Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays (The New Middle Ages)

THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studie...

Author: Lawrence Besserman

12 downloads 3114 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses.This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly

Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho

The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone

Engaging Words:The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Amtower

Presence and Presentation:Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition by Sherry J. Mou

Robes and Honor:The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon

The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews

Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose

Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W. Rosemann

Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn

For Her Good Estate:The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller Listening to Heloise:The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff Listen, Daughter:The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr.

The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges

Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt

The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren

The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick

Charlemagne’s Mustache:And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects,Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl

Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson Medievalism and Orientalism:Three Essays on Literature,Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska Roberts Performing Women: Sex, Gender and the Medieval Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios Necessary Conjunctions:The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams,Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Capetian Women edited by Kathleen Nolan

False Fables and Exemplary Truth: Poetics and Reception of a Medieval Mode by Elizabeth Allen

Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W.Astell and Bonnie Wheeler

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman

SACRED AND SECULAR IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURES NEW ESSAYS

Edited by Lawrence Besserman

SACRED AND SECULAR IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURES

© Lawrence Besserman, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6732–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sacred and secular in medieval and early modern cultures : new essays / [edited] by Lawrence Besserman. p. cm—(New Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6732–6 (alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Medieval. 2. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 3. Secularism in literature. 4. Holy, The, in literature. 5. Christianity in literature. 6. Church and state—Europe—History— To 1500. I. Besserman, Lawrence L., 1945– II. New Middle Ages (Palgrave (Firm)) CB353.S155 2005 940.1—dc22

2005048705

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Judy

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Acknowledgments Preface

ix xiii xv

Introduction Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: Issues and Approaches Lawrence Besserman

1

Part I Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Lyric, Narrative, and Drama 1.

2.

The Imitation of Hagiographic Formulas in Occitanian Vidas (Lives of the Troubadours) Cyril Aslanov

19

“Quid Hinieldus Cum Christo?”:The Secular Expression of the Sacred in Old and Middle English Lyrics Thomas G. Duncan

29

3.

Reading Radical Metonymy in Pearl Alan J. Fletcher

4.

Purchasing Pardon: Material and Spiritual Economies on the Canterbury Pilgrimage Alastair Minnis

5.

Sacred and Secular in The Merchant of Venice Murray Roston

47

63 83

viii

CONTENTS

Part II Medieval and Early Modern History: Church and State 6.

The Communal Body, the Corporate Body, and the Clerical Body:An Anthropological Reading of the Gregorian Reform Lior Barshack

101

7.

Sacred, Secular, and Impure: The Contextuality of Sensations Esther Cohen

8.

Secular and Sacred:The History of Rhetoric and Religious Community in the Middle Ages Rita Copeland

135

Sacred Authority and Secular Power:The Historical Argument of the Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensis Robert M. Stein

149

9.

10.

The Space of the Altar Miri Rubin

123

167

Notes

177

Index

227

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Cyril Aslanov is Associate Professor of French Language and Literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published a study of André Chouraqui’s translation of the Bible (Pour comprendre la Bible: la leçon d’André Chouraqui, Monaco, Editions du Rocher, 1999) and a monograph on the fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish lexicographer Joseph Kaspi (Le provençal des Juifs et l’hebreu en Provençe: le dictionnaire Sharshot ha-Kesef de Joseph Caspi, Paris-Leuven: Peeters, 2001). Lior Barshack is a senior lecturer in legal and social theory at the Radzyner School of Law in the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. He has written many articles on the place of legal rituals and fictions in civil religion. He is currently working on a book on civil religion and editing together with Peter Goodrich and Anton Schutz a collection of essays on the work of Pierre Legendre. Lawrence Besserman is Professor of English at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has taught at Harvard, New York University, and Columbia. His publications include The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 1978), Chaucer and the Bible (New York, 1988), and Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics (Norman, OK, 1998). He has also edited The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York, 1996); and he is the general editor of the first anthology of European medieval literature in Hebrew translation, An Anthology of Medieval Literature (Tel Aviv: Dvir-The Israel Council for Translation of the Classics, 1991). Esther Cohen is Professor of Medieval History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her publications include The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Society in Late Medieval France (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993); Peaceable Domain, Certain Justice:Crime and Society in Fifteenth-Century Paris (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996); and “The Animated Pain of the Body,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), 36–68. Rita Copeland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include Rhetoric, Hermeneutics,

x


and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1991–95), Criticism and Dissent (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her current work is focusing on medieval intellectual biography and the history of rhetoric. Thomas Gibson Duncan was educated at Glasgow University and Pembroke College, Oxford. He tutored at Oxford and was Assistant Lecturer in English Language at Manchester University before returning to Scotland as Lecturer in English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of St. Andrews. He is now an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the University School of English. His publications include two volumes of Middle English lyrics, Medieval English Lyrics: 1200–1400 (1995) and Late Medieval English Lyrics and Carols: 1400–1530 (2000), and (with Dr. Margaret Connolly) the first volume of an edition of the hitherto unpublished Middle English Mirror: Sermons from Advent to Sexagesima (2003). The year 2005 should see the publication of A Companion to the Middle English Lyric. Alan J. Fletcher teaches and researches late medieval and early Renaissance texts at Trinity College, Dublin. His publications include studies of Old and Middle English writings, and of medieval and early Renaissance drama, especially in its Irish dimension. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Alastair Minnis, Distinguished Humanities Professor at Ohio State University, formerly taught at the Universities of York and Bristol, and The Queen’s University of Belfast. His publications include Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (1984, revised ed. 1988);The Oxford Guides to Chaucer:The Shorter Poems (1995, rpt. 2000); and Magister Amoris: The “Roman de la Rose” and Vernacular Hermeneutics (2001). Currently he is completing a monograph entitled, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath. Murray Roston holds a dual professorship, at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and at the University of California at Los Angeles. His main research has been placing literature in the context of changing contemporary movements in painting, architecture, and sculpture. His recent books include: Victorian Contexts: Literature and the Visual Arts (New York University Press, 1997), Modernist Patterns: In Literature and the Visual Arts (New York University Press, 2000), and The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature (Palgrave Press, 2001). Miri Rubin is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary college—University of London. She is the author of several books and articles, including Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture


xi

(Cambridge, 1991) and Gentile Tales:The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (London and New Haven, 1999). Her latest book is The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Britain, 10) (London: Penguin Books, 2005). She is currently researching the figure of Mary in Christian cultures. Robert M. Stein is Associate Professor of Literature at Purchase College, SUNY and Adjunct Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Along with Sandra Pierson Prior he is the editor of Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). His most recent book, Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority 1025–1180 will appear in spring 2006, from University of Notre Dame Press.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

he essays gathered in this volume are, with two exceptions (Minnis and Stein), the fruit of a two-year faculty-student interdisciplinary seminar and two conferences on the theme of “The Sacred and the Secular: Conflict, Convergence, Coexistence,” held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from October 2000 to June 2002. I am grateful to the president of the Hebrew University, Professor Menachem Magidor, for the funding he provided from the Ring Fund, to enable the faculty–student interdisciplinary graduate seminar to take place. I am also grateful to the Academic Committee of the Center for Literary Studies and to the Center’s founding director, Professor Sanford Budick, for sponsoring conferences on the theme of the seminar in June 2001 and June 2002. Further support was provided by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 902/03). Two research assistants,Anna Narinsky and Victoria Prilutsky, helped along the way with myriad organizational and bibliographical details. Evelyn Grossberg did the initial copyediting of the entire manuscript with care and good commonsense. The following people at Palgrave have been most helpful and efficient: Bonnie Wheeler, academic editor of the New Middle Ages Series; Farideh Koohi-Kamali, in-house editor of the series; Lynn Vande Stouwe, the editor who actually shepherded the book from manuscript to print; Will Fain, Production Assistant; and Maran Elancheran and the rest of the outstanding team at Newgen Imaging Systems, Chennai, India, who provided major help with the Index and did an excellent job of producing the entire book. My greatest debt is too elliptically expressed on the dedication page. My wife, Judy Besserman, helped to iron out all the details in the planning and smooth running of the two conferences mentioned above, and her editorial labors have improved my contribution to the volume considerably.

T


PREFACE

estern concepts and concrete manifestations of the sacred and the secular have always been fluid and complex. For an early and particularly striking instance of cross-pollination between secular and sacred realms, consider the fate of the word suffragium in Roman and Late-Antique political and ecclesiastical history.1 During the Roman Republic, in the secular sphere, the word suffragium meant ‘the vote of free people’; but then, by the end of the second century CE, it came to mean ‘the influence or patronage of a powerful man’; and finally, by the end of the fifth century, it had come to mean to ‘bribe’ (i.e., that which buys the influence of one’s powerful patron). Similarly, in a parallel series of developments in the sacred sphere, suffragium started out meaning ‘vote’ (referring, as early as the middle of the third century, to the election of bishops); then, by the fourth century, suffragium had shifted to mean ‘intercession’ (as when a Christian asked a saint to intercede in the divine realm); and finally, by the fifth century, suffragium was used to refer to the corrupt simoniac practices whereby bishoprics were being bought and sold. An even more fundamental instance of the imbrication of sacred and secular at the heart of Western values is the structuring of the traditional system of “the seven virtues,” offsetting the seven vices or deadly sins. Beginning in Late Antiquity and up until the present day, theologians and philosophers have routinely divided the virtues into a group of three that are religious or ‘theological’ (faith, hope, and charity) and a complementary group of four that are secular or ‘cardinal’ (prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice).2 These two instances of pagan and Christian cultural interdependence point to something still pervasive and profoundly important in our culture— yet something that, at present, many people choose to ignore or reject and most find perplexing at best. In the Introduction and in the essays by ten distinguished medieval historians and literary scholars that follow, my fellow authors and I seek to illuminate the methodological problems that a study of premodern sacred and secular cultural production entails, and we consider additional detailed instances of such interplay in major texts of

W

xvi

P R E FAC E

premodern Western civilization. Here, however, I focus mainly on the modern period. By offering a proleptic glimpse at the future of the premodern world that is considered in the essays that follow, I hope to demonstrate how many of the issues and approaches that have dominated the field of modern sacred/secular studies are firmly anchored in the past. * * * Ever since the Enlightenment, people in the West have routinely used the word sacred in a way that implies the replacement of the Divine by a secular imperative.They speak of the sacred rights of the individual, the sacred work of volunteers in a charity clinic, and other such sacred activities. In a similar fashion, there are masses of people who routinely show the kind of reverence and awe formerly reserved for the domain of religion and the holy to secular symbols (the flag, national anthem, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, etc.). In addition, at communal secular events (e.g., the Olympics; football, basketball, or baseball games in the United States; and soccer games in Asia,Africa, Latin America, and Europe), spectators and participants engage in ritualized actions that similarly recall behavior restricted to the religious and sacred domain in earlier times.3 The modern sacralization of sport coincides with a view of the natural world as devoid of sacred content and available to be used for exclusively secular purposes. Weberian and related sociological explanations of when and why the “sacred” retreated and why and to what extent “secularization” has been successful in so many quarters in the West continue to roll from the presses.4 In the English-speaking world, Matthew Arnold, while not the first, was certainly the most influential modern critic and poet to announce that he was lowering his sights and looking for something other than the JudeoChristian “sacred” in poetry. “More and more,” as Arnold says in a characteristic passage, “mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.”5 From the Victorians to the present day, Arnold’s words about the place of art in culture have usually been assumed to capture succinctly the common-sense meaning of a “secular” worldview—namely, one in which human beings find consolation and sustenance in their own works and through their own efforts, and reliance on the supernatural in the form of a personal deity is no longer felt to be a viable option. In the contemporary debate about the place of the sacred in the public sphere, the philosopher Richard Rorty has taken the position that getting over the sacred is a most worthy goal—and the sooner the better. In an article entitled “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” in the journal Common

P R E FAC E

xvii

Knowledge, Rorty takes strong issue with the views of the political philosopher L. Stephen Carter, whose book on public policy, entitled The Culture of Disbelief, argues that religious African Americans (and others of course) should not be deprived of their right to invoke their sense of divine duties and obligations when they take their stand on public issues (e.g., a Carter supporter might say, “I don’t want my money to go to support abortion clinics because God tells me that abortions are immoral”). Rorty’s answer is a resounding “No!” One may certainly not bring one’s ideas about sacred doctrine to the public sphere.The imperatives of one’s private sacred commitments, Rorty insists, are out of bounds in public discourse. But Carter’s position is equally uncompromising. As he and his supporters might say: “If you rule our religious convictions out of bounds for public discourse then you have abridged our rights as individuals and public agents.”6 The civility of the debate between Carter and Rorty belies the deadly passions that are frequently aroused by conflicts between sacred and secular claims on the duties and obligations of citizenship. To be sure, from its earliest beginnings—and in the familiar form of religious wars of centurieslong duration, past and ongoing—Western civilization has repeatedly been threatened by the clash of sacred beliefs: Judaism against Canaanite paganism, Christianity against Islam and Judaism, Islam against Christianity and Judaism.As Karl F. Morrison observes, at various times and in different regions throughout the Christian West (e.g., at the conversion of the Roman Empire, in the Carolingian era, and during the Investiture Conflict of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which pitted popes against emperors and bishops against kings and local lords—to name just a few of the peak events surveyed by Morrison) “Christians heard from the Gospel the same lordly call to transform the political order into an instrument of holiness.”7 In all of these early medieval instances of holiness politicized, as in similar instances throughout the centuries leading into the modern era, whenever secular authorities have co-opted the powers of the sacred or whenever sacred authorities have sought secular power, oppression and violence have followed. More recently, conflicts between the sacred and the secular have also involved oppression and violence: Marxist–Leninists against the Orthodox Church and other religious groups; Maoist and post-Maoist Communists against Buddhists and other religious groups, including, most recently, the widely publicized attempts of the Chinese authorities to suppress the Falun Gong. In the recent wave of violent acts committed in the name of the Islamic sacred, the targets that the attackers have considered to be legitimate have included both the sacred (Christian missionaries, Jewish yeshiva students), and the secular or profane (American soldiers in their barracks and sailors on shipboard; Israelis on buses, in markets, and at shopping malls; Indonesian

xviii

P R E FAC E

citizens and foreign tourists in a discotheque). And for some Israeli Jews, the act of killing in defense of the “Holy Land” of Israel is considered quite different from the morally repugnant act of killing under most other circumstances. Similarly, the American-led response to the worldwide terrorist threat seems also, at times, to have taken on the character of a religious struggle. Punitive violence is threatened against “an axis of evil” consisting of individuals and groups who are marked as “the evil ones.” Their elimination is therefore implied to be a sacred duty. The present study of the shifting borders of the sacred and the secular in the medieval and early-modern centuries of Western cultural development is not likely to diminish the current level of violence being carried out in the name of the sacred. Still, it may prove helpful to recall that the borders between the sacred and the secular have always been permeable and constantly shifting. Even more helpful would be the realization that trying to impose one’s own ideas about what is sacred and what is secular, or about sanctification and profanation, on those who strongly believe otherwise has always been, and still is, a difficult, if not impossible, task; and moreover, that attempting to do so has always proven to be, at the very least, harmful to individual and communal peace and well-being. The intercalations of sacred and secular discussed above instantiate a much wider phenomenon in Western culture. Parallel phenomena are found in the major literary, historical, religious, and philosophical texts discussed in this collection. Each essay was written or adapted especially for this volume; most were presented at a conference on the theme of “The Sacred and the Secular: Conflict, Convergence, Co-existence” held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June 2002, and the range of the subjects discussed is clear from the Contents. Rather than summarizing the essays or highlighting their original claims—a convention of essay collections that I find of minimal value—I shall let them all speak for themselves. Lawrence Besserman

INTRODUCTION SACRED AND SECULAR IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURES: ISSUES AND APPROACHES Lawrence Besserman

Provides an overview of various manifestations of the theme of the sacred and the secular in Western culture, from its roughly simultaneous appearance in ancient Greece and among the Israelite tribes and later Jewish urbanites depicted in the Hebrew Bible, through its development in New Testament and patristic times, and on into medieval and early modern European civilization. The survey and analysis demonstrate that the categories of the “sacred” and the “secular” are and have always been in flux, and that the critical methodologies for studying sacred and secular phenomena are correspondingly varied. In premodern Christian Europe, despite the overarching claims of many clerical authorities, the border between the spheres of the sacred and secular was always shifting; and even when it seemed to be most fixed, it very often exhibited a surprising degree of permeability. Historians (at least since Weber) have discussed and debated the timing and processes of “secularization;” without calling the importance of the latter phenomenon into question, we also need to pay attention (especially now) to the less often noted but also ancient and still ongoing phenomenon of “desecularization.”

rom earliest times down to the present day, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have sought contact with “sanctity” or “holiness,” a quality or force inherent in the “sacred” or the “holy” and believed to derive from the Divine.1 Though Israelites, Jews, Early Christians, and Muslims were all hostile to

F

2

L AW R E N C E B E S S E R M A N

pagan manifestations of the sacred, their own traditions provided tools and venues for its appropriation that were often similar to those of the pagans. As it was thought to come from the realm of the Divine, an encounter with the holy was deemed to require or entail at least a temporary, and in some cases even a permanent, separation from the domain of the profane or secular, and, of course, also a separation from anything polluted or impure. For our present purposes, the terms sacred, holy, and sanctified will be taken as roughly synonymous.Though in practice they are used differently (e.g., we refer to a “holy” man, not a “sacred” or “sanctified” man), all three terms are regularly employed interchangeably to refer to qualities associated with God or the gods. Among the ancient Greeks a tripartite schematization of sacred or holy, not-sacred or profane, and impure or polluted was the norm; and indeed (as we shall see shortly, though with important qualifications and with further exemplifications in the essays that follow), the same tripartite scheme appears to operate throughout most other cultures, and was certainly prominent throughout medieval and early modern Europe. In the Hebrew Bible, the words kadosh (holy as an adjective; Septuagint Gk. hagios; Vulgate Lat. Sanctus) and kodesh, kedushah (holiness as a noun; Septuagint Gk. hagios; Vulgate Lat. sanctitas) can refer to various things, including a “holy place,” “the (Tabernacle or Temple) sanctuary,” “a sacred offering,” a “holy person, object, or time.” Deriving from a Hebrew verbal root, k-d-sh, meaning “to separate, set apart,” the biblical Hebrew words for holy and holiness frequently refer to cultic matters, especially the ritual sacrifices in the Temple, for which a synonym is simply ha’kodesh “the holy (place).”2 In this cultic-sacrificial frame of reference, there is certainly some degree of overlap—but nothing like full congruence—between the bipolar concepts of holy/profane and pure/impure (or taboo). In a crucial verse of Isaiah, the prophet describes a vision in which a chorus of seraphim sing a hymn of praise that also expresses a credo affirming the essential nature of the divinity: “And one cried unto another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory’ ” (6.3). Isaiah responds to this vision-with-sound by expressing fear for his life, because of his and his people’s unworthiness:“Then said I, woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (6.5).Apart from reflecting a belief in the dangers inherent in human–divine encounters, Isaiah’s response also implies that the holiness of God involves a moral dimension, as do the purification of Isaiah’s lips, the “purging” of his sin, and the taking away of his “iniquity” in the next two verses (6.6–7).3 Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the terms kodesh (holy) and kedusha (holiness) refer to an attribute of the one true God as the God of justice and righteous actions. As God himself proclaims, kedusha is an

I N T RO D U C T I O N

3

attribute attainable by his Chosen People: “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19.6).4 But as Isaiah’s fearful response to his vision demonstrates, in Israelite religion (as in other Near Eastern religions) the “holy” can be mysterious and even dangerous. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible we discover that looking at a divine manifestation, or even seeing the sacred vessels when they are not in use, may cause death (Exod. 33.20; Num. 4.20; Judg. 13.22; cf. 1 Kings 19.13). The danger inherent in the sacred is also witnessed by the sudden deaths of Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, who violated the rules for sacrificing on God’s altar (Lev. 10.1–7); and, more perplexingly, by the sudden death of Uzzah, who—to King David’s confusion and dismay—was struck down by the Lord only because, while transporting the Holy Ark on his ox cart, he “put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it” (2 Samuel 6.3–9). Their potential dangers notwithstanding, the holy and holiness are most often spoken about in the Hebrew Bible as if the way to experience them and to live comfortably in their presence were actually a simple and straightforward matter. In fact, holiness as a way of life is often depicted in the Hebrew Bible not only as “risk-free,” but also as salubrious in pointedly physical and material terms (see, e.g., Deut. 6–7).To become a “holy nation” (Heb. goy kadosh), Israel must obey the laws outlined in Leviticus 17–26, an early, and probably once-independent document that biblical scholars refer to as “the Holiness Code.”5 However, although seemingly simple and straightforward, the acquisition and retention of holiness are repeatedly proven to be beyond the capabilities of a backsliding and sinful people.Yet, in later Israelite religion, the gulf between the sacred and the profane is presumed to be only temporary. Particularly in the prophetic books, the ancient Levitical command to achieve holiness is combined with a vision of the universal worship of God in holiness and “the unification of human experience, the harmonizing of people with their universe, and of people with God.”6 Not surprisingly, ideas about the sacred in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament overlap significantly. In the Gospels, Jesus’ followers call him “the holy one of God” (Mark 1.24; Luke 4.34; cf. John 6.61–67), an epithet that echoes similar epithets for God in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., “the Holy one of Israel” [Isa. 1.4],“thy Redeemer, the Holy one of Israel” [Isa. 48.17], etc.).The authors of the Gospels highlight Jesus’ disputes with the rabbinic authorities over their ideas about holiness, and especially their idea of holiness centering on ritual purity (Matt. 15.1–20; Mark 7.1–8, 15; 11.17).7 As in the Pentateuch, in the New Testament the goal of achieving holiness is presented as a corporate endeavor involving the pursuit of moral perfection. Only now, in contrast, the achievement of holiness is presented as an

