to Isabelle appear in an inventory of the abbey’s belongings, made after the election of Jeanne of Vitry as abbess in 1325. Isabelle’s goblet and gems were stored in the treasury, her writings in the church. Other objects were kept in the sacristy alongside fragments of relics of the Passion:30 ‘Item, I blanc escrin d’ivyre [sic] qui fu ma dame qui nous funda et IIII toelle, II chemises, une coife de tele, une cote, I auqueton, une chauce et I orillier de duvet qui furent ma dicte dame’ [‘Item, a white reliquary of ivory that belonged to the lady who founded our monastery and four pieces of cloth, two shirts, a headscarf, a surcoat, a length of cotton, a stocking and a pillow that belonged to the lady mentioned’].31 These were regarded as invaluable relics despite the lack of official canonization. Significantly, all but the reliquary were textiles and all directly evoked certain moments in the Vie written by Agnès of Harcourt – works undertaken by Isabelle in her youth, in aid of the poor or in support of the Church. At the time of her burial, Isabelle’s dress was removed and put into service as a relic. To touch her clothing, or her pillow, was said to effect miraculous cures.32 In this regard there was common ground between Isabelle and Saint Clare: the corporaux [altar cloths] made by the latter were also kept at Longchamp.33 The same inventory refers to a relic of Saint Louis, but without specifying exactly what the relic is: ‘de monseigneur saint Looys le roi de France et de plusieurs autres sains en I grant vaissel d’argent a pié de cuivre’ [‘of my lord Saint Louis, king of France, and of several other saints, in a large vessel of silver with brass feet’].34 From this we might deduce little more than that the relic was quite small. However, the inventory carried out following the election of Jeanne of 29   A. Du Monstier, Martyrologium Franciscanum, (2nd edn, Paris, 1653), p. 424; the text is translated into French in MS. Paris, Bibl. nat. de France, fr. 11662, fos 15– 20; L. Oliger, ‘Le plus ancien office liturgique de la bienheureuse Isabelle de France’, in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, II : Letteratura medioevale (Vatican, 1946), pp. 484–508. There are many possible explanations for the delay in canonizing Isabelle; Field, Isabelle of France, p. 159. 30   Fragments of the True Cross and the crown of thorns; these may have been gifts from Saint Louis, although there are no documents to confirm this hypothesis. 31   Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 5. ‘abbess Jeanne of Vitry (9 October 1325–8 November 1328)’; Sean L. Field, ‘The Abbesses of Longchamp up to the Black Death’, Archivum Franciscanum historicum, 96 (2003): pp. 87–93. 32   Field (ed.), Vie d’Isabelle, p. 80, § 18 and 20; Allirot (ed.), Vie d’Isabelle, p. 93, § 46 and 48. 33   Marco Bartoli, Claire d’Assise (Paris, 1993), p. 111. 34   Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 5.

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Gueux, who was appointed abbess for the second time in 1328, reports that Blanche, daughter of Philippe V and a nun at Longchamp, offered a luxurious reliquary for a joint (a phalanx) of Saint Louis, owned by the convent.35 The statuette depicted the princess, perhaps in the habit of a nun, kneeling in front of the crowned saint. The entablature was decorated with the arms of France and Burgundy, that is, the arms of Blanche’s mother, Queen Jeanne of Bourgogne.36 This reliquary was undoubtedly commissioned for the abbey, in order to emphasize the spiritual and familial bonds between the Capetian princesses and their grandfather. The inventories that were stored in the archives at Lourcine are not as detailed as those from Longchamp. Only the later testimony of François Courtot, in 1674, indicates that the convent held some relics of Saint Louis: a blue coat embroidered with fleurs-de-lis and a grey serge tunic.37 These objects may have been offered to the abbey by Marguerite of Provence or Philippe III, but no sources confirm this. As in Longchamp, it is the founder’s clothing that is preserved. Here, the two items have different connotations: the humble tunic evokes that of Saint Francis and the austere clothing worn by the French king after his return from the crusade;38 the emblazoned royal clothes, which had been around at least since Louis VIII’s coronation, may have been used during the great royal ceremonies of Saint Louis’s reign.39 Now we must examine a third mode of commemoration: the development of offices of worship devoted to the founders. The calendar of celebrations in Longchamp, in MS. français 11662, mentions the feast of Saint Louis on 25 August, as well as that of Isabelle, instituted after her beatification. The princess was buried in the church, near the choir, where an effigy showed her dressed   Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 8 et 9: ‘Item, ma dame madame suer Blanche donna au couvent une ymage de saint Francois d’argent doré qui poise XI mars. Item, ma dite dame donna une ymage de saint Loys de France sur I entablement d’argent doré esmaillié entour de France et de Bourgoigne et est madame suer Blanche devant saint Loys a genous sur l’entablement et a le dit saint Loys couronne et fermail d’or garnis de bonne pierriere et a en milieu du fermail une grant esmeraude et tient saint Loys en sa main un vaissel de cristal ou il a une jointe dudit saint, laquele jointe fu prise es saintuaires de l’eglise et est tout d’argent doré et poise XII mars VI onces.’ 36   It is mentioned again in the inventory of 1448. Mlynarczyk, Ein Franziskanerinnenkloster, p. 290, n° 84. 37   The royal coat was cut up to make a chasuble and two blue coats dotted with fleursde-lis, used on Saint Louis’s feast day. This was done in 1600, according to the testimony of the 74-year-old Mme Mérault. 38   On Saint Francis’s tunic, see Saint François d’Assise. Documents, écrits et premières biographies, ed. T. Desbonnets and D. Vorreux (Paris, 1968), p. 752; Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996), p. 215; Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, pp. 367–9. 39   Colette Beaune, Le miroir du pouvoir. L’art de l’enluminure au Moyen Age (Paris, 1989), p. 152; Yvonne Deslandres, ‘Le costume du roi saint Louis, étude iconographique et technique’, in Septième centenaire de la mort de saint Louis, actes des colloques de Royaumont et Paris (1970), (Paris, 1976), pp. 105–14. 35

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in a Clarisse habit. On 10 September 1267, Clement IV had granted Isabelle’s request and freely permitted the whole royal family, ‘nepotes et neptes, affines, consanguinei et propinqui’ [‘nephews and nieces and kin by blood or marriage’], to come and see her future burial place.40 Even though Isabelle was the object of a form of veneration after her death, an official cult did not develop around her until the sixteenth century, with the celebration of a special office inspired by her life.41 In Lourcine, the veneration of Saint Louis seems to have developed more quickly. The grey serge tunic was preserved in a reliquary on an altar dedicated to Louis, mentioned in the seventeenth century, but probably older.42 At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the cult of the sainted king was publicized in a series of fourteen murals, most likely painted between 1304 and 1320 on the order of Blanche, the widow of Ferdinand de la Cerda and daughter of Saint Louis and Marguerite of Provence.43 These paintings, which decorated the abbey church, have now disappeared, but in the seventeenth century Peiresc provided quite detailed descriptions of them, accompanied by a few sketches.44 As the work of Mary Carruthers has reminded us, painting was much more than a layman’s form of writing: it was also a form of reading, a rhetorical activity which facilitated the learning of history.45 According to the description of Peiresc, the murals in Lourcine depicted a selection of episodes based on the hagiographies by Geoffroy of Beaulieu and Guillaume de Saint-Pathus – the latter had dedicated his La Vie et les Miracles de Saint Louis to Blanche. With an evident desire to evoke a sense of spiritual progression, the paintings emphasized Louis’s crusades and his time in captivity (five images), the image of Louis at prayer, his works of mercy and his role as the builder of churches.46 40   Arch. nat. L 261, n° 100; Sean L. Field (ed.), ‘New Evidence for the Life of Isabelle of France’, Revue Mabillon, 13 (2002): pp. 109–23. 41   L. Oliger, ‘Le plus ancien office liturgique’. 42   Arch. nat. LL 1652, pp. 65–6 : ‘Et les dites meres abbesse et discretes ont ajouté que la dite tunique qui est de serge grise est dans une chasse sur l’autel dressé en l’honneur du dit saint dans l’intérieur de leur monastere’; Willesme, ‘Les Cordelières de la rue de Lourcine’, p. 219. 43   Blanche was born in Jaffa, Syria, in 1252 and married Ferdinand de la Cerda, Infante of Castile, in 1269. After the death of her husband in August 1275, she returned to France, where she lived until her death in June 1320. 44   Carpentras, Bibliothèque inguimbertine MS 1779, fos 13–16; Documents parisiens sur l’iconographie de saint Louis d’après un manuscrit de Peiresc conservé à Carpentras, ed. Auguste Longnon (Paris, 1882), with reproductions of drawings. The exact position of these paintings in the church remains uncertain. Broca Hospital was built in the nineteenth century on the site of the abbey. 45   Mary Carruthers, Le livre de la mémoire. Une étude de la mémoire dans la culture médiévale (Paris, 2002), pp. 322–3. 46   (I) ‘Comment il va oultre mer’, (II) ‘Comment il est en prison (miracle du bréviaire perdu et retrouvé)’, (III) ‘Comment il lessa son frere en otage por sa reencon’, (IV) ‘Comment il met en sa foi les infidels’, (V) ‘Comment il fu receus quant il revint’, (VI)

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The arrangement of this cycle invites us to speculate as to its intended audience. In addition to the Clarisses themselves, we might also imagine that this audience included members of the royal family, who obtained permission to enter the cloister along with a small train of attendants.47 In 1289, Jeanne of Navarre was allowed to enter with four soldiers and six ladies-in-waiting; on June 2, 1291, Marie of Brabant, the widow of Philippe III, enjoyed a similar privilege.48 But the most likely spectator of these paintings must be Blanche herself, who spent her widowhood near Lourcine, just as her mother, Marguerite of Provence, had done before her. The Feminized Commemoration of Royal Ancestry Longchamp and Lourcine were both marked by close connections with the women of the royal family. Saint Louis’s sister, Isabelle, lived near the nuns of Longchamp without joining them.49 In 1301 and 1303, two nieces of Queen Marie of Brabant, Jeanne and Marguerite, were admitted to the convent, bringing with them the offices of worship dedicated to Saint Louis of Toulouse.50 After this, two princesses of the royal blood joined the Clarisses in Longchamp: Blanche, daughter of Philippe V and Jeanne of Bourgogne, followed by Jeanne, daughter of Jeanne of France and Philippe of Evreux and granddaughter of Louis X and Marguerite of Bourgogne. The admission of the infant Blanche to the abbey in February 1319 is recorded in MS français 11662: Ma dame madame seur Blanche, fille du noble roy de France nostre tres excellent seigneur monseigneur Phelippe qui trespassa en ceste maison, qui fut filz monseigneur le roy Phelippe que l’en appelle le Bel, et ma dicte dame fut vestue en l’an monseigneur mil IIIc XVIII, la veille de la Chandeleur, et fut fait en cuer devant l’autel et fut offerte dessus, presentes les personnes cy aprés ‘Comment il [fait jeter le fonde]ments de pluseurs eglises’, (VII) ‘Comment il visita fill. qui … portere de brevvar malade  (peut-être épisode de la maison-Dieu de Vernon)’, (VIII) ‘Comment il a de coustume la nuit estre en oroison’, (IX) ‘Comment il se confesse et prent les disciplines’, (X) ‘Comment il [nourrit le frère Léger de Royaumont]’, (XI) ‘Comment es mesons-Dieu il sert trestous les pauvres malades a genous’, (XII) ‘Comment… il lave les pieds des pauvres’, (XIII) ‘Comment il servoit tous les jours les povres avant qu’il menjast’, (XIV) ‘Comment il aloit nus piez par les villes le vendredy donant l’aumosne de sa main aux povres’ (Longnon, Documents parisiens). 47   Such authorization was made necessary by the bull of Boniface VIII, Periculoso, in 1298. See ‘Clôture’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, d’ascétique et de mystique (Paris, 1953), vol. 2, cols 979–1007. 48   Théobald, ‘Les Cordelières’, pp. 571–2. 49   Field, Isabelle of France, pp. 119–31. 50   Mlynarczyk, Ein Franziskanerinnenkloster, p. 194.

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nommees : monseigneur le roy dessus nommé son [pere], madame la royne Jehanne sa mere, monseigneur Charles de Valois l’oncle au roy, monseigneur Charles conte de la Marche, frere au roy qui puis fut roy de France, madame la contesse d’Arthois, aiole madame, et moult de aultres grans personnes. Et la vesti l’archevesque de Rains qui avoit nom monseigneur Robert de Courtenay, revestu en chasuble et en mitre, et madame la royne sa mere et seur Jehanne de Gueuz qui adonc estoit abbesse la aidierent a vestir, present frere Nicole de Lire adonc menistre des freres mineurs en France, et tout le couvent des seurs. [My lady, sister Blanche, daughter of the noble king of France our most excellent royal master Philippe who died in this house, who was the son of my lord the king Philippe who is called the Fair, and my lady [Blanche] took the habit in the year of our lord 1318 [Julian calendar], on the eve of the Chandeleur, and was willingly placed before the altar and was offered [to God] there, in the presence of the persons hereafter named: my lord the king her father, aforementioned, my lady the queen Jeanne her mother, my lord Charles of Valois the king’s uncle, my lord Charles count of La Marche, the king’s brother who later became king of France, my lady the countess of Artois, my lady’s grandmother and many other illustrious persons. And she [Blanche] was bestowed with the habit by the Archbishop of Reims, my lord Robert de Courtenay, dressed in his chasuble and mitre, and my lady the queen her mother, and sister Jeanne of Gueux, who was then the abbess, aided in the investiture, in the presence of brother Nicholas of Lyre, who was then the head of the minor friars in France, and [in the presence of] all the sisters in the convent.]51

The witnesses represented the crown and the royal blood: King Philippe V, Queen Jeanne, Charles of Valois, Charles of La Marche, Mahaut of Artois and Nicolas of Lyra, then Provincial Superior of the Franciscan order in France and closely connected to the king and queen.52 The archbishop of Reims, Robert of Courtenay, officiated at this ceremony, thus evoking the ritual of the royal coronation. A register at the abbey states that the princess’s profession of vows in 1337 was made against the will of her parents, who wanted her to be married.53 No other document mentions any plans for Blanche’s marriage, so this anecdote may have been intended to affirm that the young girl entered the order of her own free will. The princesses’ admission into the abbey is also commemorated through objects: altar dressings and other linens were offered by Blanche at the time of   Paris, Bibl. nat. de France, fr. 11662, fo. 45v.   Charles-Victor Langlois, ‘Nicolas de Lyre, frère mineur’, in Histoire littéraire de la France, 36 (1927): pp. 355–400; Henri de Lubac, Exégèse medieval, vol. 2 (Paris, 1964), pp. 344–67; Philippe Buc, ‘The Book of Kings: Nicholas of Lyra’s Mirror of Princes’, in Nicholas of Lyra. The Senses of Scripture, ed. P. D. W. Krey and L. Smith (Leyde-BostonCologne, 2000), pp. 83–110. 53   Arch. nat. LL 1604, fo. 10. 51 52

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her profession of vows. They were carefully recorded in the inventories as gifts from the princess.54 The inventories of books at Longchamp mention several manuscripts which belonged to her and then became the property of the abbey, among them a number of devotional works in French.55 The inventories only cease to record the origin of these books – ‘venus de ma dame madame Blanche de France’ – at the end of the fourteenth century. Queen Marguerite of Provence decided to live among her protégées in Lourcine, just as Isabelle had done in Longchamp and Blanche of Castile before her in Maubuisson. On 5 April 1290, Marguerite bought a manor with gardens close to the abbey, for 240 livres, from Etienne, Jean and Adam of Chailly and had a house built adjoining the cloister.56 On 16 February 1295, shortly before her death, Marguerite gave this house to the nuns, though reserving usufruct for Blanche.57 The latter then took residence there and completed the construction of the abbey church, placed under the invocation of Saint Etienne and Saint Agnès. Although Blanche was buried in a nun’s habit, like Blanche of Castile and Isabelle, this of course does not prove that she was a Clarisse.58 However, shortly after her death (in 1320), the church was decorated with stained glass windows (gone now, but described by Father Serpe) which depicted Blanche’s coat of arms and represented her as a founder or protector, holding in her hands a model of the church and presenting it to God. Among the daughters of the kings of France, only Eudeline, the alleged biological daughter of Louis X, joined the Fransciscan nuns of Paris. On 10 August 1330, a letter from Pope Jean XXII congratulated her on erasing the stain   Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 8 : ‘inventaire sous le second abbatiat de Jeanne de Gueux (1328–39). Item ma dame madame suer Blanche dona en l’an XXXVII a sa profession aus VI auteux du moustier paremens de drap d’or vermeil de Turquie et VI couvrecuers et VI touailles parees et I parement aus reliques par devans les suers tous semblables.’ 55   Arch. nat. L 1021, n° 48ter : ‘inventaire sous l’abbatiat de Marie de Lyon (1339–45) Item, I livre de la vie de plusieurs sains que madame suer Blanche donna au couvent’; Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 48: ‘Ce sont les livres qui sont venus ou temps de ladicte suer Marie de Gueuz. Premiers de ma dame madame suer Blanche de France. I bon livre en francois que l’en appelle la Guarde du cuer. Item, I livre de la Vie de plusieurs sains en françois. I livre des Miracles Notre Dame en francois. Item, I livre de l’Apocalipse en françois. I livre de la Vie saint Francois qui est en françois. Item, I livre de la Vie saint Loys de France en françoiz. I livre de la Vision saint Pol en françois et II autres livres en latin qui ne sont mie de grant valeur’; see Père Ubald d’Alençon, ‘L’abbaye royale de Longchamp et sa bibliothèque au XVe siècle’, Etudes franciscaines, 15 (1906): pp. 206–12; F. Berriot, ‘Les manuscrits de l’abbaye de Longchamp aux Archives de France et la Vie de saint Claire inédite’, Archivum franciscanum historicum, 79 (1986): pp. 329–58. 56   Arch. nat. S 4675. 57   Arch. nat. L 1050, n° 12a, b et c: ‘(1295, 16 février. Couvent des sœurs). Charte de la reine douairière Marguerite de Provence par laquelle elle donne aux sœurs la maison qu’elle a fait construire à côté de leur couvent, en retenant l’usufruit pour sa fille Blanche.’ 58   Théobald, ‘Les Cordelières de Saint-Marcel’ 54

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of her birth through her virtues and granted her the possibility of being chosen as abbess. Eudeline did in fact serve in this capacity from 1334 to 1339.59 Isabelle of Valois, after the death of her husband, Duke Pierre de Bourbon, lived among the same nuns until her death on 26 July 1383.60 The Capetians were not memorialized in the same way at Longchamp as they were at Lourcine. In addition to Isabelle’s sepulchre, Longchamp accommodated the heart-tomb of Queen Jeanne of Bourgogne, wife of Philippe V. The list of anniversary Masses celebrated in Longchamp, preserved in MS français 11662, includes the whole of the previous generation of Capetians. Louis IX founded Masses for Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile after their deaths. Blanche, the daughter of Philippe V and Jeanne of Bourgogne, founded Masses for her parents and siblings, for which she paid nine and a half silver marks of revenue on Aubignyen-Laonnois.61 Sister Jeanne of Navarre founded a Mass for her father, Philippe of Evreux, King of Navarre. In 1342, the dowager queen Jeanne of Everux gave 200 livres to found an anniversary Mass for her husband, Charles IV, as well as one for herself after her death and those of ‘leurs enffans et ceux que elle entent a tous jours accompaignes et acompaignons’ [‘their children and those by whom she wanted always to be accompanied’], to be carried out in the same manner as for a sister of the abbey.62 In contrast to Longchamp, Lourcine does not seem to have housed so many prestigious memorials. Registers of deaths were apparently not preserved. Although a number of royal foundations were established in the abbey, they were not typical Capetian memorials.63 In November 1331, two benefices – of NotreDame de Liesse and Saint Catherine – were founded there in accordance with Blanche of Cerda’s will.64 In 1341, Jeanne of Evreux bestowed a grant of just 100 sols to maintain her anniversary Mass.65 Charles V in 1371, Charles VI in 1384 59   See L. Wadding, Annales minorum, III, lettre 621: bref de Jean XXII; Arch. nat. S 4681 n° 3: (1340) Lettres de Philippe VI, roi de France. After Eudeline’s death, her annuity of 100 livres was transferred to the convent. 60   Anselme, Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France (9 vols, Paris, 1726), vol. 1, p. 299. 61   Paris, Bibl. nat. de France, fr. 11662, fos 22–30: ‘liste des anniversaires, fin XVe’; see Obituaires de la province de Sens, vol. 1, p. 659; Arch. nat. K 42, n° 6 et 6 bis: (1330, 21 janvier). In her will, Jeanne de Bourgogne left a pension of two silver marks to Aubignyen-Laonnois, to be continued by Blanche of France. 62   Arch. nat. K 43, n° 21 ‘(1242, 31 mai): Quittance de la somme de 200 livres reçue par les religieuses de Longchamp de madame Jeanne d’Evreux, reine de France, veuve de Charles IV, pour être convertie en rente et employée pour anniversaire du roi son mari.’ 63   Willesme, ‘Les Cordelières de Lourcine’, pp. 210–11. 64   Arch. nat. L 1051, n° 3: ‘(1331, 6 novembre): Fondation des chapellenies de NotreDame de Liesse et de sainte Catherine à la demande testamentaire de Blanche, fille de saint Louis.’ 65   Arch. nat. K 179, dos. 23, n° 115.

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and 1393 and, finally, the queen Isabeau of Bavière in 1395, also bestowed various pensions on the nuns.66 Gift-giving seems to have been a method more frequently used, particularly by women, to commemorate the links between their families and these abbeys. In the inventories put together at the time of the election of the Longchamp abbesses Agnès of Harcourt, Jeanne of Vitry and Jeanne of Gueux, one notices a series of ‘dresses’, dressings and clothes’, most of them given by queens and princesses, used as altar dressings and ‘priests’ vestments’, and preserved in the treasury or sacristy.67 The fourteenth-century inventories diligently record the origins – predominantly royal and female – of these gifts, but the memory of those origins disappears in the following century, when the inventories refer to the items simply as ‘vielx’ or ‘tres vielx’ cloths. The first of these inventories, made after the election of Agnès of Harcourt in 1281, mentions gifts from Queen Jeanne of Navarre, Philippe IV’s wife, and from the dowager queen Marie of Brabant.68 The second, made after the election of Jeanne de Vitry on 9 October 1325, again mentions Marie of Brabant and a ‘reine Jeanne’ who could either be Jeanne of Evreux, Charles IV’s wife, or the wife of Philippe V, Queen Jeanne of Bourgogne (d. 1330).69 Furthermore, the inventory refers to a duchess of Bourgogne, which must be Queen Jeanne of Bourgogne’s daughter, Jeanne (d. 1347), wife of Eudes IV of Bourgogne; the inventory also cites her sister, Marguerite, the countess of Flanders. The lady of Evreux mentioned is probably not Jeanne of Evreux, who was then Queen of France, but perhaps her sister Marguerite. The countess of Luxembourg referred to in the inventory is one of Charles of Valois’s daughters, Blanche (1316-48), recently married to Charles IV.70 The inventory also mentions a duchess of Austria, who could be another Blanche,

  Arch. nat. S 4683.   See Frédérique Lachaud, ‘Documents financiers et histoire de la culture matérielle. Les textiles dans les comptes des hôtels royaux et nobiliaires (France et Angleterre, XIIe– XVe siècle)’, Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartes, 164 (2006): pp. 71–96. 68   Arch. nat. L 1026, n° 2: ‘inventaire d’Agnès d’Harcourt, abbesse pour la seconde fois’; Arch. nat. L 1021, n° 48ter; ‘copie partielle en LL 1604. Second abbatiat d’Agnès d’Harcourt: 2 septembre 1281–29 août 1287; abbatiat de Marie de Lyon: 18 juin 1339–4 mai 1345’; Field, ‘The Abbesses of Longchamp’, pp. 242–4. Marie of Brabant probably exerted a considerable influence on fashions at the French court and would have encouraged the wearing of the royal livery colours: Michel Pastoureau, ‘Le temps mis en couleur. Des couleurs liturgiques aux modes vestimentaires XIIe–XIIIe siècles’, Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartes, 157 (1999): pp. 128–9. 69   Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 5. 70   W.B. Smith, ‘Charles IV’, in Medieval Germany, an Encyclopedia, J.M. Jeep (ed.), (New York–London, 2001): pp. 108–10; F. Seibt, Karl IV und sein Kreis (Munich, 1978). 66 67

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the daughter of Philippe III and Marie of Brabant, who was married in 1300 to Rudolf III of Hapsburg and who founded the Franciscan convent in Vienna.71 The garments bequeathed to the abbey were antique souvenirs of the era’s great royal ceremonies. They were coloured gold, white, red, green and sometimes blue, and embroidered with fleurs-de-lis. They were made from the richest materials, notably Turkish cloth.72 Some of these items were worn by the queens of France at their weddings: the mantel worn by Jeanne of Navarre at her wedding, said to be made of drap d’or, was kept in the treasury.73 According to the inventory carried out in 1339 at the end of Jeanne of Gueux’s second abbacy, Queen Jeanne of Bourgogne, Philippe VI’s wife, gave the convent a vermilion robe made of ‘drap d’or de Chypre’, lined with green sendal.74 This extremely sumptuous garment may have been Jeanne’s coronation robe.75 It was used to make vestments for the priests who officiated in the abbey, such as Denis of Etampes, who gave the sacraments to the nuns in Isabelle of France’s time.76 Items used in royal or aristocratic funeral processions – especially the drap d’or palls – were reused as altar dressings.77 Thus a red and gold cloth remained with the nuns after the funeral of Jean II, count of Dreux, in 131078 and the pall used in the funeral of Philippe V, who died in Longchamp, subsequently decorated the altar of Saint Francis.79 A third drap d’or, given by the queen of England,

  G. Schmidt, ‘Das Grabmal der Blanche de France’, in Beiträge zur Kunst des Mittelalters. Festschrift für Hans Wentzel zum 60. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1975), pp. 181–92. 72   Christian de Mérindol, ‘Signes de hiérarchie sociale à la fin du Moyen Age d’après les vêtements. Méthodes et recherches’, in Le vêtement. Histoire, archéologie et symbolique vestimentaires au Moyen Age (Paris, 1989): pp. 181–224. 73   Drap d’or is silk cloth patterned with gold threads. Christian de Mérindol highlights the rarity of gold fabrics; it seems they were often given to churches. ‘Signes de hiérarchie sociale’, p. 192. 74   Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 8 et 9. 75   Vermilion was the colour traditionally worn by the king in public ceremonies (Deslandres, p. 105); although there are no surviving pictures of Jeanne de Bourgogne’s coronation, we know that Jeanne of Bourbon, crowned in 1364, wore a magnificent red silk outfit in three pieces (dress, shirt and tunic): Claire Richter Sherman, ‘The Queen in Charles V’s Coronation Book. Jeanne de Bourbon and the ordo ad reginam benedicendam’, Viator, 8 (1977): pp. 255–98. 76   Field, Vie d’Isabelle, p. 72, § 4; Allirot, Vie d’Isabelle, p. 89, § 32. 77   See Murielle Gaude-Ferragu, D’or et de cendres. La mort et les funérailles des princes dans le royaume de France au bas Moyen Age (Lille, 2005), pp. 172–4. 78   Jean II, count of Dreux, Braine and Joigny, died on 7 March 1310, and was carried the next day to the monastery of Longchamp near Saint-Cloud, where he was interred in the middle of the church under a black marble tomb, with a white marble effigy. See A. Du Chesne, Histoire généalogique de la maison royale de Dreux (Paris, 1631). 79   Arch. nat. L 1027, n° 5:  ‘inventaire réalisé après l’élection de Jeanne de Vitry, (troisième abbatiat, 1325–28)’; Philippe V died in Longchamp at the beginning of January 71

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Philippe IV’s daughter Isabelle, was sold for 7 livres parisis [Paris pounds] to buy 58 pounds of wax.80 The inventories list the finery and draps d’or given by queens and princesses along with the garments (and relics) of Saint Louis and Isabelle. It was customary for kings and princes to give precious materials and garments to religious establishments.81 The bestowal of such gifts (in the tradition of Saint Martin of Tours) is stipulated in the wills of queens and princesses related to Saint Louis (such as Jeanne of Châtillon and Mahaut of Artois), with the aim of benefiting the servants in the abbey’s hospital or noblewomen who had fallen on hard times.82 But in the early fourteenth century, these gifts were usually sold for charitable ends. This was not the case with the garments bequeathed to these two abbeys. The most luxurious and decorated garments were for the most part bequeathed to direct descendants and godsons, while a wedding dress would, as a rule, be bequeathed to an unmarried woman who had assisted the bride.83 The garments given by royal benefactors were not always put to the noblest uses: for example, they were commonly used as saddle cloths.84 Even the reuse of these garments in the making of habits and liturgical finery embodied, in a tangible sense, the princesses’ voluntary asceticism, fostered in the interests of the nuns at Longchamp (also known as ‘L’Abbeye de l’Humilité de Notre Dame’). This conversion of clothes to more spiritual uses may have been intended to mitigate the stain of pride which preachers of the time sometimes cast on ladies’ clothing.85 In the thirteenth century, 1322. His body was then taken to Saint-Denis, his heart to the Franciscans and his entrails to the Jacobins. 80   The average price of a pound of wax was about two sous and a few deniers in Paris in 1314–16 and 1318–19: see; Catherine Vincent, Fiat lux. Lumières et luminaires dans la vie religieuse du XIIIe au XVIe siècles (Paris, 2004), p. 71. 81   See Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Se vêtir au Moyen Age (Paris, 1995), pp. 44–5; Françoise Piponnier, ‘Vêtement liturgique’, in Dictionnaire du Moyen Age, ed. Claude Gauvard, Alain de Libera, Michel Zink, (Paris, 2002), pp. 1443–4. 82   Priscille Aladjidi, ‘Rex pater pauperum. Théorie et pratique de la charité royale en France (XIIIe–XIVe siècle)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris X-Nanterre, 2006), pp. 448–9. 83   Piponnier and Mane, Se vêtir, pp. 44–5. 84   For some examples in the court of England: Lachaud, ‘Vêtement et pouvoir à la cour d’Angleterre sous Philippa de Hainaut’, in Au cloître et dans le monde. Mélanges en l’honneur de Paulette L’Hermitte-Leclercq, ed. Patrick Henriet and Anne-Marie Legras (Paris, 2000), pp. 217–33. 85   O. Blanc, ‘Vêtement féminin, vêtement masculin à la fin du Moyen Age. Le point de vue des moralistes’, in Le vêtement. Histoire, archéologie et symbolique, pp. 243–54; Elodie Lequain, ‘L’éducation des femmes de la noblesse en France à la fin du Moyen Age’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris X-Nanterre, 2005), pp. 130–32; Frédérique Lachaud, ‘La critique du vêtement et du soin des apparences dans quelques œuvres religieuses, morales et politiques, XIIe–XIVe siècles’, Le corps et sa parure, Micrologus, 15 (2007): pp. 61–86.