4


endeavor in which Christ and the Church—an ekklesia or community of believers “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3.11)—have replaced the holy nation of Israel (Col. 1.22, I Pet. 1.15–16, 2.5; etc.). Yet, important continuities between the roles of the sacred (or holy) in the Old Law and the New Law persist.There are some eighty references in the Hebrew Bible to the “holy spirit” (ruah hakodesh) or its synonym the “spirit of God” (ruah Elohim), a manifestation of God working in the world, especially through human beings.8 In the Hebrew Bible, access to the sacred is usually said or implied to require Israelite birth and the observance of the laws of ritual purity and cultic ceremony, but moral behavior and belief in God can also open a channel to the sacred, made manifest when the holy spirit works through “the congregation of the Lord” (Deut. 23.2; Joel 2.16; etc.). In the New Testament the role of the Holy Spirit (or the synonymous “spirit of Christ” [Greek pneuma Christou; Vulgate Lat. Spiritus Christi]) increases considerably, being mentioned some 240 times. Its manifestation among the Church of believers is no longer conditioned on observance of ritual purity or cultic ceremony but rather exclusively on their moral behavior and belief in Jesus as the Son of God and the messiah (Rom. 8.9–11; 1 Pet. 1.11–12; etc.). At the same time, among Greek and Roman pagans, offerings at shrines, temples, and other holy places continued to constitute the major means of encountering the sacred. Priests and priestesses, sacred springs, groves, caves, and mountains were in plentiful supply. Encounters with the sacred were known to be potentially dangerous, but on balance they were regarded as desirable because they were an effective way to call down sacred beneficent effects or to ward off maleficent ones.9 As in the fictions of Homer and Virgil, so in “real life”: the ancient Greeks and Romans knew that personal encounters with gods and goddesses were reserved only for special individuals. However, as the historian Ramsay MacMullen explains, in the Roman Empire around the time of Jesus, the sacred was something that the average pagan encountered everywhere—in the form of sacred birds, fish, gardens, parks, picnic and dining facilities, museums, aviaries, zoos, botanical gardens, concert halls, and art galleries.10 In Jesus’ day, and for centuries thereafter, the interpenetration of the pagan sacred and the erstwhile secular was also witnessed by the fact that elected officials in Greek and Roman cities routinely “paid courtesy calls” on the local gods, while magistrates used “the porticoes of sacred enclosures for their business, in just the same way that votaries as such met freely in civic buildings.”11 As MacMullen further notes, “the honoring of sacred officials in secular settings, and vice versa; the prominence of the one or the other at each other’s ceremonies;


5

the alternation of offices from sacred to secular in a given man’s career; and the confusing of aims and benefits in assemblies for the gods or for civic business—all reflect the closest relations.”12 Beginning in New Testament times, belief in Jesus as the Son of God introduced a blurring and often even an erasure of the boundaries between the inscrutable realm of the supernatural and sacred and the familiar realm of the human and secular. This blurring of the sacred/secular boundary, embodied in the ideas of Jesus as an Incarnation of God and the Hypostatic Union in Jesus of divine and human natures, has been a defining feature of most forms of Christianity from Late Antiquity to the present day. According to Max Weber, belief in God’s redemption of the secular realm by means of the Incarnation and Hypostatic Union was the most revolutionary claim of early Christian culture, ultimately contributing to the secularization and modernization of Western society. In a controversial but memorable reflection on this feature of Christianity, the French sociologist Marcel Gauchet modified Weber’s classic theory of Entzauberung (Disenchantment) in order to account for the split between the sacred and the secular realms in the postmodern world.13 Evidence in support of Gauchet’s counterintuitive assertion that the Incarnation brought about a split in Christianity between, on the one hand, the “invisible” Divine and “wholly other” and, on the other hand, the “visible” human and “terrestrial” realms is found throughout the premodern period.14 One finds it, for example, in the growth of eremitical and cenobitical monasticism, which separated a class of Christians living a completely sacred lifestyle from those living a worldly one; in the adoption by male clergy and female religious of celibacy, which separated Christians who were chaste from those who were sexually active; and, more generally, in a sharpening of the distinction between the sanctified lifestyle of the clergy and the secular lifestyle of the laity. Moreover all of the foregoing developments have been especially prominent in churches maintaining strong forms of the paradoxical doctrine of the Incarnation. In the first three centuries of the Common Era, while proponents of Christianity celebrated manifestations of the sacred in the acts of the martyrs inspired by the holy spirit, pagan cultic worship of the sacred continued to flourish.15 Pagans, Jews, and Christians all still shared the belief that a god could appear to a human being.16 Similarly—though we sometimes tend to forget it—Jews, Christians, and pagans also shared a belief in the causal link between morality and access to the sacred.17 In time, however, the Christian idea of the sacred diverged in many (but by no means in all) respects from Jewish and pagan ideas. Focusing on the sacred/secular dichotomy, the historian R.A. Markus has argued that “the end of ancient Christianity” was marked in Western

6


culture by the triumph of a “tendency to absorb what had previously been ‘secular,’ indifferent from a religious point of view, into the realm of the ‘Sacred’; to force the sphere of the ‘secular’ to contract, turning it either into ‘Christian,’ or dismissing it as ‘pagan’ or ‘idolatrous.’ ”18 Markus attributes this “re-drawing of the boundaries” between the secular and the sacred to various factors, but he suggests that the most influential element was the “Constantinian revolution,” which led to “the eclipse of the ‘secular’ dimension in Christians’ consciousness” and “the absorption of the ‘secular’ in the ‘sacred’ as ascetic norms came to penetrate wide sections of Christian society and to colour aspirations far beyond the walls of the cloister. That ascetic take-over signals the end of ancient Christianity.”19 By the time of Gregory the Great, Markus asserts,“the massive secularity of John Chrysostom’s and of Augustine’s world” was gone: “There was little room for the secular in it. The Devil was close, always ready to swallow up the world and the flesh.”20 In his more recent work, Markus has drawn an even sharper black-and-white picture:“Questions about the value and purpose of the secular order and its institutions and the way they are related to human salvation such as had exercised Augustine no longer had any meaning in Gregory’s world.”21 This is of course an exaggeration. Unrelieved Christian asceticism would hardly have been able to accommodate poetry, painting, sculpture, and other arts in the service of religion.Yet, beginning in Late Antiquity and continuing throughout the “ascetic” medieval Christian centuries that are the focus of Markus’s analysis, sacred Christian formal and thematic elements are seen to pervade an impressive number of diverse and thematically complex artistic masterpieces that were ostensibly secular in origin and destination.Conversely, during the same period, religious works of significant poetic merit often made use of themes and motifs derived from pagan sources (e.g., the works of Prudentius,Aldhelm, and other Christian and secular Latin poets, and the anonymous Old English poems).An explanation for this phenomenon is not far to seek. Augustine and Jerome’s theoretical justifications for Christians to “use” pagan literature have been discussed frequently and analyzed from various points of view.22 Two of the most important passages in which Jerome and Augustine affirm the validity of pagan texts, and thereby accommodate sacred and secular elements in Western culture, must be noted here, albeit briefly. In an oft-cited passage, Jerome allegorically interprets the biblical figure of “the captive woman” (Deut. 21.10–13) in order to defend his use of, and his taking pleasure in, the rhetorical grace and stylistic elegance of pagan “secular” texts. Is it surprising that I, too, admiring the fairness of her form and the grace of her eloquence, desire to make that secular wisdom which is my


7

captive and handmaid, a matron of the true Israel? [Quid ergo mirum, si et ego sapientiam saecularem propter eloquii uenustatem et membrorum pulchritudinem de ancilla atque captiua Israhelitin facere cupio?]23

Comparable in influence to Jerome’s “captive woman” trope was Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the biblical figure of “the Israelites despoiling the Egyptians” (Exod. 11.2–3). In his magisterial pedagogical treatise, De doctrina christiana, Augustine informed Christian teachers that pagan texts—especially texts that happened to be Platonist in outlook— were like the gold and silver jewelry that the Israelites “borrowed” from their Egyptian neighbors.Though their origin might be suspect, pagan texts could contain wisdom and truth useful for Christian education. Usually, however, the usable Christian wisdom and truth in such texts had to be extracted from beneath the surface by allegorical interpretation.24 Jerome’s and Augustine’s attempts to recuperate the secular are often cited in the influential work of the late D.W. Robertson, Jr. and his disciples, for whom an axiomatic methodological assumption is that religious allegory is always applicable to seemingly secular medieval European texts. Ranging beyond the conventional dating of the end of the Middle Ages at around 1500, Robertson maintained that the pervasiveness of religious allegory persisted in European literature and art until at least 1750. Finding the sacred within the seemingly secular is thus a key to the proper understanding of works of art that, according to Robertson, have been persistently misinterpreted by modern critics. Medieval and Early Modern poets and artists, and their audiences, Robertson and like-minded critics assert, were trained to see below the surfaces of texts and images (the “chaff ”) in order to discover inner, sacred symbolic meanings (the “fruit”). Nowadays, few scholars are convinced by Robertson’s totalizing Christian-allegorical interpretations of medieval and later European literature and art. Yet, the issues raised by the Christian-allegorical approach remain fundamentally important for the study of European culture, not only in the Middle Ages but throughout the Renaissance and Reformation and beyond too. Strong, if indirect, evidence for the Christian-allegorical approach to premodern art may be found in the process of desecularization in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a process much less studied, though no less important than, the more familiar and later process of secularization.25 In the City of God, Augustine contrasts the absolutely true sacra historia recorded in the Bible with the utterly mistaken, false,“profane,” and so-called sacra historia of Rome’s pagan past.26 By the time of Gregory the Great, the pressing need to explain secular power that had motivated Augustine was gone, for “in a significant sense ‘secular’ authority and institutions had vanished from Gregory’s world.”27 Gregory’s attitude toward

8


the worldly power that his once-persecuted Church was now wielding over secular rulers might seem overly optimistic; yet, as Markus explains, Gregory’s optimism was combined with a drive away from worldliness and toward ever more stringent and ascetic Christian observance. For in Gregory’s world, “the boundaries of sacred, secular, and profane” had shifted dramatically from where they had been drawn in the Church of Augustine’s day.28 The sixth-century spread of Christian asceticism was adumbrated much earlier, with the rise in Late Antiquity of Christian veneration of holy places (often associated with the “relics” of holy persons).29 How Christians came to venerate holy places is all the more significant because there were powerful factors that should have precluded it. Markus has highlighted the paradoxical change that took place in early Christian attitudes to the idea of sacred places as follows: “In its first centuries Christianity was a religion highly inhospitable to the idea of ‘holy places’; by the end of the fourth century it had become highly receptive.”30 After all, in the New Testament Paul warned against thinking that God the Creator could “dwell in shrines made by man” (Acts 17.24); he also said that Christ’s followers were themselves “the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6.16).31 In the same spirit, Eusebius (ca. 260–340?) affirmed that it was pagans and Jews, not Christians, who needed holy places:“Moses had promised a holy land to the Jews; Jesus promised to his followers a much greater land, truly holy and beloved of God, not located in Judaea.”32 For Eusebius, if there was now any such thing as a holy city, it could only be the heavenly Jerusalem.33 A reversal of the Christian attitude to the notion of holy places, from generally hostile to entirely favorable, occurred in the years between Eusebius and the next generation. Completion of the transition is clearly seen in the case of Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, who told his disciples: “Others merely hear, we see and touch.”34 As Markus and others have noted, the change in attitude toward holy places seems to have resulted mainly from a series of actions initiated by Constantine in the 320s and 330s. These actions, constituting what Markus calls “a genuine Constantinian revolution,” were followed by the ideological adjustment described above.35 The transition, however, was not entirely smooth.Thus, Gregory of Nyssa and Jerome continued to express their skepticism about “holy places”; while Augustine, the most influential among these early Christian thinkers, seems only gradually to have changed his attitude toward relics and the places where they were venerated. Indeed, Augustine was initially hostile to the notion of holy relics and said so in his writings at the beginning of the fifth century, but by his later years (in the early 420s) he had come to accept that miracles had been performed by the remains of St. Stephen, which had recently been discovered and brought to Africa.36


9

As the historian Patrick J. Geary explains, communities as well as individuals that could obtain “the special protection” of a genuine saint’s relic would hardly be likely to pass up the opportunity.37 Moreover, as Geary further observes, monasteries and cathedrals were eager to own the relics of saints not only because they “inspired the laity both rich and poor to give alms,” but also because “the miracles performed to heal the sick reminded the unscrupulous that the same power could be used against those seeking to harm a saint’s chosen church.”38 By the time of the Carolingians, “the confluence of popular devotion, official Christianity, and RomanFrankish politics” had produced a brisk trade in relics; and with popes in Rome frequently approving the transfer of desirable sacred remains northward, the “foundation for their great role in the mass movements of later medieval piety” was being laid.39 Over the past several decades, innovative and influential studies of Late-Antique and Early Modern European responses to the paradoxes of the sacred/secular dichotomy have taken a markedly “anthropological” turn. Special attention has been paid to the symbolism of the body; food; death rituals; pilgrimage; the veneration of saints, relics, and holy places; and the role of gender in shaping all of the above.40 For example, applying a socio-anthropological approach, Jonathan Z. Smith posited the “locative” as opposed to “utopian” nature of early Christianity, revealed in the growth of rituals keyed to the sacred geography of Jerusalem; similarly, Gregory Dix documented an emphasis in the early Jerusalem church liturgy on the historicity of holy places—an emphasis that was then imitated in liturgies far from the Holy Land.41 As Markus observes, the mere availability of the buildings that Constantine and later emperors built cannot by itself account for these developments: “The growth of ritual around sacred sites that took place in the later fourth century seems to require more explanation than the mere availability of ritual space.”42 The answer Markus proposes is that late-fourth-century Christians felt the need to assert their connection with the persecuted church and the martyrs, a need and its fulfillment that are “dramatically displayed in the swamping of the liturgical calendar with martyrs’ festivals and the development of their liturgy.”43 According to this hypothesis,“[t]he sacredness of space was a reflex, a projection on the ground, of the sacredness of time.”As Markus concludes, a new sacred topography came gradually to organise the Christian perception of space and to overlay the old, pre-Christian meanings. Places became sacred as the past became localized in the present. It was always the past that really mattered, and it was the impact of past human action that gave places their significance:“You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.”

10


Even more unexpected than the rise of Christian holy places was the radical and concomitant change in Late Antiquity in the Christian treatment of the dead. As we have seen, veneration of the dead was entailed by, and in turn partially responsible for, liturgical celebrations centered on holy places. “In the Middle Ages as in other epochs,” as R.C. Finucane reminds us,“death ritual was not so much a question of dealing with a corpse as of reaffirming the secular and spiritual order by means of a corpse.”44 In the early Middle Ages, reaffirmation of the secular and sacred order by means of the dead took a decidedly magical turn. For, as Peter Brown demonstrated, what characterized the “cult of the saints” that arose and flourished in the third through the sixth centuries of the Common Era was the commonly held belief that the graves of the saints, fragments of their bodies, and even physical objects that had come into contact with these holy bodies, were “privileged places, where the contrasted poles of Heaven and Earth met.”45 This new way of relating to the dead marked a breakdown of long-standing, deeply rooted taboos. Suddenly, Christians were digging up remains and praying in cemeteries and other places that formerly “had been treated as antithetical to the public life of the living city. . .” and the removal of dead bodies from these formerly taboo places for reburial in new and formerly prohibited locations was even more extraordinary.46 As Brown further asserts, the new ritual practices surrounding the LateAntique cult of saints signaled “the end of a way of seeing the relation between the human dead and the universe, and, as an immediate consequence, a shifting of the barriers by which Mediterranean men had sought to circumscribe the role of the dead, and especially of those dead to whom one had strong links of kinship or place.”47 Today, as in Late-Antique Christianity, veneration of the saints continues to be practiced by countless millions of Christians around the globe. Whether or not contemporary Christians are similar to early medieval Christian devotees of the cult of the saints in all respects is certainly open to question (though I suspect that many if not most of them are). There is little doubt, however, that most of these early devotees, like their pagan contemporaries, were less interested in copying saintly models than in accessing the miraculous healing and miracle-working power of the saints’ holy relics.48 To be sure, in the last medieval centuries, saints’ lives frequently included fewer lists of miracles and more detailed accounts of holy living, and they may have been meant to provide the saints’ devotees with models of virtuous behavior for imitation. But as in its early years, as well as throughout its entire pre- and post-Reformation history, the Church undoubtedly fostered a belief in saints as potential intercessors and supernatural helpers.49


11

Among the most dramatic changes characterizing the historical phenomenon that scholars call “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” was the emergence of a new Christian attitude toward the place of humanity in the secular world that was largely shaped by a rediscovered and Christianized Aristotelian philosophy.50 For Anselm of Bec, Alain de Lille, and other twelfth-century theologians and philosophers (as for Thomas Aquinas in the next century), God was now thought of as the Creator who had set the universe in motion according to rational laws. God had placed man in the center of the universe and endowed him with the faculty of reason. Reason made man capable of understanding the rules governing a “desacralized” nature and the provable truths of religion. Hence, there was no absolute need to adduce the confirmatory, parallel evidence of revelation.51 As Jacques Le Goff demonstrates in a landmark essay, a major social change that occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (enabled, if not directly caused by the latter intellectual innovations) was the “desacralization” of the vertical vassal–lord relationship and its replacement by a “horizontal and fraternal agreement” involving money.52 Le Goff shows how in the thirteenth century and after, the sacred ritual of a kiss on the mouth between lord and vassal became less and less commonly practiced. He correlates the disappearance of this symbolic ritual kiss with “the decline of feudalism.” With the kiss no longer part of the ritual of vassalage, secularization of social bonds—a defining characteristic of the modern era—was well under way.53 Artistic production in this period showed similar signs of a redrawing of borders. In lyric poetry, as in the new genre of versified romance narrative, Provençal and Northern French poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries led the way in deploying a striking blend of sacred and secular motifs. Italian, German, and English authors soon followed suit. The blending of sacred and secular motifs, which reached its most intricate esthetic and theological form in the works of Dante, would characterize verbal art throughout the next two centuries and beyond.54 Though not without a certain amount of resistance from conservative bishops and theologians, many artists and sculptors in the High and Later Middle Ages began to depict a nurturing, maternal, and physically attractive Mary and a handsome, exposed, and visibly suffering Christ.The use of religious images to educate Christians (both the modestly learned as well as the illiterate) and to rouse them to religious devotion—or as they frequently say, to make invisibilia known and felt by means of visibilia—was sanctioned by authoritative Western churchmen from Gregory the Great, through Peter Lombard, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and others of similar stature and influence well into the seventeenth century.55

12


In ancient art, icons of sexuality and fertility—erect penises, engorged breasts, and gaping vulvas—served a central, ritualized religious function.56 As Leupin reminds us, “la sacralisation du sexuel est partout dans la mythologie parce que le destin du monde entier dépend de la copulation réussie du mâle et de la femelle.”57 Christian artists for the most part may have repressed these earlier erotic impulses, but they also occasionally gave expression to the erotic impulses of a sanctified sexuality. In order to portray Christ as fully human, artists in the High and Later Middle Ages often depicted him as an infant; and sometimes, especially in the late-fourteenth century and after, even depicted his circumcised penis (viewers were expected to know that the blood Jesus shed at the Circumcision was a foreshadowing of the fully redemptive blood he would shed at the Crucifixion). Even more daringly, some artists went so far as to affirm the full humanity of Christ by depicting him on the cross with the suggestion of an erect penis under the covering of his traditional loincloth.58 In portraits of Mary, problems of the secular/sacred dichotomy could also become acute. Paintings that render Mary’s exposed breast as she nurses the infant Jesus provide the most dramatic instances of this new phenomenon, as the stylistic vocabularies of late-medieval artists depicting the beautiful goddess Venus or a goddess like courtly lady and artists depicting the Virgin Mary began to overlap.59 In his treatise on painting, Leonardo Da Vinci gives a striking account of how this blurring of boundaries could affect the artist’s audience. The painter, Leonardo asserts, can even induce men [to] love and fall in love with a picture which does not portray any living woman. It once happened to me that I made a picture representing a sacred subject which was bought by one who loved it, and who then wished to remove the symbols of divinity in order that he might kiss her without misgivings. Finally his conscience prevailed over his sighs and lust and he felt constrained to remove the picture from his house.60

From the late Middle Ages on, artists depicting Christ, Mary, and the saints often used shockingly secular motifs. But mindful of the fact that “the symbols of divinity” were able to restrain the transgressive desire of Leonardo’s client, we should not be too quick to assume that the difference between a wholly secular and a provocatively secular-seeming but identifiably sacred work of art was normally breached.The renewed philosophical and theological valorization of humanity and the human intellect that began in the twelfth century was accompanied by a wave of popular and highly emotional devotion directed toward the two principal human agents of salvation, the suffering Jesus and his gracious mother, the Virgin Mary.61


13

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the rise and rapid spread of the Franciscan order was aided by, and also helped to further, positive philosophical and religious attitudes toward the natural world and its human inhabitants. Accompanying this new attitude was an increasing devotional stress on the humanity of Mary and Christ. Dramatic evidence of this revaluation of the secular realm is seen in the rise of new forms of lay religious association and expression, exemplified in the thirteenth century by the devotio moderna (mainly but not exclusively in the Low Countries) and in the fourteenth century by the Wycliffites in England and the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia (again, not exclusively). The devotio moderna and Lollardy are exceptional manifestations of the general tendency frequently referred to by students of late-medieval religion as the growth of “lay piety” and the “privatization of religion”—both names for various attempts by laymen and women to experience the sacred without clerical mediation. In England and on the Continent, new liturgical devotions, sermons, and miracle stories celebrating the accessibility of the Virgin Mary proliferated.62 Simultaneously, there was an outpouring of sermons, miracle stories, and liturgical innovations highlighting the salvific power of the Host and its miraculous transubstantiation from bread to Christ’s flesh.63 Undoubtedly the most significant of these innovations was the introduction in the mid-thirteenth century of the “Feast of Corpus Christi,” at which the Host was honored in a processional display. Supplementing the traditional liturgical hours and sacraments, the new sacramentals, feasts, miracle stories, and liturgical innovations celebrating or drawing upon the power of Mary and the Host opened up new avenues of lay access to the sacred.64 The lay-directed late-medieval revolution in religious ideas and practices was accompanied by widespread anticlericalism and the rise of heretical sects.A contentious question that seemed to follow inevitably from the new “rational” attitude toward nature and reason was,“If nature is not necessarily evil and if reason is sufficient to know God, then why must I submit to the sacerdotal authority of priests?”65 For Wyclif and his English followers, almost all aspects of the orthodox clergy’s ideology and practical control of the sacred—veneration of the saints and their relics; religious paintings, sculpture, jewel-encrusted crosses, and other devotional objects; pilgrimage; auricular confession and priestly absolution; elaborate masses for the dead and liturgical innovations of any kind; the so-called private religion of friars, monks, and canons; the papacy; and, last but not least, the very claim that there could sometimes be a need for priestly mediation—were considered to be corruptions of the true gospel faith.66 Yet, as several recent and expert surveys of Christian belief and practice in the High and Later Middle Ages all testify, a sacramental understanding

14


of nature and a fundamental acceptance of some measure of priestly authority were alive and well among Western Christian believers of all genders and social stations.67 Otherwise, their continuing reliance on a host of ritual observances—sacraments (baptism, confession, marriage, last rites, etc.) and sacramentals (pilgrimage, blessing of candles, “magical” uses of the Eucharist or objects that had come in contact with the Eucharist, and other private devotional practices)—would be hard to account for. The rise of mysticism and the success of anticlerical sects in the High and Later Middle Ages indicate that, whatever the primary cause or causes may have been, there was a weakening of faith in a monopoly on access to the sacred controlled by the official Western Church. Cataclysmic events like the depredations of the Vikings, the victories of Islam in the Mediterranean periphery, the devastations of the Black Death, and the growing self-confidence of secular rulers were challenges to the authority and efficacy of the Western Church, which it overcame with only partial success.Yet, aside from a relatively small if vocal and determined number of heretics, the vast majority of premodern Christians were unwilling (as are their modern-day counterparts) to face life without the protections and consolations that the official Church provided, even if that meant believing that individual and communal sin were the cause of all their misfortunes and that their best defenses against the next catastrophe were repentance and prayer under the guidance of the clergy. It all depends on where one chooses to look. Whereas repentance and prayer within the existing Church were enough of an answer for some, others sought access to sacred power in new, and sometimes (from the establishment’s perspective) heretical ways.68 As Richard Trexler explains (in an essay on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant iconoclasm, but with methodological and theoretical assumptions that are more widely applicable), for some religious seekers, the quest for the sacred sometimes finds expression in a surprisingly iconoclastic manner: Religions continually test the utility of their objects, and then apologise to the figure or relic; they change divine representations to increase their utility; they discard or store away those proved useless and, since objects harm as well as heal, these various modes of ongoing group iconoclasms are practised against both gods and devils to prevent harm as well as cause good.69

As Trexler also points out, in addition to the (somewhat dubious) influence of theological and philosophical arguments about where to draw the boundaries between the sacred and secular, there are always more immediate material bases that correlate with religious–ideological positions on such questions. In particular, as Trexler reminds us, “[p]roperty was and


15

is secured within and in part through the sacred and profane behavioural classifications in a society, and iconoclasm is an historically widespread behaviour when societies redistribute property.”70 The crusades, the Spanish Reconquista, and the colonization of America all make it abundantly clear that in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods a sacred imperative could motivate activities in the secular realm such as “just” wars and the staking of proprietary claims to lands that lay oceans and deserts away. Indeed, in this respect, true “modernity”—if by that we mean the separation of the sacred and the secular realms—has yet to arrive.


PART 1 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE: LYRIC, NARRATIVE, AND DRAMA


CHAPTER 1 THE IMITATION OF HAGIOGRAPHIC FORMULAS IN OCCITANIAN VIDAS (LIVES OF THE TROUBADOURS) Cyril Aslanov

Demonstrates the influence of the Golden Legend by Jacob de Voragine on the genre of troubadour vidas. It also seeks to reassess the textual status of these short biographical sketches in the framework of the compilation of Provençal lyric poetry. Conceived as paratexts that consist of biographical material on the troubadour whose selected songs they precede, these secular vidas—modeled on saints’ lives—were eventually to function as full-fledged texts in their own right, and later they would also provide a basis for further elaborations of this biographical material.

n the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the transmitters of Occitanian lyric poetry compiled collections of the poems of the troubadours in songbooks known as cansoniers, adding brief sketches of the lives of the troubadours.These brief lives, known as vidas, also included commentaries (razos or reasons) on specific poems.1 Recently,William E. Burgwinkle has suggested a postmodern, materialistic reading of the razos subcorpus.2 The present study focuses on the vidas themselves, and shows in what way these profane texts describing the lives of secular singers and poets, written in the vulgar language of the masses, nevertheless display significant affinity with sacred literature written in Latin.

I

20

C Y R I L A S L A N OV

Indeed, these biographical sketches have at times a narrative structure that is similar to hagiographic epitomes, especially those found in Jacobus de Voragine’s compilation, Legenda Aurea (“The Golden Legend”).Although the epitomes are longer and have a more elaborate structure, the vidas are nonetheless quite reminiscent of the saints’ biographies, not only in literary terms,3 but also from historical and geographical perspectives. Interestingly enough, the compilers of the troubadours’ poetry began writing the vidas at approximately the same time that de Voragine completed his work (generally accepted as 1263–67).4 Furthermore, sponsored by local aristocrats, the Occitanian transmitters composed the first vidas in Northern Italy. It should be noted that de Voragine came from the same area (Voragine/Varagine is the re-Latinization of the toponym Varazze, a small town on the Ligurian Riviera). It is thus plausible to assume that the short hagiographic sketches in the Golden Legend served as the literary model for troubadours’ vidas. One possibility, of course, is that both the troubadours’ vidas and the short hagiographies independently reflect the prevailing style of mid-thirteenth century Northern Italy. However, even if this is so, these biographical sketches are an important instance of the interaction between sacred and secular literary works in the Middle Ages. It seems unlikely that the hagiographic accounts in the Golden Legend were influenced by the troubadours’ vidas. Indeed, the latter seem to have been an innovative thirteenth-century literary form (although, according to some scholars, oral or semioral vidas existed during the creative phase of troubadour poetry in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries).5 In contrast, Latin hagiographies, which date back to Late Antiquity, also served as the basis for saints’ lives in Romance vernacular languages, especially in Occitania and northern France.6 Therefore, it is more reasonable to assume that the hagiographic accounts influenced the troubadours’ vidas, rather than vice versa. To illustrate the proposed links between sacred hagiography and the secular vidas, this essay highlights the similarities between the Golden Legend and the vidas in two areas: diction (especially in the incipits) and narrative patterns. Another feature of the vidas reminiscent of sacred texts is the relationship between the biographic texts and quotations from the troubadours’ songs. The vidas include interpolations of pseudoautobiographical allusions from the songs. Thus, quoting verses or strophes from the songs authenticates the biographical sketches. Including verses from these poems imbues the vidas prose with a quasi-canonical aura that may well have affected their status as well as that of the razos. Such a relationship between the quotation from the lyric corpus and the biographic sketches is akin to that between the Bible and its associated commentaries (the troubadours’ songs corresponding to the sacred text and the vidas to the exegetical or homiletic paratext). In addition, through reutilization of these texts by

I M I TAT I O N O F H A G I O G R A P H I C F O R M U L A S

21

Dante Alighieri and Ezra Pound, the troubadours’ vidas were later to achieve literary renown in their own right. In this context, the vidas are not merely dependent paratexts, but rather full-fledged poetic texts, imparting quasi-hieratic respect to Ezra Pound’s macaronic Cantos. Narrative Patterns in the Golden Legend and the Vidas Immediately after the usual (pseudo-)etymological introduction in which the origin of the saint’s name is explained, many hagiographic sketches in the Golden Legend record the saint’s geographic and social origins. Similarly, the vidas open with the troubadours’ geographic and sociological backgrounds. However, whereas the saints in the hagiographies usually came from the higher social classes, many troubadours were born in poverty. Despite this difference, the biographers in both cases stress the contrast between the social status of both at the beginning and end of their lives. In hagiographies, pagan aristocrats often lost their social preeminence after converting to Christianity. This narrative pattern appears in sections describing various devout characters, including St. Nicholas, St. Lucy, St. Anastasia, St. Vincent, St. Paula, St. Julian, St. Agatha, St. Gregory the Great, St. Secundus, St. Pancratius, St. Qiricus, and St. Julitta. It is also evident in the epitomes dedicated to St.Theodora, St. Alexis, St. Christina, St. Nazarius and St. Celsus, St.Abdon and St. Sennen, as well as St. Bernard, St. Augustine, St. Savinianus, St. Savina, St. Giles, St. Gorgonius and St. Dorotheus, St. Protus and St. Hyacinthus, St. Euphemia, St. Jerome, St. Margaret, St. Chrysanthus and St. Daria, St. Cecilia, St. Clement, and St. James the Dismembered.These saints are presented as former members of the nobility who abandoned their privileged social status and suffered as martyrs or spent their lives in contrition. The authors of the vidas describe a reverse process: the troubadours’ rise from poverty to social recognition. Despite being impoverished at birth, the troubadours eventually became celebrities appreciated for their artistic skill. In both the vidas and the Golden Legend’s epitomes, social mobility is the primary focus, but the movement is downward in the saints’ hagiographies and upward in the vidas. Some troubadours, however, were aristocratic by birth. In such cases, the similarity between the vidas and the hagiographic model is even more striking.Thus, Jaufre Rudel’s bitter destiny is described in a way reminiscent of the hagiographic epitomes:“Jaufres Rudels de Blaia si fo molt gentils hom, princes of Blaia. . .” [ Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaye, he was a very noble man].7 The Occitanian word gentils [noble] is the vulgar counterpart of the Latin adjective nobilis, which often occurs in the incipits of the Golden Legend’s epitomes. Since Rudel renounces the mundane joys of life when he goes to Syria, his biography may be viewed as a

22


kind of ascetic withdrawal, or retreat from the world, similar to the accounts of conversion found in the hagiographic epitomes of the Golden Legend. This impression is strengthened by the fact that after Rudel’s death in Tripoli, the Countess of Tripoli put on a veil, thereby forgoing earthly glory, and retrospectively imbuing Rudel’s striving to reach his distant love with new significance. Other successful poets eventually take the path of Christian asceticism, forsaking material joys and retiring to monasteries, as seen, for example, in the vidas of Bernard de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Raimon de Miraval, and Perdigon.8 Such sharp transitions from the top to the bottom of the social order, from the carnal world to monastic retreats, also characterize hagiographic epitomes. It should also be noted that, as well as being moral and religious edifying texts, the hagiographies were and still are read for entertainment at communal meals in monasteries and convents.Thus, both the hagiographies and the vidas are written texts intended for public reading: the vidas to aristocratic laymen and the hagiographies to monks and nuns. The authors, therefore, strove to make these short texts more attractive by sharpening the contrast between the beginning of the narrative and its end.

The Quasi-Canonical Status of the Troubadours’ Poems Since the vidas are primarily based on information in the songs themselves, it is hardly surprising that verses from them are quoted by the authors as textual evidence, or loci probantes.9 Marcabru’s vida, as transmitted in MS K (Paris BN fr. 12473), is a classic example of this:10 Marcabruns si fo de Gascoingna, fils d’una paubra femna que ac nom Marcabruna, si com el dis en son chantar: Marcabruns, lo fills Na Bruna, Fo engendraz en tal luna Qu’el saup d’amor cum degruna. . . [As for Marcabru, he was from Gascony, son of a poor woman called Marcabruna, as he says in his song: Marcabru, the son of Lady Bruna was begotten under such a moon that he knew how love is picked off. . .]

Curiously, the quotation does not indicate that Marcabru’s mother was called Marcabruna. Rather, she is referred to as Na Bruna, that is, “Lady Bruna.” However, in another version of this poem, the verse “Marcabruns, lo fills Na Bruna” [Marcabru, the son of Lady Bruna] reads “Marcabrus, fills Marcabruna” [Marcabru, the son of Marcabruna], supporting the


23

biographer’s assertion.Thus, the vida only makes sense with the assumption that the quotation comes from the second version of the poem, in which Marcabrus refers to himself as “fills Marcabruna” [the son of Marcabruna]. The transmitter’s preference for the second version seems to suggest that he did not understand the purpose of this quotation in the specific context of this vida. Such doubt about the exact formulation of the locus probans seems to contradict the postulated quasi-canonical status of quotations in the vidas. However, in light of what are now widely accepted theories regarding the essential fluidity (mouvance, variance) of medieval texts written in the vulgar tongue,11 the suggestion that this quotation may not be accurately formulated seems irrelevant. Quoting a particular verse, all the more so for an inappropriate formulation, implicitly includes the full scope of possible readings, and the more fitting variant, “Marcabrus, fills Marcabruna” [Marcabru, the son of Marcabruna] could be easily reconstructed by those familiar with the troubadour corpus.Thus, the canonical dignity of the text, on the one hand, and its plasticity, on the other, can be attributed to the rather flexible approach to sacred texts in the Christian tradition. Unlike writers in the Jewish or Muslim traditions, who assign paramount importance to exact formulation of canonical texts in the original language (Hebrew for the Bible and Arabic for the Koran), Christian authors were more likely to use primary or even secondary translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, introducing significant variations in quotations from the Holy Writ.This was also characteristic of transmission of the Latin text of the Bible, beginning with St. Jerome’s revision, which was further complicated by the numerous further recensions. Thus, as with biblical quotations in patristic sources, a quotation of a verse from troubadour poetry need not be exactly word-for-word in order to fulfill the role of locus probans. Despite differences between the original and quoted verses, their resonance would be palpable to the reader. The recurrence of a verse creates a kind of circularity between the text of the poem and its paratext.Thus, authors of vidas (paratexts) strove to authenticate their accounts by quoting verses from the troubadours’ poems. However, such quotations, resurfacing in the context of the vidas, acquired additional allusiveness, confirming the reference to a real episode in the troubadour’s career. According to Schutz,12 this resonance was even more effective when vidas were read aloud before the song was performed. From a pragmatic point of view, the texts of the vidas—a rewriting in prose of the biographical passages contained in the poems—did not enjoy equal status with the original verse.13 A parallel development is found in the thirteenth-century practice of rewriting courtly romances originally composed in verse in prose form—a process that apparently involved a change

24


in attitude toward the pragmatic status of the text.14 This is particularly clear in various hybrid texts, such as Philippe de Novare’s Estoire de la guerre des Ibelins contre les Imperiaux, in which prose and verse appear simultaneously.15 The Occitanian songbook or collection of lyrics (cansonier) is actually another such hybrid text. In the early printed editions of the troubadours’ poetry, the alternation of verse and prose was not as clear because the verse was often presented in a continuous form, without paragraphs, with the contrast a result of content rather than form. However, since vidas are in very simple prose, verses quoted often appear as encoded text and may pose riddles to the reader.This intrinsic contrast between the plain vidas texts and the encoded poetry reflects the essential distinction between the “truth value and referentiality” of the prose, giving rise to a lack of ontological consistency in the verse.16 Indeed, the first known troubadour,William of Aquitaine, affirmed that verse deals with mere vanity, as he says in his well-known song, “Ferai un vers de dreit neant” [I’ll do a song about nothing at all].17 This clearly recalls the previously mentioned analogy between the sacred texts of Christianity and the troubadours’ corpus. Whereas the Bible is endowed with supreme ontological value, the troubadours’ verses entirely lack such standing.The quasi-canonical aura that radiates from the troubadours’ songs does not necessarily imply ontological value or reliability. But with respect to the distinction between prose as truthful and poetry as fanciful, the vidas surely do carry more ontological weight than the verses paraphrased; by being quoted in the context of a prose text, the verse acquires ontological importance. Furthermore, moving from a lyrical to a narrative genre implies an upgrading of the ontological status of the discourse.Whereas the former, in the first-person singular, is allegedly self-effusive, the prose narrative, in the third person, is presumed to be inherently more objective.The hagiographic epitome also has a lyrical/musical counterpart, namely, a prayer to the saint whose life story the hagiography relates.The latter, unlike the troubadours’ lyrical cansons, is in the second person, using the imperative form ora pro nobis [pray for us]. However, moving from the objectivity of the vidas to the intersubjectivity of the prayer does not call the invocation’s ontological importance into question. On the contrary, such prayers can be considered as illocutionary speech-acts with the postulated ability of modifying extralinguistic reality. Despite these pragmatic and ontological differences, there is a reverse symmetry between the lyrical vidas, on the one hand, and the hagiographic epitomes, on the other. In the troubadours’ songs, the lyrical first person addresses a potentially wide audience, whereas the invocations appeal to a unique saint figure.


25

Transformation of a Paratext into a Poetic Text It is reasonable to assume that verse rewritten as prose, while gaining ontological weight, suffers a corresponding loss in poetic power. Applying the standards prevailing in the Middle Ages, this is certainly arguable, since the sophisticated encoding of messages is the essence of medieval poetics, and the vidas are merely plain and almost tedious accounts of the salient events in the troubadours’ lives. However, authors from Dante Alighieri to Ezra Pound, including Jehan de Nostredame, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Uhland, Robert Browning, and Giosua Carducci incorporated narrative material from the vidas (especially from Jaufre Rudel’s vida) into their own literary work, showing how easy it is to recross the boundary between text and paratext, including sophisticated encoding. Thus, when other writers recycled them into new poetic frameworks, the vidas acquired a new kind of canonicity. This shift in status of paratext, which an author can reuse as a source of inspiration for a new text, finds a precedent in early Christian literature, namely, the Gospels.These New Testament narratives may be considered as closely related to Rabbinic Midrash or Pesher (the form of exegesis practiced by the Dead Sea sectarians), since they recast the Old Testament prophets in such a way that there is a distinction between the canonical aura of Old Testament prophecy and the paratextual status of the New Testament narratives applied to the Old Testament quotations. For example, Matthew’s description of the massacre of the Holy Innocents quotes Jeremiah 31:14 as a paratext.18 However, when other writers cite this verse of Jeremiah as it is quoted by Matthew,19 it takes on the role of a canonical text, as opposed to the new, noncanonical paratext in which it is integrated. Similarly, Dante’s description of Bertran de Born’s torments in hell20 also illustrates this process, in which a paratext attains the status of a full-fledged text once another writer quotes or refers to it in a new text.The following passage may be considered as an interpolation of the last sentence of de Born’s vida: “E s’il aguen patz ni treva, ades se penet ab sos sirventes de desfar la patz e de mostrar com cascuns era desonratz en aquella patz. E si n’ac de grans bens e de grans mals.”21 [And if they had peace and truce, immediately he would strive by means of his political songs to undo the peace and to show how much ashamed everybody was by this peace. Hence he got great goods and great evils].

The author of this vida did not explicitly mention de Born’s eternal damnation. He merely relied on the polemical verses about the troubadour,

26


depicting him as a bellicose knight who eventually paid for his intrigues. Dante read this paratextual interpolation in light of his interpretation of the vague formula de grans mals (great evils) as referring to the pain of hell. Viewing this vida as paratextual packaging of the troubadours’ verses to be reutilized in a new poetic context is even more striking since, according to another paratextual version of this vida, de Born followed Bernard de Ventadorn’s example and ended his days in repentance in the Cistercian abbey of Dalon. However, Dante chose the version presenting the troubadour as a sinner doomed to damnation. By deliberately ignoring the alternative version in which de Born is given a second chance, the author of the Divine Comedy imparted a particular kind of canonical authority to one particular version of the rather plastic material of the troubadours’ biographies. Some of Ezra Pound’s compositions prominently portray the changing status of the vida: from a paratext into a quasi-orthodox text recycled in the framework of a new paratext.Whereas Dante relied only implicitly on de Born’s vida to describe the bellicose troubadour’s pain, Pound quotes the original version of Sordello’s vida verbatim.22 Pound’s methodology demonstrates a posteriori how a prose paratext that surrounds the poetry in the framework of a medieval cansonier could eventually assume the character of the poetic text from which it is derived. Once transposed in the new context of modernist American poetry, the essential difference between prose and poetry becomes blurred. In Canto 6, the obfuscation is so efficient that Pound sequentially quotes a fragment of Sordello’s vida and two verses by the well-known troubadours, William of Aquitaine and Arnaut Daniel. In Canto 36, he combines another quotation from Sordello’s vida with a fragment from a charter signed by Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, in which the King endowed the troubadour with an estate. In this way, Pound adroitly elevates a nonliterary document to the level of literary texts or paratexts. Reduced to the dimension of a mysterious fragment, excerpted from a context that is in all likelihood unknown to the average reader of American poetry, the vida no longer serves the role of an informative message, but becomes an opaque and foreign element embedded in the context of new English verse.The obscurity arises from the deliberately fragmentary nature of the quotation and the preservation of the Occitanian formulation in the new context of Pound’s poetry. For the average modern English-speaking reader, Occitanian is no more understandable than such liturgical languages as Latin and Hebrew. However, as the French romanticist Chateaubriand remarked, the very use of an unfamiliar language in the framework of religious worship extends an aura of mystery to the divine cult.23 By inserting quotations in Old Occitanian into the framework of his Cantos, Pound seems to have applied Chateaubriand’s observation to his secular poetic


27

endeavor.Although Occitanian served to create a whole corpus of medieval secular poetry, when Pound recycled it in the framework of twentiethcentury American verse, he was apparently putting it to use as a semisacred language.Thus, he not only managed to promote this medieval language to the status of a hieratic language, but also transformed leaden prose into a golden poetic discourse. Reproducing the Golden Legend’s formulas and narrative patterns, the troubadours’ vidas seem to be a kind of secularized hagiography. In this secularization process, hymns to literary glory replace the accounts of martyrdom (most of the Golden Legend’s saints are martyrs). But this significant step is not the only mark of convergence between the secular and the sacred spheres. As we have seen, even the way in which a vida paratext connects with its related poetic text is reminiscent of the link between a paratextual commentary and its related biblical text. Moreover, the troubadours’ songs themselves often crossed the boundary between the sacred and the secular domains. Even their melodies have close bonds with church music.24 The hypothesis of the clerical origin of Provençal lyric is also corroborated by the borrowing of rhythmical patterns from liturgical or paraliturgical poetry written in Latin.25 Theories ascribing a clerical origin to the troubadours’ songs only reinforce the impression that, even in its formative and creative periods, the troubadours’ lyric served as the secularized vulgar counterpart to liturgical poetry written in Latin. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the trend of following the model of sacred literature reappeared during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the postclassical phase of troubadour poetry, when the primary goal was no longer to create new songs, but to compile the extant ones.