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the Dominican Humbert of Romans and the Franciscan Guibert of Tournai had specifically prescribed unostentatious dress for women.86 Guibert wrote treatises for Saint Louis and his sister, one of them a letter to Isabelle about virginity in which he explained how the princess should adorn herself with virtues (rather than fine clothes) in order to attain perfection.87 Addressing himself to widows in one of his sermons, he implored them to render up their finery to its natural origins: the wool to the ewe and the colourful dyes to the earth.88 Some of these garments seem to have been carefully preserved for their own sake in the abbey church, without being put to any other use; this is the case for the wedding dress stored in the treasury. Perhaps such dresses and linens were seen as privileged depositories for a ‘mémoire de soi’ [‘memory of the self’].89 When given for the sake of charity, clothing could be a sign of, as well as a method of achieving, salvation.90 In this case, it also served as a very specific memorial for these royal ladies. After 1360, these abbeys do not seem to have accommodated royalty. Charles VI’s daughters inclined more towards the Dominicans in Poissy. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however, Longchamp and Lourcine had fostered the exaltation of royally descended women and of Saint Louis. The foundation of Lourcine seems to have been conceived by Galien of Pisa and Marguerite of Provence in imitation of Longchamp, but with less sense of involvement in the commemoration of the Capetian dynasty. Sadly, the documents relating to Lourcine are not as rich or plentiful as those relating to Longchamp, but it is clear from the surviving records that both establishments hosted the beginnings of the cult of Saint Louis, as well as the commemoration, not only of the quasi-saint, Isabelle, but also of the queens of France, the wives of Saint Louis’s descendants. The memory of these ladies and their prestigious relatives was preserved in foundations, in the abbey records and in the various items they   Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Gli inganni delle apparenze. Disciplina di vesti e ornamenti alla fine del Medioevo (Turin, 1996), pp. 155–63; Carla Casagrande, Prediche alle donne del secolo XIII. Testi di Umberto da Romans, Gilberto da Tournai, Stefano di Borbone (Milan, 1978). 87   Guibert de Tournai, Epistola ad dominam Isabellam, edited by A. de Poorter in ‘Lettre de Guibert de Tournai, O.F.M., à Isabelle, fille du roi de France’, Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, 12 (1931): pp. 116–27; and Field, ‘Gilbert of Tournai’s Letter to Isabelle of France: An Edition of the Complete Text’, Mediaeval Studies, 65 (2003): pp. 57–97. 88   Casagrande, Prediche alle donne, p. 81. 89   The expression, ‘mémoire de soi’ is used by Catherine Vincent, Les confréries médiévales dans le royaume de France (XIIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris, 1994), p. 121; it is adapted from Philippe Ariès’s phrase, ‘la mort de soi’. 90   Aladjidi, ‘Rex pater pauperum’, p. 439; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les revenants. Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (Paris, 1994), pp. 233–4; Cécile Treffort, ‘Du mort vêtu à la nudité eschatologique (XIIe-XIIIe siècles)’, in Le Nu et le vêtu au Moyen Age (XIIe–XIIIe siècles), Sénéfiance, 47 (2001): pp. 351–63. 86

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gave or bequeathed to the abbeys.91 The giving of rich garments signalled the paradoxical conjunction of luxury and humility in the lives of the French queens and princesses. By such means, these women affirmed their status as the worthy descendants of the holy Capetian king and his sister.

  Here, ‘le souvenir de l’apparence nourrit le souvenir de l’être’ [‘the memory of someone’s appearance sustains the memory of their being’], to borrow a phrase used by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin: Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, ‘Les lumières de la ville: recherche sur l’utilisation de la lumière dans les cérémonies bourguignonnes (XIVe–XVe siècles)’, Revue historique, 609 (1999): pp. 23–44. Denis Crouzet, in ‘Les processions blanches (1583–1584)’, Histoire, économie et société (1982): pp. 512–63, speaks of the ‘pouvoir du signe comme fixateur d’une mémoire de l’être par le paraître’ [‘sign’s capacity to solidify the memory of someone through their appearance’] (p. 513). 91

Chapter 13

Louis IX and Liturgical Memory M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

Louis IX – Saint Louis1 – is without a doubt one of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire that fed notions of French history and identity throughout the late medieval and early modern period.2 We know him best through Jean de Joinville as the hapless though valiant crusader, as the moralizing king who asked Joinville himself if he would rather be a leper or be in mortal sin. But Joinville’s Louis was not the   I thank Meredith Cohen for inviting me to participate in the 2007 symposium in Paris at which this chapter was first presented. A slightly shorter version appears in French in the Revue d’histoire de l’église de France (‘Saint Louis et la mémoire liturgique’ in volume 94 (2009): pp. 23–34). The arguments here are drawn from a larger work, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusades in the Late Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2008), particularly pp. 13–16 and chapters 4–5. The liturgical texts discussed here can be found in full in Appendix 2 of that work (pp. 253–83). Earlier editions of five of the offices can be found in Guido Maria Dreves and Clemens Blume (eds), Analecta hymnica medii aevi (55 vols, Leipzig, 1886–1922; reprint, New York, 1961), vol. 13, pp. 185–98, nos 71–5 (for offices) and vol. 11, pp. 77–82, nos 317–33 (for hymns); and in Andrew Hughes, Late Medieval Liturgical Offices: Texts, ed. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Subsidia Mediaevali 23 (Toronto, 1994). The text in LMLO can also be searched at: cantusdatabase.org.. I refer to the various liturgical offices by the following abbreviations: LC1 = Lauda celestis 1, LDR = Ludovicus decus regnantium, FR = Francorum rex. The following system of abbreviations is used to refer to elements of the liturgical office: V = 1 Vespers, M = Matins, L =Lauds, W = 2 Vespers, H = Hymn, R = Responsory, V = Verse, Mag = Magnificat antiphon, Ben = Benedictus antiphon. Thus MH3–4 stands in for the third and fourth stanzas of the Matins Hymn; VA2 stands in for the second antiphon for 1 Vespers; MR6 = The sixth response for Matins; and MRV6 stands in for the sixth responsory (i.e., both response and verse) for Matins and so forth. Full explanations are found in Gaposchkin, Making, pp. xvii, 93–9. Translations are my own, but I have drawn on the Douay-Rheims translation in quoting the scriptural passages. LDR can also be found in Latin and English in M.Cecilia Gaposchkin, Blessed Louis, the Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France (Notre Dame, IN, 2012), translations with Phyllis B. Katz, 159-207. 2   Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire (3 vols in 8 pts, Paris, 1984–92). The collection does not include an essay on Saint Louis specifically, though he is a centrepiece of Alain Boureau’s contribution on ‘the king’. Alain Boureau, ‘Le roi’, in Nora (ed.), Lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1986), vol. 3, pp. 785–817. The role of Louis’s memory in the construction of French identity is treated masterfully in Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985), pp. 126–64. 1

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Louis of the Middle Ages, since Joinville’s text was not available in any real sense until the middle of the sixteenth century.3 Instead, one of the most important ways that Louis was memorialized, that his sanctity was constructed, that his memory was propagated, was through liturgical texts. Unlike Joinville’s vie or the other hagiographical texts through which today we primarily know Louis, the liturgy defined Louis’s sanctity as people participated in it on a daily basis, as part of the lived and ritualized experience of devotion. It also functioned to construct a communal memory of Louis within a particular institutional and devotional context, creating a legitimizing canon that nourished institutional identity. Individual institutions commissioned or composed their own liturgical offices for Louis’s feast day that remembered Louis in individualized ways and, through these, we can see how memory recorded in this way reveals a dynamic process in which Louis’s sanctity was variously constructed according to the fractured ideals of the later Middle Ages. In this sense, the multi-faceted liturgical memorialization of Louis offers a view into the multiple and competing ideals of religious and political virtue that animated late medieval culture. This chapter begins by outlining how the study of liturgical sources intersects with the production and study of memory. It follows with interpretations of selected texts from three traditions – the Cistercian tradition, the royal and courtly tradition and the Franciscan tradition – to offer, as it were, a case study in how liturgical commemoration contributed to what Jacques Le Goff called the ‘production of royal memory’.4 Liturgy and Memory Liturgical texts are at root memorializing. Known in the Middle Ages as the historia – the saint’s story – a liturgical office advanced a focused interpretation of a saint’s life, a crystallized summary and interpretation of a saint’s vita and most potent attributes.5 Because multiple offices were often written for an individual saint and because it is often possible to identify individual liturgies with particular authors or institutions, we can look at different centres of memorialization and, in turn, at competing interpretations of the virtues and qualities that defined sanctity. Liturgical offices were tied up with memory and memorialization in a number of ways. Firstly, the offices themselves were produced in order to memorialize Louis within the rituals of the ecclesiastical calendar. This was true of all liturgical   Alain Boureau, ‘Les enseignements absolutistes de Saint Louis 1610–1630’, in La monarchie absolutiste et l’histoire en France: théories du pouvoir, propagandes monarchiques et mythologies nationales (Paris, 1987), p. 88. 4   Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996), p. 311. 5   Andrew Hughes, ‘The Monarch as the Object of Liturgical Veneration’, in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne. J. Duggan (London, 1993), p. 375. On historia in general, see Ritva Jonsson, Historia. Etudes sur la genèse des offices versifiés (Stockholm, 1968). 3

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offices in the sense that all liturgy was explicitly commemorative and the essential role of saints’ liturgies was the saint’s remembrance. A saint would be honoured within the liturgical cycle at one or more points during the year in order to recall his or her virtue to the worshipping community. After the fervour of popular devotion had waned, many saints were remembered only in institutionalized liturgical cycles. By the later Middle Ages, the very term memoria could signify a modest liturgical honour designed to ensure that a saint would not be entirely forgotten. Secondly, the meaning evoked by the recitation of an office was inflected by meanings and associations fostered by the medieval arts of memory.6 Churchmen drew on banks of scriptural and liturgical images, texts and vocabulary that were deeply engrained in memory and the recitation and recall of which was fostered by their musical and scriptural associations. This meant that a single text – an evocation, for instance, of a phrase from the Psalms – would evoke the entirety of that Psalm and the other liturgical texts and chants thereby associated with it. The linear narrative embedded in (most) saints’ offices also fostered memorialization. The same was true for the musical element, the evocation of which might recall a whole corpus. Thus, as discussed below, when Franciscan friars recited an antiphon in the office of Saint Louis that used the vocabulary and rhyme scheme from the office of Saint Francis, the entire complex of ideas, images and meaning associated with Francis was in turn associated with and mapped onto the figure of Louis. Lastly, in the aggregate, liturgical offices also formed the canonical and communal memory of a religious community or institution, defining and ultimately institutionalizing interpretations of sacred history and particular saints.7 It was in these texts – these canonical and authoritative texts which together constituted the work of God (opus dei) – that values, ideals and valorizing histories were 6   For more on this topic, see Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, 2005); Catherine Cubitt, ‘Memory and Narrative in the Cult of Early Anglo-Saxon Saints’, in Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000); Andrew Hughes, ‘Memory and the Composition of Late Medieval Office Chant: Antiphons’, in L’enseignement de la musique au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance. Colloque organisé par la Fondation Royaumont en coproduction avec l’A.R.I.M.M. (Asnières-sur-Oise, 1987); Gabrielle Spiegel, ‘Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time’, History and Theory, 41/2 (2002); Leo Treitler, ‘Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music’, Speculum, 56 (1981): pp. 471–91. On the arts of memory in general, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990). 7   In addition to the works comprised in Nora, discussions of communal memory can be found in James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992); Steven Knapp, ‘Collective Memory and the Actual Past’, Representations, 26 (1989): pp. 123–49; and Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York, 1992). Institutional aspects are treated in Bernd Schneidmüller, ‘Constructing the Past by Means of the Present: Historiographical Foundations of Medieval Institutions, Dynasties, Peoples, and Communities’, in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 169–92.

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constructed, articulated and then rehearsed, ritually and annually. In a sense, liturgical traditions of this sort represent one of the most potent forms of Brian Stock’s textual communities, serving both to define and to bind the ideals of a particular group.8 Thus, the offices for Louis both demonstrate how Louis himself was remembered and sanctified in different and competing ways and, in turn, contributed to the creation of institutional values and to social memory. Liturgical offices are evidence both of the interpretation of that saint at a particular moment and place in time and also, because of their cyclical and institutional nature, of the ritual solidification of memory. Once incorporated into the corpus of the opus dei, any individual liturgical rite became part of the defining canon. That is, liturgical memorialization both reflected interpretation and served to create identity. The liturgical form thus proved a dynamic mechanism of devotional practice and memory construction, informed by changing spirituality in a changing world. The Liturgical Offices for Saint Louis, King of France The offices of Saint Louis offer a forceful example of just how liturgical commemoration did the work of shaping and directing memory. Louis IX died in north Africa, outside the walls of Tunis, on 25 August 1270. Efforts began immediately to canonize him. In 1272 the pope elect, Gregory X, asked Louis’s confessor Geoffrey of Beaulieu to write a vita and he commissioned Simon de Brie quietly to begin inquiries into Louis’s sanctity.9 In 1275, churchmen from northern France wrote to Gregory to request expedition of Louis’s canonization.10 A formal inquiry into his sanctity lasting over a year was held at Saint-Denis in 1282 and 1283.11 But it was not until 1297, as part of the negotiations between the 8   Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1983). 9   Louis Carolus-Barré, Le procès de canonisation de Saint Louis (1272–1297): essai de reconstitution, ed. Henri Platelle, Collection de l’Ecole Française de Rome 195 (Rome, 1994), pp. 17–18; Marie-Dominique Chapotin, Histoire des Dominicains de la Province de France. Le siècle des fondations (Rouen, 1898), p. 648, n. 1; Thomás Ripoll, Brémond and Antonin, Bullarium Ordinis FF. [i.e. Fratrum] Prædicatorum: sub auspiciis SS. D.N.D. Benedicti XIII, pontificis maximi, ejusdem Ordinis (Rome, 1729), vol. 1, no. 1, p. 503. For the request to Simon de Brie, see J.-H. Sbaralea (ed.), Bullarium Franciscanum (4 vols, Rome, 1759–68; repr. 1983), vol. 3, p. 241. 10   Chapotin, Histoire des Dominicains, pp. 648–9, n. 1; Gallia Christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa: qua series et historia archiepiscoporum, episcoporum, et abbatum Franciae vicinarumque ditionum ab origine ecclesiarum ad nostra tempora deducitur, & probatur ex authenticis instrumentis ad calcem appositis (16 vols, Paris, 1715), vol. 12, Instrumenta, pp. 78–9; Guillaume Marlot, Histoire de la ville, cité et université de Reims, métropolitaine de la Gaule Belgique (4 vols, Reims, 1843–46), vol. 3, p. 816; Sbaralea (ed.), Bullarium Franciscanum, vol. 3, p. 474. 11   Carolus-Barré, Le procès.

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pope (Boniface VIII) and the French king (Philip IV, “the Fair”) that the papacy formally canonized Louis.12 In the bull of canonization issued on 11 August 1297, Boniface called for the churches of all cities and dioceses to institute the celebration of Louis’s feast day – his dies natalis – on 25 August.13 Ecclesiastical houses that took up this injunction had two choices: either to employ the common office for the non-pontiff confessor, or to procure a proper office specific to Louis himself. By and large, most resorted to the common, but those institutions that had enjoyed particular ties to Louis and that were especially devoted to him chose the latter and the period after 1297 witnessed a spate of liturgical composition in honour of the new saint-king.14 Immediately after Louis’s canonization in 1297 the Dominicans of Paris, the Franciscans of Paris and the Cistercians each composed a liturgical office – these were Nunc Laudare, Francorum Rex and Lauda Celestis respectively. Shortly thereafter, someone at the royal court, probably a man named Pierre de la Croix who appears in Philip the Fair’s account books in 1298, took the Dominican Nunc Laudare and reworked it into a new, elaborate liturgical office, Ludovicus Decus Regnantium. This office was destined to become the most popular and widely copied and used office, both in secular churches in Paris and throughout France (although it was by no means adopted universally). It may well have been this office that was used at Saint Denis for the inaugural translation celebration in 1298 in which Philip the Fair participated (and that Joinville recounted).15 That said, either at SaintGermain-des-Prés or (more probably) at Saint-Denis (where Louis was buried), someone took an altered version of the monastic Cistercian office, Lauda Celestis and reworked it with elements from the secular royal text, Ludovicus Decus, to compose a new office that would be used in these two Benedictine houses. In 1306, yet another new office – Exultemus Omnes – was composed for the feast of the translation of Louis’s relics to the Sainte-Chapelle and, sometime after this, the ‘Hours of Louis’ – Sanctus Voluntatem – that was based on a reworking of Nunc

12   M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, ‘Boniface VIII, Philip the Fair, and the Sanctity of Louis IX’, Journal of Medieval History, 28 (2003): pp. 1–26; and Making, pp. 48–66. 13   Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. Martin Bouquet et al (24 vols, Paris, 1738–1904), vols 23, 159. 14   For a fuller discussion of the development of these traditions, see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, ‘Ludovicus Decus Regnantium: The Liturgical office for Saint Louis and the Ideological Program of Philip the Fair’, Majestas, 10 (2002): pp. 27–90; ‘Philip the Fair, the Dominicans, and the Liturgical Office for Louis IX: New Perspectives on Ludovicus Decus Regnantium’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 13/1 (2004): pp. 33–61; Making; pp. 86–92; and ‘The Monastic Office for Louis IX of France: Lauda Celestis Regio’, Revue Mabillon, 20 (2009): pp. 143–73. 15   John of Joinville, The Life of St Louis, trans. René Hague from the text edited by Natalis de Wailly (New York, 1955), pp. 217–28, pars. 760–765.

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laudare and Exultemus Omnes but also included a host of new texts, was included in Books of Hours associated primarily with women of the Capetian line.16 Competing Memories of Saint Louis Each of the liturgical historia drew on the common fund of ‘knowledge’ about Louis, on a kind of consensus about why Louis was a saint that had been worked out during the canonization proceedings held at Saint Denis in 1282–83. Each of the liturgical offices took this received understanding of Louis’s sanctity and modelled the king’s ritual memorialization in a way that revalorized sets of priorities and identities of individual institutions. In what follows I take up only three of the offices and, of these offices, only a cluster of individual antiphons or responsories, to demonstrate ways in which each institution constructed their memory of Louis, a memory that was used, in turn, to reify and confirm institutional memory and, through a discourse of sanctity and within the construct of the canon, to legitimize that memory. 1. The Cistercians (Lauda celestis) Of the six offices, it was the Cistercian Lauda celestis that most closely followed the narrative hagiographic tradition that had emerged from the canonization. But the translation of the hagiographical portrait into the poetry of liturgy drew on the language of scripture and in particular on a vocabulary that resonated within monastic and ascetic tradition. For example, in a technique used throughout the office, the third Matins antiphon spoke of Louis’s youth and upbringing. ‘As a youth, separated from the love of the world, once made a man he put away those things of a child’ [‘Ab amore seculi iuvenis abstratus ea que sunt parvuli vacuat vir factus’], the celebrant was reminded of 1 Corinthians 13.11: ‘When I was a   Known manuscripts include New York Public Library Spencer 56, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Met 54.1.2 (‘The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux’), Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) nal 3145 (‘The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre II’), The (lost) Savoy Hours (formerly Turin ms. E. V. 49), Venice Marciana Lat 1.104 (‘The Hours of Marie de Navarre’) and Paris, BnF nal 592. Editions of the text can be found in Léopold Delisle, ‘Les Heures de Blanche de France, duchesse d’Orléans’, Bibliotheque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 66 (1905): pp. 521–30; Libro de Horas de la reina Maria de Navarra: cuyo original se conserva en la Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venecia, bajo la referencia Lat. I, 104 (=12640): Officium (1 + commentary vols, Barcelona, 1996), pp. 348–62; Das Stundenbuch der Jeanne d’Evreux = The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux = le livre d’heures de Jeanne d’Evreux (Lucerne and New York, 1998); Auguste Longnon, Documents Parisiens sur l’iconographie de S. Louis (Paris, 1882), pp. 53–65. Discussions are found in AnneHélène Allirot, Filles de roy de France: princesses royales, mémoire de saint Louis et conscience dynastique (de 1270 à la fin du XIVe siècle), Culture et société médiévales 20 (Louvain, Brepols, 2010); Gaposchkin, Making. Elizabeth A.R. Brown is currently working on a study of Sanctus Voluntatem, which promises new discoveries. 16

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child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child’ [‘cum essem parvulus loquebar ut parvulus sapiebam ut parvulus cogitabam ut parvulus quando factum sum vir evacuavi quae errant parvuli’]. A reference in the seventh verse for Matins to Louis’s refusal to take the oath during his captivity in Egypt – ‘yes, yes; no, no, declaring more than this is evil’ [‘est est, non non, dicens amplius malum indicavit’]17 – evoked Matthew 5.37 – ‘but let your speech be yes, yes; no, no, and that which is over and above these is evil’ [‘sit autem sermo vester est est non non quod autem his abundantius est a malo est’].18 Here, it was memory of scripture, of Saint Paul and the Evangelists, of apostolic history that, engrained through recitation, animated the story of Louis’s vita. Gabrielle Spiegel, in her treatment of medieval Jewish liturgy, has discussed how this use of scripture had the effect, through commemoration and remembrance, of collapsing the presentness of the ritual into sacralized liturgical time and of using the received memory of the sacred past to sacralize the ritual of the present.19 Here too, the use of embedded scriptural language and phrases had the effect of making immediate Louis’s conformity both to scriptural ideals and to core elements of biblical and Christian history. The Cistercian office used two further techniques in constructing its image of Louis. The first was the use of language that came out of monastic spirituality – earthly exile from God, the imprisonment of the body, obedience to authority and so forth.20 The office spoke of Louis ‘having overcome his exile on earth’ and his ‘following in the footsteps of Christ’. The third and fourth stanzas of the hymn for Matins read: After the labours of exile, after the accumulation of virtues, running the road of salvation towards the repose of the blessed. What he saw darkly, enclosed in the prison of the flesh, he sees, this obstacle having been endured (or, overcome), in the mirror of eternal light.21   LC1 MV7.   The reference to Cor. 13:11 also recalled a passage from Geoffrey of Beaulieu’s vita in which Geoffrey said that, in regard to oath taking, Louis followed these words of the Evangelist. Recueil des historiens, ed. Bouquet et al, vol. 20, 5 (ch. 7). 19   Spiegel, ‘Memory and History’: pp. 149–62. 20   Jean Leclercq, ‘Le cloître est-il une prison?’, Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, 47 (1971): pp. 407–20; Paul Meyvaert, ‘The Medieval Monastic Claustrum’, Gesta, 12 (1973): pp. 53–9; Gregorio Penco, ‘Monasterium – Carcer’, Studia Monastica, 8 (1966): pp. 133–43. 21   LC1 MH3–4. ‘Post labores exilii, post virtutum congeriem, viam currens compendii, ad beatorum requiem. Quod videns enigmatice, carnis clausus ergastulo, sublato videt 17 18

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The hymn drew on all manner of Cistercian ideals – that life on earth was exile from God, that life weighed down by the corrupting body was exile, and that the body itself was a prison. And it did so by evoking what was perhaps one of the singularly most important texts in contemplative mysticism, 1 Corinthians 13.12: ‘For now we see in a mirror darkly, but then, face to face’ [‘videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem’]. This verse was a favourite among mystical and contemplative authors, including Cistercians such as Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint Tierry and it had a long tradition in monastic mystical writings. The text for None spoke of Louis, in heaven, having overcome his exile on earth: ‘He sings praises to God, having left his exile; translated into joy, he was not mindful of his afflictions’.22 Another potent image – walking in the footsteps of Christ – was also evoked. Jean Leclercq has said that this image was dear to the Cistercian school from the very start.23 The first Matins responsory said ‘Louis, the noble king among king of the French, [was] desirous from the very beginning to follow in the footsteps of Christ.’24 The only way out of exile and home to God was through learning, contemplation and, above all, bodily asceticism. Lauda celestis thus detailed Louis’s learning and ascetic chastisement of the flesh. The office spoke of Louis ‘restoring his spirit with the nourishment of sacred doctrine’ and of his ‘many fasts, the tears of his vigils and disciplines, his pallor, the bluish aspect of a dead man, his hair shirt, the hardness of his bed, [which], it said, all revealed a body consumed by meagreness, subjugated to the spirit’.25 Louis, said the office, chastised his flesh and bore the lashes from the iron chain of his confessor. Eventually, he was, ‘freed from prison, freed from his chains’, to enter the kingdom of heaven.26 The body as a prison and the cloister as a prison were both images that structured much monastic thought obice, lucis eterne speculo.’ For the ‘road of salvation’: in the original, compendii, meaning ‘gain’ or ‘profit’, is meant here as spiritual profit, or salvation. 22   LC1 None: ‘Laudes Deo concinit, egressus exilium; pressure non meminit, translatus in gaudium’. 23   Jean Leclercq, ‘Lettres de vocation à la vie monastique’, Analecta monastica, 3 (Studia Anselmiana, 37. Rome, 1955): p. 174, n. 11. See p. 176 for the use of this image in the thirteenth-century Cistercian letter discussed by Leclercq. ‘Ce theme avait été cher à l’école cistercienne dès ses débuts’. 24   LC1 MR1: ‘Ludovicus rex inclitus regum francorum, gloria, a primevo sollicitus Christi sequi vestigia.’ 25   LC1 MA6: ‘Evitans mundi strepitum, sedens domatis angulo, reficiebat spiritum, sacred cotrine pabulo’. LC1 MRV9: ‘Corpus eius confectum macie, subiugatum suo spiritui, monstravere crebra ieiunia, discipline, fletus, vigilie, pallor, livor vultus emortui, cilicium lecti duricia. [v] Statum penalem et asperum, rex pius elegit, se velut Manassem alterum, penitens subegit’. 26   LC1 MRV10: ‘De quinque cathenis ferreis, occulte suscepta verbera, manu confessoris benigne ferebat in eis, devote recolens vulnera, nostri redemptoris. [v] Erutus a penis, carcere solvitur, libera cathenis, regnum ingreditur’.