CHAPTER 2 “QUID HINIELDUS CUM CHRISTO?”:THE SECULAR EXPRESSION OF THE SACRED IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH LYRICS Thomas G. Duncan

The expression of the sacred in the heroic mode of Old English literature through the exploitation of secular Germanic images and concepts is examined in the representation of Christ as a young warrior in “The Dream of the Rood.” A contrasting picture is encountered in Middle English lyrics reflecting Anselm’s new doctrine of salvation centered on love. Now, in the interplay of the secular and the sacred, the divine is presented in unreservedly intimate human terms, Christ as child and as man, Mary as a loving and suffering mother.The gap between secular and sacred narrows to a vanishing point.

hat has Ingeld to do with Christ?”Alcuin’s celebrated question in a letter of 797, probably addressed to a “Mercian bishop concealed behind the by-name Speratus,”1 rather than, as hitherto supposed, to Bishop Hygbald of Lindisfarne, clearly invited the answer “nothing whatsoever.”A definitive boundary is set between the heroic world of Germanic tradition and the realm of Christianity—between Ingeld and Christ:

“W

The house is narrow and has no room for both.The Heavenly King does not wish to have communion with pagan and forgotten kings listed name by name: for the eternal King reigns in Heaven, while the forgotten pagan king wails in Hell.2

30

T H O M A S G. D U N CA N

Both in sentiment and in manner of expression the great Northumbrian scholar was, at the end of the eighth century, following in a tradition established by earlier Christian writers. By the end of the second century CE,Tertullian had already asked,“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”3 Some two centuries later, Jerome followed with, “What has Horace to do with the Psalter,Virgil with the Gospels and Cicero with Paul?”4 Tertullian and Jerome had in mind pagan classical authors; for his part, Alcuin was concerned with a literature typified by Ingeld, a pagan Germanic hero best known to us from the Old English epic Beowulf. There were, of course, other Christian writers who were eager to justify the reading of classical literature. Albeit the work of pagan authors, classical texts were nevertheless, in Christian understanding, part of God’s creation and as such were to be regarded as potential vehicles of spiritual truth as understood through allegorical and typological interpretation. Notably Virgil’s fourth Eclogue came to be viewed as prophetic of the birth of Christ, and the hero of the Aeneid as a type of Christ.5 Even so, it is clear that Alcuin, unlike some twentieth-century scholars, would never have dreamed of finding Christian allegory in Beowulf. Moreover, if he had no notion of discovering spiritual truths in tales of a pagan Germanic past, nor, perhaps, did he realize the potential role of such pagan Germanic traditions in expressing the emergent Christian culture of Anglo-Saxon England. However, if, as reported by Bede, Pope Gregory instructed Augustine not to destroy English heathen temples but to convert them to Christian use by the sprinkling of holy water, the building of altars, and the installation of relics, so too Old English writers in prose and poetry were not slow to exploit secular Germanic images and concepts in the expression of the new faith.6 Nowhere in Old English literature is just how much Ingeld had to do with Christ more strikingly apparent than in The Dream of the Rood. This is immediately evident from four characteristic features of this poem. The first concerns the presentation of Christ, who is here depicted as a young warrior, a hero, strong and steadfast, stripping himself to do battle on the cross. At the end of the poem he is still a hero, a warrior, triumphant, mighty, and successful in his final mission, the Harrowing of Hell.The second is essentially a significant aspect of the first.The emphasis on the suffering of the crucifixion in this poem is registered not through Christ but through the cross—the personified, speaking cross: it is the cross that is pierced with dark nails, the cross that is drenched with blood. Christ at the conclusion of the crucifixion scene, far from being pictured as a victim suspended in agony, continues to be represented as a hero, now as a warrior described as resting, exhausted after a great battle. Third, the man–lord relationship, that relationship so fundamental to heroic society, is also fundamental to this poem. Here it is the relationship of the personified cross and Christ. The cross, however, cannot defend his lord, Christ, as a true retainer should;

“QUID HINIELDUS CUM CHRISTO?”

31

ironically, it dare not, contrary to its lord’s command, bend, or break, or fell His enemies. Likewise, in the second half of the poem, the relationship of dreamer and cross also becomes that of man and lord, as the dreamer honors and serves the cross and the cross becomes his protector.7 Finally, it is to be noted that Heaven, like the hall of any earthly lord, is imagined in terms characteristic of the heroic life, that is, as a place of banqueting. The Dream of the Rood is expressed in a heroic idiom, in terms and concepts familiar to an Old English audience from the literature of the pagan, secular world of Ingeld. However, it should be noted that the poem’s emotive power derives not from the Christ figure but from the immediacy with which the experiences and emotions of the dreamer and of the personified rood are presented, in some measure paradoxically, via the Germanic man–lord relationship. Christ is here recognizably a Germanic hero as he does battle on the cross for mankind and, at the end of the poem, triumphantly completes his final expedition, the Harrowing of Hell, bringing a host of souls to dwell in glory in his heavenly home. This heroic Christ, however, remains a remote figure. What a contrast was to emerge in English devotional poetry within three centuries of the Vercelli MS version of The Dream: Swetë Jhesu, king of blisse, Min hertë love, min hertë lisse, Thou art swetë mid y-wisse, Wo is him that thee shal misse.

[heart’s love, my heart’s joy] [sweet indeed ] [who will lose you]8

How completely foreign to Old English religious poetry, alike in sentiment as in expression, are these opening lines of a thirteenth-century Middle English devotional lyric! Here we encounter the mood and sensibilities of a new age where, as in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?, the doctrine of salvation earlier conceived of as a cosmic battle between Christ and the Devil is now focused on love: Christ out of love for man becoming man to suffer for man. A heroic contest had become a metaphorical fight for love, a conception superbly expressed in Love me broughte, a lyric found in John of Grimestone’s late-fourteenth–century Commonplace Book: Love me broughte, And love me wroughtë, Man, to be thi ferë; Love me fedde, And love me ledde, And love me lettëd herë. Love me slow, And love me drow,

[created ] [companion] [nourished] [kept me here] [slew] [drew, stretched out]

32


And love me leyde on berë; Love is my pes, For love I ches Man to byen derë.

[laid on a bier] [peace] [chose] [buy (i.e., redeem) at a cost]

Ne dred thee nought, I have thee sought, Bothen day and night; To haven thee, Wél is me, I have thee wonne in fight.

[won]9

Love triumphs, but it does so paradoxically through suffering: Love me slow, [slew] And love me drow, [drew, stretched out] And love me leyde on berë. [laid on a bier]

In Middle English religious lyrics reflecting this new doctrine of salvation the interplay of sacred and secular is now seen in the presentation of the Divine in unreservedly intimate human terms: the gap between human and divine, the secular and the sacred, so great, even absolute in some religious traditions, narrows to the disappearing point.True, in the earlier version of Christian salvation represented in the Old English Dream of the Rood, Christ indeed became man but, as noted earlier, only as a rather remote hero in that poem, virtually untouched by the suffering endured by the personified rood. By contrast, Christ as man, not hero, his suffering vividly depicted, is the immediate subject of several early Middle English lyrics including the following, one of the various renderings into Middle English verse of a passage beginning Candet nudatum pectus from John of Fecamp’s Liber Meditationum: Whyt was hys naked brest and red of blod hys side, Bleyk was his fair andléd, his woundës dep and wide, And hys armes y-streight, hey upon the rode; On fif stedes on his body the stremës ran o blode.

[white] [red with blood ] [pale, fair face] [deep] [stretched ] [high upon the cross] [five places] [the streams of blood ran ]10

More telling and affective are the second and third stanzas of “Worldës blissë, Have God Day”:11 Ha, Jesu! thin holi heved With sharpë thornës was by-wevëd,

[holy head ] [encircled ]


Thi fairë neb was al bi-spet, With spot and blod meynd al by-wet; Fro the crounë to the to Thi body was ful of pine and wo, And wan and red.

[ fair face; spat upon] [spittle; mingled; drenched ] [ from the crown to the toe] [ pain and woe] [wan and red]

Ha Jesu! thi smartë ded Be my sheld, and minë red From develes lorë Ha, swéte Jesú, thin orë! For thinë pinës sorë, Tech min herte right lovë thee Whos hertë blod was shad for me.

[Ah Jesu! your painful death] [may it be; help] [ from the Devil’s promptings] [have mercy]

33

[to love you properly] [heart’s blood was shed ]

The verbal realization of the suffering of God as man is accompanied in some later Middle English manuscripts by graphic illustrations.The fifteenthcentury lyric O man unkynde12 is written down the left side of the manuscript page. To the right of the text is a drawing of Christ, with blood pouring from the nail holes in his hands and feet and, especially, from the gash in his side.13 This is the popular fifteenth-century iconographic imago pietatis, the “image of pity”—not specifically a crucifix (with Christ hanging from the cross), but the timeless image of the wounded Christ as the Man of Sorrows. In one moving fifteenth-century complaint lyric, Wofully araide, Christ appeals to man in terms of the sufferings he endured on the cross. These agonies are partly described in the present tense: Thus naked am I nailed, O man, for thi sake. I love the, thenne love me— why slepest thu? Awake!14

[(marked by) nails]

However, the tenses of the poem are mainly past: Thus wàs I defasëd, Thus wàs my flesh rasëd, And I to deth chasëd; Like a lambe led untò sacrefise, Slayëne I was in most cruell wise.15

[disfigured ] [torn] [hounded ]

[slain]

This address from the cross is one of a number of Middle English lyrics that echo the text O vos omnes, Old Testament words from Lamentations 1.12, originally a lament for Jerusalem, that were used as an antiphon at Laudes

34


on Holy Saturday with reference to Christ’s agony. Here in Wofully araide a vivid depiction of Christ crucified begins to merge with the timeless image of the Man of Sorrows. Indeed, in the Harley manuscript version a small drawing of the imago pietatis appears above the first stanza of the poem. Nowhere, perhaps, in Middle English lyrics is God more fully portrayed as man than in another fifteenth-century complaint poem, Brother, abyde, I the desire and pray, a poem that reflects the medieval practice of dwelling in the imagination on the events and details of Christ’s earthly existence as a form of spiritual exercise. This devotional mode, already advocated by St. Anselm and St. Bernard, promoted the production of such largely fictional accounts of the life of Christ as the Meditationes Vitae Christi, a work long attributed to St. Bonaventura (ca. 1217–74).The style of this narrative is simple, the emphasis throughout being on the Franciscan values of humility and poverty. Particular attention is paid to the infancy of Jesus (the Virgin’s gentle, motherly care of her child is lovingly described), to Christ’s boyhood, and to the events of the Passion. Details and episodes unrecorded in the Gospels or in such traditional sources as the writings of the Church fathers, the Glossa ordinaria, and the Legenda aurea, are vividly and sympathetically supplied by the author. Several English translations of parts of this text were made in the fourteenth century, and the complete fifteenthcentury translation by Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christ, became one of the most popular books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is from this literary and devotional tradition that the vivid details and human touches of Brother, abyde derive. Christ’s appeal is not focused solely on his sufferings at the crucifixion but on a review of his entire life—a life of poverty and sacrifice. At one point Christ recalls his boyhood as a youth playing with children in the street dressed in such poor clothes as his mother could make or spin: I lede my youth wyth children in the strette, Poorly arayed in clothës bare and thyne, Suche as my mother for me dyde make and spyne.16

[street] [dressed]

One may compare this last passage with the detailed account in the Meditationes Vitae Christi of the Virgin spinning and sewing in order to clothe herself and her child, and of the child Jesus acting as her messenger as she sewed for others to earn a living.17 At another point Christ is like an idealized Franciscan, wandering barefoot and bareheaded, suffering so much from hunger, thirst, and cold that even his own mother did not know him. Thus longe I lyved, passyng frome place to place, Barefotyd, caplese, wythout sylver or gold.


Payne of my traveylle aperëd in my face, Men myght perceyve yf thei listed to behold. Watch and grett labur, sharpe honger, thurst and cold

35

[if they wished ] [wakefulness and great exertion]

Full ofte me brought so feble and so lowe, That myne owne mother sum tyme dyd me not knowe.18

If the Divine is expressed here in so radical a realization of Christ’s humanity, in other Middle English lyrics, divine love was manifested primarily in terms of the archetypal human relationship of parent and child. This, of course, was nothing new: “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him”—the words of the Psalmist immediately spring to mind.19 It is, therefore, not surprising that Middle English lullaby lyrics with the Virgin and her infant child and crucifixion lyrics with an anguished mother at the foot of the cross offer the most moving attempts at expressing the divine paradox of love and suffering. It is worthwhile pausing for a moment to consider the marked contrast Old English literature presents in this regard.The Blessed Virgin is referred to only once in The Dream of the Rood.The cross asserts that God had caused it to be honored above all trees as He honored Mary above all women: Hwæt, me Qa geweor5ode ofer holmwudu, swylce swa he his modor eac, ælmihtig God geweor5ode ofer eall wifa cynn.20

wuldres Ealdor heofonrices Weard, Marian sylfe, for ealle menn

There is no mention in The Dream of the Rood of the Virgin grieving at the foot of the cross. Still less is there any vestige in Old English of the mother-and-child lullaby poems found later in Middle English. Probably the most noteworthy appearance of the Virgin in Old English poetry is in the Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book, formerly known as Christ I. Here one finds a remarkable dialogue with Joseph where she explains why he should put aside his anguish and his shame. Yet, although the main emphasis in these poems is on the purity of the young maiden Mary and the miracle of the Virgin Birth and Mary is addressed here in terms reflecting such traditional patristic and liturgical titles as “Bride of Christ,” “Queen of Heaven,” and “Empress of Hell,” she is also spoken of as “holy Mary, ever triumphant.”21 From this latter description it would seem that not only Judith, the archetypal biblical heroine of Old English literature, but even the Blessed Virgin was conceived of in a manner more characteristically heroic than womanly. It is hardly surprising that in a period in which Christ could appropriately be depicted in Ingeldian terms there was little place for a

36


Virgin of tenderness and compassion. Indeed, it may be supposed that there could have been no role of any great significance for the Virgin in the heroic world of Old English poetry. However, in the post-Anselmian world of Middle English literature, the situation is totally different. It requires no great exercise of the imagination to understand how, in many Middle English lyrics, especially lullaby and crucifixion lyrics, the Virgin came to be a central figure in the expression of the tenderness and compassion inherent in the new theology of divine love. Some lullaby lyrics express the joy of that maternal love, as in the words: “Lullay, myn lyking, my dere sone, myn sweting, Lullay, my dere herte, myn owyn dere derling’

[beloved ] [sweet one] [darling]

—the burden of a tender lullaby carol to the infant Jesus that begins: I saw a fair maiden sitten and singe, She lullëd a litel child, a swetë lording.

[sweet lord] 22

The Virgin, like any earthly mother, suckles her child and sings him to sleep: Whan it gan wepe, Qat child so swete, Sho stilled him with mylk of tete; Sho clipte hym ofte and keste also, Gret was Qe ioye be-twene hem to. Pat 3onge child whan it gan wepe, WiQ song she lulled him a-slepe; Pat was so swete a melody hyt passet alle mynstralcy; Pe nyghtyngale sang also, Hure wois is hors and noght Qer-to.23

Often, however, joy is mingled with sorrow, as in the following lines picturing the nativity in the later-medieval manner, with manger, ox, and ass: Jhesu, swetë sonë dere, In porful bed thou list now here, And that me grevëth sore; For thi cradel is as a bere, Ox and assë ben thi fere, Wepe may I therfore.

[dear] [on a pitiful bed you lie] [ grieves me bitterly] [byre] [are your companions] [weep]24


37

Although lullaby lyrics dwell on the tender human relationship of mother and child, it is precisely because this mother is the Virgin and Christ the child that, characteristically in these lyrics, one encounters the coexistence of love and suffering. Frequently the Virgin is gripped by ominous premonitions of what lies ahead for her child.Thus, in one such lyric Mary is unable to sing at her child’s request “as do mothers all”: The maiden wolde withouten song Hire child o slepë bringe; The child thoughtë she dide him wrong, And bad his moder singe. Lullay, lullay, etc. “Sing now, moder,” seide that child, “What me shal befalle Here after whan I come to ild, So don modrës alle. Lullay, lullay, etc.25

[wished ] [to put her child to sleep]

[what is to happen to me] [come to maturity] [as do]

The Virgin can only offer what—not least, in the light of other lullaby lyrics—is a rather ironic excuse for not being able to sing to her child of his future: she claims only to know what she learned from the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation: “Swetë sonë,” seydë she, “Wherof sholde I singe? Wist I never yet more of thee But Gabrieles gretinge. Lullay, lullay, etc.26

[of what] [knew I ] [than Gabriel’s greeting]

Indeed, in one fifteenth-century lullaby poem, the weeping Christ child’s account of his coming crucifixion draws from the Virgin, almost as from one who feels herself a victim of deception, an exceptionally candid, rueful, and (with its double negative) emphatic comment: “A! sone, that is a heyvy cas: [sad plight] When Gabrell cnelled before my face, [knelt before me (lit. before my face)] And sayd,‘Heylle! Lady, full of grace,’ He never told me noothing of this.”27

Most anguished of all are the crucifixion lyrics in which Mary, standing at the foot of the cross, beholds the agonies of her son and, as a mother, suffers accordingly. One of the best known of these lyrics takes the form of a dialogue between Christ and Mary. Jesus appeals to his mother to put her

38


sorrow aside and be joyful: “Stond wel, moder, under rodë, [stand well, mother, under the cross] Bihold thi child wyth gladë modë, [ gladsome heart] Blythë moder might thou be.” [a happy mother you may be]28

This request is repeated throughout the dialogue with various supporting arguments of a theological nature. Inevitably this makes Christ seem detached and less than wholly sympathetic as motherly grief is in counterpoint with theological rationale. The Virgin’s anguish remains unassuaged as she continues to behold her crucified son: “Sone, how may I blithë stonden? I se thin feet, I se thin honden, Naylëd to the hardë tre.”29

[be (lit. stand) happy] [hands]

Christ begs Mary not to weep; her tears, He says, cause Him greater grief than His own death. But how, asks Mary, can she possibly restrain her tears in the face of the blood streaming from Him, her son. Christ persists with various reasons why He must die; Mary’s grief remains undiminished until, in the second last stanza, Christ’s mention of His resurrection provides the cue for the turning point in the poem, which, in its final stanza, briefly celebrates the triumph of Easter and Mary’s final joy as Queen of Heaven: Blissed be thou quen of hevenë, Bring us out of hellë levenë Thurgh thi derë sonës might. Moder, for that heighë blodë That He shadde upon the rodë, Led us into hevene light. Amen.

[Hell’s flames] [noble blood ] [shed ] [Heaven’s light]30

In later Middle English lyrics the expression of aspects of the Divine through the figure of the Virgin develops in two contrasting directions. In one remarkable poem, a fifteenth-century complaint of the Virgin addressed to “all women that ever were born,” the humanity of the Virgin as a mother is movingly evoked in a context of domestic detail.31 Poignant comparisons are developed between Mary, who holds her dead son on her lap, and other mothers, who dance their children merrily on their knees. The scene so vividly depicted here was clearly inspired by the characteristically fifteenth-century iconographic representation of the Virgin, the pietà, the image of the Virgin with the dead Christ on her lap. In this lyric, one of the mothers addressed is pictured as happily combing her child’s hair: Mary meanwhile picks thorns from her dead son’s head; such a mother


39

takes pleasure in making a garland of flowers for her child; Mary’s child has a garland of thorns. O woman, a chaplet chosyn thu has [ garland (of flowers); you have] Thy childe to were, hit dose the likyng, [(for) thy; wear; it gives you pleasure] Thu pynnes hit on, grete joye thou mas; [you make] And I sitte with my son sore wepyng, His chaplet is thornys sore prickyng, His mouth I kys with carfull chere— [in sorrow] I sitte wepyng and thu syngyng, For now liggus ded my dere son dere. [lies dead my dear, dear son]32

In particular, one should note how the descriptions of motherly affection in this complaint recall the detailed accounts of Mary and the infant Jesus so lovingly dwelt upon in medieval lives of Christ. In this regard, this lyric may be compared with Brother, abyde with its imaginative depiction of details from the life of Christ. However, in this poem it is not the maternal joys of the Virgin herself that are recounted but those of other mothers, presented here in ironic contrast to the Virgin’s bitter sorrows. If aspects of the Divine may thus be expressed in scenes of ordinary domestic life, they are also portrayed in a wholly different context in lyrics on the Assumption and Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, themes that came into prominence in the fifteenth century.As noted earlier, Mary was already being addressed by her traditional title “Queen of Heaven” in the Old English poem Christ I. However, it is only in the fifteenth century that this role is fully realized in English lyrics. Now, at a time when Christian devotion focused in ever more detail on Christ’s humanity, Mary, the human mother of lullaby and crucifixion lyrics, is raised to quasi-divine status in lyrics celebrating her Coronation. In a sense, the sacred in the secular is enhanced as Mary, human advocate, icon of womanly compassion, reaches virtual apotheosis as Queen of Heaven. It is interesting to note that in contrast to the simple style characteristic of the best of earlier Middle English devotional lyrics, fifteenth-century Coronation lyrics were more frequently written in a “high” style. One such begins as follows: The infinite power essenciall, Me thoght I sawë verrement, Procedyng from his trone celestiall To a dere damsell that was gent. Songes melodious was in their tent, Of angells synging with gret solemnyté Before a quene whiche was present. Ecce Virgo, radix Jessé.