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and contemplative practice, for the aim was to release one’s soul from the shakles of bodily flesh through celibacy, meditation and the rule of the flesh. This brings us to the third strategy by which the office commemorated Louis according to essential ideals of monastic life: its Old Testament typologies. Spiegel has argued that typology of this sort functioned to collapse time, using biblical memory to shape interpretation of the present.27 The office compared Louis to Josiah, Solomon, David, Manasseh, Jacob and Ahuseuerus. But the typologies, although centred on kings, compared Louis to these kings in terms of their devotion, suffering, humility and obedience – that is, according to spiritual and devotional ideals and not to explicit ideals of rulership. David is praised as firm in faith; Josiah for his attention to the law; Solomon for his obedience to parental authority; Jacob (not a king) as a teacher of doctrine; and Ahuseuerus as a true worshipper of God.28 Manasseh, however, is odd. He was not among the common stock of examples of Old Testament kings and was not by and large considered an especially good king. Manasseh was the king of 2 Chronicles 33.2 and 2 Kings 21, who came to the throne at the age of 12 (Louis was 14 when he became king) and ruled for 55 years (Louis ruled for 46 years).29 Captured and imprisoned by the Assyrian monarch, an event which led to his repentance of idolatry and penitence, Manessah ultimately humbled himself before the Lord, who then restored him to his kingdom and court. This was a fair model for Louis’s capture by the sultan in Egypt and certainly evoked both the trial of his captivity and the heightened spirit of penitence with which he returned to France.30 All of a piece, the deployment of Manasseh in this way emphasized, through a royal type, the central themes of capture and exile, penance and austerity, and marked a spiritualizing of bodily exile. In this way, the use of biblical references within liturgical chant animated the interpretation and enactment of liturgy. The Cistercian office remembered Louis using core devotional ideals at the heart of the monastic contemplative vocation, in turn reifying, in the memory of the saint king, those very ideals to the religious community as it ritually performed the liturgy each year.

  Gabrielle Spiegel, ‘Political Utility in Medieval Historiography: A Sketch’, History and Theory, 14 (1975): pp. 314–25. 28   LC1 MV5: [v] ‘Ut angelus Domini, cum David immobilis, non cedit discrimini, vir in fide stabilis’; LC1 MV2: [v] ‘Si legis attentus, in iosya figuratur, cuius sic iuventus, regi regum famulatur’; LC1 MV4: [v] ‘Mater regno prefuit, in potioribus bonis; matri thronum posuit, more regis Salomonis’; LC1 MV11: [v] ‘More Iacob liberis, thesaurum doctrine, profuturum posteris, legavit in fine’; LC1 MR12: ‘Regie tribus gemine, spiritus sincerus, Ludovicus origine, cultor Dei verus celesti regnat agmine, factus Assuerus’. 29   2 Chr. 33:1–3; 2 Kgs 21:1. 30   Guibert of Tournai OFM cited Manassah precisely in this manner with respect to Louis: Guibert de Tournai, Le traité Eruditio regum et principum de Guibert de Tournai, O.F.M. (étude et texte inédit), ed. Alphonse de Poorter (Louvain, 1914), p. 28. 27

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2. The Royal Court (Ludovicus decus regnantium) The themes of asceticism, penitence and obedience of the Cistercian office for Louis contrasted sharply with the interpretation of Louis’s sanctity in the ritual memorialization at the royal court. Like the Cistercian office, the secular royal tradition drew on the language of the Psalms and on Old Testament typology, but to different interpretative ends and in ways that fed not monastic spirituality, but an ideal of sacral kingship. For instance, drawing on Psalm 5.9, in which David, the putative author of the Psalms, sings ‘Lead me, o Lord, in thy justice’ [‘Domine deduc me in iustitia’], the office spoke of how Louis, ‘led in justice [‘deductus in iustitia’], ruled his subjects clemently and instituted laws, punishments and rewards wisely’.31 This technique for sacralizing Louis’s royalty was initially established in the Dominican Nunc laudare, from which a number of texts were retooled for Ludovicus decus regnantium. For example, the ninth Matins antiphon for Nunc laudare ran ‘Rex innocens manibus, atque corde mundo, regnat cum celestibus in regno iocundo’ [‘The king, innocent in hands and clear of heart, reigned with the heavens in happy rule’]. This was adapted for Ludovicus decus as ‘Innocens manus prebuit cordis quoque mundicia, Ludovico, quod meruit regni celestis premia’ [‘Innocent hands gave purity of heart to Louis as well, because he merited the heavenly kingdom as a reward’]. Both drew on Psalm 23.4: ‘innocens manibus et mundo corde qui non exaltavit frustra animam suam et non iuravit dolose.’ [‘The innocent in hands, and clean of heart, who hath not taken his soul in vain, nor sworn deceitfully to his neighbour.’]. In almost every text of the office, a Psalm verse was retooled in such a way as to make Louis conform to biblical prescription and to describe Louis in the language of the Psalms. In this way, Louis was compared with David, who as author of the Psalms provided the model of the sacral and saintly king. A second strategy was the use of vocabulary associated with the tradition of the Coronation ordines- that most sacralizing of liturgical rites in which the man becomes king, which was constitutive of the king’s royal authority and which also reached back to the Old Testament models for royal authority dependent on God’s will. Phrases used in the office such as ‘Gloria et honore coronasti eum’ and ‘in Syon constitutus’ and the images of the virgam virtutis, the sceptre of power (or, of virtue), were all biblical, mostly derived from what biblical scholars refer to as the ‘royal psalms’, which were themselves probably ancient coronation liturgies designed to showcase that the king’s authority derived directly from God.32 These phrases and images had been incorporated into medieval coronation liturgies – going back to the Carolingian tradition and adopted, for instance, in

31   LDR MA5: ‘Deductus in iusticia, clemens subiectis prefuit; leges, penas et premia, sapienter instituit’. 32   Scott R.A. Starbuck, Court Oracles in the Psalms: The So-Called Royal Psalms in their Ancient Near Eastern Context (Atlanta, GA, 1999).

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the Last Capetian Ordo (dating to about 1250).33 They were then in the Ludovicus decus to laud Louis and drew on existing sacralizing and royalizing imagery to give scriptural authority to Capetian kingship. For instance, in Ludovicus decus the sixth antiphon said that the saint was ‘crowned with glory and honour’ [‘coronatur gloria sanctus et honore’].34 The language came from the Psalms (8.6: Gloria et honore coronasti eum), which was used repeatedly in the ritual tradition of coronation. The Last Capetian Ordo enjoined: ‘May God crown you with the crown of glory and justice’ [‘Coronet te Deus corona glorie atque iusticie, honore et oper fortitudinis’].35 Another favourite was the idea of being ‘made king in Sion’. Ludovicus decus had spoken of how Louis was ‘Made king in Syon’ [‘Syon constitutus’: MA2] and Nunc laudare had spoken about how Louis was ‘appointed by God’ [‘a dei constitutus’, NL MA2]. Both drew on Psalm 2:6: ‘But I am appointed king by him over Sion [that is, Jerusalem] his holy mountain, preaching his commandments’ [‘Ego autem constitutus sum rex ab eo super Syon, montem sanctum eius predicans preceptum eius’]. A third example is the use of the virgam virtutis, which derived from Psalms 109.2 and had been adopted in both the text and the symbols of the coronation ritual as one of the most enduring symbols of royal authority.36 The virgam virtutis – the sceptre of power, the Main de Justice – was one of the most important symbols of the coronation ritual, both in the text itself and also, on a broader plane, in the visual symbolism of royal authority. Images of crowned kings throughout the Sainte-Chapelle, for instance, are shown bearing the sceptre and the investiture of the sceptre was a key moment in the coronation rites.37 Lastly, Old Testament kings – and particularly David and Solomon – were also evoked throughout this office, though to a very different end than in the Cistercian office. Andrew Hughes has noted that, surprisingly, Old Testament typology played little role in the offices for other royal saints and royal typology was not   Richard A. Jackson (ed.), Ordines Coronationis Franciae: Texts and Ordines for the Coronation of Frankish and French Kings and Queens in the Middle Ages (2 vols, Philadelphia, 1995–2000); for gloria et honore, see pp. 79, 85, 86, 161, 209, 246, 261, 359; for the image of the rex constitutus, see pp. 70, 108, 119, 123, 128, 150, 189, 211, 256, 354; for virgam virtutis, see pp. 121, 149, 162, 187, 210, 245, 260, 358. 34   LDR MA6: ‘Coronatur gloria, sanctus et honore, quia mundi gaudia, duxit in timore’. 35   Jackson (ed.), Ordines Coronationis Franciae, p. 401, Ordo XIIA. 36   Hervé Pinoteau, ‘La tenue de sacre de Saint Louis IX roi de France son arrièreplan symbolique de la “renovatio regni juda”’, in Vingt-cinq ans d’études dynastiques (Paris, 1982), pp. 447–504; Hervé Pinoteau, ‘La main de justice des rois de France: essai d’explication’, Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France (1982): pp. 262– 4; Hervé Pinoteau, ‘Les insignes du roi vers l’an mil’, in Le roi de France et son royaume autour de l’an mil (Paris, 1992). 37   Alyce Jordan, Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 26–7; Jacques Le Goff et al, Le sacre royal a l’époque de Saint-Louis, le temps des images (Paris, 2001). 33

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operative in the Dominican office, Nunc laudare, on which Ludovicus decus was based.38 Royal typology was thus explicitly introduced at the court when Nunc Laudare was refashioned into Ludovicus decus regnantium. The antiphon for the Magnificat compared Louis to David, Solomon, Ezechias and Josiah – the traditional ‘great kings’ of the Old Testament. The author of Ecclesiasticus had spoken of David, Ezechias and Josiah as the only kings who had never sinned greatly and Solomon was, of course, the font of royal justice. Guibert of Tournai, OFM, who, in 1259, wrote on kingship for Louis IX himself, said that David, Ezechias and Josiah were the kings to whom any modern king ought to conform.39 The office spoke of how Louis sat on the throne of David, doing the justice of Solomon.40 The Benedictus antiphon called Louis David’s ‘twin in virtue’ and a responsory compared Louis to David as more glorious in his humility.41 The texts for the Little Hours reformulated scripture and Solomon was deployed in the context of the development of an ideology, as Joseph Strayer taught us, where France was being modelled as the new Israel.42 The reading for Terce, drawing on 2 Ezra 13.26, spoke of how ‘Among many nations there was not a king like him, and that he was beloved of his God, and God made him king over all of Israel’.43 The scriptural text referred explicitly to Solomon. None, drawing on 1 Chronicles 29.25, spoke of how ‘The Lord magnified him over all Israel; and gave him the glory of a reign, such as no king had before him’.44 The text here also originally referred to Solomon. The reading for chapter, drawing on 1 Ezra 7.27, explained that the Lord ‘gave this in the king’s heart, so that he might glorify the house of the Lord, which is in Jerusalem’. Louis was thus identified with Solomon and France with Israel.45 In these ways, the office modelled – memorialized –   For the role of typology in the offices of other royal saints, see Andrew Hughes, ‘Rex sub deo et lege: Sanctus sub ecclesia’, in Roman Hankeln (ed.), Political Plainchant? Music, Text and Historical Context of Medieval Saints’ Offices (Ottowa, 2009), pp. 107–54. 39   Guibert de Tournai, Eruditio regum et principum, p. 21. 40   LDR MV6: ‘David regni sedit in solio, Salomonis utens iudicio’. 41   LDR MR4: ‘Gloriosus apparuit, non cultu presidentis sed cum incultus prefuit, more David ludentis; nec ex hoc sibi defuit, auctoritas regentis’. See David in 2 Sam. 6.5. 42   Joseph R. Strayer, ‘France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King’, in Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel (eds), Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E.H. Harbison (Princeton, NJ, 1969), p. 316; reprint, Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History (Princeton, NJ, 1971), pp. 300–315. 43   LDR Terce: ‘In gentibus multis non erat rex similis ei et dilectus Deo suo erat et posuit eum Deus regem super Israel’. [See 2 Ez 13.26]. 44   LDR None: ‘Magnificavit eum Dominus super omnem Israel et dedit illi gloriam regni qualem nullus habuit ante eum rex’. [See 2 Chr. 19.25]. 45   France as the new Israel was certainly a theme that was developed at the Capetian court in the mid-thirteenth century. See discussions in: Jordan, Visualizing Kingship; Chiara Mercuri, Corona di Cristo corona di re: la monarchia francese e la corona di spine nel Medioevo (Rome, 2004); Matthias Müller, ‘Paris, das neue Jerusalem? Die Ste-Chapelle 38

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Louis according to ideals current at the royal court in 1300, thus using Louis to legitimize those ideals while at the same time allowing the image, the memory and the symbol of Louis as a saint in turn to represent these ideals, to associate Capetian kingship with biblical, Old Testament and Christic kingship. To the extent that these royalizing ideals so closely tracked the larger ideological claims and propagandistic strategies of the Capetian court around the year 1300, Ludovicus Decus Regnantium is an example of how liturgical offices might represent not only saintly memorialization (as was their explicit function), but here, also, the construction of political memory. 3. The Franciscans (Francorum rex) In comparison to Cistercian memorializaton, which sought to valorize monastic contemplative ideals, and courtly memorialization, which emphasized the sacral quality of Louis’s kingship, the Franciscans framed their liturgical memory of Louis in terms of the life and sanctity Saint Francis. The Franciscan office, Francorum rex magnificus, was built upon the liturgical memory of Saint Francis. That is to say, the liturgy for Louis was explicitly designed to recall the liturgy for Saint Francis, Franciscus Vir Apostolicus, written by Julian of Speyer and dating to 1232.46 The recital of the office for Louis – its cadence, its language, and quite possibly its music – would have per force recalled Francis and thus melded the virtues and qualities of Francis onto Louis. The first technique for comparing Saint Louis to Saint Francis was simply the use of language and poetic rhythm. The very opening of the office echoes that of Francis. For Louis: ‘Francorum Rex magnificus, Ludovicus vir celicus’. For Francis: ‘Franciscus vir catholicus: et totus apostolicus’. Borrowed language structured the entire office and in particular the long service for Matins. In both offices, the Matins hymn began with ‘In celesti collegio’ and the antiphons and responsories throughout the office drew directly on Franciscus vir. For example, the fifth antiphon for Matins: in Francorum rex this antiphon described Louis’s steadfastness before the Saracens when in captivity: ‘The prince did not desist from fear of the violent people, showing himself to be willing to suffer evil for Christ’ [‘Populi princeps furie non cedit effrenati monstrans se voluntarie pro Christo mala pati’]. The antiphon was drawn directly from the fifth Matins antiphon in the office of Saint Francis, which had described Francis’s confrontation with his father: ‘And then, freed from the fury of his father, he did not desist from proclaiming that he was willing to suffer evil for Christ.’ [‘Iam liber patris furie non cedit effrenati clamans se voluntarie pro Christo mala pati.’]. Francis’s struggle against his father was juxtaposed to Louis’s struggle against the infidel. Where Francis had been als Imitation der Golgatha-Kapellen’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 59/3 (1996): pp. 323–36; Daniel Weiss, Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (Cambridge, 1998). 46   Enrico Menestò and Stefano Brufani (eds), Fontes Franciscani (Assisi, 1995), pp. 1097–1121.

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quoted as saying of poverty ‘this is what I desire’ [‘inquit est quod cupio’], Louis was quoted as refuting the Saracens by saying ‘this I will never do’ [‘respondet … nunquam sum hoc facturus’]. Both men were said to have been led from jail, to have fed lepers with their own hands, to have built churches, to have served the poor with generosity and compassion. The seventh antiphon for Matins described both as anxious in fulfilling God’s mission (for Francis: ‘Cor verbis nove gracie sollicitus apponit verbumque penitencie simpliciter proponit’; for Louis: ‘Cor verbis sacre scripture sollicitus apponit omnique regali curie verbum Dei proponit’). The ninth antiphon explained that both were eager to teach their children (spiritual children, in Francis’s case; Francis: ‘Ut novis sancti merita remunerantur natis his nova tradit monita viam simplicitatis’; Louis: ‘Ut regis sancti merita remunerantur natis his pia tradit monita semitas equitatis’). Both offices divided their hero’s lives into three parts: preparation, the ‘battle’ (for Louis, the crusade; for Francis, the renunciation of wealth) and finally, good works and death. In all, this constituted a kind of imitatio of Francis, in the same way that, around the year 1300, Francis was being explicitly understood as an alter Christus in the language of imitatio. After Bonaventure’s writing of the official life of Francis, the notion of imitatio had become central to the Franciscan understanding of sanctity and spiritual identity, and by the turn of the fourteenth century, Francis’s life was primarily defined as an imitatio Christi, a re-enactment and thus a fulfilment of the essential virtue of Christ’s life. Louis thus imitated Francis in much the same way that Francis imitated Christ.47 For the Franciscans, what most exemplified Louis’s sanctity was the crusade – and it was crusade understood in a very Franciscan way: as renunciation, service to the church, and suffering.48 The bulk of the office was devoted to a celebration of Louis’s crusade – just as the bulk of Francis’s office was devoted to his renunciation. In particular, Louis’s crusade was modelled as a parallel to Francis’s stigmata. Crusade and stigmata were both understood on a metaphysical level (articulated by Bonaventure) as the mystical moment of compassionate unification – that is, a co-suffering (compassio) – with Christ.49 The best example 47   On imitatio, see Giles Constable, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, in his Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 143–248, especially pp. 92–3; and Jan Ziolkowski, ‘The Highest Form of Compliment: Imitatio in Medieval Latin Culture’, in John Marenbon (ed.), Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke (Leiden, 2001), pp. 293–305. 48   On these themes in the Franciscan corpus, see Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate: una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto (Turin, 1993); Richard Trexler, Naked Before the Father: The Renunciation of Francis of Assisi, ed. Peter Lang (New York, 1989). 49   On unification with Christ, see John Fleming, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1977), p. 46; Frugoni; John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order From its Origins to the Year 1517 (Chicago, 1968), pp. 256–94 (repr. 1988, pp. 256–94).

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of this is the antiphon for the Magnificat – the O martyr desiderio antiphon – which for Francis treated his reception of the stigmata and for Louis, the crusade. In Francis’s office it ran: O martyr by desire, Francis, suffering with such zeal, you followed Him, whom suffering you found in the book that you opened. You, peering into the sky, at the Seraph placed upon the cross, thereafter on your hands and your side and on your feet, you bore the likeness of the wounds of Christ.50

The Magnificat antiphon for Louis ran: O martyr by desire, how you suffer with the Crucified One by the zeal of your pious mind, whose cross you twice took upon your shoulders, the passion weakened you, but the fervour and zeal for Christ has made you a martyr.51

Liturgically, the Magnificat itself was predicated on the exaltation of reversal – eternal life in death, greatness in humility, and so forth52 – and at the heart of both O martyr desiderio antiphons were the images of suffering on the cross and desiring martyrdom, themselves Franciscan tropes.53 The antiphon for Louis picked up the very language of martyrdom, desire, zeal and suffering prioritized within the Franciscan scheme. It said that Louis suffered with Christ, took the cross upon his shoulders and was affixed to (or, in some manuscripts, afflicted by) the cross, weakened by passion, and made a martyr. The language was itself evocative of the ideals of the stigmata and of suffering with Christ, and the interpretation of Louis as a willing martyr whose crusading was salvific precisely because of its failure, was an essentially Franciscan argument, bolstered by the memory of Saint Francis as bequeathed by Bonaventure to Franciscans at the end of the thirteenth century. Louis’s sanctity was understood through and imbued with the aura of Francis’s sanctity, the connection between them established through the association of language and the recall of sound and cadence in the performance of Louis’s office.

  Menestò, (ed.), Fontes, p. 1117. ‘O martyr desiderio, Francisce, quanto studio, compatiens hunc sequeris, quem passum libro reperis, quem aperuisti. Tu contuens in aere, Seraph in cruce positum, ex tunc in palmis, latere, et pedibus effigiem, fers plagarum Christi.’ 51   FR WMag: ‘O martyr desiderio, quam pie mentis studio, crucifixo compateris, cuius crucem in humeris, tuis bis aff[l]ixisti; passio tibi defecit, sed martyrem te effecit, fervor et zelus Christi.’ 52   Elizabeth A. Johnson, Truly our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York, 2003), pp. 266–7. 53   E. Randolf Daniel, ‘The Desire for Martyrdom: A leitmotiv of St. Bonaventure’, Franciscan Studies, 32 (1972): pp. 74–87; Frugoni. 50

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Final Thoughts Different orders remembered Louis in different ways according to their spiritual ideals and institutional identity. The Cistercians memorialized the king as a quasimonastic contemplative and ascetic; the royal court, as a glorious and sacral king; the Franciscans, as a new Francis, suffering on crusade in the work of passion and martyrdom. On the one hand, memorialization of this sort was backward-looking – institutions sought to map onto their own history the sanctifying memory of the new saint king, using Louis to valorize essential and root ideals that defined the community to begin with. But this memorialization also carried forwards in time and influence: it structured communal memory ritually by encoding in the memory of Louis the ideals and qualities of the institution that then became part of the larger fabric of the opus dei, the institution’s raison d’être. Performed every year, on the feast day of the saint, the ritual of liturgical memorialization ensured that Louis – or, rather, the memory of a particular Louis – was recalled and celebrated. Yet these memories did not all carry forwards in time equally. The Franciscan and Cistercian offices were not widespread and do not seem to have outlived the transition from manuscript to print. In contrast, versions of the secular royal liturgy, Ludovicus decus, were disseminated throughout (northern) France,54 and this was the office that was reworked in a newer version in breviaries of the sixteenth century printed in Paris.55 No doubt, this was in large part because of the political interest of the French kings and the strength of Louis’s cult in Paris (itself owing to the monarchy’s interests). But it is surely consequential that it was the royalized memory of Saint Louis (not the monasticized or Franciscanized memories) that flourished and then survived, bolstering the consistent and almost continuous role that Louis has played in the development of French national consciousness as the symbol of just kingship and legitimized political authority.

  On the manuscript tradition, see Gaposchkin, Making, Appendix 1, pp. 245–9.   Ibid., pp. 90–92.

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PART V Remembering Medieval France

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Chapter 14

Pierre Loti’s ‘Memories’ of the Middle Ages: Feasting on the Gothic in 18881 Elizabeth Emery

Known for his novels set in Turkey, Japan and Tahiti, among other far-flung lands, French novelist Pierre Loti’s taste for the medieval has been largely forgotten today, though his nineteenth-century contemporaries considered it as ‘exotic’ as his travel narratives. The press was particularly fascinated by Loti’s re-enactments of medieval festivities, notably the elaborate ‘Louis XI dinner’ he held in his fifteenth-century dining room in 1888, an attempt to return to the year 1470.2 He designed every detail himself – from menus to costumes to entertainment – leading journalists to marvel at the ways in which this evening brought the Middle Ages back to life: The local colour was so perfect, and so easily and so well did everyone speak Old French, says M. Adrien Marie, that one thought oneself in the century of Louis XI. […] The truth of the costumes accentuates the truth of the decor. It really is a bit of Old France that has been resuscitated in the mysterious vapour of the torches.3

This enthusiasm for the past transported to the present, however, begs a question, that of whether it is, in fact, possible for someone without first-hand memories of the medieval past to ‘remember’ it well enough to resuscitate it or to appreciate it as ‘truthfully’ resuscitated. Can archaic language, costumes and decor bring the past 1   Research for this chapter was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A preliminary version was presented at the International Medieval Society, Paris, Symposium on ‘Memory’ (29 June 2007). 2   Loti himself called the event a ‘dîner Louis XI’ in his Journal intime (see, for example, entries for 10 and 12 April 1888), while the press alternately labelled it a ‘festival’ or ‘festin’. Pierre Loti, Cette éternelle nostalgie: journal intime (1878–1911) (Paris, 1997). 3   ‘On se serait cru, dit M. Adrien Marie, tant la couleur locale était exacte, au siècle de Louis XI, à ce point que chacun se mit à parler en vieux français sans trop de difficulté. […] La vérité des costumes accentue la vérité du décor. C’est bien un coin de la vieille France qui ressuscite dans la mystérieuse vapeur des torches.’ ‘Festival Louis XI. Chez Pierre Loti’, Le Monde illustré, 62 (January–June 1888), pp. 251–8 (p. 255). All translations in this chapter are my own.

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back to life? Through study of Loti’s 1888 ‘Louis XI Dinner’, an event reported heavily in the French press, this essay will examine the ways in which Loti and his contemporaries negotiated this conundrum. Far from seeing a contradiction in the idea of bringing the Middle Ages back to life, Loti and his contemporaries considered ‘reliving’ the Middle Ages through performance as an important and legitimate way of ‘remembering’ it, both individually and collectively. Pierre Loti was the pseudonym of naval officer Julien Viaud, who was wildly famous in the late nineteenth century thanks to his bestselling romance novels set in faraway countries. His eyewitness accounts of other cultures and traditions appealed to armchair travellers and made the name Pierre Loti synonymous with Orientalism. Further emphasizing this link with the ‘exotic’ was the fact that Viaud’s public persona, the swashbuckling ‘Pierre Loti’, wore make-up and loved to be photographed in costume, often to the chagrin of his naval commanders and fellow members of the Académie Française.4 The press was understandably fascinated by Loti. He in turn cultivated their attention, inviting them to visit his Rochefort home, which became well-known for its eclectic interior decoration, including a number of themed rooms, among them a ‘Turkish sitting room’ (constructed 1877–94), an ‘Arab room’ (built 1884) and a ‘Japanese pagoda’ (installed in 1886).5 While this kind of display was not the norm in fin-de-siècle France, it was justified by Loti’s profession: after all, he was a naval officer nostalgic for the lands of his travels. Among these rooms dedicated to Loti’s real-life travels, however, was something more unusual, a fifteenth-century hall he called his Gothic dining room (‘salle à manger gothique’) (Figure 14.1).6 Completed in 1887, the medieval room was constructed around five flamboyant bays taken from the demolition of a local bell tower.7 Altered to fit the modest size of a modern house, these windows dominated the room, which also featured stones from a fifteenth-century church in Marennes and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century wood panels from Toulouse that had been incorporated into a massive fireplace. Polychrome decoration, iron furnishings, tapestries, fur rugs, curtain rods made of lances, armour and banners on the walls and various medieval-looking pieces of bric-à-brac completed the decor. According to Emile Blavet (also known as Parisis), who reported on the dinner for Le Figaro, this room was the house’s ‘gem’ and ‘not one stone, not one   A host of books explore Loti’s role-playing, best among them the lavishly illustrated, Pierre Loti portraits: les fantaisies changeantes Bruno Vercier (Paris, 2002). Lesley Blanch describes contemporary reactions in Pierre Loti: Travels with the Legendary Romantic (New York, 1983). 5   The history of these rooms and their design can be consulted in Thierry Liot’s richly-illustrated La Maison de Pierre Loti à Rochefort, 1850–1923 (Chauray, 1999), which also includes images of the costumes and tableware that Loti created for his 1888 dinner. 6   For the history of this room, see Bruno Gaudichon, Maison de Pierre Loti (Rochefort, 1993), n.p.; Blanch, pp. 197–8; and Liot, pp. 49–50. 7   Loti claimed that the flamboyant bays were from Marennes, but others, notably MariePascale Bault, have disagreed, proposing Saint-Just as the correct location. See Liot, p. 49. 4

Pierre Loti’s ‘Memories’ of the Middle Ages

Figure 14.1 Loti in his Gothic Dining Room

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piece of panelling, not one detail of architecture, furniture or ornamentation is not purely fifteenth-century. On entering the room, one feels renewed – aged would be more accurate – by 500 years.’8 Journalists such as Blavet were impressed by this late medieval room; they did not criticize it as eccentric, nor did they question its existence among rooms otherwise constructed in honour of contemporary cultures from around the world. What was the relationship between the vestiges of medieval art displayed in the Gothic dining room – dedicated to a time period – and the souvenirs from geographical locations displayed in other rooms of the house? Although one might assume that Loti, like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, had dreamed up a decor to reflect his medieval fiction, Loti wrote no novels about the Middle Ages; his fiction treated largely contemporary subjects (though some of his essays describe medieval architecture). An analysis of the 1888 Louis XI dinner, the event that inaugurated his Gothic dining room, will help answer this question. First of all, it is important to note that in an era before widespread international travel and distribution of photographs or movies, faraway Turkey, China, Japan or Tahiti were nearly as foreign as the French Middle Ages. Loti, accustomed to learning about foreign cultures by reading and note-taking, applied the energy he generally deployed before visiting new countries to learning about fifteenth-century France, making everything in his banquet as ‘authentic’ as possible. He spent at least six months planning the party, going so far as to consult with specialists from the Ecole des Chartes.9 He drew sketches of tableware at the Musée de Cluny and sent his Parisian niece on errands to find appropriate fabrics for wall coverings and costumes and to shop for other supplies necessary for creating the decor, such as specially designed and commissioned spoons and goblets created from materials commercially available, but based on models from the Musée de Cluny.10 His final

8   ‘[…] il n’y a pas une pierre, pas une boiserie, pas un détail d’architecture, d’ameublement ou d’ornementation qui ne soit du plus pur quinzième siècle. Dès le seuil, on se sent rajeuni – vieilli serait peut-être plus juste – de cinq cents ans.’ Parisis (pseudonym of Emile Blavet), ‘Festival Louis XI’, Le Figaro (14 April 1888): pp. 1–2 (p. 2). Despite Blavet’s enthusiasm for the ‘purely’ fifteenth-century decoration, much of the decor came from the sixteenth century. 9   Loti’s mentor Juliette Adam says that he spent six months planning the event, though he himself claimed to have spent a year, doing most of the work himself independently of his wife, Blanche (Blanch, p. 197). Juliette Adam also notes that two students at the Ecole des Chartes helped with preparations, though Liot mentions just one, Loti’s friend, Charles Souëf, who developed the menu (p. 105). Alain Quella-Villéger also attributes the Old French text on the invitation to Souëf on the prepublication web page for an article entitled ‘Une fête médiévale chez Pierre Loti, en 1888’ [http://lapril.u-bordeaux3.fr/IMG/ pdf/Alain_QUELLA_Chez_Pierre_Loti.pdf] (p. 2). 10   See Liot, pp. 104–105, 150–55, for a summary of Loti’s correspondence with his niece, Nadine Bon, and for reproductions of the pictures Loti drew for her of his imagined implements.

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products can be glimpsed in Figures 14.3 and 14.5.11 Loti’s attempts at authenticity impressed guests. Every report of the feast mentioned the ‘accuracy’ of the event’s decor, its ‘authenticity’, ‘reconstitution’ or ‘resuscitation’. Yet despite their claims of authenticity, none of the guests had first-hand memories of the Middle Ages. To what ‘memories’ of the Middle Ages did Loti then appeal in impressing them with the ‘truth’ of his recreated past? Above all, he built upon commonly-held notions about the period. His insistence on the use of archaic French, for example, made use of a medieval element known to all, while also plunging guests into a ‘foreign’ experience, linguistically speaking. The invitations, though printed (Figure 14.2), made a rough approximation of fifteenth-century spelling, if perhaps not of script. Here we see ‘disner’ for ‘dîner’, ‘hostel’ for ‘hôtel’, ‘apvril’ for ‘avril’ and ‘ung’ for ‘un’. Despite some incorrect applications of diacritical marks and very modern drawings by Edouard Zier, the use of vocabulary such as ‘moult’ (très), ‘illec’ (ici) and ‘cestuy’ (ce), and phrases such as ‘Messire et Dame Pierre Loti requièrent [X] de leur bailler grand liesse et contentement en venant diner’ [‘Monsieur and Madame Pierre Loti request that [X] honour them with the great happiness and satisfaction of coming to dine with them’], were calculated to ‘sound’ medieval to a nineteenth-century audience, as was the use of a concept such as ‘heure de vespres’ [‘the hour of vespers’]. Archaic French was in vogue at the end of the century in France, inspired not only by earlier works, such as Hugo’s NotreDame de Paris (1831) and Balzac’s Contes drolatiques (1832), but also by more recent publications, such as the neo-Gothic fabliaux that appeared in the Chat Noir journal from the early 1880s. The fabliaux were the work of cabaret owner Rodolphe Salis, who spoke a variant of Old French in his cabaret with guests and wrote his tales in a similar style. In addition to medievalized modern works, there were available by this time numerous editions of real medieval texts edited and published by the Société des Bibliophiles François (founded in 1820) and the Société des Anciens Textes Français (founded in 1875).12 Philippe de Commines’s Mémoires, well-known and edited in the early 1880, and François Villon’s poetr, were certainly important influences on Loti and his guests. One wonders whether they had also read parts of Olivier de la Marche’s Mémoires sur la maison de Bourgogne, which had been edited several times during the century.13 Moreover, Loti did not simply create a spectacle to which he invited observers. Instead, he assigned guests a critical role: they were to be active participants 11   Additional photographs and drawings of Loti’s house and banquet can be consulted on the prepublication web page for Quella-Villéger’s article. 12   See Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot, 2003). 13   Examples of editions of Commines’s Mémoires include those by Mlle Dupont and Kervyn de Lettenhove de Maudrot (1874), Fierville, Documents inédits sur Philippe de Commines (Paris, 1881) and Chantelauze, Philippe de Commynes, which appeared in Le Correspondant (1880–81).

Figure 14.2 Invitation to the Louis XI dinner

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in the event. The exclusive guest list (about 30 people) was eclectic, including Parisian writers – his mentor, Juliette Adam, his aunt Nelly (children’s author Nelly Lieutier), the poet Marcel Sémézies and the journalists Emile Blavet from the Figaro and Adrien Marie from Le Monde illustré – local Rochefort notables (merchants, engineers, writers), the wives of his superiors (admirals) and a few Loti family members.14 Upon deciphering their invitations, the guests would have realized the interactive nature of the party and the creativity demanded of them. They were to arrive attired in costumes from 1470, the precise year that Loti had chosen from the two-decade reign of Louis XI (1461–83). The importance of costumes was emphasized in the invitation by a strange reminder (between parentheses) that these should not be too brightly coloured or new looking. These were to be old clothes and well slept in. Loti seems not to have considered that medieval nobles were perfectly capable of ordering new clothes for banquets. Loti’s complaints about having to assist guests with their costumes also suggest that they were not familiar with the Middle Ages, as does Blavet’s text, which stresses Loti’s originality in having chosen a little-known period for his costume party.15 Guests were also to adopt medieval names, which would be called out by a valet upon arrival. Minstrels and pilgrims would be permitted and there would be a table for vagrants and the poor requesting hospitality. A mystery play would be performed and tasty pies and jams would be served. Although the event did not take place in Paris, but in Rochefort, 300 miles away on the Atlantic Coast, journalists were eager to take part, even if it involved a ninehour train ride each way, as Blavet notes in his account of the event. Journalists’ reports, published in some of the best-read publications of the time (Le Figaro, Le Monde illustré, Illustration, La Nouvelle Revue, L’Univers illustré, La Vie illustrée, La Famille), confirm that guests rose to the occasion. At seven o’clock, carriages arrived with the sumptuously-attired participants who ranged from historical to fictional: from Philippe de Commines and Louis XI’s doctor, Maître Coictier, to Laméfrée the Witch and Tiel the Jester. No one played Louis XI; the premise was that he would not be in attendance, having been detained at Plessis-les-Tours.16 All spoke a proximate rendering of ‘Old French’ throughout the evening. After everyone had arrived, horns sounded to call the guests to the dinner table. They passed through the Japanese pagoda and into the fifteenth century. Poet Marcel Sémézies, writing for the Nouvelle Revue, described the scene as ‘emanating from dreams and enchantment, of creating the illusion that you are entering a marvellous palace, preparing you for some amazing celebration, never

  ­Emile Blavet lists the best-known guests and describes their costumes (p. 2).   Loti complained, for example, in a letter to his niece, Nadine Bon, about guests unwilling to dress properly and took matters into his own hands. Cited in Liot, p. 104. 16   ­ Marcel Sémézies, ‘Chronique de Rochefort. Fête Louis XI’, La Nouvelle Revue, 52 (May–June 1888): pp. 214–18 (p. 214). 14 15

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before seen’.17 The procession, accompanied by bagpipers, passed between two lines of valets holding resin torches and into the great ‘Gothic hall’ with its redpainted half-timbered ceiling and its multicoloured heraldic banners (Figure 14.3). Guests took their assigned seats as their names were called, while Loti and his wife, Blanche, faced one another under canopies. It was a moment that seemed to onlookers like the perfect reconstitution of the Middle Ages. Sémézies enthused: ‘It is a dream come true, a marvellous, unique, unforgettable evocation. It is truly the Past, this dead past so dear to Loti, which suddenly awakes in the pale light of the church candles as from a four-hundred-year sleep, feudal France alive once more for an instant, and something new, inexpressible, and unknown makes the heart beat.’18 By appealing to received ideas about what the Middle Ages had been, the language, costumes and decor conspired to bring the Middle Ages back to life. Drawn from authentic medieval art as well as from the nineteenth-century imagination of what medieval life had been like (Troubadour paintings, Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Balzac’s Contes drolatiques, Albert Robida’s numerous pseudo-medieval drawings, for example), these linguistic and visual elements – true and false – were the ‘memories’ Loti used to suggest ‘authentic’ medieval culture. Loti thus called upon guests’ aural and visual ‘memories’ of the Middle Ages by appealing to well-known aspects of the fifteenth century such as archaic language and costume, but he also introduced lesser-known and more ‘exotic’ aspects of the period by appealing to taste and smell in the banquet itself.19 The table was, according to Blavet, ‘strewn with subtly perfumed plants and goblets, candy dishes, ewers, sculpted silver cups, etc., among which thick slices of brown bread served the role of chargers’ (one remarks the consciously archaic vocabulary).20 Sémézies mentions a monumental salt cellar in the form of a ship.21 The menu (Figure 14.4) was extraordinarily elaborate, and corresponded closely to the kinds of dishes that would have been served in the late Middle Ages, judging from such

17   ‘Et tout cela tient déjà de la féerie et du rêve, donne l’illusion d’un palais merveilleux où l’on entre, préparé à quelque fête étonnante, jamais vue […]’. Sémézies, p. 214. 18   ‘C’est un rêve réalisé, une évocation merveilleuse, unique, inoubliable. C’est vraiment le Passé, ce passé mort cher à Loti, qui se réveille tout d’un coup dans la pâle lumière des cierges comme d’un sommeil de quatre cents années, la France féodale qui un instant revit, et quelque chose de nouveau, d’inexprimable et d’inconnu fait battre le coeur.’ Sémézies, p. 215. 19   Surprisingly little has been written about the importance of the senses for memory. A notable exception is the anthology edited by C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Chicago, 1996). 20   ‘Jonchée de plantes aux parfums subtils, ce ne sont que hanaps, drageoirs, aiguières, coupes ciselées, etc. parmi lesquels d’épaisses tranches de pain bis remplacent la vaisselle plate’. Blavet, p. 1. 21   Sémézies, p. 215. Quella-Villéger’s online prepublication article describes the event in great detail and provides numerous illustrations from various articles about the event.

Figure 14.3 The Louis XI dinner and entertainment

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texts as the Mesnagier de Paris, written in c. 1393 and edited by J. Pichon for publication by the Société des Bibliophiles François in 1846.22 The 13 courses began with a ceremonial hand washing and followed with such dishes as Capons with blancmange, ocean and freshwater fish (lampreys) and a selection of roasted game (venison, squirrel, heron, goose, hedgehog, among others). Next came fried almonds, a variety of savoury pastries, and the arrival of a majestic roasted peacock paraded around the room on a golden litter. All courses were accompanied by wines, beers, hydromel and hypocras. The feast ended with fruit, Jordan almonds and spices. Entertainment and music separated the different courses, as they would have in 1470.23 In the borders of Figure 14.3 we see drawings of some of these diversions, described in detail by Sémézies: the fictitious story of the Saracen sailor freed by Seigneur Loti once his ransom was negotiated (a scene also visible as a photograph in Figure 14.5); guests paying alms to beggars and pilgrims; the triumphal parade of the peacock; and live bird pies. Best of all, however, was deemed the goldcovered jongleur who burst out of a giant pie, performing acrobatics as in the ‘good old days’. The notables of Rochefort – in costume from the waist up – craned their necks from a small tribunal at the back of the room in order to catch a view of the action below. By one in the morning, the tables were taken away, making way for a torch dance and real medieval games: Saint-Cosme and Capendu.24 The evening drew to a close as René d’Yalange sang an old Breton love song full of melancholy, as if to bid adieu to the feast as the nineteenth century’s ‘cruel pettiness’ reappeared.25 The evening was proclaimed magical by all who wrote about it (such as Sémézies, quoted above) and labelled more picturesque than the theatre.26 Why did Loti devote so much time, energy and money to imitating a medieval feast, and why did he invite the press to attend? In his other rooms, one could make the argument that Loti was commemorating his cultural and culinary experiences in North Africa or the Orient. In the case of the medieval room, however, there was no such excuse. Loti had never been to the Middle Age, and, indeed, short of inventing a time machine, could not. One could thus argue, as have most scholars, that the Gothic room and the dinner itself were created to satisfy Loti’s personal

22   The Mesnagier de Paris is now available in a modern edition by Georgine Brereton and Janet Ferrier, published by the Lettres gothiques series (Paris, 1994). The dishes at Loti’s feast also bear an uncanny resemblance to the laxative meal served by Louis XI as a joke in Balzac’s Contes drolatiques (‘Les Joyeustes du roy Loys le Onzieme’), itself based on a tale from the humorous Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, a volume long thought to have been written by Louis XI himself. 23   Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (Westport, CT, 2004), pp. 164–9. 24   Blavet, p. 2 ; Sémézies, pp. 217–18. 25   ‘La mesquinerie cruelle’, Sémézies, pp. 217–18. 26   ‘Au théâtre le pittoresque est moindre’. Henri de Weindel in La Vie illustrée (10 November 1898), p. 38.

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fantasies, adult-scale theatrical productions of the puppet shows he loved to put on as a child.27 Such suppositions about Loti’s theatrical penchant have much truth: when visitors called the dinner more picturesque than the theatre, they recognized the rooms of the Rochefort house as playing an important role in Loti’s ongoing fascination for creating a persona and publicizing it in the press. It was not enough for Loti to build rooms for his own pleasure and meditation, as, indeed, he would continue to do, adding a great Renaissance hall and a real mosque, smuggled to France from Damascus.28 He also needed performances to bring these spaces to life, to give them a function, and an audience, which he obtained by cultivating the attention of guests and the general public (via the illustrated periodical press). This is not to suggest, however, that Loti’s interest in the Middle Ages was superficial. The complexity of his dinner reveals a serious attempt to engage with the medieval past, to ‘remember’ it in modern times by reactivating medieval artefacts through performance. The painstaking planning of the feast cannot be explained by mere theatrics, in which case pasteboard sets and imagined costumes would have sufficed, as would have done a supper of meat eaten with fingers and bones thrown to the dogs. These were the techniques of other events that called themselves ‘medieval’ at the time – banquets, cabarets, balls and street fairs – all of which based themselves primarily on images of street culture taken from Victor Hugo’s 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris.29 Loti, on the other hand, based nearly every aspect of his dinner on existing medieval artefacts – particularly art works and written documents. He was conscientious in consulting medieval specialists, books and museum displays. What good was his Gothic dining room, featuring bits and pieces of medieval architecture, if it served only as empty decor? His dinner gave the room a use value that the fragments alone had lost as they were divorced from their original context and consecrated as archaeological relics or set in museum display cases. Indeed, as Sémézies put it in his article, Loti dedicated the time and money to make the feast happen because he really wanted to try to ‘live several hours deep in the fifteenth century’.30 We began this essay by asking what link existed between Loti’s Gothic dining room and his other installations. It is clear that they all stemmed from his interest in foreign cultures, both contemporary and past. Though Loti did not have personal memories of the Middle Ages, he used archives and works of art as ‘memories’ of the period much as he used souvenirs from his travels. Indeed, he treated the Middle Ages as he did modern Turkish or Japanese culture, bringing souvenirs   See Blanch and Gaudichon, for example.   Nearly all Loti’s biographers mention the smuggled mosque as well as his numerous themed parties, among them the 1893 ‘fête paysanne’ to inaugurate a ‘Breton room’ and the ‘Fête Chinoise’ of 1903, to celebrate the creation of a Chinese room. 29   See Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, pp. 171–208. 30   ‘De vivre quelques heures en plein quinzième siècle’. Sémézies, p. 218. 27 28

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Figure 14.4 Menu for the Louis XI dinner

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from those countries alive by using language, costume, dining and entertainment to re-enact traditions linked to them, thus transporting the participants to a time or place to which they had no access. It is likely that this is why journalists did not comment that the medieval room seemed out of place in a house with so many other displays dedicated to real travel. In concluding his account of Loti’s Gothic banquet, for example, Sémézies remarked that Loti was not in love with the past, per se, but with ‘the faraway in space and time’.31 John Ganim has recently linked medievalism and orientalism.32 I would go even farther, linking medievalism to what could inelegantly be termed ‘faraway-ism’: in late nineteenth-century Europe, the cultures of distant lands seemed every bit as marvellous, as difficult to imagine, as the Middle Ages. In Loti’s banquet, this tendency is manifested by his focus on cultural difference – eating, drinking and performance – set against a decor of real artefacts from the past. While Loti was careful to resurrect a specific historical moment (1470) and a specific context (a courtly banquet) that were in keeping with the architectural elements of his fifteenth-century dining room, his selections of food, language, dress and entertainment were all ‘luxurious’ elements that presented the Middle Ages as an idealized and privileged ‘other’.33 Representing entire cultures within confined spatial frameworks in order to understand them, often in contrast to modern life, was characteristic of the late nineteenth century. Loti’s contemporaries believed that it was possible to experience the Middle Ages by recreating the period, much as one could know a foreign culture by visiting a single city or even a World’s Fair display dedicated to it. Loti’s small rooms, which mixed authentic elements from foreign cultures with figures from his imagination, were the mirror image of Paris World’s Fair exhibits, where China, Tunisia, Russia and Algeria took shape in small enclosed displays near other constructions, like those of Paris in 1400 and Old Paris, the re-creation of entire medieval villages in which visitors could speak Old French and rub shoulders with medieval soldiers and shopkeepers.34 At these fairs, as in Loti’s home, entire centuries and their cultures were presented in easily digestible morsels to the visiting public. The desire to integrate fragments from the Middle Ages – medieval souvenirs, as it were – and to recontextualize them, to bring them back to life by giving them ‘use value’ – explains the nineteenth-century proclivity for displaying real artefacts from the Middle Ages. This often took place within imaginary frameworks (as in   ‘Du Lointain dans l’espace et dans le temps’, Sémézies, p. 218.   John Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism (New Middle Ages) (London, 2005). 33   While guests would have expected a lavish event from a leading literary figure like Loti, Sémézies stressed that the event’s success was not the product of the theme chosen, nor was it because of money or social class: ‘a millionnaire […] or king of finance could have emptied his coffers without arriving at such results’ [‘Un millionnaire […] un roi de la finance aurait pu vider ses coffres sans arriver à un résultat égal’]. Sémézies, p. 218. 34   See Elizabeth Emery, ‘Protecting the Past: Albert Robida and the Vieux Paris exhibit at the 1900 World’s Fair’, Journal of European Studies, 35 (2005): pp. 65–85. 31 32

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Loti’s constructed fireplace of Figure 14.1), supplemented by imagined ‘medieval’ objects created in the nineteenth century, such as Loti’s designs for silverware or Viollet-le-Duc’s gargoyles. An entire culture could thus be extrapolated from these souvenirs, less to remember them than to relive them in an attempt to gain direct access to the past. Loti’s penchant for re-created rooms is characteristic of such affinities and, as Sémézies noted, his wish to re-enact his experiences was part of a desire to ‘take refuge in the visions and evocations of other periods’, to put aside repulsion for ‘the cruel pettiness of the nineteenth century’ by living in the ‘noble fifteenth century’.35 The past Loti chose to reproduce was a direct response to the present in which he found himself. By concentrating on a single moment of joyous feasting, Loti idealized the tumultuous reign of Louis XI, making specific choices that would turn Louis’s complex 22 year reign into an evening of food, drink and shared entertainment. Like other writers and artists of his time, Loti took refuge in an idealized noble past, much as he took shelter from the real world by embarking on his naval tours of duty, cloistered in a ship for months at a time. Modern anthropologists have shown that attempts to ‘capture’ moments of history or geography are doomed to failure precisely because of the choices made in assembling the display, be it in a museum or at a Louis XI dinner.36 Privileging some details and excluding others automatically limits what is represented. Pierre Loti’s banquet, like so many other re-enactments and displays dedicated to the Middle Ages and foreign countries, served up culture in a seemingly comprehensive form, much to the delight of participants who truly did feel as though they had been transported to the past. Yet as soon as the dinner was over, the guests were already hungry for more; despite his months of work, Loti was able to concoct only an appetizer, a brief glimpse of what a moment in the ‘real’ Middle Ages might have been like for a particular set of nobles. His Journal intime relates his exuberance at having succeeded, accompanied by disappointment at the fleeting nature of this accomplishment: For two fugitive instants I have a complete impression of the Middle Ages: upon arrival, when I am the first to enter the room lit with the red glow of torches held by long-haired valets, bagpipes wailed quietly below us, –the long procession of guests following along behind. And also, at the arrival of the peacock, carried on a litter with wings outstretched, preceded by bagpipes and the serving knight (Fressac) armed to the hilt, –followed by valets carrying resin torches.37   ‘Se réfugier dans des visions et des évocations d’époques tout autres […] la mesquinerie cruelle [du 19e siècle] […] le noble siècle quinzième’. Sémézies, pp. 217–18. 36   See Dean McCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1976) and Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester, 1992). 37   ‘A deux instants fugitifs, j’ai l’impression complète du moyen-âge: à l’arrivée, quand j’entre le premier dans la salle éclairée à la lueur rouge des torches tenues par les 35

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Still recounting the event in the present tense the day afterwards, Loti continued to relive the experience by writing it down, his ‘memories’ of his own ‘Middle Ages’ still fresh. Yet, as Stephen Bann has noted, Loti’s disappointment in this passage captures the ‘radical precariousness of the whole exercise. Loti desires the “complete impression” of the past, in the same way as he desires to embrace the alterity of another culture’, but he cannot attain it. The communion with the past, or with another culture, can occur only in flashes. For Bann, visual spectacles such as Loti’s and particularly photographs of them, ‘contaminate’ history with their visuality by determining ‘the form in which we register the presence (and absence) of the past’.38 The photographs Loti had taken the day after the Louis XI dinner are a case in point (Figure 14.5). He asked his guests to don their costumes once again (in the daylight necessary for interior photography in 1888) in order to chronicle the previous night’s activities. In so doing, he constructed new memories of the Middle Ages based more on the previous night’s ‘medieval’ activities than on longstanding received ideas about the medieval period.39 The resulting photographic record contributes another dimension to those elements – language, costume, cuisine – already associated with the time of Louis XI. Figure 14.5, for example, captures a scene (the Saracen’s ransom) represented in Adrien Marie’s drawing (Figure 14.3) and described by both Emile Blavet and Marcel Sémézies: the noble lord (Loti) graciously accepts the prisoner’s ransom, frees him and invites him to dine with his guests. In the staged photograph the armed guard holds the prisoner’s shoulder as valets and guests witness the lord’s act of kindness, untying the prisoner’s hands and offering him a place at the table. The entire event, which plays upon stories of the Crusades and courtly hospitality, adds a new chapter to legends about the Middle Ages by giving them material form. Capturing the elaborate scene – costumes, Gothic setting – with a camera adds a new realist component to the many artistic renditions of life in the Middle Ages, the alleged ‘truthfulness’ of photography further confirming the event’s authenticity. Roland Barthes has suggested that photographs are not memories, but counter-memories, the strength of whose physical presence replaces more fleeting true memories.40 The newspaper reports and photographs that proliferated after the valets à longs cheveux, les cornemuses gémissant en sourdine au-dessous de nous, –le long cortège des invités suivant par-derrière. | Et aussi, à l’arrivé du paon, porté sur un brancard les ailes déployées, précédé des cornemuses et du chevalier servant (Fressac) armé de toutes pièces, –suivi des valets portant les torches de résine […]. Loti, Journal intime, 12 April 1888, p. 254. 38   Stephen Bann, ‘Face-to-Face with History’, New Literary History, 29/2 (1998), pp. 239, 242. 39   These photographs were published in the catalogue for an exhibit entitled Le Dîner Louis XI de Pierre Loti (Rochefort, 1988) and can also be consulted digitally at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (Dîner Louis XI. MPL M203–24, MPL G 1–7). 40   .Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris, 1980).