[absolute] [truly] [throne] [dear; noble, beautiful ] [were the concern]

[behold the Virgin, the root of Jesse]33

40


This high or “aureate” style, often associated with the fifteenth-century poet Lydgate, was characterized by a copious use of words derived from Latin, many recently or even (in some poems) newly adopted into English. Medieval opinion, however, frequently viewed the high style as vain and even worldly and advocated a plain style for sacred subjects. Indeed, as Douglas Gray observes in this regard, “there are so many references to plainness and simplicity of style that one feels that it was almost a stylistic ‘imitation’ of Christ.”34 The simple style appropriate to devotional literature is sometimes contrasted with the high style used by pagan writers of antiquity. Dante’s description of Beatrice’s manner of speaking as “soave e piana”35 prompted Benevuto da Imola, a late-fourteenth-century commentator, to remark:“Well he says this, for the divine speech is sweet and plain, not high and proud like the speech of Virgil and the poets.”36 What, then, was the appeal of the high, aureate style to writers of fifteenth-century Coronation lyrics? Presumably, it was, in the first place, the sound of long Latinate words—their sonority and rhythm. Such words normally carried at least two stresses, ending with the rhythmic pattern / x /. When they occurred in rhymes, the combination of the weight of stressing with the repetition of like sounds maximized sonority. Resonance was sometimes enhanced by alliteration, which was often used to link Latinate words in aureate verse. If this kind of writing is read with sympathy, confidence, and rhythm, the original appeal of these Latinisms as part of the music of poetry may still be felt. Significant, also, was a traditional social function of high style defined by Chaucer’s Host in the following words to the Clerk: Youre termës, youre colours, and youre figures, Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite Heigh style, as whan that men to kyngës write.37

If appropriate for kings, was not such a style suitable for poems addressed to the Queen of Heaven? It is not difficult to understand the appeal of an elevated Latinate vocabulary to fifteenth-century poets as, in poems on the Coronation of the Virgin, they attempted to express the almost baroque splendor of ornate celestial settings, with Mary, suffused with resplendent light, enthroned as Queen of Heaven and surrounded by angelic hosts. So far this discussion of the sacred and the secular in Middle English lyrics has focused on the expression of the Divine in human terms, of divine love in Christ the man, of divine compassion in Mary the mother, conceptions of love rooted in a theological and devotional background stemming from Anselm and Bernard. Meanwhile, in the same period an equally novel understanding of the role of love, the idea that love is noble


41

and ennobling, was emerging in secular literature.Viewed in one way or another, such a notion would not have surprised Plato,Virgil, St. Paul, or St. Augustine. But the belief that the proper object of love should be a woman and that unqualified devotion to a woman was the true inspiration of refined and noble conduct would indeed have astonished them. This, however, was the troubadours’ creed. In many Middle English secular love poems, poets languished and made urgent and repeated appeals to their ladies for “pity,” for “mercy.”Typical is the opening stanza of secular love lyric from the British Library MS Harley 2253, perhaps the most famous of all surviving medieval English lyric manuscripts: With longing I am lad, On molde I waxë mad, A maidë marrëth me. I grede, I grone, unglad, For selden I am sad That semly for to see.

[I go (lit. am led)] [on earth I am going mad] [distresses] [cry out; groan; anguished ] [seldom; tired ] [that fair one; of seeing (lit. to see)]

Lady, thou rewë me, To routhe thou hast me rad, Be bote of that I bad, My lyf is long on thee.

[have pity on me] [to grief; brought] [be the remedy for which I have prayed ] [my life is dependent ]38

This poet’s very life depends upon his lady; troubadour ideals had truly arrived in English literature. If in the eighth century Alcuin could ask what Ingeld had to do with Christ, now that the heroic age had given way to the era of courtly love, a twelfth-century descendant of Alcuin might likewise have asked what troubadours had to do with Christ. That is, he might have asked were it not for the fact that the exploitation of the modalities of later-medieval secular love poetry in Middle English religious literature was so manifestly widespread, and not least so through the influence of the Franciscans, as to render such a question absurd. The conventions of the new secular love poetry most readily found employment in a sacred context in Marian lyrics. Not infrequently, the Virgin is addressed in the very manner of medieval lovelorn poets addressing their ladies.Take, for example, the following lines addressed to the Virgin in a thirteenth-century Marian lyric Edi be thou, hevene queen:39 On thee hit is wel eth-senë Of allë women thou havest the pris. My swetë Levedy, her my benë, And rew of me yif thi wille is.

[very evident] [you are supreme] [lady, hear my prayer] [have pity on me if ]

42


Nis non maide of thinë hewë, So fair, so shene, so rudy, so bright; Swetë Lady of me thou rewë And have merci of thin knight.

[complexion] [so fair, so beautiful, so rosy] [have pity on me]

Ladi mildë, softe and swotë, Ich crie thee merci, Ich am thy mon, Bothe to hondë and to fotë, On allë wise that Ich con.

[ gentle and sweet] [your servant] [both hand and foot] [in every way I know]

Ich am in thine love-bendë.

[love-bonds]

There is, of course, little to be surprised at in this use of the language of secular love in religious contexts, as, in some measure, in secular lyrics poets echoed religious language and imagery in addressing their mistresses. In the fifteenth-century verse epistles came to play a considerable part in the ritual of paying court to a lady, and several lyrics of this kind began with variations of the formula “Go little bill.”This convention is exploited in a remarkable Marian lyric beginning: Goe, lytyll byll, and doe me recommende Unto my lady with godely countynaunce— For trusty messanger I the sende.40

[letter] [as a trusty servant I thee send]

This lady is thought of in thoroughly courtly terms: She restëth in my remembraunce, Day other nyght wherso I be; It ys my specyall dalyaunce For to remembyr hur bewté; She is enprented in ych degree With yftes of nature inexplicable And eke of grace incomparable.

[remains in my thoughts] [day or night] [special intimate delight] [her beauty] [endowed in every respect] [ gifts; inexpressible] [and also41]

Up until the end of the fourth stanza, where the poet’s feyrest paramour (line 25) is suddenly referred to as Most soverayne medyatryce (line 27), there is hardly a hint that the lytyll byll is, in this instance, being sent to the Virgin herself. Especially interesting is the thirteenth-century lyric Now I se blosmë sprynge: Now I se blosmë sprynge, Ich herde a foulës song, A swetë love-longinge Myn hertë thurghout sprong,

[blossom flourish] [I heard a bird’s song] [throughout; has sprung up]


That is of lovë newe, That is so swete and trewe, Hit gladëth al my song; Ich wot al mid y-wisse My lyf and eke my blysse Is al theron y-long.

43

[about a new love] [so sweet and true] [it gladdens] [know with certainty] [and also] [dependent42]

The opening references to springtime here are, of course, conventional and characteristic of not a few secular love lyrics, in which, as here, the sight of blossoms and the sound of birds singing move a poet to speak of a “swete love-longinge” (line 3) that “gladeth al [his] song” (line 7) and upon which his life and joy depend. However, a modern reader experiences no little astonishment that the second stanza of this same lyric begins: Of Jhesu Crist I synge, That is so fayr and fre, Swetest of allë thynge, His owne Ich owe wel be.

[noble] [of all beings] [His own I ought indeed to be]43

Not only does the cause of the poet’s “love-longing” turn out to be Christ, but the very language used for Christ—Christ “so fayr and fre,” Christ “swetest of allë thynge,” “Jhesu, lemman softe”—is none other than that typically used for the beloved in many a secular love lyric. In this lyric, however, if the language and conventions of secular love poetry are used, the situation of the secular lyric is reversed. Here the true lover and sufferer of love’s anguish is not the poet himself but his beloved, the crucified Christ. For all his professed “love-longing,” the poet admits that, compared with Christ, he is incapable of love:“Of love ne can I nought” (line 37). He therefore implores Jesus, his lemman softe, his “gentle beloved,” to give him the strength to succeed in the true service of love: Jhesu, lemman softe, Thou yif me strengthe and might, Longinge sore and ofte To servë thee aright.44

[ give me] [yearning sore and often]

The lover poet of this devotional lyric is thus humble and contrite; he has nothing of the secular lover’s self-indulgent anguish. Nor is Christ, his beloved, remote and distant like the typical lady of a secular lyric. Just as the conventions and language of Middle English secular love poetry are used in lyrics in which the Virgin or Christ is the object of the lover-poet’s love-longing, so too the conventions of chivalric romance make their appearance in Christ as the Lover-Knight. In a seminal discussion

44


of this theme, Rosemary Woolf attributed its popularity to the “exceptional fitness” of “the story of the knight who dies for the sake of his lady. . .in order to win her love” for expressing “the dominant idea of medieval piety: that Christ endured the torments of the Passion in order to win man’s love.”45 As a version and precursor of the story of a knight who returns to his lady to find her gates hard-heartedly barred against him recorded in the fourteenth-century Fasciculus Morum,Woolf quoted the following brief but moving lyric found in a late-thirteenth-century manuscript: Alas! alas! wel evel I sped! For sinne Jesú fro me ys fled, That levely fere. At my dore He stant alone And calleth “Undo!” with rewful mone, On this manere: “Undo, my leef, my dowvë dere! Undo! Why stond I steken out here? Ich am thi make! Lo, mi lokkes and ek myn heved Are al with blody dropes bywevëd For thinë sake.46

[very ill have I fared ] [dear companion] [at my door He stands] [with pitiful lament] [my beloved, my dear dove] [stand I shut out] [your spouse] [my locks and also my head ] [covered]

It is precisely because sin has banished the lover, Jesu, from his lady’s heart that she now hard-heartedly excludes Him. This lyric evocatively recalls the biblical texts, Revelation 3.20 (“Behold, I stand at the door and knock”) and Song of Songs 5.2 (“Open to me, my sister, my love”). In a grimly ironic manner it also echoes the last half of the latter verse (“my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night”) in the description of Christ’s bloodstained head—“Lo, mi lokkes and ek myn heved / Are al with blody dropes bywevëd”—blood this knight has shed in doing battle for the sake of this lady. The image of Christ as Lover-Knight is also found in a longer lyric of some wit and sophistication, In a vaile of restles mynd, one of two fine Middle English Quia amore langueo poems.47 In this lyric different representations of Christ—Christ as king, knight, lover, brother, mother, and husband— emerge and merge. In particular, the image of Christ as Lover-Knight searching for and ready to sacrifice himself in the service of his beloved, here, Man’s soul, comes into play in the following lines: “My faire love, and my spousë bright, I saved hyr fro betyng, and she hath me bet; I clothed hyr in grace and hevenly light, This blody surcote she hath on me set.

[beating; beaten] [surcoat]


For longyng love I will not let; Swetë strokës be thes, lo! I have loved ever as I het, Quia amore langueo. “Loke unto myn handës, man! Thes gloves were given me whan I hyr sought; They be nat white, but rede and wan, Embroudrëd with blode (my spouse them bought!); They wyll not off—I leve them nought! I wowe hyr with them where ever she go. Thes handes full frendly for hyr fought, Quia amore langueo. “Marvell not, man, though I sitt styll; My love hath shod me wonder strayte. She boklëd my fete, as was hyr wyll, With sharp nailes (well thou mayst waite!). In my love was never dissaite, For all my membrës I have opend hyr to; My body I made hyr hertës baite, Quia amore langueo.48

45

[because of lovelonging; give up] [ promised ]

[discolored ] [embroidered ] [come off; discard them not] [woo her; goes] [so lovingly]

[shod me wondrously tight] [buckled] [may see] [deceit] [limbs] [bait for her heart]

Here we have the usual late-medieval representation of Christ’s sufferings and the instruments of His Passion as His knightly armor.49 His scourged and bleeding back becomes His “bloody surcoat,” a garment worn over armor. His nail-pierced hands are gloves embroidered with blood. “Sharp nails” are likewise the buckles of His shoes. But, with the bitterest of ironies, this surcoat, these gloves, and these buckles in this poem are none other than the cruel “presents” Christ, the Lover-Knight, receives from his beloved, Man’s soul. The foregoing discussion of the expression of the sacred via the secular in Old and Middle English lyrics has centered on two themes: first, the use of the language and conventions of secular literature in religious lyrics, and, second, the expression of aspects of the Divine in human terms.Two brief qualifications may be added by way of conclusion. First, it may seem somewhat cavalier to associate Ingeld with troubadours and chivalric knights as representatives of the secular. Even if the pagan Ingeld is so to be viewed, such an equation may seem questionable in the case of the latter, who, in real life, were doubtless Christians. Indeed, the companions of the Round Table, according to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, were no less than the most renowned knights under Christ

46


himself.50 However, as exponents of courtly love in lyrics and romances, troubadour poets and chivalric knights may, for the purposes of this discussion, be counted as representatives of a secular literature.They were certainly so viewed by St. Bernard, who had little love for the troubadour entourage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and by the homilist Robert de Gretham, who composed sermons for his patroness, Dame Aline, as an antidote to pernicious romances.51 Second, whereas in Middle English lyrics aspects of the Divine were certainly expressed in terms of Christ in his earthly life and Mary as an earthly mother, it is to be noted that such representations were selective, partial, and, to a degree, metaphorical.The Christ of the Nativity lyrics may be a cold, weeping, vulnerable baby, but, unlike any other baby, this child can speak, is aware of His identity and destiny, and is able to share this knowledge and concomitant emotions with His mother and, by extension, with the reader. As Caroline Bynum observes: “There are all sorts of homely scenes within which Jesus is not located, all sorts of childish actions that are not attributed to the baby God.”52 A medieval equivalent of Max Ernst’s 1926 painting of Mary spanking the infant Jesus is inconceivable.53 Just as alien to modern sensibilities, however, at least until recently, is another version of the medieval “humanation” of the Divine, the concept of Jesus as mother.54 This image appears at line 107 of In a vaile of restles mynd, where Christ the lover becomes a tender mother: My babe shall suffer no disese, I may not here my dere childe wepe, For with my pappe I shall hyr kepe.

[distress] [ for close to my breast]

No wonder though I tend hyr to— Thys hole in my side had never ben so depe But quia amore langueo.55

Later-medieval theologians found it uniquely appropriate to express the Divine in terms of equating the wound in Christ’s side with a breast and the blood that flowed from it with mother’s milk.Writers from Anselm to Julian of Norwich (not least the latter) dwelled on the theme of Jesus as mother and especially as nursing mother. Addressing Christ, the twelfth-century theologian William of St. Thierry wrote: “. . .it is your breasts, O eternal Wisdom, that nourish the holy infancy of your little ones. . . .”56 But what the author of The Dream of the Rood or, indeed, Alcuin might have made of this is hard to imagine, and however expressive of Christ it may be, it is certainly all a far cry from Ingeld.

CHAPTER 3 READING RADICAL METONYMY IN PEARL Alan J. Fletcher

Argues that the Middle English poem Pearl repays study of its treatment of the linguistic trope of metonymy for two chief reasons: first, metonymy is radical to its project in the sense that not only is it deployed pervasively throughout Pearl, but second, and more interestingly, that it offers a unique point of access to the understanding of the poem’s aesthetic and cultural dynamics. Via metonymy, Pearl can be conceived as a poetic dimensioning of imperatives powering the culture of contemporary exegesis; in that culture, hermeneutic principles may be encountered in the raw that are reconfigured in Pearl as poetry.Thus, the poet’s assimilation of such cultural resources helps to define his position, and that of his text, within the wider continuum of late-fourteenth century English cultural practice.

he subject of this essay is Pearl, and the object is to go through a door into this late-Middle English poem that has been left ajar but hitherto not really opened. Pearl is gone into here via the access of metonymy, one of language’s foundational tropes, as Roman Jakobson termed it,1 and also one whose energies are dynamically and pervasively active in the poem. Hence the appropriateness of taking metonymy as my point of departure. As we shall see, metonymy’s presence in this poem may be said to be radical in the simple sense that its deployment is fundamental to the poem’s project and in a more complex and culturally interesting sense that, in one of its manifestations, it ceaselessly displaces and alternates the products of its own procedures.Through metonymy, the object figured is at once absent and present

T

48

A L A N J. F L E T C H E R

in the moment of its figuring.2 A classic definition characterizes metonymy as “a figure of speech whereby the name of one entity e1 is used to refer to another entity e2 that is contiguous to e1.”3 From the humble to the exalted, the procedure is the same: thus a “boiling kettle” elides its “water,” while a “crown appointment” elides the monarch who authorizes it.To contribute a famous medieval example,Thomas Aquinas, early in the Summa Theologiae, said that when we read in the Bible that God’s arm was displayed, the expression does not mean that the Deity had some literal limb that might be laid bare; rather, it means that God displayed his effective power.4 This particular example chosen by Aquinas of a figurative biblical language that can be decoded to discover its literal sense provides, in fact, an applied hermeneutic reading of a biblical metonymy—although, of course,Aquinas did not use that term—and for him, metonymy’s successful decryption accessed both the sensus litteralis, the literal sense of scripture, and the intentio auctoris, the intention of the author.5 The commendable task of lifting any veils or integuments of figurative speech that might be hiding the sensus litteralis similarly uncovered what the author intended to convey. Yet, the way in which the metonymic thrust of the presenting image moves away from the image itself toward the literal sense in which it should properly ( proprie) be understood—that is, the presenting image is installed simply as a point of departure toward what matters,namely,the literal sense—is a procedure whose ramifications are worth reflecting on within the context of latemedieval hermeneutics. For these hermeneutics furnish an important circumstance in which to try to understand Pearl, as Ian Bishop perceived as far back as 1968, though he perceived it not quite in the ways that I pursue here. The metonymic thrust of which I speak, as meaning drives away from point A toward point B, resembles, though is not completely commensurate with, the way in which things that may be understood in the literal sense in Scripture are themselves capable of gesturing away from themselves and toward a spiritual sense.The difference in the procedures might be phrased like this: in the exegesis of Scripture, one may quit and abandon metonymy’s presenting image for what it signifies in the literal sense; and one may quit, but not abandon, the literal sense for what it signifies in the spiritual sense.To express this more graphically, the trope of metonymy as resolved by the exegetes may discard the vehicle in which meaning drives toward a destination or tenor in the literal sense, whereas the literal sense, as the vehicle for reaching the spiritual sense, is a valued and indispensable mode of transport: in this case, the traveling is just as important as the arriving. One might even wish to distinguish a dual kind of metonymic process, one that is exhausted in the act of signifying (metonymy as commonly understood) and another that as it signifies constantly recycles itself (quasimetonymy), where multiple possibilities have equal value. Thus, while my

READING RADICAL METONYMY IN PEARL

49

distinctions are modern, they may help us approach two related semiotic processes also known, albeit less formally, in medieval exegesis. In scriptural hermeneutics, then, figurative language use of the sort metonymy designates might be resolved into a literal sense, and that literal sense, increasingly considered in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to be of fundamental importance, might nevertheless disclose a spiritual sense (that was itself variously classifiable, although most usually into the three familiar species of tropology, allegory, and anagogy).6 The spiritual sense could thus always finally be anchored in the primacy of the sensus litteralis. It even became possible to speak of a duplex sensus litteralis, a twofold literal sense,7 which embraced, on the one hand, the surface, literal sense expressed in the words of a text—the primary or “proper” literal sense— and, on the other, a secondary or “figurative” literal sense. In other words, the spiritual sense that was accessed when the surface meaning of the words were read figuratively nevertheless always folded back into the literal sense and thus could be called a figurative literal sense. Since the figurative literal sense was cousin to the “proper” literal sense, the figurative literal sense was also understandable as an (secondary) authorial intention. Complex exegetical negotiations like these, in which the exfoliation of senses generated commerce between different departments of signification, surround, and I believe, inform (though by no means in any crudely deterministic way) the writing of Pearl. As the linguistic trope of metonymy in Pearl is a natural point of departure into the poem’s constitutive exegetical hinterland,8 analysis of its metonymies helps calibrate this theologically dense text’s relationship to particular aspects of the contemporary exegetical enterprise; it thus raises into consciousness some of the medieval habits of thought that underlie its composition. A relatively neglected dimension of Pearl awaits further exploration.9 Moreover, the course of the exploration may broach issues concerning the cultural work that Pearl accomplishes. But before I proceed further with this twin task of situating Pearl and considering what its cultural work may be, let me cite some empirical reasons to justify the first part of it, the attempt to gauge exactly how Pearl relates to its surrounding exegetical culture. Not only should these reasons endorse the opinion of many critics concerning the intellectual formation of the Pearlauthor, but also, more importantly, they should help qualify a significant observation Bishop made about the poem. Critics have universally acknowledged the fact of the Pearl-author’s exposure to the currents of clerical culture—so evident is this that many also considered him a cleric by profession,10 a view that I share—but apart from expounding his poem’s theology and its topicality in his time, most critics have been less aware of the clerical textual practices and characteristic procedures that prompted him as he composed.11 While the indisputable evidence for his acquaintance with this

50


particular clerical province clusters only locally in the poem (at lines 185, 793–960),12 its very appearance is most suggestive: it establishes his familiarity (whether prolonged or passing seems unknowable, but is in any event unimportant to the present argument) with the technical thought processes of scriptural exegesis that I outlined earlier. Bishop’s observation that the exegetical passage on the Lamb and on Jerusalem between lines 793 and 960 is the “one passage in Pearl that affords indisputable evidence that the author was familiar with the ‘method of the theologians’ (i.e., with the methods of exegesis)”13 can be endorsed and its supporting evidence amplified. First, its endorsement. Much earlier in the poem, at line 185, when the jeweler has caught sight of the Pearl-maiden for the first time, he says of the vision:“I hoped that gostly watz that porpose.”14 Here, it has generally gone unheeded that the collocation “ghostly purpose” was also a commonplace in the discourse of vernacular preaching, used to signal to the audience that the matter was capable of releasing a spiritual sense.15 (The earliest use of the collocation of which I am currently aware is in Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, not itself a sermon, though since Hilton was an Augustinian canon, he was a member of an order with a strong preaching tradition.)16 Thus by having his jeweler say this, the Pearl-author betrays his awareness of sermon discourse, where exegesis, albeit usually of a relatively modest and pastorally applied sort, was often conducted. Second, its amplification. The passage between lines 793 and 960, as Bishop has shown, could be analyzed as playing with literal, allegorical, and anagogical senses of the word “Jerusalem.”17 Here, we might simply pause to note in addition the sheer frequency of Jerusalem as an exegetical topic.18 Since Jerusalem was a locus classicus for illustrating the senses that could be expressed from Scripture beyond the literal, the clerically connected Pearlauthor doubtless had ample opportunity to encounter Jerusalem as an exegetical topic in some shape or form. So common was it, in fact, that he could conceivably even have heard its fourfold exegesis rendered in song.19 However, we can hazard a guess as to that shape or form. Pearl’s Jerusalem exegesis has not been lifted wholesale from that typically expounded by the exegetes; there, Jerusalem is often used mechanically to crank out and illustrate the four traditional senses of Scripture. In Pearl, rather, Jerusalem exegesis is selectively and carefully tailored to the poem’s requirements. The poem speaks of three Jerusalems, two literal and one spiritual: the first literal one, that in Old Testament times, the city of King David, which the jeweler first identifies (line 919); the second literal one, that in New Testament times, the city in which Christ died, which the Pearl-maiden identifies (lines 804–05, 816–17, 828–29, 941); and the spiritual one, that at the end of time, the Apocalyptic Jerusalem, which she also identifies (lines 792, 840–41) as her eternal home and which the jeweler comes to glimpse toward the end of the poem (line 987).