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Figure 14.5 The Saracen ransomed. Photograph from the Louis XI dinner Louis XI dinner operated in this fashion, similarly creating new memories about the Middle Ages for Loti’s contemporaries, as had illustrated editions of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris earlier in the century. Pierre Nora has pointed out the extent to which new accounts or representations of the past constantly run the

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risk of replacing the ‘true’ ones, located in what he calls ‘milieux de mémoire’.41 This was certainly the case for nineteenth-century contemporaries who had never been to the Middle Ages and whose concept of the period was largely indebted to Hugo’s novel. They accepted Loti’s archival research as ‘accurate’, thus adding the newspaper descriptions and photographs of Loti’s feast to pre-existing notions about the fifteenth century. His attention to courtly customs, for example, drew attention to the high culture of the fifteenth century, in contradistinction to Hugo’s proto-democratic representation of Paris in 1482. Loti’s dinner also retouched the image of Louis XI, reviled by Hugo as a sadistic spider king and by Walter Scott as ‘a character so purely selfish […] that he seems almost an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour at the very source.’42 Like Balzac before him, Loti turned the king into a bon vivant and his court into a place of sumptuous and joyous feasting. The widely-distributed artistic renditions of these scenes, along with Loti’s private photographs of costumed lords and ladies enjoying themselves, made the distant past more vivid, more approachable than could text alone. The idea that modern representations of the past somehow replace the ‘true’ past, however, assumes that the past can somehow be captured intact. In reality, as the works of Hayden White, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora and others have shown, what we call history is so reliant on fallible individual memories that it is often more useful to speak of a collection of ‘fugitive instants’ – like those recorded by Loti and journalists – than of history as a monolithic entity.43 Loti himself, in remarking his ability to resurrect only certain moments, seems to have understood this principle, recognizing his own feelings as impressionistic and fragmentary, but appreciating them nonetheless. The ‘new’ version of the past Loti disseminated after his Louis XI dinner displaced older popular ‘memories’ of the court of Louis XI. But as we have seen, these ‘older’ memories of the king were themselves based on fragmentary or fictional sources (Commines, Hugo, Balzac and his illustrator Doré, Scott and others). In reality, since the Middle Ages (and even during the Middle Ages) individuals have built their own personal image of the past based on the information they have encountered about it. Jan Assmann’s distinction between ‘communicative’ or ‘living’ memory (kommunicative Gedächtnis), the oral accounts of those who   ‘Environments of memory’. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989): pp. 7–25. 42   Preface to Quentin Durward (1831). Walter Scott, Quentin Durward (Garden City, 1967), p. 7. For more about early nineteenth-century images of Louis XI in circulation, see Isabelle Durand-Le Guern, ‘Louis XI entre mythe et histoire’, in Figures mythiques médiévales, special number of Cahiers de recherches médiévales, 11 (2004): pp. 31–45. 43   This idea is elaborated by Hayden White in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1975) and in much of Maurice Halbwachs’s work: see especially the latter’s La mémoire collective (Paris, 1950), known in English as The Collective Memory. 41

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have experienced an event and ‘cultural memory’ (kulturelle Gedächtnis), the written stories or monuments that remain for interpretation after the death of the eyewitnesses, is particularly useful in understanding this phenomenon.44 Pierre Loti’s dinner, for example, was based entirely on ‘cultural memory’, the fragments of recorded memories from the Middle Ages – the accounts of Commines, images from illuminated manuscripts and so on – that survive in the modern world. Aleida Assmann has further expanded the definition of cultural memory to distinguish between ‘archival memory’ (Speichergedächtnis), a repository of written memories and ‘working memory’ (Funktions-gedächtnis), the ways in which societies put these accounts to use, ‘remembering’ them in the form of new celebrations, performances, pilgrimages or banquets. For her, cultural memory is distinct from collective memory in that it involves a constant reinterpretation of second-hand material from the past.45 Loti’s dinner is a perfect example of ‘working memory’. He could not consult with people from the Middle Ages in planning his banquet, nor could he ‘remember’ the period for himself. Instead, he assembled vestiges of the Middle Ages from among those elements available to him, drawing his own conclusions about how to organize the event. His preferences towards luxury, atmosphere and exoticism are thus on display in the choices he made in representing the year 1470, as such choices are for anyone who attempts to bring the Middle Ages back to life. Regardless of whether Loti’s performance was ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ to the historical reality of the Middle Ages, the vestiges of medieval art he assembled in a setting that appealed to the senses – costume, lighting, colours, music, perfumes, taste, touch – made his production ‘real’ to participants who experienced the time period in a way they never could have from the passive reading of a book or the examination of an artefact in a museum. From Loti’s dinner stemmed new memories of 1470. If Saint Augustine posited that memory was the stomach of the mind, Loti reversed the paradigm, using his contemporaries’ stomachs to engage their minds, feeding them new memories in the process.46 While it is easy to dismiss Loti’s banquet as a self-indulgent evening of escapism, the long months he spent planning the event and the research he undertook to try to reproduce cultural elements as accurately as possible, say a great deal about his interest in foreign cultures, past and present. The broad dissemination of narrative accounts and photographs of the evening similarly reveal the fascination the public felt for this event, creating enthusiasm for a period about which people still knew far too little. Like those who embarked on travels to learn more about Africa and the Orient, Loti’s contemporaries did the same for the Middle Ages, plunging into dusty archives and contextualizing their findings in an attempt to ‘remember’ 44   Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in Frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1997). 45   Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich, 1999). 46   Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991), 10.14.21.

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them by bringing them back to life. The ‘Louis XI dinner’ provides an excellent illustration of such activities. Loti turned souvenirs from the medieval period – stained-glass windows, tapestries, costumes, archived menus and autobiographical accounts – into memories by using performance to reactivate them. It is thanks to such late nineteenth-century ‘connoisseurs’ and the popular interest they cultivated for the medieval period that scholars today continue their quest to understand the Middle Ages, perhaps less through performance than through volumes such as this one, an intellectual feast Loti himself would have enjoyed.

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Chapter 15

Celebrating the Medieval Past in Modern Cluny: How Popular Events Helped Shape Collective Memory for a Small French Town1 Janet T. Marquardt

The town of Cluny in France had three events commemorating the former medieval abbey between 1898 and 1949. All of them included attempts by French administrators to form a notion of the town’s collective past and shape an acceptable celebration of its role as host to a great medieval abbey. The first was modelled upon the revival of Catholic pilgrimage and the celebratory ‘jubilee’ of the late nineteenth-century French Church, bringing local ‘pilgrims’ to the town, and staging religious ceremonies at a time when the French Church was under siege. The second, held in 1910, was a very grand occasion, bringing a king, pope, emperor and all their retinues in full glory into the streets of the little town for one special day of festive re-enactment. The third was a post-Second World War reclamation of Cluny for France and regional tourism, when newspapers and radio stations broadcast the speeches of administrators and academics extolling the importance of medieval Cluny. After briefly introducing the history of Cluny, I will discuss the three events, attempting to place them within the context of their day and tracing the layering of popular collective memory that they served. My conception of ‘collective memory’ here is drawn partly from Halbwachs, but also from studies of popular history ‘from the bottom up’ as practised by Georges Lefebvre and the Annales school.2 In particular, I respond to the famous   Portions of this chapter are excerpted and reformulated from my book on Cluny. More descriptive information on all three events can be found there: Janet T. Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony (Newcastle-uponTyne, 2007). I would like to thank the participants in the seminar sponsored by the Center for Research on Festive Cultures at the Newberry Library in October 2007 for inviting me to present my work and for their helpful suggestions towards this essay’s final form. I am also grateful to Harvard University, through the kindness of archivist Mary Daniels, for permission to use material from the Francis Loeb Library Special Collections. The translations in the chapter are my own. 2   Maurice Halbwachs and Lewis A. Coser, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992). 1

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series of anthologies on ‘lieux de mémoire’ compiled by Pierre Nora, especially the essay by Guy Lobrichon on Vézelay.3 In addition, I find very important the ideas of Jan and Aleida Assmann on ‘cultural memory’. Their contention is that there is no one set of collective memories, but that successive stages of shaping the past have created layers of cultural memories.4 In particular, Aleida Assmann employs the useful term ‘Funktions Gedächtnis’, which means ‘working memory’ and refers to the constantly shifting and active practice of what we call ‘remembering’.5 Although many different types of people shaped our understanding of the past at Cluny, ultimately the townspeople themselves, in their marketing of the monument to tourism, have come to embrace a highly romantic view that downplays religious associations and their presentation embeds this view in the popular imagination. The abbey of Cluny had been one of the largest administrators of a monastic ‘empire’ during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, owning a vast amount of property and overseeing more than 1000 dependent houses across Europe.6 The abbot was a diplomat of consequence among Church prelates and European heads of state. The abbey’s physical layout demonstrated this international wealth and religious stature. With the rebuilding of the abbey church from 1095 to the 1130s, the monks made it clear that they were not merely serving utilitarian needs but creating a monumental symbol. Its scale outsized all European churches to date, competing with the imperial church at Speyer to symbolize institutional power. It served as the grandest representative of the Romanesque style of architecture in France. It was this architectural association that drew attention to Cluny in the early nineteenth century, during the Revolutionary French government’s search for monetary resources to fund their war in Europe.7 Movable goods were stripped from the abbey buildings and the monks were dispersed during the Terror. Under 3   Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989): pp. 7–24; Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (3 vols, New York, 1996); Pierre Nora, Rethinking France: Les lieux de mémoire (Chicago, 2001); Guy Lobrichon, ‘Vézelay’, in P. Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, 3, Les France (3 vols, [Paris], 1992), vol. 3, pp. 317–57. 4   Jan Assmann, ‘Cultural Memory: Script, Recollection, and Political Identity in Early Civilizations’, Historiography East and West, 1/2 (2003); Jan Assmann and Rodney Livingstone, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (Stanford, 2006). 5   Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des Kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich, 1999). 6   This famous congregation has been the subject of extensive scholarship, starting around 1840 and continuing in lively fashion to the present day. A general introduction can be found in Marcel Pacaut, L’Ordre de Cluny: 909–1789 (Paris, 1986). For the architecture of the abbey, the most recent excavation work is Anne Baud, Cluny, un grand chantier médiéval au cœur de l’Europe (Paris, 2003). See also the more complete bibliography in Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument. 7   Information about the revolutionary period in Cluny comes primarily from letters held (in 2007) at the Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Paris (cote 1/81/71) and Bruno MargueryMelin, La destruction de l’abbaye de Cluny 1789–1823 (Cluny, 1985).

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Napoleon, attempts were made to reuse the deteriorating site, but eventually the property was auctioned in lots for building materials, and the site of the former church was taken by the State as stables for the horses of the national army. During the 1820s, as contractors were knocking down walls and dynamiting vaults, awareness grew in France of the cultural value of the country’s quickly disappearing medieval heritage. Demolition was halted at Cluny just in time to save one transept arm with its two towers and a small adjacent Gothic chapel (Figure 15.1). The town regained ownership of some of the smaller structures for municipal use, including two abbots’ palaces, now serving as the town hall and museum. Cluny town leaders struggled throughout the nineteenth century to secure funds for maintenance and repair of their giant ruin. Since the building was incomplete, it was of less interest than others nearby, such as at Vézelay, where the State could renovate hallmark examples of medieval French architectural innovation.8 Thus funding was weak and sporadic. In addition, Cluny did not have a saint’s cult to renew during the fourth quarter of the century when Catholic pilgrimage became a political tool against the Third Republic. Cluny had never had substantial relics, and was never a destination on the medieval pilgrimage routes. By the end of the nineteenth century, Cluny was all but lost to popular awareness. Although it had figured in volume 9 of Baron Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques … dans l’ancienne France, begun in the 1820s with Emile Sagot’s romantic lithographs of Romanesque official buildings and private houses, including the ruined abbey, it was not an early tourist destination on the new French railroad system.9 Textbooks from the standardized classroom instruction of the Third Republic rarely mentioned Cluny, and if so, only among other examples emphasizing the vast resources of all medieval abbeys, or in reference to major players in European affairs who were once associated with the Cluniac order, such as Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII.10 The one exception is a complete set of nine volumes published in seventeen parts under the direction of Ernest Lavisse in 1910/11.11 More comprehensive than any of the other textbooks Lavisse initiated, chapter four of volume two, part two, book one, written by Achille Luchaire, includes a discussion of the Church during the eleventh century. Here, in part three, eleven pages are dedicated to Cluny, with a reproduction of a view of the abbey church from 1665. Serving to portray Cluny as the quintessential example of monastic power, this coverage lays many of the Third Estate’s abuses at the monks’ door,

  Kevin D. Murphy, Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (University Park, PA, 2000). 9   Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor et al., Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Paris, 1820–78), vol. 9. 10   Albert Malet, Le moyen âge et le commencement des temps modernes: rédigé conformément aux programmes du 31 mai 1902 (Paris, 1902). 11   Ernest Lavisse et al., Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu’à la révolution (Paris, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 123–32. 8

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Figure 15.1 The remaining transept of the abbey church at Cluny even while marvelling at the brilliant and competent monastic leaders and their complete independence from outside control.12 1898 Cluny was never forgotten by the Church and, in 1898, Cardinal Perraud, who was bishop of Autun, Chalons and Mâcon, established a celebratory year of prayer in honour of the 900th anniversary of the Feast of All Souls, la commémoraison des fidèles passés, founded by the Cluniac abbot Odilo in 998. An official closing festival held in Cluny lasted nine days (31 October–9 November), and consisted of religious ceremonies and a colloquium, designed to recollect the medieval Christian origins of the town, especially the period in which it had seen its heyday 12   Interestingly, Luchaire’s recommendations for further study are all texts by German authors. Since nineteenth-century historical studies of religious institutions in French were mostly written by clerics and steeped in regret, Luchaire opted for more recent and objective outside perspectives. In particular, Ernst Sackur, Die Cluniacenser in ihrer kirchlichen und allgemeingeschichtlichen Wirksamkeit bis zur Mitte des elften Jahrhunderts (Darmstadt, 1892–94) presented a challenge to the academic rigour of French historians.

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during the tenth to twelfth centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century in France, when local conceptions of the past were not yet shaped to the acceptable compromise offered to tourists today, such a religious event was bound to be fraught with conflict. During the late nineteenth century, final opposition to the Republican government’s imminent control over the Church gave rise to a renewed pilgrimage movement in France.13 Not only traditional holy sites from the past were visited; new ‘destination shrines’ were built to accommodate an increasingly modernized class of visitors who travelled for more than just spiritual inspiration. These pilgrims were also tourists, predominantly French visitors to areas of the country they did not know, who used the new rail system and expected to find hotels, restaurants and souvenirs along with ritual celebrations. The most widely known example of this new cult was the visiting of the grotto at Lourdes in southern France.14 Another was Paray-le-Monial, the home of the first visionary of the Sacred Heart in Burgundy, a cult that came to symbolize the struggle of the Catholic Church against the Third Republic.15 In fact, it was to the latter that the first national pilgrimage was launched in 1873, when a large festival enticing 20,000 pilgrims was organized by the political Right to underline ultramontane (pro-Vatican) and monarchist affiliations, and over 100 conservative deputies from the Assemblée Nationale met there to dedicate France to the Sacré Cœur. Also growing in popularity were the traditional ceremonial religious pardons held in Brittany. Anatole le Braz published his first edition of the wildly popular Au pays des pardons in 1894.16 By combining such attractions as travel, spectacle and religious piety at Cluny, Cardinal Perraud must have felt he was also bringing these current fashions to his region. Simultaneous with these demonstrations of the Right’s attempt to effect political and moral reform through public manifestations of faith was the appearance of similar events on the local level, incorporated into anniversary celebrations of civic communities.17 Many such commemorations, especially in the north of France, emphasized the Republican and revolutionary memories of citizens. However, there were other towns whose history was intrinsically bound up with a religious institution. The leaders of these locations were faced with the tension 13   Joseph F. Byrnes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France (University Park, PA, 2005). 14   Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York, 1999); Suzanne K. Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, NY, 2005). 15   Raymond Anthony Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley, 2000). 16   Patrick Young, ‘Of Pardons, Loss, and Longing: The Tourist’s Pursuit of Originality in Brittany, 1890–1935’, French Historical Studies, 30/2 (2007): pp. 269–304. 17   Stéphane Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories & Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2003).

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between growing Republican nationalist sentiment in favour of the Revolution, a century-long interest in the artistic power and political advances of medieval France, and the revival of a powerful, conservative political movement back to the Catholic Church. Such a place caught in conflicting appreciations of the past was the small town of Cluny. There was already a French tradition of making visits on All Souls’ Day to lay memorials on local graves.18 During 1898, Cardinal Perraud offered indulgences for those who went further, visiting the churches in Cluny. The term ‘pilgrimage’ was specifically used when referring to the three towns in Burgundy from which trips would begin: Mâcon, Saint-Gengoux and Paray-le-Monial. Likewise the title jubilé adapted a word that the medieval Church had appropriated from the Old Testament to mean a ‘holy year’ during which the Pope granted a special indulgence to all who visited Rome under special conditions. It also linked Cluny’s religious event to Lourdes’ recent jubilee of 1897 when 25 years of pilgrimages to that shrine were celebrated with grand festivities.19 However, Cluny was at this point only a quiet, small provincial town that had not yet begun to position itself within the orbit of a regional Burgundian tourist industry. In addition, unlike the complete control over the town that the Assumptionist fathers held at Lourdes, at Cluny the great abbey monuments were cut off from religious supporters within the new secular realm of the city council and the political party in power – the Socialists – who were wedded to enacting the letter of the Republic’s laws, especially when it concerned religious observances. In fact, the mayor, Julien Simyan, who was a Socialist, posted notices around town and ran the same text in his paper, reminding his constituency of the national laws forbidding public displays of religious veneration. Civic leaders at this point were trying to distance themselves from Cluny’s monastic past, not celebrate it. Thus the elaborate culminating services that occurred in Cluny during the autumn of 1898 were kept very close to the functioning churches, Saint-Martial and Notre-Dame de Cluny. The clerics could only try to suggest original medieval conditions in Cluny, unlike at Lourdes where the cult was new and history was being made by the visitors of their own day. Abbé Auduc, chaplain at Cluny’s Hôtel-Dieu, wrote a little booklet chronicling the plans for this commemorative project.20 With the approval of Pope Leo XIII, Cardinal Perraud initiated his plans in February 1898, dedicating the year to intercessory prayers for the dead. Besides serving the Feast of All Souls, intercessory prayer had also been the primary occupation of the monks of Cluny 18   Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999), p. 265. 19   1897 was also the year Queen Victoria of England celebrated her secular jubilee of 50 years’ rule, while the city of Tours commemorated the 1500th anniversary of Saint Martin, the patron soldier-saint of France, whose tomb had been ‘rediscovered’ in 1860 within the ruins of a church also destroyed after the French Revolution. 20   Emmanuel Auduc, Les fêtes de jubilé de Cluny: leur préparation, leur célébration, leur conclusion (Cluny, 1898).

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during the Middle Ages. It was the business that had helped Cluny acquire huge property holdings. By using the theme of intercessory prayer for the 1898 events, contemporary practice and historical reference to the abbey of Cluny were joined, and people were able to participate in what appeared to be ‘authentic’ medieval religious performance. The event thus became a dual commemoration of Cluny’s medieval past and the religious feast day of All Souls, with its tradition of intercessory prayer. This was a time of extreme tension between Church and State: sentiments surrounding the Dreyfus Affair were at their peak and the government was in the process of outlawing religious educational orders.21 The views and practices of those residing within Perraud’s dioceses would certainly have concerned him: up to 20 per cent of the population voted for the extreme Left, and religious observation has been described as ‘indifferent’.22 Perraud therefore urged the faithful to fulfil requirements to acquire the plenary indulgence of the Jubilee, ‘… applicable by way of intercession to the souls in Purgatory’.23 These consisted of confession, communion, and a visit to one of the two parish churches in Cluny to pray for the Pope’s current intentions: peace between Christian leaders, eradication of heresy, conversion of sinners, and the aggrandizement of the Church.24 In addition, the faithful were ‘strongly urged’ to add a donation if they wanted to gain the indulgence, delivering it either ‘into the hands of one of the priests of Cluny’ or into church alms-boxes.25 The journal Le Pèlerin, published in Paray, was designated as the official centennial bulletin. For six months the history of Cluny was published in instalments and donations were solicited through its pages. The culminating festival held at Cluny saw solemn and elaborate observances of traditional Catholic liturgical practice, including two high Masses approved by the Pope. Prayer was turned towards a revival of sympathy for the monks of 21   A great deal has been written about French political concerns regarding the power of the Church to influence the government around 1900. See Jean Marie and Madeleine Rebérioux Mayeur, The Third Republic from its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914, trans. J.R. Foster (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 161–9; Peter McPhee, A Social History of France, 1789–1914 (New York, 2004), p. 257; Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (New York, 2001), p. 85; Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 92. 22   Georges Dupeux, French Society, 1789–1970 (London, 1976), p. 180, Fig. IV.2; Mayeur, The Third Republic, p. 105, diagram. 23   ‘… applicable par voie de suffrage aux âmes du purgatoire’. Cardinal Perraud, Le Jubilé de Cluny (Autun, 1898), p. 6. 24   ‘… la concorde entre les princes chrétiens; l’extirpation des hérésies, la conversion des pécheurs, l’exaltation de notre sainte mère l’Eglise’. Ibid., p. 7. 25   ‘… vivement exhortons …’. Ibid., p. 7; ‘Remises entre les mains d’un des prêtres de Cluny, ou déposés dans des troncs qui seront placés dans les deux églises de Notre-Dame et de Saint-Marcel, les offrandes jubilaires seront employées à faire célébrer des messes pour le soulagement des âmes du Purgatoire’. Ibid., p. 7.

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Figure 15.2 Cover of Alfred Forest’s Histoire d’un Jubilé, 1899

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the ruined abbey and other religious people of the past. Clerical participants were drawn mostly from the diocesan seat at Autun and the stronghold of ultramontane revival at Paray-le-Monial. The press mentioned the events at Cluny, calling the jubilee a ‘centennaire’ (shortening ‘neuvième centennaire’ listed on the programme), which was an increasingly popular civic event in France, not just for celebrating 100-year anniversaries but often for commemorating events of the Middle Ages, as in this case. However, there was little overall coverage. Auduc wrote summaries for the Journal de Saone-et-Loire, and the conservative newspaper L’Autunois covered the events on 9 November, but most journalists found more interest in the petty thefts that occurred in the churches while services were being held. Simyan, the Socialist mayor, owned the newspaper L’Union Républicaine, which took a cynical view, running irreverent verses written to a well-known tune by ‘an old Cluny native’ entitled La Complainte de Saint Odilon, and asking whether the saint could not perhaps intercede with God to help the police end the problem.26 Lourdes was famously lambasted in Zola’s eponymous novel of 1894, and Cluny’s jubilee also became the subject of a humorous little book, published in Paris in 1899, ranting against what the author saw as a reactionary farce.27 Alfred Forest was a local writer who took a strong line against the Church throughout his description of the ‘neuvième centenaire.’ He denied that revolutionaries had had anything to do with the demolition of the abbey, insisting instead that it was a story invented by the Roman Catholic clergy to cover up capitalist greed for the building materials. In contrast to nineteenth-century historians who had sided with the ‘poor monks’, Forest, a radical Republican who romantically held to the idealism of the Revolution, wrote in the unbridled style of anticlerical ridicule rampant since the 1880s. Though apparently local to Cluny, he wrote from the point of view of an enlightened Parisian scoffing at the primitive Catholic provincials who let the Church control their lives and steal their money. He felt it was his duty to point out the collective ignorant state of souls ‘... under the maniacal cane of clerical tyranny’.28 The cover, attributed simply to ‘ZARD,’ set the mood for Forest’s text, with a drawing showing Notre-Dame de Cluny behind the shadowy, skulking figure of a cleric, complete with ‘the soutane, broad-brimmed hat and buckled shoes habitual to the French curé’ (Figure 15.2).29 He is being struck by rays of light streaming 26   ‘On se demande si Saint Odilon ne va pas intercéder auprès du grand Maître pour fournir les indications nécessaires à la gendarmerie pour mettre fin à cette série de vols’. Union Républicaine, #300 (3 November 1898): p. 2. 27   Alfred Forest, Histoire d’un jubilé, neuvième centennaire de l’institution par SaintOdilon, abbé de Cluny (962–1049) de la commémoraison de tous les fidèles trépassés (31 octobre–9 novembre 1898) à Cluny (Paris, 1899). 28   ‘… sous la démoniaque férule de la tyrannie cléricale’. Ibid., p. 32. 29   Quoted from Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel of 1905. Although written a few years later, the novel is set during the French Revolution and evokes similar macabre

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down through a break in dark, ominous clouds. Tiny pupils at the bottom of the whites of his eyes give him a macabre and menacing appearance. Large, primitive and dark undulating letters spell out the title of the book, Histoire d’un jubilé. By 1910 Forest had changed his tune, writing popular accounts of the next commemorative event and histories of the abbey that were uncritical in nature. Perhaps his youthful response to 1898 was actually meant to be a spoof, parodying the revival of the medieval pilgrimage event with another medieval form: the fabliaux, which revelled in making fun of stock figures of medieval clerics, especially after standards had been set for their performance at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Daron Burrows postulates that such motifs as those Forest reused in his work had served in the Middle Ages to defuse the fears that lay people had of clerical powers.30 Arguments over Church authority in France at the end of the nineteenth century would have justified the use of similar techniques. 1910 By 1910, the millennial anniversary of Cluny’s foundation in 910, the separation of Church and State was a fact, and popular acceptance was growing. This commemoration was therefore not tied to the abbey’s religious significance, but to the civic historical pride of Cluny itself. Initiated by the Academy of Mâcon, a regional society dedicated to historical documentation, and organized with the town leadership, this festival seems to have involved preparation by nearly the entire population of Cluny. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, imaginary re-creations of the Middle Ages were tied to periods that had been visualized in popular culture. Thus no effort was made to return accurately to the early tenth century. Rather, Cluny hoped to attract visitors to a spectacle that would conform to current fashion. The founding date of the abbey became merely a convenient excuse for a medievalesque commemoration, and the focus remained on Cluny’s years of power after the construction of the monumental church (beginning in 1088) whose picturesque ruins served as a centrepiece for budding tourism.31 Like that of 1898, this festival was also held in the autumn, but earlier, 10– 12 September. Besides liturgical ceremonies, there was a more comprehensive academic conference (Congrès) on history and archaeology organized by the Academy of Mâcon and fully documented in volumes of proceedings and there was a lavish historical re-enactment organized by the municipal council (Figure 15.3). figures in clerical garb associated with victimizing poor citizens. 30   Daron Lee Burrows, The Stereotype of the Priest in the Old French Fabliaux: Anticlerical Satire and Lay Identity (Oxford, 2005). 31   For more on the picturesque quality of ruins and the place of Cluny within the nineteenth-century French recognition of the value of medieval architecture, see chapter two in Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument.

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Figure 15.3 Programme cover, 1910 (Cluny Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University)

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Some of the papers given at the academic conference did try to emphasize the Truce of God from the tenth century – attributed to Cluny –, yet for the re-enactment an entirely different period was selected: the visit of King Louis IX (1214–70) to the abbey in order to meet Pope Innocent IV coming from Rome in 1245.32 The fact that Louis IX was a king who tried to establish his independence from the papacy, requiring this strained meeting on neutral ground at Cluny, reinforces how little voice Church authorities must have had in the re-enactment. But Louis’s simulated presence did allow the town to cash in on the current popularity of the Gothic period, as well as the perennial attraction of royalty. Only a decade earlier, the popularity of the Gothic period had been showcased in the Exposition Universelle of 1900. There, Albert Robida created an entire medieval village on the banks of the Seine with functioning shops, strolling musicians and period architecture.33 At Cluny, a long procession of famous people from the thirteenth century was re-enacted with great flair, including over 300 local inhabitants dressed in medievalesque garb, many in rented costumes from Paris. Trumpets were sounded in the morning and sections of pages, heralds, knights and other characters took their places. The royal cortège began outside the city walls and wound its way slowly through streets crowded with spectators to the abbey facade where the ‘pope’ and ‘abbot’ waited. Participants, including authentic medieval greyhounds, followed the roster given in the abbey’s medieval chronicle, and a printed programme listed the lords and ladies by rank, along with the name of their contemporary enactor.34 It is one of the few times that women are acknowledged to have participated in Cluny’s history, though mostly in the guise of royal wives. Journalists commented upon the intermingling of members of opposing 1910 political parties as townspeople played the parts of their forebears, many as minor nobility. The former Socialist mayor and his wife even played the Emperor and Empress of Constantinople!35 Monks who had been exiled from

32   The Trêve de Dieu was established in 958 between secular and religious leaders to limit private warfare. It is easy to trace the source of most speakers’ general estimation of Cluny back to Lavisse’s volumes (see footnote 11). In fact, the pages directly following Luchaire’s treatment of Cluny in volume two concern the Trêve de Dieu and begin with the line: ‘Grace aux ordres religieux et surtout à Cluni …’. 33   Elizabeth Emery, ‘Protecting the Past: Albert Robida and the Vieux Paris Exhibit at the 1900 World’s Fair’, Journal of European Studies (2005): pp. 65–85. 34   Auguste Bernard and Alexandre Bruel (eds), Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny (6 vols, Paris, 1876). 35   Some postcards label them the ‘Byzantine’ rulers and the cortège list in the official programme says Constantinople, while the description of the historical event, also in the programme, refers to ‘l’Empereur d’Orient’. In fact the city was under Latin rule in 1245. Thanks to Cecily Hilsdale for troubleshooting this with me.

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France were invited back from England and Belgium to participate, two of them seizing the opportunity to politicize their position.36 The religious associations of the abbey were downplayed in the advertising. In fact, only a tiny roundel in the upper right of the official festival poster makes reference to the monks. There Cluny’s most famous abbot, Saint Hugh, is shown as grantor of the city’s communal charter (‘affranchissement communal’), contributing to a popular nineteenth-century notion of French medieval towns as initiators of the modern republic (Figure 15.4). Other events that were held at Cluny on the same weekend, such as a national gymnastics championship, fireworks and concerts, also featured on this poster. There were plenty of reasons for people to make an effort to come to the festival. The 1245 meeting fitted with modern ideas about reconciliation between Church and State, and inserted the ruler into an abbey history that offered relatively obscure saints and needed some celebrities to draw crowds. It also provided great opportunities for participation among locals, fed current fashions for the Gothic era, and became a widely reported spectacle. It was deemed a grand success and certainly added a layer to imagined memories of medieval Cluny. Postcards, the latest fashion, recorded everything, even showing that religious processions were allowed on public streets this time around. Magazines across France ran special features on Cluny’s events. They broke the attractions down according to their audiences, essentially designating members of the three medieval orders: the clergy in festal vestments (those who pray), the administrators and academics in suits (those who fight), and the public (those who work), with the men in boaters and casquettes and women in big hats of the day (Figure 15.5).37 Postcards also show that decorations were constructed to update the architectural style of Cluny’s buildings from Romanesque to Gothic (Figure 15.6). Rather than mirroring the rounded arches typical of most of the abbey buildings and the many surviving twelfth-century houses in town, the ornamental street arches were pointed. These crossed streets by simple ogive arches attached to tall ‘columns’ (metal or wood supports), some three storeys high and in many cases complete with tracery in the spandrels evocative of Gothic windows. Both parts were covered with greenery and paper flowers. Shorter columns held heraldic signs in shield shapes and draped garlands.

36   For more information on Dom Cabrol and Dom Besse, who participated in 1910, see Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument, pp. 110ff. 37   It appears that the first reference to these three divisions was by Aelfric, an English monk, in the tenth century. It was picked up and formalized in 1023–25 in response to the Truce of God by Adalbero of Laon and Gerard of Cambrai. See Georges Duby’s study, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago, 1980). The extrapolation of this concept at medieval Cluny is treated in chapter 16.

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Figure 15.4 Official poster, 1910 (Cluny Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University)

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Figure 15.5 Awaiting the arrival of Louis IX, 1910 (postcard)

Figure 15.6 Religious procession, 1910 (postcard)

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Because the original medieval cloister had been destroyed, the eighteenthcentury neoclassical buildings, hung with red velvet drapes and electric lamps, were the venue for a great banquet of Congrès participants. In spite of the anachronism, speakers attested to feeling that they were back in the surroundings of Abbot Hugh’s time. Many of the toasts were eulogies for the venerable president of the 1910 organizing committee, Léopold Delisle, who had died during the year. Regret for his passing merged into that for loss of the abbey. Records for this conference are available in the proceedings, showing that 728 people registered for the Congrès, far exceeding all expectations and causing a flurry of last-minute hotel arrangements in Mâcon. There are no records for the number of visitors for other events. Papers given at the conference were quite mixed, with topics ranging from tenth-century Cluny proper, to the abbey’s influences on her far-flung dependencies, and even the various schools housed in the reused cloister buildings during the nineteenth century. Most speakers concentrated on Cluny’s ‘golden period’ of the High Romanesque. Many called upon their listeners to support the preservation of their heritage, citing the Cluniac order as a model for early French conservation of Classical culture and innovations in art and architecture. They all hoped the event, especially the academic meeting, would foster more archaeological and historical interest in the physical site. Certainly the wide journalistic coverage of the cortège re-enactment drew interest in the town, even for those who could not visit during the event. It also established an association between provincial medieval ruins and fantastical notions of chivalrous society. The town of Cluny assumed a collective identity within this new shape of its heritage: living citizens play-acted roles from the past and cooperatively imagined the abbey buildings whole again. Local touristic understandings of the ruins’ attraction would remain indebted to the form of this commemoration. 1949 After the Second World War, in 1949, another fête was held at Cluny along the same lines as that of 1910, minus the cortège re-enactment. The mayor, Dr Pleindoux, was deeply interested in Cluny’s medieval history and had strongly supported the work of the Harvard architectural historian, Kenneth Conant, who had been excavating abbey remains since 1927 in order to make detailed reconstructive drawings (Figure 15.7). Pleindoux welcomed the opportunity to bring together scholars who specialized in Cluniac history at a new conference, and justified the commemoration as centring on the anniversaries of the deaths of two saint-abbots, Odo (927–42) and Odilo (994–1049), suggesting that the millennial commemoration for Odo had been delayed by the war. Cluny’s mayor valued the legacy of the abbey and invited Church prelates to arrange ceremonial events similar to those of the previous two commemorations.

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By 1949, Cluny had hard evidence of its medieval glory to show in the work done by Conant. He had revived interest in the ruined buildings and it was appropriate that the abbey became the centre of this thanksgiving ceremony, for popular religious belief had revived during the desperate years of the Occupation. Even after the war’s end, the French continued to suffer through the divisive trials of collaboration, the misery of a ruined economy and industry, starvation, cold and a staggering need to replace lost buildings. France’s role as world cultural leader was finished and the French were still struggling to find political stability amongst bitter, splintered opposition parties. An interest in sacred art (l’art sacré), revived since the 1920s, was growing in France.38 Although the Catholic Church had been deeply compromised by its collaboration with Vichy, many Resistance members were Christians who later formed a new party, the Mouvement républicain populaire, which joined the left in a coalition government.39 They won a majority of their votes from newly enfranchised women, who continued to support the Church.40 The publications of Simone Weil, a philosopher and resistant, who converted from Judaism to Catholicism (calling herself ‘a Christian outside the Church’ during the war) and who had worked alongside the poor, had come out posthumously in 1948 to an avid public.41 By the end of that year, a bill was introduced in the Chamber of Deputies to grant amnesty to the approximately 8,000 alleged collaborators still in prison. 1949 began a period of rebuilding, even in Cluny where German bombs had landed in the central square in 1944. It was the first year since the war that most products had become available, partly due to the Marshall Plan for economic recovery in Europe, and Janet Flanner recounts that the 1949 season was surprisingly good for travel.42 The leaders of Cluny wanted to link their monument to revived concerns for national patrimony and to draw visitors from beyond the region of Burgundy. In 1910, local leaders had incorporated religious ceremony apolitically to enhance their spectacle and to reinforce the abbey’s historical role. By 1949 there 38   See, for example, the art and writings of Albert Gleizes in such texts as Albert Gleizes, Art et religion (Chambery, 1970). More information about his work can be found in numerous exhibition catalogues, especially L’art sacré d’Albert Gleizes: 22 mai–31 août 1985, Musée des beaux-arts de Caen (Caen, 1985). 39   Sowerwine, France since 1870, pp. 236ff. One of the resistant local men deported to a work camp in Germany was a young seminarian, finally ordained in 1949, Jean Mercier. See: Amicale des déportés de Cluny, Cluny février 1944: le pire que c’était vrai! (Cluny, 2005), pp. 249–55. Robert Gildea also notes how works like Charles Péguy’s Jeanne d’Arc from 1897 were performed in defiance of the Occupation: Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation (New York, 2004), pp. 134, 201. 40   Sowerwine, France since 1870, p. 237. 41   Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil (New York, 2001). 42   Sowerwine, France since 1870, pp. 266–7; Janet Flanner and William Shawn, Paris Journal (New York, 1965), pp. 98–122.

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Figure 15.7 Kenneth Conant at the 1949 Congrès (Cluny Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University)

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were fears of a Communist recovery, which suggested the potential usefulness of Catholics to balance their power.43 Thus the Comité d’honneur for the event listed representatives from both sides: state functionaries, religious authorities and scholars. Two committee presidents were named: the president of the Assemblée Nationale, Edouard Herriot and the Archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Gerlier. Only two members were from outside France, but both were important Cluny scholars: Kenneth Conant and the English art historian, Joan Evans. Plenary addresses at the academic congress recognized scholars who had helped reclaim Cluny’s greatness, including Conant, who was thanked by Marcel Aubert, president of the Academy of Mâcon, for his contributions. The day was filled with rich exchanges between experts in three sections: History, Administration and Art/Archaeology, all again published in the proceedings. Presentations followed growing progress in medieval scholarship. Conant had opened up Cluny to new lines of study and his theories had also presented a challenge to French scholars. Important historians and art historians participated and a great deal of discussion was generated in response to some of the papers. More newspaper accounts were dedicated to Cluny’s celebration than in the past, each paper focusing on the area they thought their readers would find most interesting. L’Écho of Lyon and Le Petit Mâconnais ran stories on the religious events, the former including a photograph of a liturgical procession coming down the steps from Cluny’s Musée Ochier through the marketplace.44 The liberal paper Le Progrès was the most comprehensive.45 The largest feature article headline was cheerful: ‘CLUNY A CÉLÉBRÉ DANS L’ALLÉGRESSE saint Odon et saint Odilon qui firent de l’abbaye un foyer de civilisation.’ (‘Cluny cheerfully celebrated Saint Odo and Saint Odilo, who made the abbey a hearth of civilization’). The headline was followed by a bold appeal to nationalistic values: Cluny! Centre of worldwide radiance! Few cities in Europe have held equal place in the intellectual, artistic and religious concerns of the previous ten centuries. For us, from lower Burgundy, its name evokes a quiet little town crossed by the idyllic Grosne [river], set within a belt of gentle hills where woods crown the terraced fields, but also [it evokes] one of the most dramatic and glorious episodes of the Resistance.46 43   Huge national strikes in 1947 worried many, even the social Christians in power: see Sowerwine, France since 1870, pp. 260–65. 44   ‘Les Fetes de Cluny’, l’Echo (La Liberte) (11 juillet 1949). 45   ‘Cluny a célébré’, Le Progrès (11 juillet 1949): pp. 1–2; ‘Les fêtes du Millénaire’, Le Progrès (11 juillet 1949): p. 2. 46   ‘Cluny! Centre de rayonnement mondial! Peu de cités en Europe auront tenu pareille place dans les préoccupations intellectuelles, artistiques et religieuses des dix derniers siècles. Pour nous, de basse Bourgogne, son nom évoque une quiète petite ville traversée par la Grosne idyllique, enserrée d’une denture de collines modérées où les bois couronnent

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The article continues with Cluny’s claim to ‘one of the most enduringly rich spirits of the Middle Ages’.47 Although apparently referring to the city, the name stands simultaneously for the abbey, allowing historical features to be merged and the specifically religious attribution downplayed. The festivities were then described with attention to their broad appeal, recalling those of 1910 and describing the new decorations and lighting, the processions of clergy (including monks from the nineteenth-century Burgundian monastery of La-Pierre-qui-Vire) and the banquet in the newly inaugurated museum installed in the Farinier, the former granary of the abbey. There François Mitterrand, state secretary for information, appeared at the table of honour along with the mayor, the bishop, the inspector general of the Monuments historiques, a representative of the prefect’s office and assorted academics, including members of the French Academy and the Institute of France. Mayor Pleindoux welcomed the guests and gave thanks that the war had spared the ‘riches of Cluny’. Mitterrand recalled the monks who had come to Cluny ‘to conquer the black country’, a traditional reference to this forested valley of the Saône. He went on: More of Cluny remains, than the stones and a bell-tower: it recalls a civilization. Cluny has known splendour, distress, the state of being forgotten and soon resurrection, for people from all countries meet to honour her; for [Cluny] does not belong to any one person but to all the world.48

The fuller coverage of Cluny’s event by Le Progrès is significant at a time when the Fourth Republic was on the point of collapse. The opening lines of the story emphasized both romantic nationalism and the recent focus on French resistance to the Germans.49 Cluny was located on the line between the free and occupied zones and experienced the trials of both: it had been under the control of the Vichy government until Germans moved in during 1942. Important members of the local maquis were from Cluny, including many who did not return after capture, l’étagement des champs mais aussi l’un des épisodes les plus dramatiques et les plus glorieux de la Résistance’. Le Progrès (11 juillet 1949): p.1. 47   ‘Pourtant, ce paysage magnifique est resté l’une des plus intarissables richesses de l’esprit du moyen âge’. Ibid. 48   ‘Enfin, M. Mitterrand, secrétaire d’Etat à l’Information, rappela que les moines sont venus à Cluny pour conquérir le Pays Noir.’ ‘ Il reste [de] Cluny, dit-il, plus que des pierres, un clocher, mais une civilisation. Cluny a connu la splendeur, la détresse, l’oubli et bientôt la résurrection, car des hommes de tous les pays se réunissent pour le célébrer car il n’appartient à personne, mais à tout le monde.’ Ibid., p. 2. 49   On the reverse of the page recounting Cluny’s festival in Le Progrès, 11 juillet 1949 (p. 3) is an article on the bestowal of the croix de guerre on the nearby town of Montceau-les-Mines for bravery and sacrifice in the Resistance from 1940–45.

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among them a founder and the organizer of the local underground, Mademoiselle Zimberlin.50 Charles Pleindoux, the mayor, had accepted the Croix de Guerre on behalf of the city of Cluny, ‘cradle of the Resistance’, in August 1948.51 Le Progrès was a liberal, republican voice, highlighting Cluny’s attempt to reclaim her place in French patrimony beyond conservative regrets for the destruction of religious sites, by highlighting the citizen’s role in contemporary France. Mitterrand spoke to the increasing awareness, both locally and in government circles, that the idea of historical Cluny had value, even as a ruin. Even as the history of the site was slowly shaped to conform to expectations of medieval life, with restorations and installation of visitor information that served to reinforce its central claim as the model for Romanesque architecture as well as monastic learning, a connection between this and the recent past indicated that Cluny continued to safeguard French identity. Numerous newspaper accounts illustrated and reported upon additional events designed for the general public. The gardens of the former palace of Abbot Jacques d’Amboise were the site of a bazaar with artisanal stands for games, traditional crafts and refreshments, as well as a stage for entertainment by players in fifteenthcentury costumes, a later ‘Gothic’ than that of Saint Louis’s era portrayed in 1910. Again comparable to 1910, the press suggested that Cluny’s 1949 events appealed to the three elements of medieval society in a modern setting. The ruling class of the mid-twentieth century, politicians and academics, met at the Farinier and told each other about their work on the history of the site and the monastic order. With them were the clerics, hand in hand as in the Middle Ages, sharing their pride at administrative accomplishments. The religious celebrations reincorporated clerics into the life of the town, a theme since the re-Christianization of France under Napoléon. And the fair, games, open-air entertainers and artisanal demonstrations were aimed at the general public. Over a half century, Cluny came a long way in academic estimation and popular awareness. Using these events in 1898, 1910 and 1949 as markers of the activities of both government officials and scholars, it is possible to gauge a shift in appreciation and a gradual layering of stories, academic contributions and funding justifications that formed a public image of the former abbey acceptable to left and right, local and national, French and foreigners. We have seen three realms of official culture influence the presentation of Cluny’s past: Church reputation (1898), local leadership development (1910) and national identity politics (1949). In 1898, it was the Church that selected sites for special notice and shaped the memory of the abbey’s history to highlight a renewed interest in veneration of the saints. During a time of heightened tension   Amicale des déportés de Cluny, Cluny février 1944, p. 344. Conant knew her and wrote to his son after the war about her death on the way home from Ravensbruck (though he thought it was Buchenwald). His letter is in the Cluny Collection, Loeb Library, Harvard University. 51   Ibid., p. 372. 50

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over religion in France, Cluny served as a powerful sign of an earlier liaison. Yet, aside from local clerics, the town was not receptive and secular agencies did not join forces for the event, which remained a Catholic commemoration. By 1910, nearby Paray-le-Monial, under the direction of the Jesuits, had proven a much more successful focus for the ultramontane Church with its pilgrimage cult and museum (the Musée Eucharistique du Hiéron opened in 1890).52 Cluny’s foundation anniversary festivities did not depend upon a feast day or abbot-saint, so pilgrimage was replaced by pageantry and saints by famous people of later, betterknown history. A popular understanding of Cluny’s role in history served local authorities (city council, Academy of Mâcon) as an excuse for the first millennial festival in France.53 Choosing a specific event to re-enact brought together French scholars with local inhabitants for communal participation and served as a base for academic presentations that further enhanced Cluny’s importance in history. Although members of the planning committee and speakers at the Congrès were pulled from around France, the initiators were all from the Academy of Mâcon, working on behalf of regional history. In 1949, Cluny was part of a larger post-war movement to recuperate the national reputation. Mitterrand, in his speech, described the patrimony of Cluny as monastic learning, which France contributed towards world civilization. Conant’s excavations at the site were accompanied by his reconstructive drawings proposing the third abbatial church as a model for Romanesque architecture throughout all of Europe. The city only really became serious about restoring former abbey buildings and transforming them into profitable tourist spots after the bombing in the central square exposed twelfth-century walls that had been incorporated into post-medieval houses. Cluny was back on the map and would remain there until the present day. A new, modern appreciation of Cluny was born from these events that seemed to come from a long and local collective memory, yet was shaped more by Romantic notions of ruins, of medieval society and of festive traditions. The awareness led to shared understandings of how to present the site to visitors and where to insert Cluny into regional Burgundian culture. Nonetheless, the inherent conflict of the site remains. Visitors who stand in awe of the apparent size of the former church are faced with the evidence of the French Revolution’s victory over Church despotism and decadence even as they are filled with regret at its demolition. The ruin is an evocative symbol of the continual crises faced by France throughout the long nineteenth century. It represents a delicate balance, seen most vividly in Bastille Day celebrations at Cluny when the fall of the ancien régime is commemorated even as visitors are proudly handed diagrams of the town that superimpose modern outlines upon those of the medieval abbey.

  See http://www.jesuites.com/histoire/hieron.   Dominique Iogna-Prat, ‘Cluny, 910–1910, ou l’instrumentalisation de la mémoire des origines’, Revue Mabillon, nouv. sér. 11/72 (2000): p. 164. 52 53

Chapter 16

‘A Mere Patch of Color’: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Shattered Glass of Reims Cathedral Shirin Fozi

Just three months after Mr Jack Gardner of Boston, Massachusetts, passed away unexpectedly in December of 1898, his widow purchased a plot of land adjacent to the Boston Fens a few miles outside the urban city centre. Isabella Stewart Gardner knew that the ‘Emerald Necklace’, a chain of parkland established by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1880s, would remain green and peaceful despite whatever the industrial growth of the future might bring. Her parcel, facing the Fenway and the larger Emerald Necklace behind it, must have seemed the perfect site for the project that she and her recently deceased husband had long imagined.1 Mrs Gardner – better known to her contemporaries as ‘Mrs Jack’ – thus embarked on building the architectural collage known today as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, filled with an astonishing collection of artworks that the Gardner had acquired during their travels abroad and through their contact with important collectors and connoisseurs. During the 1890s, Gardner had dreamed of   This essay grew out of a seminar paper written under the supervision of Professor Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University; I am grateful for her unwavering encouragement at all stages of the project. I also wish to thank the staff of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, particularly Peggy Burchenal, Rich Lingner and Judy Murray, for their enthusiasm and especially Kristin Parker for her generosity in allowing me access to the museum archives. Finally, I am indebted to Kathryn Brush, Elizabeth Emery and Janet Marquardt for reading this text; it has benefited enormously from their suggestions and from the larger scholarly discourse on modern medievalism that their own work has advanced. For a full history of Isabella Stewart Gardner and her activities, see: The Eye of the Beholder: Masterpieces From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, ed. Alan Chong, Richard Lingner and Carl Zahn (Boston, 2003); Hilliard Goldfarb, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History (New Haven and London, 1995); The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887–1924, with Correspondence by Mary Berenson, ed. Rollin van Hadley (Boston, 1987); Philip Hendy, European and American Paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1974); Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs Jack (Boston, 1965); The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Fenway Court: General Catalogue, ed. Gilbert Longstreet (Boston, 1935); Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston and New York, 1925). 1

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building an independent museum where her treasures could be housed. By 1903 the museum, a modern structure studded with Venetian balconies and Renaissance fireplaces, had been completed and the artworks installed. For 20 years, until her own death in 1924, Gardner would entertain visitors in this palace that she called ‘Fenway Court’. Even during her life, however, she held court in a palace that was haunted with memories of the past, filled with objects that she and her husband had acquired during the travels of her younger years, and built around the retrospective glamour of a fading Gilded Age. Gardner’s will established a Board of Trustees to ensure the Museum’s survival ‘for the enjoyment and education of the public forever’.2 Beyond renaming Fenway Court as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, this testament stipulated that the collection would remain intact and unmoved, preserving not only the works of art but also the installations designed by Gardner herself. With the passage of time, these installations have ossified into fragile traces of Gardner’s presence. A largely oral tradition devoted to remembering Gardner – not only the events of her life, but also the vivid impressions of her spirit and her personality – has become an integral part of the experience offered by the museum. Attentive visitors (often with the help of the museum’s highly trained docents) sometimes spend as much time considering the decorative pieces and bric-a-brac (for lack of a better term) in the galleries as they do examining the major works of painting and sculpture, tapping into these mementoes as a means to know and thus to ‘remember’, the woman who collected them. For example, Titian’s Europa painted for the court of Philip II of Spain hangs above a large swatch of green silk from Gardner’s favourite ball gown and John Singer Sargent’s powerful El Jaleo is exhibited together with pale green pottery that matches flecks of green painted in the dancer’s shawl.3 Preserved together in one dizzying mosaic, these juxtapositions of the priceless and the everyday, the masterpiece and the mundane, provide a provocative glimpse into the ideas and the aesthetics of the Gilded Age. Visitors are invited to recall an older world that they never knew and thus to participate in a culture of memory that somehow keeps Gardner’s own presence alive. This essay examines a single tessera within the larger whole, a panel of stained glass fragments that were extracted from the ruins of war and preserved by Gardner in her museum. Due to their status as remnants of a medieval programme that is now destroyed, these fragments have generally been understood to have little more than sentimental value. ‘Sentimental value’, however, is not a category of meaning whose significance should be dismissed automatically: the root of sentiment, after all, is a deep desire to remember and to ensure that memory remains coded with the subjective experience of the past. My goal is to reconsider the provenance of the fragments as an integral part of their meaning, their installation as a reflection   The will was published after Gardner’s death in the first Annual Report of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1925). 3   Goldfarb, Companion Guide, pp. 36–7, 115–20; Hendy, Paintings, pp. 219–21, 257–60; General Catalogue, ed. Longstreet, pp. 53, 219–20. 2

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Figure 16.1 Stained glass fragments from Reims Cathedral, France, in the Chinese Loggia, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

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of their significance and their shattered state as the locus of their aesthetic appeal. If tracing this history reveals something nostalgic in character that is part of the point: I wish to assert the status of the keepsake, the souvenir, as the potent repository that preserves ephemeral memory, as the touchstone that breathes life into history long after the individuals who experienced its impact are gone. Cordingly’s Initial Assessment In November 1925, just one year after Gardner’s death, her museum received an inquiry from Arthur C. Watson, assistant curator of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Watson apparently wished to know more about the panel of stained glass fragments that hangs in the Chinese Loggia on the ground floor (Figure 16.1), but the Museum’s knowledgeable director, Morris Carter, was travelling at the time. The request for information was answered by an assistant, W.W. Cordingly, who wrote the following response: Mr Carter is at present abroad. The window at Fenway Court made of glass from Rheims is a small panel, approximately 12 by 20 inches. It was given to Mrs. Gardner in recognition of her generosity in supplying funds to our American Ambulance Corps. I believe the French government took great care to keep all the window fragments that were of any importance, and these pieces are a mere hodge-podge of plain color except for a fragment or two showing parts of faces. As you know, all the French glass has had to be very much restored, and experts who have seen these fragments tell me that a good many of them are of recent date. The whole thing is, therefore, of very little artistic value, and it serves as a mere patch of color set into the modern sash of the so-called Chinese Cloister.4

The dismissive tone of Cordingly’s letter did not necessarily reflect the attitude of the entire museum staff towards the panel and it may well be that Carter would have responded differently. Nevertheless, Cordingly’s brief commentary raises significant questions about these fragments. Cordingly points out that the panel is made primarily of plain pieces of coloured glass, with few representational elements; there is no narrative content and the authenticity of the medieval glass is greatly reduced by the inclusion of nineteenth-century fragments.5 Thus 4   Letter dated 25 November 1925, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. See also: General Catalogue, ed. Longstreet, pp. 55–6; Stained Glass before 1700 in American Collections: New England and New York, ed. Madeline Caviness et al (Washington DC, 1985), p. 44. 5   This last point remains difficult to prove, but it seems likely that the paler green and pink pieces of glass derive from nineteenth-century restoration. See the Gardner Museum conservation files.

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Cordingly’s assessment that the panel is ‘of very little artistic value’ initially seems more or less correct, in the sense that it tells us little or nothing about the issues traditionally raised by those studying medieval art objects, such as style, iconography or workshop practicses. Yet Cordingly’s description also alludes to the role of provenance, memory and association in assessing the value of objects. The knowledge that these fragments were a gift to Gardner evokes the history of the glass pieces, the cathedral where the glass was first broken, the violence that caused the breakage and the larger political, humanitarian and cultural crisis that prompted Gardner’s donations to a group of ambulance drivers. By examining this interpretative context together with the placement of the glass fragments in the palimpsest of the Gardner Museum, it becomes possible to revisit the assessment made by Cordingly in 1925 and contend that there is both an aesthetic dimension and real artistic value in this ‘mere patch of color’.6 Catastrophe and Commemoration The glass fragments at the Gardner Museum were originally from the cathedral of Reims, a small city approximately 75 miles northwest of Paris. Reims had long held enormous political significance for the kingdom of France; the baptism of Clovis is believed to have taken place at Reims in 496 and the city served as the coronation setting for French kings throughout the medieval period. When an older basilica burned to the ground on 6 May 1210 the structure was replaced by an enormous Gothic cathedral that contained some of the finest sculptures and stained glass windows produced in thirteenth-century France.7 By the nineteenth century, a significant portion of the original windows had been broken and later replaced, which may explain why only some of the fragments in the Gardner museum panel are medieval. Nevertheless, the windows had held up fairly well in comparison to those of most other Gothic structures, and many nineteenth-century connoisseurs of medieval art considered the stained glass of Reims cathedral as equal to that of Bourges and Chartres – in other words, among the best-preserved and most beautiful in all of Europe.8   I wish to thank Elizabeth Emery for suggesting another interpretation of Cordingly’s letter: perhaps he understated the significance of the glass to avoid any potential pressure to return the pieces to Reims, where restoration efforts were underway at that time. There is, however, no known mention in the Gardner Museum archives of any suggestions that the glass should be returned to France, leaving the possible ulterior motive in Cordingly’s statement difficult to verify. 7   Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, La cathédrale de Reims: chef-d’oeuvre du gothique (Paris and Arles, 2007); Patrick Demouy, Notre-Dame de Reims: sanctuaire de la monarchie sacrée (Paris, 1995); Hans-Joachim Kunst, Die Kathedrale in Reims: Architektur als Schauplatz politischer Bedeutungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1998). 8   For example, one guide to the cathedral introduced the glass by stating, ‘Disons avant tout que les vitraux de Reims […] peuvent lutter glorieusement avec ce que le Moyen6

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In September 1914, some seven centuries after the medieval conflagration that led to the creation of the Gothic cathedral, heavy bombing by the German forces caused yet another great fire. The building sustained terrible damage: the roof was burnt; the priceless carpets, choir stalls and ornaments were lost; the great rose window was shattered. The cathedral was struck a hundred times in 1915 and 1916 and worst of all, in April 1917 the attacking Germans shelled the wounded building for seven straight hours.9 The complex treasure that had once been one of France’s greatest Gothic monuments was all but destroyed, and Reims became a martyr of the First World War. While the brutality of the cathedral’s destruction remains an extreme instance of the damage to cultural heritage that takes place during times of conflict, the reception of this case in the mass media of its time presents an equally striking example of an architectural icon being used to symbolize the greater losses caused by a catastrophic war. Along with countless photographs, posters and postcards created to commemorate the burning cathedral, many books devoted to the topic of its fate were printed during the war and in the period immediately following. They have pointed titles, including La cathédrale de Reims, livrée aux flammes par les Allemands and Ce qu’était Reims: ce qu’elle est devenue (Figure 16.2).10 Some give stark before-and-after images of the cathedral, inviting the reader to participate as a voyeur of history (Figures 16.3a and 16.3b). What seems common among these publications is the use of the cathedral as a metonym for beauty and civilization, and the presentation of its destruction as a sign of the horrors of war. The outcry over the tragic fate of Reims was not limited to French journalism: the German media was quick to defend its national position, asserting that the French necessitated damage to the cathedral by using it as a strategic base for storing weapons and supplies. Whatever grain of truth may or may not have existed in these claims, and whether or not this justified the savagery of the repeated attacks, it is not difficult to find some measure of sincere remorse among the citizens of Germany at this time: one need only look to the case of German art historian Wilhelm Vöge, whose grief over the tragedy of Reims was so great that it triggered a nervous breakdown and effectively ended his academic career.11 Age nous a laissé de plus parfait.’ V. Tourneur, Description historique et archéologique de Notre-Dame de Reims (6th edn, Reims, 1889), p. 105. 9   Elizabeth Emery, ‘The Martyred Cathedral: American Attitudes toward NotreDame de Reims during the First World War’, in Alyce Jordan and Janet Marquardt (eds), Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2009), pp. 312–39; Nicola Lambourne, ‘Production Versus Destruction: Art, World War I and Art History’, Art History, 22/3 (1999): pp. 347–63; Mythes et Réalités de la Cathédrale de Reims de 1825 à 1975, ed. Sylvie Balcon et al (Paris and Reims, 2001). 10   G. Eyssautier, La cathédrale de Reims, livrée aux flammes par les Allemands (Marseille, 1914); Ce qu’était Reims: ce qu’elle est devenue, ed. Reims-Cathédrale (Reims, 1918). 11   Yan Harlaut, ‘L’incendie de la cathédrale de Reims, 19 septembre 1914: Fait imagé…Fait imagé…’, in Balcon, Mythes et Réalités, pp. 71–9; ‘Germans Regret Rheims’,

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Figure 16.2 Cover of Ce qu’était Reims … Despite their removal, audiences in the United States were also keenly aware of the violent acts of destruction taking place in France and American journalists generally sided with the French in portraying Reims Cathedral as the great cultural victim of the war.12 After the Armistice, Victory magazine published a special edition devoted entirely to Reims and the questions surrounding its postwar restoration (Figure 16.4).13 Here the concept of martyrdom is tied explicitly to Reims, whose west facade is presented on the cover of the magazine with a caption labelling the impressive structure as ‘The Martyr Cathedral’. The title of the magazine has become a large white crown of victory above the towering New York Times, 21 September 1914. For more on Wilhelm Vöge, see Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1996) and Erwin Panofsky, ‘Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir’, The Art Journal, 28/1 (1968): pp. 27–37. 12   For a discussion of the American response to the World War I damage at Reims, see Emery, ‘Martyred Cathedral’. For more on American responses to the war in general, see Robert Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Charlottesville, 2007); Robert Bruce, A Fraternity of Arms: America and France in the Great War (Lawrence, 2003); David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980). 13   The Martyr Cathedral, special edition of Victory Magazine, 1919.