51

Commenting further on these three, the Pearl-maiden also classifies the two literal historical Old and New Testament Jerusalems of Judea together as “Old Jerusalem,” naming the Apocalyptic one, after biblical precedent, as the “New Jerusalem” (lines 937–44).This triadic distinction of “Jerusalems” is also interwoven with a triadic exegesis of biblical uses of the word “Lamb.” In the threefold Jerusalem, the Pearl-maiden’s “lemman swete” was similarly thrice taken for a Lamb (note his explicit reference in lines 830–34 to three different biblical uses of Lamb). I suspect that the way the poet makes his awareness of thinking in sets of three perfectly clear here may provide a telltale clue either to the kind of source that was influencing him or within whose terms he was accustomed to think. The Pearl-maiden’s “lemman swete” was the sacrificial victim whom Isaiah likened to a lamb in his messianic prophecy, the victim dumb like a lamb before his shearer (“And, as lombe that clypper in hande nem, / So closed he hys mouth fro vch query,” lines 802–03, based on Isaiah 53.7); her “lemman swete” was also the Lamb identified by St. John the Baptist (“Lo, Godes Lombe as trwe as ston”; line 822, based on John 1.29) when St. John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River; and her “lemman swete” was the wounded Lamb of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the Lamb worthy to open the seven seals on the librum scriptum intus et foris (“Lesande the boke with leues sware / There seuen syngnettes wern sette in seme”; lines 837–38, based on Revelation 5.1). It is possible that the Pearl-author’s triadic exegesis was suggested by, if not indeed directly derived from, some distinctio on Jerusalem combined with another on Lamb.20 (Although I have found no exact candidate yet, more work remains to be done; I note, for example, that Rabanus Maurus––an early authority, but one still being read and copied in the fourteenth century— associated these three Lambs in one of his homilies.)21 Thus distinctiones, those taxonomies that were the characteristic currency of exegetical culture, may either have contoured the way in which the Pearl-author thought, and thus explain his arrangement of this passage, or indeed have provided his material directly.Alternatively, he may have derived it not from some distinctio collection but from some other kind of text, such as a sermon, in which Jerusalem and Lamb distinctiones may have already been worked up and drawn together.22 Of course, should it prove that his poem at this point was not quite as derivative as my source-hunting speculations might seem to imply and that he alone was responsible for constructing the Jerusalem/Lamb nexus from received materials, he did his job so deftly that it argues a close sympathy with this particular quarter of clerical culture, whose value as an interpretative framework for the poem I am interested in exploring further. So, on the basis of such empirical evidence, I submit that we have a good formal warrant for deeper reflection on how Pearl might situate in relation to the hermeneutic practices that typically orbit biblical exegesis, at whatever level, and for considering how this situation bears upon the poem’s

52


cultural work.23 While not single-mindedly systematic in the way of the high practitioners of scriptural hermeneutics—Pearl is, after all, not a dedicated hermeneutic treatise but a poem free to cannibalize several literary genres and procedures including the exegetical24—it is a poem that has nevertheless connected with the tradition of the exegetes beyond ways already acknowledged and drawn strength from it. So much so, I wish to argue, that we are justified in building a platform from which to view Pearl that is constructed from practices of textual engagement contemporary with the poem and that the poem demonstrably draws upon. Further to my opening reflection on metonymies old and new, we discover a conflict and a convergence in the coexisting conditions that constitute metonymy: the constituents of any metonymy are not in themselves what they signify (hence a conflict), yet they nevertheless at once associate in some way with what they signify (hence a convergence).When we turn to Pearl with the linguistic/exegetical trope of metonymy in mind—and recall that we have distinguished in biblical hermeneutics a dual aspect to the metonymic process, metonymy and quasi-metonymy—we find it active at central junctures of the poem.The sacred and the secular in Pearl engage together in a dialectic, as the value systems of earth contend with those of Heaven, the spokesperson for each system, respectively, the jeweler and the Pearl-maiden, trying to control the metonymic consequences of the figuration of the other.As each speaks to the other, each constitutes her/his identity and that of the other relationally from specific sets of metonymic significances. To anticipate one of my conclusions: part of the cultural work of Pearl is to identify exegetical practice, whether it be faultless (the Pearl-maiden’s) or faulty (the jeweler’s), as constituting the ground of personal identity, our very sense and construction of selfhood proceeding from correct or incorrect ways of exegetical seeing. This being so, the correction of what is exegetically incorrect may thus accomplish a remedial personal, social, and spiritual reorientation.All that need happen is that the authoritative exegetical tuition vouchsafed in the poem be taken to heart.Admittedly, its lesson may be a hard one and learned at considerable human cost, a cost that may entail no less than the abandonment of one’s prior sense of identity.25 Moreover, as we recall that the internal dynamic of metonymy is itself dialectical, a play between presence and absence, it becomes apparent that the overarching macrodialectic of Pearl, registering on its narrative surface in the (unequal) debate between the jeweler and the Pearl-maiden, aptly mimes the microdialectic internal to each of the various metonymies and quasi-metonymies that inhabit the poem. Pearl’s surface structure—to some extent reminiscent of the altercatio or scholastic disputatio, established medieval genres of literary and academic discourse to which the (multigeneric) text of Pearl alludes26—makes a fitting formal counterpart to the dialectical


53

seesaw signifying inherent in metonymy. Here the signified, as we have seen, is present through being absent and, in the case of quasi-metonymy, the metonymically signified is simultaneously present with the literally signified, both having a more or less equal status. However, more than being merely fitting, it is, arguably, from such a strenuously and richly inflected dialectical texture that the poem’s cultural work emerges, as it seeks to redimension exegesis practically and in a pastoral application to a distressing set of human circumstances, namely, bereavement of a peculiarly affecting kind. Ordinarily, the tension of dialectic in any form yearns toward resolution—just as nature abhors a vacuum, so nature is similarly uncomfortable about living with tension.That resolution may happen at the local, linguistic level of a figurative expression that resolves into a sensus litteralis,27 as in Thomas Aquinas’s example of how a biblical metonymy should be read, or at the overarching, narrative level of a debate pro and contra that yearns to resolve into a determination or synthesis. Pearl’s sophisticated levels of dialectic paradoxically both resolve one kind of tension by determining in favor of the maintenance of another: that is, the dialectical tension in the poem’s debate disperses in a settlement that yet upholds the necessity of retaining the dialectical tension by which metonymy and quasi-metonymy are powered, figures which themselves are mobilized to help drive the debate along.This means that the debate in Pearl is potentially never-ending, waiting to happen over and over for its readers. Caught in that eternal debate between earth and heaven, which will continue as long as the earth survives and prove as enduring as the ontological divide imaged by the river separating the two realms that the jeweler tries vainly to ford near the end of the poem, singular identity may yet find grace, if exegesis can help it, to die into multiple identity. Indeed, the watchword of this poem might be that provided by the Scripture paraphrased early on at lines 31–32: “For vch gresse mot grow of graynes dede; / No whete were elles to wones wonne” [For every grass must grow out of the death of its grain; otherwise no wheat would be won to harvest home].28 In this paraphrase of the gospel image of the grain that dies into new life is an allegory in little of what I think this poem could be striving to achieve in its own medieval terms as it recruits into itself the strategies of exegesis. The death of singular identity into multiple identity, one of the stakes in the contest that the poem stages between the values of earth and heaven, is mediated in the context of an arbitration of what is exegetically right and proper. In practical terms, as far as Pearl is concerned, the individual who becomes a good exegete learns her/his true significance in heaven’s sanctioned teleology. For the good exegete, the damage inflicted by the grief of human loss is repairable, and the distress caused by turbulent human affect can be calmed.

54


The question is, how to become a good exegete: how to see properly what the real value of the integumental veils covering meaning may be.The poem offers some implicit direction on the matter, but first, it will be helpful to substantiate these conceptually dense propositions by a series of concrete illustrations. I begin by considering the metonymic maneuvering of the jeweler, then that of the Pearl-maiden, and finally that of the poem’s author, for his identity, too, is implicated in a wider metonymic figuration. The jeweler’s central metonymy can be expressed as follows:“I have lost a highly prized pearl.” As far as he is concerned, this resolves into the following sensus litteralis:“I have lost in death a highly prized infant girl.”The sensus litteralis, to recall Thomas Aquinas, reveals the intentio auctoris, or in the case of the jeweler we might distinguish this instead as the intentio narratoris, reserving the idea of the intentio auctoris to the clerical Pearl-author himself. (The distinction may be useful because later I suggest what his intentio auctoris may have been or, at the least, suggest that his writing implicates him in a wider metonymy in which his own identity was also caught up and was at stake.) It quickly becomes quite clear that the narrating jeweler’s lost pearl serves him as a metonym and that, beneath its presenting image, he is really lamenting the loss in death of a precious literal female infant. As he sees it, for “lost pearl” read “dear dead baby girl.” It is the intentio narratoris to treat his pearl image as a conventional metonym that exhausts into something literal, in his case an emphatic statement of personal grief and loss. But is the sensus litteralis that he distills a sound one? Aquinas considered that the sensus litteralis, when clearly perceived, might in turn be made permeable by a sensus spiritualis.Yet, this is precisely the exegetical step at which the jeweler falters: the private sensus litteralis that his metonymy arrives at shuts down meaning into a single possibility, into a singularity and a stability of reference that, in the human sphere, are also routine concomitants to private possession and personal ownership. The idea that “You are what you own” (i.e., “your possessions define you”) bears as much existential weight as the modern maxim “You are what you eat” bears a physiological and psychological one (in Pearl, note the frequent use of possessive adjectives that characterizes the jeweler’s discourse as he clutches his values to his chest). The jeweler’s very identity, then, is constituted from his sense of ownership, and this includes the ownership of meaning.29 In possessing meaning he possesses his identity, an existential apperçu no less true in the fourteenth century than in the twenty-first. However, the fact that his private sensus litteralis shows itself incapable of admitting a public sensus spiritualis may be an index of the flawed nature of his exegetical practice and its faulty way of seeing. (I describe the sensus spiritualis as “public” because its admission pluralizes meaning beyond the total simultaneous access of any single


55

individual, and thus it broadens the grasp of meaning’s totality beyond mere individuals and out into an interpretative community. In short, no single individual can do justice to multiple, simultaneous meanings, especially where those meanings are technically and paradoxically equivalent.) The jeweler’s exegetical practice is, in fact, earthbound, but since he is a layman, perhaps we should not be too surprised at this shortcoming in the context of late-fourteenth century arguments as to who were the best exegetes, arguments in which the Pearl-author has implicitly taken sides.30 What if the jeweler’s metonymic figuration were to be adjusted, as the Pearl-maiden is determined to adjust it? “No,” she says,“you have not lost a pearl at all; what you lost was a rose.” We can take it on her authority as one of the illuminated who “thurghoutly hauen cnawyng” [have complete understanding] (line 859) that this is the right metonym for the dead infant girl, a metonym appropriately used up in the process of signifying and discarded: the perishable rose fittingly serves as a perishable metonym for what the jeweler believes he has lost, that is, a dead baby girl. Again, it is likely that it was clerical culture that provided the Pearl-author with his metonymic image here.31 “What you grieve for in fact is a rose,” she says, a dead-end metonym. For in speaking of an enduring pearl, the jeweler has come closer to apprehending the truth than he recognizes; his error is simply the misrecognizing of it and the unheeding coercion into a finite metonymic reading of a figure whose status, if judged rightly, is quasimetonymic. His missing pearl is not a metonym for the child; rather, it is the quasi-metonym for the child because while the pearl is the child, the child in her heavenly reality—the only one that matters—is also the pearl. While pearls may be an aspect of the jeweler’s private earthly reality, part of his stock-in-trade, which causes him to think in terms of them (among other gems), pearls also existed as the common property of the iconography of heaven before he was born. Moreover, they had an ancient public significance that exceeded his private control and ownership (in the same way that all words preexist their users and have a preexistent public significance that may escape the confinement of their users’ intentio). Pearls were always already a traditional point of commerce between the earthly and the heavenly.The paradoxically animate pearl of the jeweler’s presenting image has, in fact, a transcendent reality that he has uttered but cannot fully comprehend. He has spoken more truly than he understands. After the poem’s opening in praise of the pearl, this pearl, after a couple of lines, is swiftly feminized by the application of a familiar, gender-specific lexis of contemporary courtly love poetry, through which its dual identity is intimated. It is from this application that we get our first hint that there is more afoot here than simply a jeweler regretting a lost pearl.32 Note the startling collision, from the point of view of earthbound human logic, of

56


the animate and inanimate pronouns settled by the jeweler on his pearl in adjacent sentences: “Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere; / Thurgh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot.” [Alas, I lost her in an arbor; it slipped from me through the grass into the ground] (lines 9–10). Two humanly incompatible identities exist in tension in his figuration. But when we eventually see the Pearl-maiden in heaven that is precisely how she is, a diverse unity. She is enclosed in pearls.The jeweler recognizes her through a frame of them, making her at once familiar yet strange to him.33 A prize pearl is centered on her breast, making her flesh its setting. Pearls, then, are intrinsic to her eternal reality. So there is, in fact, a rightness within his opening figuration of the Pearl-maiden that must be salvaged from his misinterpretation. It will be salvageable for the poem’s readers, who are after all the only people who really matter in that they are the ones who stand to be materially altered by their consumption of this text,34 if they can be led to see that the jeweler needs to abandon his monopolizing, monological literalism, impervious as it is to any democratizing, dialogical sensus spiritualis. It is toward this vantage point that the poem guides them, as well as the jeweler, the Pearl-maiden leading the way. Thus, the rightness within the jeweler’s opening imagery is salvageable if exegetical figurations are embraced that uphold multiple—from the limited human point of view potentially incompatible—truth claims. This, then, is the Pearl-maiden’s heavenly level of existence, in a narrative and exegetical multiplicity that is at once also a community, not in some private singularity. In the narrative, the Pearl-maiden belongs to the Lamb in common as a member of the community of the 144,000 virgins; but her status can also be conceived hermeneutically, for she similarly exists now in the fluidity of properly conducted exegesis, where senses commute in transit between each other, no one more authoritative than the next, perplexing though that may be from a human perspective. In heaven, there are indeed no “supplantores” (line 440), either political or exegetical.This is the egalitarian community emphasized not only in the circumstances of the poem’s narrative,35 but also in the community of the exegetical senses when they work harmoniously together, and in whose ceaseless oscillation she now has her being.Egalitarian community is the distinctive quality of quasi-metonymy, the figure that structures and hatches her transcendent identity.36 It is the figure, if we prefer, that helps breed the spiritual communism of the exegetical senses. If we turn now from the jeweler to consider the metonymic figurations of the Pearl-maiden, we can see her to be more perfectly enmeshed than he within figurations that I have distinguished as quasi-metonymic.37 As a corollary to this, she, unlike him, can discriminate accurately between a singular, private metonymy and a plural, public quasi-metonymy. Witness


57

how she adroitly exchanged the first for the second when she substituted the jeweler’s (inappropriate) pearl metonym for the dead baby girl with the (appropriate) metonym of the ephemeral rose. In short, she is by far the more adept exegete and knows her way better than he through the integumental veils covering the sensus litteralis. Just as we summarized the jeweler’s identity-defining figure of speech as a private, singular metonymy, “I have lost a prized pearl,” so we may summarize the Pearl-maiden’s as a public, plural quasi-metonymy,“I belong as a bride to the New Jerusalem Lamb.” Like the jeweler’s metonym, the Pearlmaiden’s quasi-metonym also resolves into a sensus litteralis: “I am wedded to Christ in Heaven.” The difference between his sensus litteralis and hers is that his shuts down into the private singularity of possessive meaning, inexpressive of any possibilities other than its own earthbound intention, whereas hers opens up into a public communality, into the sort of sensus spiritualis with which Aquinas thought the sensus litteralis, correctly perceived, might be permeated. The Christ implicit in the literal sense of her quasi-metonymic figure is in a spiritual sense simultaneously the Lamb; exactly how this is so is a matter carefully expounded in the threefold Lamb distinctio that I described earlier. Indeed, in Pearl, the presentation of Christ’s literal manhood is relatively underplayed, bucking the trend of the affective style in which his manhood is usually presented in contemporary vernacular texts, especially those relating his Passion.38 More strikingly foregrounded by the poem than his literal manhood is his spiritual identity as the wounded and perpetually bleeding sacrificial Lamb, who,“Thagh he were hurt and wounde hade, / In his sembelaunt watz neuer sene, / So wern his glentes gloryous glade” [Though he was hurt and wounded, it was never apparent in his countenance, so gloriously glad were his glances] (lines 1142–44). The spiritual sense, of course, always had to be capable of being folded back into the literal sense. In Pearl, this requirement is more usually met in the way the spiritual reality is often allowed to shine through the literal one, thereby disrupting the familiar and mundane logic by which the literal is normally governed. In artistic terms, this results in the poem depicting a terrain where nothing has a homely and familiar feel and its inhabitants are constructed to match. In heaven, all the hermeneutic senses are simultaneous in the way that quasi-metonymy respects. Several instances could be cited of the heavenly simultaneity that impinges at so many places in this poem, but specifically in relation to the Pearl-maiden we might note her multiple ways of figuring the Lamb.The Lamb is figured in a chain or garland of related possibilities, as one sense perpetually slides into another, defying earthbound human inclinations to arrest and settle upon a determinate meaning: He is her destiny (line 758); her Lamb (lines 407, 795), her lord

58


(lines 407, 795), her jewel (line 795), her joy and bliss (line 795), her noble, sweet “lemman” (lines 796, 805, 829); and underlying all this is the literal sense that He is her Christ. The heavenly simultaneity of the senses in which the Pearl-maiden participates perfectly also finds frequent poetic manifestation at the level of individual lexical items and compounds.39 Among several examples, a striking one is the compound word “lombelyght” (line 1046), used to describe the illumination of the heavenly Jerusalem. Revelation 21.23 says that this city needs no sun or moon, because the claritas Dei shines in it, et lucerna eius est Agnus [and the Lamb is its lamp]. So the Pearl-author’s “lombelyght” compound works perfectly (lamp light/Lamb light). Since the words “lamb” and “lamp” were probably homophones in the Pearl-author’s dialect, this compound condenses alternative meanings effortlessly into itself.40 I propose that this condensation is the poem’s equivalent at the individual, lexical level to the exegetical plenitude that it celebrates generally as the condition of clear-sightedness and, indeed, in the end, of consolation.41 But if becoming a good exegete, like the Pearl-maiden, requires the embrace of simultaneous multiplicity, it can only come at a cost in human terms. Allowing oneself to be dispossessed of singularity in its various vestures, and particularly in this poem, of the sense of possession that is a constituent of selfhood, is one of the highest prices that Pearl exacts. For we have seen that what the narrating jeweler is lamenting is not only his loss through bereavement but also the loss of himself, the dispossession of his own identity, and that is just as hard to part with. Yet paradoxically, that dispossession proves a consolation, in that human grief is also part of the confined identity that he is relinquishing and from which, by grace, he may come to be estranged. “For vch gresse mot grow of graynes dede; / No whete were elles to wones wonne” (lines 31–32). These early lines are in some ways its watchword; they emblematize the death of identity as the condition of life, both at the level of the remedial human process that the course of the poem’s narrative works out and exemplifies and at the level of the exegetical process with which the human one is to be correlated.42 So radical is Pearl’s exegetical lesson of dispossession, or perhaps we could express it analogously as Pearl’s exegetical displacement of the responsibility for interpreting meaning from a private to a public sphere, that its consequences also arguably touch the Pearl-author.And so now to his metonymy, the one that implicates the Pearl-author himself. He stands, I suggest, in a set of metonymic relations to his own text. If these relations can be decoded into a sensus litteralis, we also have access, theoretically, to the intentio auctoris. My case runs as follows. Who is the exegetically flawed, narrating jeweler of Pearl?43 He is evidently not cast in any easily recognizable likeness of the poem’s author, whose


59

real-life profession we can justly infer was clerical, not secular. Nevertheless, he might yet represent something of the real-time writing author metonymically. We recall metonymy’s basic procedure, whereby one entity stands in for another contiguous to it. Arguably, the jeweler stands in for the author in some way, and one formal metonymic point of contact between them could be their joint citizenship within the first-person pronoun, “I”: “I” is the author who writes and “I” is the jeweler who narrates.They are, in that formal sense, contiguous (and we might circumstantially note that it has often been remarked on other grounds that in medieval dream poetry, there is traditionally “some degree of historical correspondence between the narrators and authors of dream poems”).44 This may also be true in the Pearlauthor’s case, though we need a sophisticated way of arriving at what that historical correspondence might conceivably be.While the narrating jeweler apparently cannot stand in for the writing author in terms of profession, he may yet do so in terms of function; that is, he may indeed through his role help us to access the author’s literal sense, his authorial intention. The function of the jeweler in the poem, by this logic, may provide another metonymic point of contact with the role of the real-time author. The jeweler’s function, then, is to represent fallen, if natural and understandable, human responses to a familiar human predicament (grief at the infant’s death) and to the nature of its heavenly resolution (incredulity at the sheer, postmortem altitude of the infant’s exaltation). Further, it is to carry those responses into the presence of an alternative, authoritative reality in whose light they are seen from a new perspective and differently. So the jeweler’s function is to stand in for the fallen responses, whether real or imagined, of the author in his humanity, or for those of his living associates, or indeed for those of us modern readers.Through the jeweler, the author has brought himself, his community, and his posterity into the righting presence of heaven. Yet necessarily, the jeweler’s function does not exist outside the context of his relationship to the Pearl-maiden.They are twin halves of one august event. So the metonymic enterprise that implicates the author in the existential consequences flowing from his own writing is not completely grasped until we ask a question of the Pearl-maiden similar to the one we asked of the jeweler. Therefore, who is the exegetically perfect Pearl-maiden? This time there is, of course, no possible formal metonymic point of contact with the author via a first-person narrating persona, but there is a contact again at the level of role and function. For the Pearl-maiden’s function is to introduce fallen human responses to their correction through perfect exegesis. As exegete, she stands in for, mimes metonymically, the exegetical role that we seem justified in assuming the Pearl-author himself was required to discharge professionally elsewhere in real time (whether that

60


was in a highbrow academic or workaday pastoral context or even, as here, in a hybrid, literary one). So the Pearl-maiden’s function is to stand in for the author in his exegetical capacity, however exercised in reality.Through the Pearl-maiden, the author, by personifying and giving his own role a voice, has addressed himself, his community, and his posterity, applying his professional mediation of the righting perspective of heaven to each. Thus, the authorial intention of the Pearl-author seems deducible from his own metonymic bilocation in the text in the persons of jeweler and Pearl-maiden. His authorial intention is reciprocally an exegetical aim, and just as the commerce among the various exegetical senses, correctly apprehended, implied the idea of community, so too his exegetical aim gathers the persons and situations that it targets, himself included, into a community of interpretation. In Pearl, the solitary sense, like the solitary individual fastened within his private solipsism, is weak and unreliable (or as Ecclesiastes 4.10 memorably figured it,“Vae soli, quia cum ceciderit, non habet sublevantem se” [Alas for the solitary person, for when he falls, he has no one to raise him up]). Strength is to be found, rather, in a sanctioned community, one that is of its nature multiple, whether that be the egalitarian community of heaven or the earthly, organic community set out in the figure of the body and its members (lines 457–68). Both find an analogy in, are apprehended in, and are intimated by the community of the ever-circling senses of exegesis. After waking his jeweler once more into time and history at the end of the poem, the Pearl-author offers through him a final metonymy that, via one of life’s regular, daily moments, gives a practical shape to this salvific community of exegesis in which heaven and earth are brought into right relation.The last stanza of the poem imagines the community of the faithful focused on the consecrated body and blood of Christ: Ouer this hyul this lote I laghte, For pyty of my perle enclyin, And sythen to God I hit bytaghte In Krystes dere blessyng and myn, That in the forme of bred and wyn The preste vus schewes vch a daye. He gef vus to be his homly hyne Ande precious perles vnto his pay.45

All gazes meet in this common cynosure, those of the faithful, the jeweler’s, and ours. They, he, and we associate in a community directed toward and construed within the Eucharistic elements, elements whose sensus litteralis, we might say, is the body and blood of Christ. It is worth pointing out the emphatic orthodoxy of the Pearl-author’s formulation in this last


61

stanza: the priest delivers Christ in form of bread and wine.This is the standard orthodox phraseology for asserting the transubstantiated nature of the elements, reiterated with some frequency at a time when, in some (heretical) quarters, the doctrine of transubstantiation was being contested.46 What you saw with your eyes, if you were orthodox, was not the whole story, for after the prayer of consecration and elevation, the transubstantiated reality, the sensus litteralis beneath the integumental veils of the accidents of bread and wine, was now Christ’s very body and blood. Eucharistic theology, yes, but the signifying movement of this sacrament reads like a metonym, a crowning one saved by the Pearl-author to the end to gather all the others into itself. Conversely, the theological failure of contemporary heretics to read this literal sense could, from the orthodox perspective, also be thought a compound failure, since it was also a failure in terms of traditional exegesis. The heretics’ dead-end literalism cannot see the bread and wine for anything other than bread and wine; it cannot tolerate heavenly simultaneity. Yet such simultaneity is precisely what Pearl celebrates, not only here, but in so many other places as well along its route.The pearl of great price on the Pearl-maiden’s breast is the reward of the Kingdom of Heaven, which in turn is the penny paid to the laborers in the parable of the vineyard, which in turn is the elevated Host, which in turn is the sacrificial Lamb, and so on and on, as simultaneity rules in its endless circular garland of meaning. I do not pretend to enclose the rich suggestiveness of Pearl within this reading of its radical metonymy. That would be to attempt a containment as shortsighted and presumptuous as that attempted by the jeweler. However, what I insist on is respect for Pearl’s volatile exegetical richness, and one way of honoring that is to trace the nature of the exegetical processes that the Pearl-author invoked, which helped to call his poem into being. In doing so, we take initial steps toward connecting ourselves with the value systems that crisscross and power his text, and necessarily begin to read our way into the cultural stakes with which its processes of signification wagered.


CHAPTER 4 PURCHASING PARDON: MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL ECONOMIES ON THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMAGE Alastair Minnis

Many generations of medieval theologians struggled to explain the difficult and dangerous relationship between the two economies, the material and the spiritual. The makers and distributors of ‘pardons’ or indulgences were especially problematic: were such people engaged in some sort of market-economy which demeaned the whole notion of posthumous reward and punishment by confusing earthly with heavenly matters, and, worse, created the impression that salvation was up for sale? This anxiety is explored with reference to the plenary indulgence associated with Canterbury, Richard Godmersham’s ardent defense of its authenticity and power being contrasted with Erasmus’s criticisms of the way in which Becket’s shrine was actually run. But Erasmus does not attack the value of indulgences as such—and neither does Chaucer, in presenting that figure who is the most blatantly immoral among all his Canterbury pilgrims, the Pardoner.The poet’s point rather seems to be that this inveterate sinner is exaggerating and exploiting shamelessly whatever limited spiritual authority he may have, all the better to make money from his credulous clients. Kittredge’s description of the Pardoner as a ‘lost soul’ is quite appropriate by the moral standards of Chaucer’s time; his obsession with the material economy has utterly subverted any chance he may have of profiting from the spiritual economy.

n idiom concerning the “purchasing” of “pardons” or indulgences was well established in Middle English, as these representative instances attest:

A

Swa mykel pardoun may a man Purches here, Qat he may Qan

64

A L A S TA I R M I N N I S

In purgatory qwyte alle Qe dett Prick of Conscience, 3918–20 I will passe in pilgremage Qis pas vnto Rome, To purchese me pardonne of the pape selfen Morte Arthure, 3497 Treuthe herde telle herof, and to Piers sente To taken his teme and tilien the erthe, And purchaced hym a pardoun a pena et a culpa For hym and for his heires for everemoore after. . . Piers Plowman, B VII. 1–41

“Purchasing” of “pardons” was a catchy phrase, the alliteration irresistible. But a considerable, and potentially misleading, simplification of theological doctrine is involved here if purchasing is understood to mean “buying” with money or some other form of collateral, instead of bearing the vaguer sense—well attested by the MED—of “acquiring,” “obtaining,” or indeed “earning,” which allows the possibility of acquisition by nonmonetary means. Not all acquisitions of indulgences involved money changing hands; some of them functioned as inducements to prayer or pilgrimage. Moreover, even in those cases where money was involved, it is incorrect to speak of buying a pardon: the recipient was making a donation to some charitable cause. A fixed price was not necessarily required, for the donation could vary in relation to the circumstances of the donor.True, an indulgence was issued in connection with the acceptance of the gift, but the system of exchange involved was rather more complicated than the one that most of us are used to, wherein we acquire the full use and enjoy the total benefit of a purchased item. For money of whatever amount was not enough to acquire the total benefit of an indulgence. In order to have any hope of that, the sinner had to do his or her best to remove the taint of moral guilt (culpa) through sincere and full participation in the sacrament of penance. If and only if this had been achieved could the indulgence take effect: part or all of the sinner’s debt of punishment (pena) was then remitted—or, more precisely, paid out of the vast spiritual treasury of merit, as filled superabundantly and inexhaustibly with the merits of Christ and his saints.2 Generations of theologians struggled to explain the difficult and dangerous relationship between the two economies, the material and the spiritual. Over and over again, the deeply disturbing thought presented itself: were the makers and distributors of indulgences engaged in some sort of market economy that demeaned the whole notion of posthumous reward and punishment by confusing earthly with heavenly matters and, worse, created the impression that salvation was up for sale? Among many others, the great

P U R C H A S I N G PA R D O N

65

Dominican master Albert the Great (d. 1280) worried about the spiritual arithmetic—it seemed as if an enterprising sinner could get a great deal for a mere obolus (meaning a very small monetary unit, and hereafter translated as “halfpenny”): Let us suppose that a fast of seven years was enjoined on someone, and that he comes on one day seven times to a church that has from the Pope the power of granting an indulgence of one year, and each time he makes an offering of a halfpenny. Therefore that man is absolved on one day, for seven halfpennies, from the seven years of penance justly enjoined upon him! It would be amazing if even infidels did not laugh at this state of affairs.3

The point of that last sentence seems to be that if even infidels can laugh at this situation, how much more ridiculous must—or should—it seem to believers.Albert’s answer is that “there is no delusion in the truth.” It is not simply a matter of the Church receiving a meager offering,“as those mockers believe.”4 The sinner’s own material means and spiritual situation must be considered, along with the extraordinary powers of the Church, which can act generously in a manner beyond earthly measure. William of Auvergne (d. 1249) employs the same monetary metaphor, in reporting the ridicule of those who say that for a single penny, or even an egg given to a church, a man might obtain remission of a third of the penance that had been imposed on him.Thus it seems that God is defrauded, since two years of penance are commuted with some paltry offering.5 Furthermore, long and severe penances can be bought off with little effort, and lightly, a penny or halfpenny being reckoned as equal to a third part of remission and penance. Those who hold such stupid opinions think that divine grace is being made venal. No matter how gravely men sin, they can obtain remission in a way that is facile and ridiculous, a trivial gift being put on a par with pilgrimage to Jerusalem or any other major undertaking against the enemies of the faith. People would be crazy to endure long penances and laborious pilgrimages when they could get the same result with three eggs or three halfpennies! William counters this stultitia opinionis with the argument that venality is not involved since the prelate who gives an indulgence of the type under discussion is acting not for money but for the honor of God and the benefit of souls. A church is built not on account of money ( propter pecunia) but by money ( per pecuniam), and without money the building could not be undertaken. Similarly, an indulgence is issued not for money but solely for the glory of God, although money is not absent from the transaction. William proceeds to offer a comparison with the sacrament of baptism. Here remission of sins is achieved not for water [ pro aqua] but by water [ per aquam] and not without water [non sine aquam]. Just so, indulgences function

66


not on account of money [non pro pecuniam] but by money [ per pecuniam] and not without money [non sine pecuniam]. As for the concern that one and the same price or cost [pretio] will pay for both major and minor penances: people who talk in that way reveal their ignorance of the strength [virtus] of God and the power of the keys, as bequeathed by Christ to St. Peter and his successors in perpetuity: “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven” (Matt. 16.19). For, just as a greater remission of sin is not gained by the person who has been baptized with more rather than less water, so the person who offers more money does not have greater remission than the person who offers less.This is so because, just as in baptism, remission comes not from water but from divine virtus, so in the case of indulgences remission comes not from the giving or from the gift but from the keys and the ministration of prelates. William proceeds to argue that prelates are perfectly entitled to augment or diminish the satisfaction due for the sins that a penitent has acknowledged in confession. However, could the sale of indulgences not be regarded as a kind of simony, which is to be understood as the exchange of a spiritual for a temporal thing? Thomas Aquinas O.P. (ca. 1225–74) asserts that indulgences are granted not “for the sake of temporal matters as such, but in so far as they are subordinate to spiritual things,” such as the suppression of the Church’s enemies, “the building of a church, of a bridge, and other forms of almsgiving.”Therefore,“there is no simony in these transactions, since a spiritual thing is exchanged,not for a temporal but for a spiritual commodity.”6 Albert the Great also answers with a firm negative: what we are dealing with here is not a mere purchase of some commodity but rather an exercise of the bounty of the Church, which encourages her children to good.7 There was some discussion of the actual sources of that bounty, the exact constitution of the spiritual treasury.The Alexandri summa (begun by Alexander of Hales O.F.M. and supplemented by others after his death in 1245) focuses on the merits of the united church and of its head, who is Christ;8 Albert the Great says that it comprises the wealth of the merits and the Passion of Christ, and of the glorious Virgin Mary, and all the apostles, martyrs, and saints both living and dead.9 Thomas Aquinas initially emphasizes the unity of the “mystical body in which many have performed works of satisfaction exceeding the requirements of their debts,” and hence much surplus merit is available to those who are in need of it, but he soon identifies the preeminent source as the merits of Christ, who acts through his sacraments yet is in no way obliged to operate exclusively through them: “So great is the quantity of such merits that it exceeds the entire debt of punishment due to those who are living at this moment.” There is no danger whatever, it would seem, of those vast resources running out.10


67

An even more eloquent affirmation of the merits of Christ is found in the Clement VI’s papal bull Unigenitus, which at last (as late as 1343) proclaimed as dogma the existence of an infinite treasury of merits: “Christ shed of His blood not merely a drop, though this would have sufficed. . .to redeem the whole human race, but a copious torrent,” thereby “laying up an infinite treasure for mankind.This treasure He neither wrapped up in a napkin nor hid in a field, but entrusted to Blessed Peter, the key-bearer, and his successors, that they might, for just and reasonable causes, distribute it to the faithful in full or in partial remission of the temporal punishment due to sin.”11 But what was a “just and reasonable cause”? Albert the Great suggested that the cause moving the maker of an indulgence should be not private but public [non privata, sed publica]. There are two types of public causes, he explains, which involve legitimate exigency [necessitas] and public advantage [utilitas], respectively.12 Examples of the former include the liberation of the Holy Land and perils that threaten the faith; of the latter, relieving poverty, hearing the word of God, and visiting relics. St. Bonaventure (ca. 1217–74) compares the spiritual treasury with those of earthly kings. In political matters and human affairs a state’s resources are deployed for two main reasons: the glory of the prince and the good of the community or because of what is necessary for it, as when something strikes at the state stipends and donations are produced in order that its soldiers may go out to fight. Similarly with the church, there is a twofold cause for dispensing from the treasury. First is the praise of God and His saints, which is done through the construction and visitation of churches in their honor and the commemoration of their virtues in sermons. Second, the general good of the church involves the defense of the Holy Land, the defense of the faith, the promotion of study, and suchlike. Bonaventure concludes that indulgences are appropriately directed toward such ends.13 These points (and many others concerning penance and indulgences) are made in almost identical terms in the Alexandri summa—a reminder of the fact that this highly influential treatise was completed by Alexander’s pupils after his death.14 It is asserted that the place of Christ’s Passion must not be bartered away to the infidels; the memory of the Passion must not slip from the minds of the faithful. Indulgences may reasonably be made by the pope if the necessity of the Church requires it, and especially for the defense of the faith.15 The schoolmen were engaged in a major effort of retrospective rationalization: indulgences had been and were being issued, and their efficacy had to be maintained.The Universal Ruler of the Church is believed to be infallible, declares Albert the Great, particularly with regard to those things that the whole Church receives and approves. Since he has ordered indulgences to be preached, they must be valid.16 Likewise, Aquinas is confident

68


that “the universal Church cannot err”; if it approves and grants indulgences, it may be assumed that they must “have some value.”17 Everyone admits this, he continues,“for it would be blasphemy to say that the Church does anything in vain.” Above all else, the conviction that what God’s Church on earth unbinds is also released in heaven was consistently affirmed, the schoolmen being anxious to make the point that there was no risk of deception. Bonaventure attributes to “some” unnamed men of straw a dangerous distinction “between God’s tribunal and the Church’s tribunal” and the belief that “relaxations do not take place in, nor are they understood of, God’s tribunal, but only of the Church’s tribunal.”18 This opinion, declares Bonaventure, is destructive of the very concept of relaxation, for if the earthly Church relaxes what God does not relax, it must be adjudged “a deception rather than a relaxation, and it must be called cruelty rather than piety, since by lessening the penance in this life it induces sufferings more severe in the life to come” (the pains of purgatory being more acute, according to common belief, than anything that one could experience in this life).The same point is made in almost identical terms in the fourth and final part of the Alexandri summa.19 Relaxatio cannot be made solely in the tribunal of the Church; God alleviates what the Church alleviates. These comments of Bonaventure’s form part of his quaestio on the issue of whether indulgences really have the value that they are credited with in preaching.20 The Pope (who has commanded such preaching) is certainly not given to lying, Bonaventure declares, offering the standard vote of confidence.21 Despite this, he subjects the economics involved to rigorous analysis, engaging in arithmetical reductio ad absurdum of a kind reminiscent of Albert’s. Given that in certain indulgences a third of the due repentance is involved, then if first one denarius is given and then another and finally a third, it would appear that a person who had committed a thousand sins would be completely freed for three halfpennies or denarii––which would not only be false but would be judged as ludicrous by all those of right mind. Furthermore, if a sinner who owes nine years has three years remitted, on the same reckoning those who owe thirty have a third part remitted (thus a ten-year period is remitted): it would seem that his sinfulness is being regarded as a commodity.Then again, is it fair that a person who lives near a church should get the same benefit as the person who lives a long way away and expends considerable effort to visit it? And that a rich man, in paying his, should get the same benefit as a poor woman, for whom that money means a lot more? Bonaventure responds with what “is said generally according to the doctors,” that in order for indulgences or relaxationes to be effective, there must be a twofold condition on the part of the giver and a twofold condition on


69

the part of the receiver. The giver must have the appropriate power and a cause that is honest and reasonable.The recipient must have confessed with true contrition and have faith with true devotion, so that he is truly repentant and confident that the pastor’s indulgence will be valid for him. “Others say,” continues Bonaventure, that in absolute terms indulgences are worth what they are said to be worth because their conferral is not adjudged a purchase but rather an exercise of the Church’s liberality, and this is allotted equally to all those who dispose themselves to receive it. A rich man, going to a tavern, receives the same wine as does a poor old woman (vetula paupercula); should not the acquisition of indulgences be understood in the same way? Bonaventure explains that this seems to be making “too great a market of indulgences” [magnum forum facere de indulgentiis], which results in their vilification rather than their praise. He suggests that the person who actually gives the indulgence to the recipient must consider the cause for which the indulgence was issued; to the extent, more or less, that the recipient approaches near that cause, he can participate more or less in the indulgence. For example, in the case of the stations of Rome there are set indulgences instituted by the holy fathers, who were mindful of pilgrims who came from remote places; they did not estimate a person living near the church to be worthy of such grace, and hence he receives a lesser indulgence. Bonaventure may not have been wholly comfortable with the idea that a given indulgence is not worth the same to everyone but must be calibrated with reference to what the recipient has done or has to do. He declares that it is “not becoming” to teach this doctrine openly, because all the faithful should believe in their hearts that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are given with equal value for all. Thomas Aquinas took issue with Bonaventure’s discussion.The argument that a man may “obtain remission in whole or in part” according as he approached near to “the cause for which the indulgence was granted” simply does not explain “the custom of the Church,” he declares, that assigns “now a greater, now a lesser indulgence, for the same cause.”22 The Pope may grant “now a year’s indulgence, now one of only forty days” to people visiting one and the same church on different occasions.The effective cause of the remission of pena,Aquinas continues,“is not the devotion, or toil, or gift of the recipient,” or indeed “the cause for which the indulgence was granted.” We cannot, therefore, estimate the quantity of remission by any of these but “solely by the merits of the Church—and these are superabundant.” In other words, the scope and scale of an indulgence depend not on man but on God, whose liberality is dispensed by His authorized representatives on earth. Hence, “we do not have too great a market of the divine mercy”—a clear allusion to Bonaventure’s statement as quoted above.