Figure 16.3a Opening from Ce qu’était Reims …, showing Reims Cathedral before it was bombed

Figure 16.3b Opening from Ce qu’était Reims …, showing Reims Cathedral after it was bombed

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structure; the words ‘The New France’ on the upper left of the page herald the Gothic cathedral – in reality a survival from a vanished era, whose relevance in the modern world might best be characterized as historical and antiquarian – as a glorious icon of post-war vitality. The magazine is filled with articles detailing the challenges of reconstruction, including an entry on the problems of reassembling the smashed panels of stained glass, but the exterior presents a triumphant and reassuring image. Perhaps the most appropriate analogy for this disjuncture between the magazine cover and its contents might be a medieval reliquary: while the hidden interior reflects a reality that seems hopelessly fragmented, the pieces are encased within a visible sign of reconstitution and wholeness. Reims cathedral was eventually rebuilt in the decades after the war, effecting the physical resurrection anticipated by the magazine cover.14 But in 1919, the year that the special edition of Victory magazine was published, the wreckage of France and its medieval treasures was still an immediate and distressing topic. While the American print media was presenting the cathedral to their audiences as a Great Martyr of the Great War, small shards of glass from the wreckage carried an emotional charge like that of a martyr’s relics. This powerful aura of destruction would have been particularly apparent to Gardner and the members of her elite social circle, many of whom were frequent visitors to Europe and would eventually become involved in the war effort. To Gardner and her friends the devastation of Europe was an incalculable loss; her museum, in contrast, was increasingly becoming a place where memories of loss could be preserved. The View from Fenway Court When W.W. Cordingly wrote that the glass fragments were given to Gardner as a gift in recognition for her generous support of the American Ambulance Corps, he assumed that his readers would be familiar with this organization. Cordingly therefore does not mention that the American Ambulance Corps had its roots in the American Field Service (AFS), organized in 1914 by A. Piatt Andrew in order to provide ambulance service for the French military during the war, and thus to create a means for young American men to serve in France despite the official neutrality of the United States.15 Andrew and Henry Davis Sleeper, who were in   For the restoration of the stained glass, see Sylvie Balcon, ‘Les vitraux de la cathédrale d’après les documents du fonds à la bibliothèque municipale de Reims’, in Balcon, Mythes et Réalités, pp. 46–55. 15   Arlen Hansen, Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War, August 1914–September 1918 (New York, 1996); George Rock, The History of the American Field Service, 1920–1955 (New York, 1956); History of the American Field Service in France, ‘Friends of France,’ 1914­–1917 (Boston and New York, 1920); Friends of France: the Field Service of the American Ambulance described by its members (Boston, 1916). 14

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Figure 16.4 Cover of The Martyr Cathedral, special edition of Victory Magazine, 1919 charge of the fundraising for this project, were both close friends of Gardner’s and regular visitors to Fenway Court.16 There is much evidence to suggest that Gardner 16   For more on Andrew and Sleeper, see Joseph Garland, Eastern Point: A Nautical, Rustical, and More or Less Sociable Chronicle of Gloucester’s Outer Shield and Inner

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was enthusiastic about the project: she used her museum for fundraising events, persuaded social contacts to donate money and herself gave an ambulance to the AFS cause.17 Andrew and Sleeper also sent a photograph of the ambulance as part of their wartime correspondence from France, showing the letter ‘Y’ painted on its side. ‘Y’ was an affectionate nickname for Gardner among her close friends (referring to ‘Ysabel’, a Spanish spelling of Isabella) and, according to a letter from Andrew, this particular ‘Y’ was placed on the ambulance as an emblem of its patron.18 Despite faraway confinement in her Boston palace, Mrs Jack was glad to play some role on the battlefields of France and it seems likely that a poetic comparison between the letter ‘Y’ on the Gardner ambulance and the chivalric ideal of a knight carrying a lady’s colors into the fray would have pleased all who were involved. Andrew and Sleeper were not the only members of this social circle to play a part in the effort to help the French. Gardner’s correspondence contains letters from many acquaintances in Europe, including Miss Elisina Tyler, who was living in Paris and helping rescue children orphaned by the war. Describing the situation in a letter to Gardner, Tyler writes: Two children were found locked in their dead father’s arms: another was abandoned for five days on a farm. She has a tragic look in her eyes. A class of twelve children were asked to draw a house from memory. Ten out of twelve drew a burning house. I might go on indefinitely with tales as sad. Let us hope these horrors will soon end. Whatever happens, the name of America will be reverenced after this war as none ever was before, because Americans have helped all those who suffered or were in want in every country and in a thousand ways, and they are not forgetful.19

Tyler’s letter twice invokes the role of memory, first in the children recalling the horrors of war, and second in her assertion that the American contribution would not be forgotten. One might suggest that the desire to commemorate the war is already present in this letter; its text is also a powerful reminder that many wealthy Americans saw the battlefields of Europe as a catastrophe to which they were intimately connected. The role played by private American citizens in the defence and reconstruction of France was regarded as a serious obligation by many Sanctum, 1606–1990 (Beverly, 1999), pp. 275–372, especially Chapter 31, ‘The American Field Service’, pp. 339–48. 17   Letters from Sleeper and Andrew, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. 18   In addition to the correspondence from Andrew and Sleeper, the Gardner Museum archives contain a letter dated 8 May 1916 from S. Grey Dayton, the driver of the ambulance donated by Gardner. Dayton begins his letter by stating, ‘As for the last two months I have been driving your car I thought that you might enjoy hearing something of the work that is being done.’ The letter also describes various members of the AFS and their close encounters near the front. 19   Letter dated 13 June 1915, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston.

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members of Gardner’s circles, and they were eager to document their experiences by writing letters to her in Boston. It is more difficult to reconstruct Gardner’s own thoughts during this anxious period, since the museum archives hold only the letters she received and very little that she wrote. Nevertheless, glimpses survive in her guest-books, where she pasted newspaper clippings and other memorabilia alongside the signatures of visitors.20 Two topics dominated these scrapbooks during the period from 1914 to 1918: sports and war. The former went well for Gardner and she diligently saved articles about the victories of the Harvard football team and about her beloved Boston Red Sox winning yet another World Series. But the other topic was more sombre and, together with articles about the German Kaiser and the continuing war, Gardner collected notices about young men from Boston who died in battle. She would later keep her correspondence from the Great War in a separate box, along with books and bulletins about the American Field Service and letters from the parents of fallen soldiers – letters written to thank Gardner for her gifts and her kind notes of sympathy. Morris Carter, the hired assistant who was to become Gardner’s first biographer and the first director of her Museum, would later describe her attitude as follows: She was too intelligent to be deceived by propaganda and too old to shout for sham ideals … She hoped desperately that President Wilson might keep us out of war; the prevalent hysteria exasperated her … She would not be false to her convictions and she could not believe that the war, terrible object lesson that it was, would end war, or make the world safe for democracy.21

The signatures of Carter and his wife appear frequently in the guest-books from the war years and it seems likely that they would have heard strong opinions from Gardner. Yet her aversion to war did not seem to reflect indifference to American involvement overseas – rather, it seems she felt that the American presence should be a peaceful one, bringing aid and relief to the wounded and the orphaned while refraining from direct engagement in armed conflict. Like Morris Carter, A. Piatt Andrew and Henry Davis Sleeper also made regular appearances in the Gardner guest-books during this period, though both were spending a significant amount of time with the American Field Service in Europe. They sent letters to Gardner from the front, reporting the wreckage of France in eloquent detail. In one letter written in late November 1918, Sleeper describes a drive through the countryside. ‘We had an intensely interesting journey over the   Guest-books from 1912–20, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston.   Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner, p. 243. Interestingly, the Gardner Museum Archives contain a copy of the Harvard Lampoon from 19 October 1917 (which included some strong anti-war sentiments) along with a hand-written note to Gardner thanking her for her support of the magazine. Gardner underlined some of the more critical anti-war remarks, which may be understood as a further hint of her political opinions. 20 21

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most devastated area north of Rheims,’ he wrote. ‘We had lunch in the ruins of the chateau at Coucy. You remember it, perhaps, in the old days of its glory.’22 The letters contain many phrases like this, reminding Gardner how many of the monuments she had visited in better days were now destroyed. At the turn of the century she had built Fenway Court using fragments of Venetian palaces torn down due to catastrophic flooding, but now she was 15 years older and far too frail to make similar trips to collect objects in France. Nevertheless, one set of fragments would eventually come to her museum and serve as a potent relic of the war. Recovery, Translation, Installation In January 1919, two months after writing about the lost chateau at Coucy, Henry Davis Sleeper obtained the shards of glass from Reims that now belong to the Gardner Museum. The pieces were given to Sleeper by a young man named Chester Howell from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Howell would later submit the following account of how he came to own the pieces of glass: On various trips during the latter part of May and the early part of June, 1918 … I obtained from among the ruins of the Cathedral [at Reims] a hundred and five fragments of the glass windows … At the period stated there seemed daily probability of the capture of Rheims, and small likelihood of the French being able to save even what little of value still remained in the city … In January 1919, I turned this glass over to Henry D. Sleeper … to bring for me to the United States. In December of 1919, he, at my request, presented this glass to Mrs Gardner, to be installed at Fenway Court, Boston.23

Chester Howell was not the only passer-by to pick up bits of glass, and it is known that soldiers who collected such pieces would sometimes have them set, like gemstones, into souvenir rings.24 But Howell’s position as an ambulance driver, not a soldier, presents a poignant resonance between the act of searching for dead

22   Letter dated 27 November 1918, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. 23   Certificate of Chester A. Howell, dated 7 February 1920 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. 24   This fact is repeated by Ralph Adams Cram in his lectures on Gothic art and its fate during World War I, delivered in 1916–17 and published in 1918. See Ralph Adams Cram, The Substance of Gothic: Six Lectures on the Development of Architecture from Charlemagne to Henry VIII, Given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, in November and December, 1916 (Boston, 1917), pp. 149–50. These lectures have been discussed in Emery, ‘Martyred Cathedral’ and in Douglass Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (2 vols, Amherst, 1995–2005).

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and wounded bodies and that of reclaiming fragments from the torn body of the Gothic cathedral that had itself become both casualty and battleground. Sleeper took the glass to an expert on Bedford Street in Boston and had it placed in a frame, but little is known about the state of the fragments at this point in their history.25 Observing this panel today, the tightness with which the small fragments fit together as one larger mosaic is noticeable, but it remains unclear whether this jigsaw-like assemblage was puzzled together by Howell, Sleeper or the anonymous Bedford Street framer. Sleeper’s letters state that much of the ‘old’ leading holding the glass pieces was preserved; however, it is not known whether this leading was medieval material or nineteenth-century restoration. Thus the artful qualities of the panel, the balance and harmony contained within the chaotic assemblage of coloured pieces, are not firmly attributed to any single hand. Yet even if the arrangement is only the product of chance combined with the good taste of the framer, the final product held visual and sentimental appeal for its viewers in the early twentieth century. Sleeper’s letters to Gardner point out delicately that Howell ‘had several alluring offers for it – but preferred this destiny’ for the collected fragments.26 Sleeper’s statement might well have been somewhat exaggerated to please Gardner, and it is also uncertain whether it was Howell or Sleeper who first decided that the glass should be given to her. But the glass pieces were presented to Gardner as a valuable gift reflecting the gratitude of the ambulance drivers, and this is the spirit in which she accepted them: the precious fragments of the martyr cathedral, collected by a young ambulance driver who turned down offers of money so that he could give the glass as a gift to thank Gardner for her patronage of the American Field Service and its cause. In this light, it is important to note that Chester Howell’s role as an ambassador of the AFS cause was not lost upon Henry Sleeper. Once the glass was installed in the Chinese Loggia in 1920, Sleeper arranged for Howell to come and visit the fragments he had saved. In one letter predating the visit, Sleeper writes to Gardner, ‘I know how proud [Howell] will be – and satisfied. The window is enough – don’t think of troubling for him to see other things.’27 By 1920, Gardner’s health was failing and it seems that Sleeper was being careful not to aggravate her frail condition; Chester Howell most likely visited the fragments of glass without seeing the rest of the museum galleries. However, the portion of the museum that Howell saw is a complex space, among the most emotionally charged of the galleries in Fenway Court. It is not known whether Gardner guided her young visitor through   Certificate written on letterhead of the AFS in France by Henry Davis Sleeper, dated 10 February 1920. Sleeper writes: ‘The one hundred and five fragments of glass were taken by me in December, 1919, to Phipps, Ball & Burnham, 65 Bedford Street, Boston, who supplied only such new leading as was necessary in making the window (21 ½” high x 13 ½” wide), subsequently presented to Gardner, and installed at Fenway Court.’ Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. 26   Undated Letter (1920?), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. 27   Undated Letter (1920?), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. 25

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the contents of the Chinese Loggia, but it remains possible to re-evaluate the significance of inserting the Reims fragments into this particular corner of the carefully constructed frame of the Gardner Museum. The Reims stained glass hangs against a large window that forms much of the exterior wall on the western side of the museum’s ground floor. Beyond the window is a green garden, enclosed by a wall that screens the museum from the outside world. This placement ensures that visitors see the glass with natural sunlight coming through it and with only the quiet solitude of the garden and simple brick wall beyond it. The austere black metal frame of the panel contributes to the relative isolation of the pieces; their bright colour scheme is neatly contained so that there are few distractions from its composition. To the immediate left an elegant fourteenth-century statue of the Virgin and Child stands at three-quarters life size on a small pediment (Figure 16.5).28 Recent scholars doubt that this Parisian-type Madonna is actually medieval, as the style of its carving displays a certain nineteenth-century flair, but for Gardner’s purposes such questions of authenticity seem immaterial. What matters is that the Virgin and Child evoke the sacred space of a French Gothic cathedral, bringing the glass fragments into a context similar to that from which they were removed. Beyond the Madonna is a small chapel-like gallery enclosed by a delicate wrought-iron fence (Figure 16.6).29 Above the visitor’s head (and largely invisible from the exterior of the chapel), Spanish prayers are painted on the walls, together with the words In Memoriam. A large credenza with candlesticks and a lacy cover suggests the function of an altar, with a seventeenth-century Spanish painting of a Madonna and Child in the role of an altarpiece.30 On the floor a fifteenth-century alabaster tomb effigy of a knight completes the effect of a burial chapel.31 It has been noted that the painting, attributed to the school of Francisco de Zurbaran, was particularly beloved by Gardner because of the resemblance between the face of the Christ child and the features of her own son, who died in infancy nearly 40 years before the museum was built. The few photographs that survive of the boy (named after his father and affectionately called ‘Jackie’) confirm that he had large, rounded cheeks and small, dark eyes, much like the child in the painting. This strange similarity, prized by Gardner herself, transformed the quasi-sacred space of the gallery into a memorial resembling a late-medieval funerary chapel. 28   Cornelius Vermeule III, Walter Cahn and Rollin Hadley, Sculpture in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1977), cat. no. 214, p. 168; C. Post, A History of European and American Sculpture (Cambridge, 1921), pp. 69–70; International Studio, LXV (July 1918): p. 9. 29   Goldfarb, Companion Guide, p. 41. For Gardner’s religious beliefs, see Richard Lingner, ‘Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Spiritual Life’, in The Art of the Cross: Medieval and Renaissance Piety in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, ed. Alan Chong et al (Boston, 2001), pp. 29–39. 30   Hendy, Paintings, pp. 303–4. 31   Vermeule et al, Sculpture, cat. no. 179, p. 146.

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Figure 16.5 Chinese Loggia, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Figure 16.6 Spanish Chapel, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

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Nor is the form entirely divorced from function: although this space was never used for burial, Gardner arranged for her own body to be laid in state just outside the chapel after her death in 1924, resting parallel to the Spanish effigy as mourners came to pay one final visit to Boston’s Mrs Jack.32 While the space to the left of the stained glass fragments bears the physical form and emotional charge of a funerary chapel in the western tradition, the area to the right of the panel was once a sacred space inspired by Gardner’s encounters with the East. Never intended for public visibility and no longer extant, the ‘Buddha Room’ that Gardner built in the basement of the museum was once accessible to her from a series of stone steps leading down from the Chinese Loggia. This small subterranean chamber was filled with Asian artworks to evoke an atmosphere of meditation – hence Gardner’s use of the term ‘Buddha Room’ to describe it. Even as the Spanish objects installed on the ground floor bear visible traces of Gardner’s response to the death of her child, so too was the Buddha Room tied to a personal loss. Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese scholar, connoisseur and aesthete who had been a longtime friend of Gardner’s, had passed away in 1913. Gardner, deeply saddened by Okakura’s death, began construction of the Buddha Room in 1914 and filled it with objects associated with her friend.33 Thus the two major renovations that took place at either end of the Chinese Loggia during the period 1914–18 are directly connected to tragedies in Gardner’s life and with the larger themes of memory and loss. Early photographs of the museum taken in the first few years after Gardner’s death show that the area surrounding the Reims fragments once contained a large number of plants, with potted lilies on the window sill of the small chapel and lush green foliage framing the Gothic-style Madonna. Thus the Reims fragments were surrounded by green plants set against the backdrop of a larger outdoor garden. To the right were steps leading down to the Buddha Room, a windowless shrine for private meditation, filled with memories of Okakura Kakuzo. To the left is the small Spanish chapel dedicated to the memory of Gardner’s only child, eventually the site where visitors paid their last respects to Mrs Jack. In the intimate gallery that connected these two sacred spaces, Gardner placed Chester Howell’s fragments of stained glass, the relics of the martyr cathedral, hanging in remembrance of the American Field Service and the heroic efforts of the volunteer ambulance drivers from the United States.

  Gardner, her husband and their child are all interred in the Gardner family mausoleum in Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, just outside Boston. For more on Gardner’s wake, see Lingner, ‘Gardner’s Spiritual Life’, pp. 36–7. 33   For more on Gardner’s friendship with Okakura Kakuzo, see East meets West: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Okakura Kakuzo, ed. Victoria Weston (Boston, 1992). 32

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Fragmentation and the Aesthetics of Loss After tracing the history that surrounds the glass and examining its placement within the painstakingly orchestrated galleries of Fenway Court, there can be no question that these small fragments held great emotional and sentimental value in Gardner’s eyes. What remains is the question of their artistic value and whether the panel can be considered a work of ‘medieval art’ or whether it should be, as Cordingly suggested, dismissed as a ‘mere patch of color’. One answer to this question lies in the aesthetic sensibilities of the Gardner Museum and the role of the fragmentary work of art in Gardner’s installations. Bits of broken sculpture, small swatches of decorative cloth and scraps of architectural ornament are used freely throughout the museum. Although the monumental paintings emerge as the focus of Gardner’s grand galleries, she also collected fragmentary works of all shapes and sizes, displaying them in curio cabinets and as independent works. On the ground floor and particularly in the Chinese Loggia where the Reims glass fragments are displayed, smaller pieces of ancient sculptures form a significant portion of the installations despite their incomplete forms. An aesthetic appreciation of the fragment and the fragmentary can be understood as a lingering enthusiasm for the Romantic tastes of the nineteenth century; indeed, the courtyard of Gardner’s museum artfully arranges broken sculptures and green plants to look something like the overgrown ruins that are glimpsed in classicizing paintings. In the case of Reims, however, the context is not the slow and poetic decline of the ancient world, but rather the calamitous destruction of the recent war. Gardner’s installation of the Reims glass among so many ancient fragments aligns the destruction of the cathedral with the decline of the classical world. Within this aesthetic of loss, each small piece bears meaning not only in itself, but also through its link to some greater thing which has been lost and remains present only through its surviving fragments and the memories associated with them. The suggestion that Gardner acted self-consciously in appropriating the aesthetics of the ruin to display the glass fragments gains force in light of the writings of American scholar Arthur Kingsley Porter, who published an impassioned essay on the wartime destruction of medieval art in October 1917.34 Porter’s article opens with a clear statement that the cathedral of Reims had been not only damaged, but irrevocably lost: The cathedral of Reims is in ruins. We all know it. We have grown accustomed – almost callous – to the fact. The cathedral of Reims, unequaled for its façade and for its wealth of sculpture, is destroyed. We shall nevermore study the wonderful

34   Arthur Kingsley Porter, ‘Gothic Art, the War and After’, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects, October (1917): pp. 485–7.

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glass of the clearstory, with its blazing scarlets and reds, the warmest, the most pulsating, the most daring glasswork in all France.35

In addition to describing the terrible destruction caused by military conflict, Porter argues that the act of restoration must be avoided at all costs, because the work of restoration is ultimately destructive to the work of art. In his statement against restoration, Porter’s writing reveals a sensibility to the aesthetic value of the ruin that harmonizes with his understanding of medieval art: From the point of view of the archeologist, a restoration puts in his hand a falsified document. It is impossible to be certain of what is old, what is restored upon reliable authority, and what is merely conjecture liable to be entirely misleading. The very fact that restorations are generally cleverly done makes it impossible to disentangle the old from the new … Paradoxical as the statement may seem, the better these restorations are, the more deplorable is the archeological result. […] The usual plea for restoration is founded upon the esthetic appeal of a work of art. It is generally felt that the total effect is marred by damaged portions and that the building can be better enjoyed if these are put in harmony with the rest so as not to distract the attention. Yet in point of fact I think even the most tactful modern restoration is quite so pernicious from an artistic as from an archeological point of view. Modern workmen cannot reproduce nor copy Gothic work … Better, a thousand times, a ruin than a restored building. The ruin may have a certain picturesqueness of its own; at any rate it tells no lies … It can not be emphasized too solemnly that restoration of medieval work is destruction of medieval art. […] Let the destroyed monuments of France stand as ruins, but noble, poetic, beautiful ruins, not machine-made, modern churches.36

Porter’s article is valuable for its direct discussion of the aesthetic issues involved in restoration, together with the more commonly addressed issue of authenticity. His praise of the ruin for its picturesque quality brings nineteenth-century Romanticism together with post-war politics. As an admirer of medieval art, Porter is emphatic that the majestic ruins of Reims cathedral should be valued, but not rebuilt. It is difficult to gauge what impact Porter’s article had in France. His work for the French government, documenting the ruins of medieval art and architecture across the country, does not seem to have brought him into conflict with the restoration efforts that began there soon after the war and, while his articles for Scribner’s Magazine retain their elegiac sorrow over the loss of these monuments,   Ibid., p. 485.   Ibid., pp. 486–7. Porter is not alone in his call to let the ruins stand as ruins; see Emery, ‘Martyred Cathedral’ and her comments on ‘To Use Rheims Cathedral as Pantheon for the Allies’, New York Times, 18 June 1917. 35 36

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Porter does not repeat his vehement appeal to let the ruins remain as ruins.37 Nevertheless, it does seem likely that Gardner would have known Porter’s personal opinions first-hand: they moved in similar social circles in Boston, and the single letter from Porter’s wife Lucy that survives in the Gardner Museum archives is written in a warm, familiar tone.38 The last lines of the letter report that the Porters planned to spend the coming summer in the Boston area and close with the inquiry: ‘May we go often to you in your garden?’ It is hard to imagine that, during their visits to Gardner, the Porters would not have discussed their mutual passion for travel and for medieval art.39 And while Porter’s arguments survive in his writings, Gardner’s attitudes are preserved in the collage of her museum, where pieces of lost architectural monuments are set into a building whose seams remain visible, retaining their status as fragments while being integrated into a larger visual whole. Looking to the museum courtyard, which evokes dismantled Venetian palaces without pretending to copy or recreate their exact forms, there is much to suggest that Porter’s ideas about conservation over restoration were not so different from Gardner’s own. Among Porter’s numerous papers and photographs in the Harvard University archives is a striking, undated photogravure from Reims cathedral (Figure 16.7). It shows the sculpted head of a Madonna or a female saint, broken from its original body and resting on a fragment of architectural ornament. The position of the head, gazing mournfully to the side with soft shadows falling across its face, presents the sculpture as precisely the sort of beautiful ruin that is evoked in Porter’s writing. This image showcases the fine quality of thirteenth-century sculpture, but no effort is made to hide the fragmentary nature of the head. Rather, the status of the object as a survival from a larger, now-destroyed sculptural programme is celebrated, lending the photograph its mournful, melancholic quality. The arrangement of the head on its fragmented pedestal can be compared with many installations of broken parts of statues at the Gardner Museum: for example, one ancient Greek or Roman head is similarly perched in the corner of the museum courtyard (Figure 16.8). Like the Gothic head in the photogravure that Porter collected, there is no desire in the display of these pieces to falsely reconstitute the broken original.   Arthur Kingsley Porter, ‘The Field of Art – The Devastated Art of France – I’, Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. LXVI, No. 1 (July 1919): pp. 125–8; Arthur Kingsley Porter, ‘The Field of Art – The Devastated Art of France – II’, Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. LXVI, No. 2 (August 1919): pp. 253–6. 38   Letter dated 28 August (no year given) from Lucy Wallace Porter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. The letter also refers to travels in Italy and Constantinople and to Porter’s appointment at the Sorbonne, indicating the letter was written in 1923 – I thank Kathryn Brush for this information. 39   Architectural historian Kenneth John Conant, whose name appears twice in Gardner’s guest-books before the start of the War, would also publish on this topic. See Kenneth John Conant, ‘A Post-War Impression of the Cathedral at Rheims’, Architecture, 42 (September 1920): pp. 257–60; Guest-books, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. 37

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Figure 16.7 Photogravure of a fragmented female head from Reims, originally from the collection of Arthur Kingsley Porter The sculptures are presented as art objects, whose fragmentary status enhances rather than diminishes their aesthetic impact. The final result, however, is more than merely aesthetic. These objects force viewers to confront the process of fragmentation itself and to remember that the temporal chasm separating the modern world from its distant past has been sadly widened by physical destruction.

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Figure 16.8 View of the Courtyard looking southwest from the North Cloister, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston This attitude towards the fragment and the aesthetics of memory and loss seems to have shaped Gardner’s reception of the Reims panel of glass. In the panel, two more disembodied human faces, again removed from their original context, are recognizable as thirteenth-century craftsmanship. They are surrounded by ‘the wonderful glass’ that Porter described, with its ‘blazing scarlets and reds’. The visual appeal of warm light shining through coloured glass exists in tension with the broken nature of the panel, carrying reminders of war and destruction in the fraught reconstitution of its shattered pieces. This belies W.W. Cordingly’s

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assertion that the glass fragments are of ‘very little artistic value’. Assembled in a riot of intense colours and set against the backdrop of memorials to loss in Gardner’s museum, the artistic value of the glass pieces lies in their potent ability to evoke memories of the martyr cathedral, long after its disastrous loss has been all but forgotten by the modern world.

Index Page numbers of pages on which illustrations appear are set in italics. Aachen 83 absolution 126, 130, 132–3, 137–9 post mortem 138 Abu Ghraib 34, 52 Accursius 164 Achilles 59, 64, 69 n. 47, 72 Acre 62, 65–6, 73–4 Adam, Juliette 282, 283, 285 Adelaide of Maurienne, see France Adelheid, see Russia, Eupraxia/Praxedis Adeliza of Louvain, see England Ælthryth, see England, Emma affective piety 35, 42 Agnès of Harcourt 246, 249, 255 Ailred of Rievaulx 237 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond 145–6, 148–9, 153–4, 156; see also Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers Allirot, Anne-Hélène 8 All Souls, feast of 302, 304–5 Almodis de la Marche 227, 228, 230, 231, 232 alphabetical tables, use of 154–6 Amazons 60–61, 63, 65–6, 71, 75 Penthesilea 63, 65–6 American Ambulance Corps 324, 330; see also American Field Service American Field Service 330–33, 335 Amiens Cathedral 93, 98–100, 102–3, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117 Beau Pilier 113, 114 Saint-Christophe chapel 98, 102 Saint-Jean-Baptiste chapel 102, 113, 116–17

Saint-Jean-l’Evangeliste chapel 102, 113, 116–17 Saint-Lambert chapel 102 Saint-Louis chapel 102–103 Saint-Nicolas chapel 102–3, 110, 112 Sainte-Agnès chapel 102 Sainte-Marguerite chapel 102, 105, 110 anathema 120–21, 125, 131–2, 135 Andrea Agnellus 27, 30, 31 Andrew, A. Piatt 330–33 Anjou Geoffrey (d. 1151) 225, 234 Hamelin, see Warenne Henry, see England, Henry II William 234 Anna of Kiev, see France Antioch Bohemund I 239 Apulia Robert Guiscard 240 Roger Borsa 221, 232, 238–41 William 221–2 Aquitaine Adela 223 Eleanor 227, 228, 230, 231 Guy Geoffrey/William 224 Aragon Ramon Alfonso/Alfonso II 224 archives 282, 289, 297 Aristotle 17 Arnulf of Montgomery 236 Assmann, Aleida 300 Assmann, Jan 4, 16, 17, 18, 300 Audin, Maurice 15 Augustine of Hippo, saint 17, 286 Confessions 42 Aumale Adelaide I 226, 230–31, 235–6 Adelaide II 227, 230–31, 235–6 Bertha 235

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Enguerrand 227, 235 Etienne 227, 235–6 Guerenfridus 235 Judith 230, 235–6 Lambert of Lens 227 Odo of Champagne 227, 235 avoidance 130, 132 Balzac, Honoré de Contes drolatiques 283, 286, 288, 295 Barbie, Klaus 16 Barcelona Ramon Berengar I 227, 232 Bavaria Welf IV 226 Bede, the Venerable 30 Bédier, Joseph 200–201 Bellême Ada, see Warenne Belting, Hans 24 Benedict of Nursia 86 Benoît de Sainte-Maure 58–61, 67, 71–2, 75 Roman de Troie 55, 57–61, 66–76 biwa-hoshi 213, 215–16 Blanche, duchess of Austria 256–7 Blanche of Castile 254 Blanche of Cerda 248, 251–2, 254–5 Blanche of France 250, 252, 254–5 Blavet, Emile (also known as Parisis) 280, 282, 285–6, 288, 293 Bloch, Marc 13 Blois William, see Warenne, William IV Bologna 23 Bonaventure 274–5 Boniface VIII, pope (1294–1303) 265 Book of Life, the 80–81, 120, 126–9 Books of Hours 38, 41, 42, 46 Hours of Etienne Chevalier 39, 40 Hours of Jeanne of Evreux 44 Boulogne Eustace II 230 Brand, Anno 17 Brescia 79 Burguière André 13 burial 133–5, 138 Butz, Eva-Maria 6

candles 125–7 canonization proceedings 266 Capetians court of 270–73 dynasty 60, 67–8, 71–2, 73–6 Trojan ancestry of 60 Caro Baroja, Julio 214–15 Carruthers, Mary 3, 19, 33, 144, 155 Carter, Morris 324, 333 Cassirer, Ernst 16 Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles 288 chansons de geste, see Old French, epic poetry chaplaincy 95–8, 102–3 Charlemagne, emperor (800–814) 81, 86, 88–91 descent from 223 Charles the Bald 85, 88 Charles V, king of France (1364–80) 113, 114, 116 Charles Martel 82, 88 Chlodwig 92 Chlothar 92 Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) 148 Cistercians 266–9 Clanchy, Michael 2–3, 13 Clare, saint 244, 247, 249 order of 244 Clement IV, pope (1265–68) 250 Cluny abbey of 9, 301–20 abbey church of 301, 302 Abbot Hugh, see Hugh, saint, abbot of Cluny Abbot Odilo, see Odilo, saint, abbot of Cluny Abbot Odo, see Odo, saint, abbot of Cluny Congrès 308, 314, 316–17, 320 jubilee 299, 304–8 millennial anniversary 308, 314, 317, 320 order of 301, 314 town of 9, 299–320 commemoration 2, 6, 21, 79–92, 93–118, 299–320 liturgical 8–9, 261–76 ritual and 7

Index and women 8–9 Commines, Philippe de 285 Mémoires 283, 295–6 Compiègne Saint-Corneille, collegiate church of 121, 125 n. 36 Conant, Kenneth 314–17, 319–20 Conseil à un ami, see coutumiers (custumals) contagion 130–31 conversion 31 coronation liturgy 270 corpse 133–6, 138 Coucy 333 coutumiers (custumals) 170–74, 176 Conseil à un ami 170, 178 Etablissements de Saint Louis 170 Livre de Jostice et de Plet 170, 171 n. 27, 178 Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis 170, 171 n. 27, 172, 173, 178 crusade 274–6 curse, cursing 120, 121, 124–6, 130 Curtius, Ernst Robert 202, 203 n. 29 damnatio memoriae 25, 31, 128 Dares Phrygius 56 n. 6, 60 De Excidio Troiae Historiae 58 Darley, Derbyshire 127 David, Old Testament king 269–72 decapitation and gender 36–8 and castration anxiety 49–52 and status 47–9 Delisle, Léopold 314 Denmark Cnut IV 221, 230, 238–40 De universo, see Hrabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis Deuteronomy 124, 134 Diderot, Denis 145–6, 150–51; see also Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers Didron, Adolphe Napoléon 161 Doležalová, Lucie 4 Domesday Book 13

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Dominican Order 35, 41, 43–4, 47, 49, 152, 154, 159–60 donor 99, 101–7, 110, 113 Doquang, Mailan S. 5, 6 Doré, Gustave 286, 295 Drogo 88 Duggan, Joseph J. 198 n. 14, 203 n. 31, 207 n. 39, 212 n. 61, 215–16 Durkheim, Emile 18 Dyctis Cretensis 58 De Ephemeri Belli Troiano 58 Easton, Martha 6 effigy 108–10, 117 ekphrasis 34 Elizabeth of Thuringia, Psalter of 20 Emery, Elizabeth 9 Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers 145–6, 148–52, 153–4, 156, 161 England Æthelred 229 Adeliza of Louvain 225, 228, 233, 234 Cnut 229 Emma 223, 229 Gunhild 223 Harold 225 Harthacnut 229 Henry I 225, 228 Henry II 227, 234, 237 Henry III 229, 234 Isabelle of Angoulême 225, 229 John 229 Matilda II 237 Matilda, empress 225, 228, 232, 234 Stephen 226, 238 William the Conqueror 236, 240 William Rufus 236 Enlightenment 146, 148–52, 160 epic poetry, see Old French, epic poetry epitaph 109–10, 117 Ermintruda 85, 88 Etablissements de Saint Louis, see coutumiers (custumals) Eucharist 2 Eudeline, alleged biological daughter of King Louis X of France 254–5 Evans, Joan 317

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excommunicants 120–22, 124–7, 129–39 excommunication 120–35, 137–9 ritual excommunication 119–23, 126, 129, 139 term of 121 elements of 123–6 execution 36, 39, 42, 47, 49; see also decapitation exempla 129–34, 138–9 fabric committee 96, 99, 100–102 Febvre, Lucien 13 Fentress, James 4 Fenway Court, see Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum feud 122 Flanders 60, 62, 66, 74 Adela (d. 1079) 223, 225 Adela (d. 1115) 221–2, 230, 232 238–41 Baldwin V 223 Charles the Good 221, 230, 238–9, 240 Constance 226, 228 counts of 60 Judith 225, 230, 233 Louis VII 227 Matilda (d. 1085) 223 Matilda, see Portugal, Theresia Philip 224, 226 Robert II 239 forgetting 3, 6–7, 119–21, 126–8, 134, 139 formes fixes 183, 184; see also lay formularies, formulas 120–21, 123–8, 130, 133–4, 139 foundation, see chaplaincy Fozi, Shirin 9–10 France Adelaide of Maurienne 225, 232 Anna of Kiev 225, 232 Constance 239 Constance [of Toulouse] 226, 232, 233 Emma 231 Gerloc, see Aquitaine, Adela Old France 279, 282 Franklin-Brown, Mary 7 Francis, saint 250, 263, 273–6 Franciscans 263, 273–5

Frederick Barbarossa, emperor (1155–90) 21 Frère Laurent, confessor of King Philip III of France 43–4 La Somme le Roi 43 Fried, Johannes 17 Frońska, Joanna 7 funeral 96, 105, 108–9 Galien of Pisa 247, 259 Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia 5, 8–9 Gardner, Isabella Stewart 321–43; see also Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Geary, Patrick 3, 16, 83 Geoffrey of Beaulieu, OP 251, 264 Gerard of Cambrai 20 Germany Henry V 233 gestures 125–7 ghosts 19 Giovanni d’Andrea 23 Giovanni da Legnano 23 glossa ordinaria, see Accursius Goody, Jack 16 Gothic art and architecture 280–82, 286, 288, 289, 291, 293, 297 stained glass 297 Grandes Chroniques de France 43, 67; see also Capetians, dynasty, Trojan ancestry of Gratian 123 Decretum 121 n. 11, 132 Gregory the Great 20 Gregory VII, pope (1073–85) 240, 301 Gregory X, pope (1271–76) 264 Guibert of Tournai, OFM 259, 272 Guillaume de Mâcon, bishop of Amiens 102, 105, 110, 111, 116 Guillaume of Saint-Pathus 248, 251 Guntramnus, king of Burgundy 86, 88–90 hagiography 136 Halbwachs, Maurice 4, 14, 16, 17, 18, 299 Hector 61, 64–8, 71–5 Helen of Troy 68 heraldry 109–10, 116 heresy, heretics 38, 130–31

Index Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César 55, 57, 59–66, 69–76 Historia Welforum 21, 22 history creation of modern memories to replace 295 medieval understanding of 156–9 ‘true’ history 292–3, 295 Holderness, honour of 236 Hrabanus Maurus 7, 145–8, 152 De rerum naturis 145–8, 152, 161 Hugh, saint, abbot of Cluny 311, 314 Hugh of Saint-Victor 155–6, 169 Hughes, Andrew 271 Hugo, Victor influence of Notre-Dame de Paris 283, 289, 294–5 Huntington Library Legenda aurea 36–7, 43–4, 47–53 repetition of martyrdom scenes in 41 repetition of decapitation scenes in 38, 49, 51 Huot, Sylvia 209 iconoclasm 44–6 Ilias Latina 56 n. 6, 58 n. 8 imagines mortuorum 21 incorruptibility 135–6 Innocent IV, pope (1243–54) 310 inscription 101–2, 104–7, 109–10, 113, 116 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 9, 321–43; see also Gardner, Isabella Stewart Isabelle of Angoulême, see England Isabelle, queen of England, daughter of King Philip IV of France 257–8 Isabelle of France 8, 244–9, 251–2, 254–5, 257–9 Isabelle, queen of Navarre 247–8 Isabelle of Valois 255 Italy Adelaide 231 Jacobus de Voragine Legenda aurea 33, 35–6, 41, 43, 49 Jakobi, Franz-Josef 87, 91 Jan Gossaert (Mabuse) 24–5, 26 Jan van Eyck 24

349

Jaser, Christian 5, 6–7 Jason and the Argonauts 59, 65–6, 68, 71, 75 Jean II, count of Dreux 257 Jean de la Grange, bishop of Amiens 102, 113, 116–17 Jean de Jandun 93, 118 Jean de Joinville 247, 261–2, 265 Jeanne of Bourgogne, wife of King Philip V of France 250, 255, 256 Jeanne of Bourgogne, wife of King Philip VI of France 257 Jeanne of Evreux 255–6; see also Books of Hours, Hours of Jeanne of Evreux Jeanne of Gueux 249, 254, 256–7 Jeanne of Navarre, granddaughter of King Louis X of France 252, 255 Jeanne of Navarre, wife of King Philip IV of France 248, 252, 256–7 Jeanne of Vitry 249, 255 John XXII, pope (1316–34) 255 jongleur 195, 198, 201–3, 206–7, 209–11, 213–16 Joutard, Philippe 14 Jumièges, monastery of 126 Justinian (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus) 26, 27, 163, 164, 170, 172, 175, 176 Corpus iuris civilis 176 Digestum vetus 7, 163, 164, 165 n. 9 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane 21 Kórnik Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences, ms. 824 (Kórnik Digest) 163–79 Kunigunde, see England, Gunhild Lambert of Lens, see Aumale Laon Cathedral 93, 95, 98, 103 Lavisse, Ernest 301 lay 183, 184 Leclercq, Jean 268 Lefebvre, Georges 299 Le Goff, Jacques 14, 15, 262 Lelong, Chloé 217 n. 79 leprosy 131

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Levy, John F. 8 Lévy-Strauss, Claude 16 libri memoriales 79–92 lieu de mémoire 144, 151–2, 159–61, 261 liminality 120, 129–30 Limoges Saint Martial, abbey of 127 synod of (1031) 135 Lindisfarne, monastery of 79 litanies 20, 30 liturgy 261–76; see also commemoration, liturgical Exultemus omnes 265–6 Francorum rex magnificus 265, 273–5 Lauda celestis 265, 266–9 Ludovicus decus regnantium 265, 270–73, 276 Nunc laudare 265, 270, 271, 272 Sanctus voluntatem 265 Livre de Jostice et de Plet, see coutumiers (custumals) Lobrichon, Guy 300 loci memoriae 147, 151, 161 Longchamp, abbey of 8, 243–60 Lord, Albert B. 199, 203, 212, 214–16 oral (formulaic) composition 199, 203, 212, 215 Loti, Pierre (pseudonym of Julien Viaud) 9, 279–97 medieval dinner of (1888) 279–97 Louis VII, king of France (1137–80) 227, 231 Louis VIII, king of France (1223–26) 245, 247, 255 Louis IX, king of France (1226–70) and saint 8–9, 44, 67, 71, 116, 261–76, 244–52, 255, 258–9, 310, 313, 319 canonization of 265 Louis XI, king of France (1461–83) 279, 282, 284–5, 288 n. 22, 292–3, 295 Pierre Loti’s ‘Louis XI dinner’ (1888) 279–97 Louis the Pious, emperor (813–40) 81–3, 85 Lourcine, abbey of 8, 243–60 Lourdes 303–4, 307 Lusignan Uc/Hugh 227

Luxeuil, monastery of 84, 89 Lyon, Second Council of (1274) 97 Lyre, monastery of 126 Mabuse, see Jan Gossaert (Mabuse) Machaut, Guillaume de 181 n. 2, 183–4, 185, 187–8, 189–90 manuscripts Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr 1584 (A) 182 n. 2, 184–5, 188, 190–92 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr 1586 (C) 182 n. 2, 183–4 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr 9221 (E) 182 n. 2, 185–6, 188 n. 16, 190, 191–2 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr 22545–6 (F–G) 182 n. 2, 185, 186, 188, 190–92 Remede de Fortune 7–8, 181, 183–4, 185, 187, 188, 190, 192; see also manuscript presentation, Remede de Fortune anagram 184, 185 Guillaume 183, 184, 185 Hope 182, 184 music 185, 186 Voir Dit 7–8, 181, 182 n. 2, 187–92; see also manuscript presentation, Voir Dit anagram 188, 191 n. 22 Guillaume 187–8, 189 Guillaume’s secretary 189, 190, 192 Toute Belle 187, 188–9, 190, 192 n. 24 music 187, 188–9, 191 McKitterick, Rosamond 83 Mâle, Emile 161 manuscript presentation music 186–7, 190–91, 192 Remede de Fortune 184–6, 190, 192–3 Voir Dit 190–91, 192–3 manuscript transmission 182, 183, 187, 189, 190–91, 192 Marche, Olivier de la Mémoires sur la maison de Bourgogne 283 Margaret, saint 237

Index marginalia 163, 165–6 Marguerite de Provence 8, 246, 248, 250–52, 254–5, 259 Marie, Adrien 279, 285, 293 Marie of Brabant 248, 252, 256 Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, Philippe de 160 Marquardt, Janet T. 9 martyrdom and gender eroticism 49–52 and the theatrical 39, 42 as visual index 46–7 Mass 95–9, 103–4, 107, 109, 118 Mathieu, chaplain of King Louis IX of France 245–6 matière 75–6 matière de Troie 57–8 Mauss, Marcel 18 Maxwell, Kate 7–8 medieval artefacts 289, 292 as ‘souvenirs’ of the Middle Ages 289, 291, 296 memento mori 24, 25 memorialization 33–53 memorials 10, 33, 34–5, 304 Vietnam Memorial 34, 46 memorization 186 n. 10, 188–9, 192 mnemonic practices and techniques 33–6, 41–2, 44, 49, 57, 59, 75–6 memory 2, 182–3, 184–5, 186, 187, 190, 191–2, 193 archival 296 collective 4–5, 9, 17, 18, 295, 299–300 creation of memories 286, 289, 293–7 cultural 296, 300 fallibility of 3, 295–6 familial 8 genealogical 21 and history 292–3, 295–6 and images 6 and imagination 9, 311 individual 4–5, 17, 18 intellectual art of 1, 2, 3, 17, 19, 29 living 296 and reading 163–79 the senses and 286 ‘working mempry’ 296, 300

351

mental images, see phantasmata Le Mesnagier de Paris 288 Michel du Bec 102, 105–6 mise en page, see manuscript presentation; page layout Mitterrand, François 318–20 Monnet, Pierre 17 Morgan Picture Bible 67, 73–4 music 182, 186; see also formes fixes; manuscript presentation, Remede de Fortune; Machaut, Guillaume de, Voir Dit neumes 19, 20 Niccolò da Verona 8, 195–217 Nicholas of Lyre 253 Nora, Pierre 3, 14, 15, 144, 151, 156–8, 261, 300 Normandy Emma, see England Richard II 229, 235 Robert Curthose 236 oblivion 17, 32; see also forgetting Odilo, saint, abbot of Cluny 302, 307, 314, 317 Odo of Champagne, see Aumale Odo, saint, abbot of Cluny 314, 317 Oexle, Otto Gerhard 17 Old French epic poetry chansons de geste 195–217 German (Frankish) versus French origins of 200–201 nineteenth-century vogue for imitating 279, 282–3, 286, 285, 291 Old Testament typology 269–73 Orientalism 280, 291, 296 Oswald, saint 234 page layout 186, 192 pain 33, 39, 41, 42, 44, 52 Paray-le-Monial 303–5, 307, 320 Paris 62–3, 67–8, 93, 94, 95, 97–103, 105–10, 113, 116–17 Ecole des Chartes 282 Musée de Cluny 282

352

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Notre-Dame 93, 94, 95, 99–101, 103, 105–8, 110 Saint-Marcel chapel 97, 101 Saint-Michel chapel 105 Saint-Nicaise chapel 101, 106–8 Saint-Rigobert chapel 101, 103 Palais de la Cité 116 Sainte-Chapelle 244 Saint Germain des Prés, abbey of 265 Parisis, see Blavet, Emile Parisot, Valentin 160–61 Parry, Milman, see Lord, Albert B. Pascal II, pope (1099–1118) 238 Passion of Christ 42, 52 penance 126, 129, 138 performance 182, 187 re-enacting, reliving or resurrecting the Middle Ages through 279–90 theatre 289 Perraud, cardinal, bishop of Autun, Chalons and Mâcon 302, 303–5 Pfäfers 79 phantasmata (mental images) 56–7 Philip II Augustus, king of France (1180–1223) 60 Philip III, king of France (1270–85) 43–4, 49 Philip IV, ‘the Fair’, king of France (1285–1314) 265 Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, see coutumiers (custumals) Picardy 62, 64 Picture Book of Madame Marie 44, 45, 46 pilgrimage 299, 301, 303–4, 308, 320; see also Lourdes; Paray-le-Monial pittura infamante 25 Plato 17 pontifical, Romano-Germanic 123, 127 Porter, Arthur Kingsley 339–42 portraits 21, 24, 102, 104–5, 109–10 Portugal Theresia 223–4, 226 postcards 311, 313 Psalms 124, 126–7 punishment and criminals 38–9, 49, 52 and pedagogy 39, 41

Purgatory 95–8, 101, 118 Quintilian 166, 168, 169 Ravenna 1, 13, 26, 27, 28, 29–32 Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, church of 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32 Rayonnant 93, 95–6, 103, 118 reading practices 56–7, 59, 75–6, 163–79 silent reading 35, 42–3 Regino of Prüm 123, 125–6, 133–4 Reichenau, abbey of 80–82 Reims Cathedral 9–10, 325–30 stained glass of 324–43 and First World War 326–30 Remensnyder, Amy 4–5 Remiremont, nunnery of 80–92 Adelphius, abbot of 84 Amatus, abbot of 84 Imma, abbess of 84 liber memorialis of 87, 89, 90 Romarich, founder of 84, 90 Theothild, abbess of 81–2, 84–5 Renaissance 146, 148–9, 160 revenants 135–9 rhetoric 148 Rhetorica ad Herennium 41 Richard de Fournival 55–6, 58 n. 8, 76 Bestiaire d’Amours 55–6, 61 parole and painture 55–6, 76 rites of passage 129–30, 134, 136 ritual, see commemoration, ritual and Robida, Albert 286, 291 Rochester, bishopric of 126 Rodríguez Porto, Rosa María 6 Roger de Lille 59, 62 romans d’antiquité/romans antiques 58–9, 76 n. 68, 78; see also Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie Roman d’Alexandre 58, 60, 69 Roman de Thèbes 58, 60 Rouen Cathedral 93, 99–101, 104–5 Rouse, Richard and Mary, 154 Rupert of Deutz 20 Russia Eupraxia/Praxedis 223 Rutledge, Eric 213, 216 n. 78

Index sacral kingship 270–73 Saint Bertin, abbey of 125–6 Saint Denis, abbey of 22, 244, 258, 264–6 Saint Gall 79–80 Salis, Rodolphe as publicist of archaic French 283 Salzburg 80 satisfaction 126, 129, 138 Schmidt, Karl 17, 85 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 6 Scotland David I 237 Henry 238 Malcolm III 237 Margaret, see Margaret, saint Scott, Sir Walter 282, 295 sculpture 104, 106–7, 110, 113, 116 secular illuminated books 56, 61–76 Senlis Maud 237 Saint Fraumbourg, priory of 127 Simon I 237 Sens, bishopric of 126 Sicily Roger I 239 signature acrostics in Boccaccio’s Visione Amorosa 208–10, 215 history of 208–9 Simmel, Georg 18 Simon de Brie 264 Simon Matifas de Bucy 97, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108–9 Simpson, Otto von 29 Sleeper, Henry Davis 330–35 Société des Anciens Textes Français 283 Société des Bibliophiles François 283, 288 Solomon, Old Testament king 269, 271–2 Souëf, Charles 282 Speculum maius, see Vincent of Beauvais speech acts 124, 130, 132, 138 Spiegel, Gabrielle 267, 269 stained glass 9–10, 102, 104–6, 110, 116; see also Gothic art and architecture, stained glass; Reims Cathedral, stained glass of statue 102, 106–7, 110, 113, 116 Staub, Martial 17

353

Stephen of Bourbon 131–3 Stock, Brian 264 suffrage 96–8, 104–5, 117 Tertullian De spectaculis 43 ‘thesaurus’ 144, 152 Theodoric, king of the Goths (493–544) 26, 27, 31 Thomas Aquinas, saint 35 Ad Herennium 41–2 Summa theologica 44 tomb 107–10, 117 torture 33–53 Tostig, earl of Northumbria 225 Toulouse Constance [of Toulouse], see France Guilhelm IV 231 Pons 227, 231 Raymond V 226 Touvier, Paul 16 translatio imperii et studii 60 Troilus 59, 68 Troy 55‒7, 60‒61, 63, 65‒8, 71 tourism 301, 303–4, 314, 320 Ulysses 67 Urban II, pope (1088–99) 240 Urban IV, pope (1261–64) 246 van Houts, Elisabeth 5, 8 Vermandois Adela 234 Hugh 234 Isabel/Elisabeth, see Warenne Odo 234 Vézelay 300–301 Viaud, Julien, see Loti, Pierre Vietnam Memorial, see memorials Villon, François 283 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel 292 Vincent of Beauvais 143–6, 152–61 Speculum maius 7, 143–6, 152–61 Virgin and Child 108–9, 113, 117 Virgin Mary 243 Vöge, Wilhelm 326 voyeurism 39, 51–2

354

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Waldef, saint, abbot of Melrose 237–8 Waltheof, earl of Northumbria 230–31, 235, 236–7 Warburg, Aby 16, 18 Warenne Ada 232 Gundrada 235 Hamelin 234–5 Isabel 232, 234 Isabel/Elisabeth 231, 234 William I 235 William II 234 William III 232 William IV 234

Weingarten, abbey of 226, 233 Westminster, abbey of 22 Wickham, Chris 4 Winchester 79 Wollasch, Joachim 17 Wooden Horse, the 61 n. 25, 69, 71–2 World’s Fairs 291 displays dedicated to foreign cultures 291 displays dedicated to medieval life 291 Yates, Frances 2, 19, 144 Zettler, Alfons 6