70


Aquinas proceeds to argue that a person who lives near the church, along with its priest and clergy, gains the associated indulgence “as much as those who come perhaps a distance of a thousand days’ journey, because the remission. . .is proportionate not to the toil, but to the merits which are applied.” His desire to celebrate the vast riches of the spiritual treasury and the generous operation of the divine mercy is evident. Of course, caveats and conditions must be admitted. It is duly noted that sometimes a distinction may be expressed, as when the Pope specifies that an indulgence of five years may be granted “to those who come from across the seas,” but one of only three years “to those who come from across the mountains,” that is, to people who have made a shorter and less arduous trip.23 Furthermore, when an indulgence is given in a general way to anyone who helps toward the building of a church, this must be understood as meaning “a help proportionate to the giver.” Consequently, “a poor man by giving one (denarius) would gain the full indulgence,” but “not so a rich man, whom it would not become to give so little to so holy and profitable a work.” The difference, as it were, here is assumed within the original grant of the indulgence and is wholly in accord with the giver’s intention. In sum, the indulgence has the full value as set by the individual who makes it, and this may accommodate certain distinctions (as just illustrated) or changes (say, from one time period to another). Of himself the recipient does not have the power to maximize or minimize that value, to alter it in accordance with the degree of effort he may have put into attaining the indulgence—the point being that the merit involved comes not from him but from the spiritual treasury. Thus, Aquinas cum suis sought to reconcile the two rival economies, secular and sacred—to bridge the gap between human giving and divine grace—bringing together deficient sinners and superendowed saints in a business transaction that was to the spiritual advantage of the former and the material advantage of those who presumed to manage the immaterial resources of the latter. In the century after Aquinas’s death the situation became even more complicated, as the popular demand for indulgences grew, and more outlets were created, generating an inflationary spiral. Every major shrine, hospital, or church wanted one or more indulgence, which is hardly surprising, given the power, influence, and retail opportunities that the possession of a prestigious pardon could bring. Competition was fierce. As Ben Nilson says, “It was more difficult to obtain indulgences (from the pope) as a shrine aged, partly because the site lost novelty value but also because new competitors for indulgences were always springing up.”24 New institutions could also experience difficulty, a good example being afforded by St. Bridget of Sweden’s arduous efforts to gain the greatest possible indulgence for her convent in Vadstena—despite her having


71

received a vision in which Christ himself had declared that Urban V should sanction it.25 Furthermore, it was not just the loss of “novelty value” that presented difficulties for established shrines: the papacy tended to raise the price (or more accurately, the amount of the requisite offering) for the renewal of a lucrative pardon. Moreover, rival interests—not to say religious dissenters—could call into question the value of even the most venerable of indulgences. An excellent case in point concerned the authenticity of the plenary indulgence associated with the shrine of “the holy blissful martyr,”St. Thomas à Becket,at Canterbury,one of the most popular shrines in Geoffrey Chaucer’s time26 and the destination of his fictional pilgrimage. A Latin treatise written shortly after the fifth Canterbury jubilee (1420),27 perhaps the work of Richard Godmersham, a canon lawyer whom Thomas Arundel appointed head of Canterbury College in 1403, argues vociferously that the indulgence granted by Honorius III on the occasion of the translation of the martyr (7 July 1220) was indeed a plenary one, valid in each successive jubilee year.28 In fact, the evidence for this is very dubious. Godmersham (supposing for the moment that he is indeed the author we are dealing with) assumes that a forged bull of Honorius III (Quanto venerabilis martyr) is genuine, but even that document does not include a clear description of a plenary indulgence, and in any case such grants were still very rare at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Boniface VIII granted one to those who visited the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul. True, in 1216, Honorius III was supposed to have given St. Francis a particularly valuable indulgence in respect of his church of the Portiuncula,29 and hence one might have expected him to have shown similar generosity to St.Thomas à Becket’s shrine just a few years later. But, once again, the exact terms of the original bequest are a matter of scholarly controversy; the so-called Portiuncula indulgence is almost certainly a later elaboration of what—if anything— Honorius had actually given.30 No trace of such skepticism troubles the surface of Godmersham’s treatise: a robust defense of Canterbury’s honor is mounted, with the reader’s consent being demanded rather than invited. General principles already familiar from our initial discussion are applied to the specific case of Becket: his martyrdom acquired many supererogatory merits for the Church (a major contribution having been made to the spiritual treasury), and the Canterbury Jubilee is supported by the figures and significations of the Old Testament jubilees. However, there is much ad hoc argument that is remarkable for its aggressiveness rather than its logic. Godmersham begins by affirming that the indulgence conceded to Becket’s shrine by Honorius III is not inferior to the crusade indulgence, as given by the previous pope, Innocent III.31 Furthermore, the Canterbury indulgence fulfills the conditions of validity laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas in his

72


Sentences commentary.32 There it is explained that indulgences are indeed worth what they are said to be worth, providing that he who grants them has the requisite authority, that the recipient has charity, and that, as regards the cause, there is piety that includes the honor of God and the profit of our neighbor. All these conditions are met by the indulgence in question, Godmersham argues, and therefore it does have the efficacy that preachers profess, which has been claimed for it on many occasions, five jubilees having elapsed without rejection of the belief that it is genuinely a plenary indulgence. Furthermore, affirmation of the value of this indulgence is a true and healthful thing; and since we are not dealing here with a matter of opinion or something that is deniable, it follows that anyone who argues the opposite is not a faithful Christian. Godmersham then goes so far as to say that the Canterbury indulgence derives from the authority of the Church on the same basis as does the Gospel; thus every faithful person should believe in this indulgence just as he believes in the most authoritative books of the Bible. The plenitude of papal power is then invoked.The pope grants indulgences not in propria persona but rather in the person of Christ, from whom his power derives, as is intimated by the words of St. Paul: “I have pardoned, if I have pardoned any thing, for your sakes have I done it in the person of Christ” (2 Cor. 2.10). The Glossa ordinaria explains that Paul’s pardons are as valid as if Christ Himself had done the deed. Therefore what Pope Honorius III conceded was given as if Christ had given it; for his part, the pope would not have dispensed this indulgence had not Christ first given his promise prophetically to the blessed martyr. While living in exile in France, Becket experienced a vision at Pontigny in which the Lord Jesus appeared to him and said, “Thomas,Thomas, my Church will be glorified in your blood.”33 Here a prophetic promise is to be understood according to mystical and spiritual understanding (in other words, this text is worthy of the same prestigious hermeneutic scrutiny as Holy Writ), because He who is the sum of truth and cannot lie promised that his Church—the congregation of the faithful—would be glorified, that is, justified and given grace by the plenary remission of sins and the grace and merit mediated by the blood of the blessed martyr. Such remission is a great glory for the Church Triumphant. Presumably part of the point here is that, through Becket, Christ wished to glorify the Church Triumphant every bit as much as he wished to glorify the Church Militant: if a pope (Innocent III) can grant an indulgence that glorifies the latter in promoting a crusade, then it seems utterly appropriate that his successor (Honorius III) should grant an indulgence that glorifies the former. From all these arguments it is brilliantly clear, Godmersham concludes, that Pope Honorius III did not grant the aforesaid indulgence merely from


73

himself alone (ex se) but rather from divine inspiration, and he prescribed that it be granted by the universal Church; thus a promise first made by Christ was gloriously implemented by the pope.Therefore Honorius could say with the apostle Paul:“Yet not I” alone have given or conceded this plenary indulgence of sins,“but the grace of God with me” (cf. 1 Cor. 15.10). The truth of the indulgence is therefore clear to all faithful believers—and those who attack it are sinning against the Holy Spirit, the sin that Christ inveighs against in Matthew 12.32,“it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come.” According to the doctors, to attack acknowledged truth is a sin against the Holy Spirit. This indulgence is acknowledged as true because it has always been preached as catholic truth, it has consistently been authorized by the Church and never revoked, and the universal Church has selected it and made it law.Therefore anyone who attacks it attacks acknowledged truth and sins against the Holy Spirit. Such people have much to fear: the wrath of God will come upon them and they will go down alive to hell (cf. Ps. 77.31, Num. 16.30). Godmersham certainly thought of Wycliffe’s followers in those terms: at one point he denounces those who are “infected with the execrable dogma of the carping Lollards.”34 More generally, here is a treatise that brooks no dissent, the tone of the discussion being very different from that found in the Sentences commentaries and summae from which I quoted above, despite the occasional vestiges of sic et non debating technique. Refusal to believe in the Canterbury pardon is not an option, its truth being placed on a par with that of Holy Writ, and with St.Thomas à Becket being afforded the same honor as God showed to St. Peter and St. Paul. Maybe Godmersham’s vehemence is a reflex of insecurity. At least the literal truth of the matter was taken out of contention by Pope Paul II, who declared unequivocally that a plenary indulgence was on offer during the jubilee year of 1420. One wonders what visitors to Canterbury in the previous jubilee year of 1370 thought they were getting; I see no reason to doubt that they expected a plenary indulgence. Certainly the 1370 jubilee was a highly successful one for the shrine,35 a fact that Chaucer may well have been aware of during the gestation of his Canterbury Tales.The issue of plenary indulgences apart, Canterbury did very well in respect of pardons of shorter duration, receiving awards from Nicholas IV in 1291, John XXII in 1328, and Boniface IX in 1395. Chaucer could have imagined his characters returning home well satisfied with their spiritual acquisitions. Some of the poet’s contemporaries were less sanguine about what Canterbury had to offer, as is evident from Godmersham’s contemptuous reference to “carping Lollards.” The eighth of the Wycliffite “Twelve Conclusions” holds that the matter of St. Thomas “were no cause of martyrdom” and William Whyte (who was burnt at Norwich in 1429) was

74


credited with a similar view.36 One of Whyte’s followers, Margery Baxter, is reported as having said at her trial (again in 1429) that “St. Thomas of Canterbury was a false traitor and is damned in Hell because he injuriously endowed churches with possessions, and he prompted and encouraged many heresies in the Church which deceive the simple people”; furthermore, far from dying “patiently before the altar,” as “a false, foolish traitor he was killed as he fled in the doorway of the church.”37 Of such extremism there is, of course, not a trace in the Canterbury Tales, and (to the best of our knowledge) neither did Chaucer share the Lollard distaste for pilgrimage in general. He was quite willing to include “himself ” among the Canterbury party, and several of his major characters are veteran pilgrims—including the Wife of Bath, who has been to Jerusalem three times and also visited Rome, Boulogne, Compostella, and Cologne(I[A] 463–67); and the Pardoner himself, of course, who has just been to Rome(I[A] 671).The issue of whether the Wife is supposed to have gained much spiritual benefit out of these travels—“She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye”—is of course a different matter. The practice of pilgrimage itself remains uncontested, and the Parson—who, had he been a genuine “Lollere” (cf. II[B1] 1173) would not have been on pilgrimage in the first place—zealously anticipates the group’s arrival in Canterbury with a tale of “moralitee and vertuous mateere,” while putting their earthly enterprise in its true spiritual perspective with reference to the “parfit glorious pilgrymage / That highte Jerusalem celestial” (X[I] 50–51). Chaucer’s construction of a Canterbury pilgrimage—an expedition that, of course, we never see arriving in Canterbury—is also a far cry from Erasmus’s thinly fictionalized account of a visit to Canterbury that he made sometime between late 1512 and the summer of 1514.The church itself is said to rise “to the sky so majestically that it inspires devotion even in those who see it from afar.”38 Despite this, the keepers of Becket’s shrine become the butt of vigorous satire. Erasmus explained later that he was drawing attention “to those who exhibit doubtful relics for authentic ones, who attribute to them more than is proper, and basely make money by them.”39 The colloquy itself recounts how a large quantity of bones was brought before Erasmus’s party,“skulls, jaws, teeth, hands, fingers, whole arms; all of which we adored and kissed.” His companion “Gratian Pullus” (to be identified with John Colet) looked “rather disgusted” when he was presented with an arm “with the bloodstained flesh” still attached, and shrank from kissing it.40 That disgust becomes even more apparent when “Pullus” is offered a very special present, one of the rags with which,“they say, the holy man wiped the sweat from his face or neck, the dirt from his nose, or whatever other kinds of filth human bodies have.”41 Something of the same disgust pervades Chaucer’s text when the relics that the Pardoner carries


75

and exploits for material gain are attacked (I[A] 699–703;VI[C] 347–84, 943–55); we are left in no doubt that they are fakes. However, the authenticity and valence of the relics that await Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims at Canterbury are never called into question; there is no suggestion whatever that the spiritual treasures of Becket’s shrine are in any way “doubtful” or have more attributed to them than is proper.42 Neither does Chaucer call indulgences themselves into question—not even those dispensed by his highly dubious Pardoner;43 the poet’s point rather seems to be that this inveterate sinner is exaggerating and shamelessly exploiting whatever limited spiritual authority he may have, all the better to make money from his credulous clients. Here a clear parallel may be drawn with Erasmus’s attitude toward the subject. The colloquy on rash vows (De votis temere susceptis, first printed in 1522) presents “Arnold” telling “Cornelius” of how, on pilgrimage to Rome and Compostella, two of his companions died and another was left behind at Florence, terminally ill. Although this man was “a complete good-for-nothing,” he “had a purse bulging with the most generous indulgences.” Therefore, the two of them mockingly conclude, he’s now safe in heaven. In the edition of this text that was published in August 1523 Erasmus has “Arnold” spell out his intention as follows: I certainly don’t disparage indulgences, but I laugh at the foolishness of my fellow drinker. Though in other respects the most foolish trifler, he pinned his whole hope of salvation, so to speak, on a piece of parchment instead of on a moral life.44

This passage was almost certainly added in face of the reaction of Nicholaas Baechem, prior of the Carmelites in Louvain, who found heresy in De votis temere susceptis on the grounds that it mocked religious vows. Erasmus’s defense was that it mocked only rash, drunken vows. In any case, he was hardly at risk, having enlisted powerful allies against his detractor: two popes in succession, Adrian VI and Clement VII, afforded him their protection. However, in his De utilitate colloquiorum Erasmus felt obliged to make his position even clearer: Nor do I condemn papal indulgences or briefs ( pontificias indulgentias aut diplomata) there [i.e., in De votis temere susceptis], but I do reprove the utterly frivolous man who, without even a thought of amending his life, puts his whole hope in human pardons (in condonationibus humanis). If, in this connection, a person but reflected on how much men’s devotion is impaired, partly by the fault of those who hawk papal indulgences ( prostituunt pontificias indulgentias), partly by the error of those who receive pardons otherwise than as they should, he will admit it is worth while for youth to be warned about this matter.45

76


Here, and in the passage quoted previously, Erasmus seems to be expressing views quite similar to those found at the end of Passus VII (B-text, 174–95) of Piers Plowman. Langland’s dreamer declares that while the efficacy of pardons must be believed (“This is a leef of our bileve”),nevertheless on the day of judgment trust in such things “is noght so siker [sure] for the soule. . .as is Dowel [do-well].” “A pokeful [bagful] of pardon,” “indulgences doublefold” and membership in all the fraternities of friars may be rated as worth a mere piecrust if Dowel does not help you, if your good works are insufficient. The similarity is hardly surprising, given that both writers are operating well within the bounds of an orthodox theology of indulgences that ( by Erasmus’s time) had been developing for at least two centuries. If people are impenitent, how can giving them indulgences be defended, particularly in view of St. Paul’s assertion that before Christ’s tribunal each one will receive what he has won, according to his works, whether good or evil (2 Cor. 5.10)? The answer to this question provided in the Provinciale seu constitutiones angliae of William Lyndwood (ca. 1375–1446), bishop of St. David’s and right-hand man of Archbishop Chichele in his proceedings against the Lollards, is quite typical.46 While sinners retain their guilt (culpa) it is impossible to remit their punishment ( pena). Now, the power of binding and loosing was handed down to ministers for edification and not for destruction: but does not an indulgence, which is a gratuitous remission of sin, tend to destruction, because by this process sin remains unpunished? Indeed, it could be said that the facility of pardon encourages men to sin: it is very easy to obtain an indulgence, so why worry? In response to these arguments Lyndwood stresses the importance of contrition on the part of the penitent, which relates to justice, and the satisfaction that is rendered through the Church’s communication of the merits of the saints, which relates to mercy. Hence both justice and mercy are given their due in the process. Mere possession of pardons—even plenary pardons—does not make one immune from divine punishment. The recipient has to be in the correct spiritual state and devoutly carry out the designated spiritual activities. Lyndwood emphasizes that people should beware of neglecting good works in the future simply because they have obtained indulgences.47 They may think themselves immune, but they can still be “bound” or convicted on charges of negligence and contempt. Proper satisfaction has to be made; penitence that has been enjoined must be performed. Neither Langland nor Erasmus would have quibbled with that. Neither, I believe, would Chaucer. His satire is directed not at the system of indulgences but rather at the individual who is bringing into disrepute his profession of quaestor,48 fundraiser for charitable causes. In view of the bad press indulgences had long received, that may seem a surprising claim. But it is high time, I believe, that we recuperated the idealism that marks the


77

foundational theology of indulgences, its affirmation of divine love and valence of religious communality and mutuality—no small task, given generations of Protestant devaluation49 and the recent (quite credulous, in my view) tendency to privilege proto-protestant polemic as the premier repository of social wisdom and religious insight in the age of Chaucer. St. Bonaventure is one eloquent witness among many others who saw in indulgences an endorsement of the recommendation of Galatians 5.2 to “bear one another’s burdens.” Taking these “burdens” as spiritual ones, he suggests that if a heavy penance is imposed on a person, it is quite possible for someone else to “bear it for him in part or in whole.”50 A comparison is offered with what happens in nature. In the case of the animal body, one member may expose itself to mitigate the hurt that threatens another member, as when the arm seeks to shield the head.Assuming “there is a connection and likeness between the mystical body and the natural body,” it seems that one member of the mystical body, which is the Church,“can and should bear the burdens of the other.” Furthermore, Christ “was punished and by His punishment He made satisfaction”—not, of course, for his own sin, but for another’s.Thus, Christ afforded satisfaction for us. Since “we are all one in Christ and are His members, we ought also to be imitators of Him.” Following His example, one individual can and should make satisfaction for another. Here, then, is a humane rationale for the dispensation of merit from the thesaurus mysticus, that vast repository of spiritual wealth that may be distributed in relation to the needs and capabilities of all its beneficiaries, whether they be rich or poor in material terms.This doctrine assumes a solidarity that is at once natural, human, and Divine, an inclusiveness that derives from our shared membership of the savior’s mystical body. Such lofty sentiments are quite lost on Chaucer’s Pardoner, who feels no human or spiritual kinship whatever for his victims: I wol have moneie, wolle, chese, and whete, Al were it yeven of the povereste page, Or of the povereste wydwe in a village, Al sholde hir children sterve for famyne. VI[C] 448–51

Bonaventure saw indulgences as a leveling device that brought their recipients together in terms of the value of the spiritual benefits received, despite any differences in material wealth: the conferral of a pardon was not a purchase but rather an exercise of the Church’s liberality. He applied the metaphor of how a rich man, going to a tavern, receives the same wine as does a poor old woman, in making the point that the pardon is worth the same to both. In the Pardoner’s view, however, that vetula paupercula is a

78


professional challenge—a sort of acid test of his powers of persuasion and extortion. He is far more interested in what he gets than in what he gives; the Church’s spiritual liberality has receded before the quaestor’s material greed. Here is no compassion, no recognition of human mutuality or Christian solidarity. So insatiable is the Pardoner’s greed that it has become a driving force that is no respecter of persons; the amount of money he gains seems less important than the pleasure he takes in exacting it. He is rather reminiscent of the greedy merchant castigated in the Roman de la Rose immediately before the critique of the immoral preacher, which is generally recognized as one of the major sources of the Pardoner’s Prologue. Here is a man whose passion for acquiring the property of others is like trying to drink the Seine dry: he “will never be able to do it, because there will always be some left.” The more he has the more he wants, and the more he longs for what he lacks; thus an “agonizing conflict tears at his vitals and tortures him” (Rose, 5049–59).51 Something of that obsessiveness has gone into Chaucer’s character. More specifically, the Pardoner has perverted the traditional justification of preaching pro questu, as may be illustrated with reference to Thomas of Chobham’s treatment of the question, does a preacher sin mortally in preaching for alms?52 It would seem so, Chobham postulates, because preaching is spiritual work, and it is not lawful to use spiritual work to acquire temporal reward; Scripture frequently condemns those preachers who “seek the things that are their own: not the things that are Jesus Christ’s” (Phil. 2.21). On the other hand, St. Paul declares that by all means Christ may be preached, and he rejoiced and will rejoice in this (Phil. 1.18). Furthermore, the Lord affirms that the laborer is worthy of his hire (Luke 10.7). Besides, if it was forbidden to preach to acquire gifts, a lot of churches would be in trouble—for in time of necessity they have sent out their preachers to obtain alms from the faithful. Chobham seeks to resolve this problem by arguing that the obtaining of temporal reward is not the final cause [causa finais] as such but rather the consequence of the actual final cause, which is devotion. Devotion is the preacher’s true motivation in preaching; from this quite impeccable final cause follows the collection of alms and the advantage of the church.The preacher must preach to excite the devotion of the faithful, Chobham explains, but because devotion cannot be proved better than by making offerings and donating gifts, a good man’s preaching pro questu may be justified because he is preaching on account of devotion, from which temporal reward follows. Therefore, when one speaks of preaching “for” ( pro) alms, that “for” does not indicate the final cause itself, but rather the consequence of the final cause—because the devotion of the faithful is


79

the final cause of the preaching, from which follow almsgiving and the advancement of the church.53 If someone preaches in order to collect alms for the renewal of the church or the construction of bridges or the maintenance of the poor, the principal intention [ principalis intentio] must be that the hearts of the faithful are stirred to devotion, while the secondary intention may be that the faithful are seen offering and giving alms on account of this preaching, because such behavior affords clear evidence that the hearts of the faithful have been appropriately excited. That noble principalis intentio is flagrantly violated in The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale: But shortly myn entente I wol devyse: I preche of no thyng but for coveityse. Therfore my theme is yet, and evere was, Radix malorum est Cupiditas. . . . But though myself be gilty in that synne, Yet kan I maken oother folk to twynne From avarice, and soore to repente. But that is nat my principal entente; I preche nothyng but for coveitise. VI[C] 423–33

The gratification of personal “coveitise” is the Pardoner’s professed principal entente, while making other folk turn away from avarice is a possible secondary intention. He is preaching pro questu in the worst possible sense of the term, with temporal reward as his real final cause and devotion (as induced in the faithful) merely being a possible consequence. Here, then, is a grotesque reversal of the proper order of things.54 The Pardoner is also a disgrace to his profession in other ways.As I have argued elsewhere, he far exceeds the statutory obligations and authorized duties of a licensed dispenser of indulgences in two crucial—and quite damning—ways, in claiming extensive powers of absolution and the right to preach (the officium praedicatoris).55 Indeed, the Pardoner’s actions and his very demeanor are an affront to common belief, a shocking (but not, alas, atypical) deviation from pious ideals that were shared by high and low, learned and lewd. The structural significance of the Pardoner’s self-exhibition within the project of Chaucer’s fictional pilgrimage is crucial.This character threatens to travesty, bring into ridicule, and reduce to absurdity every major spiritual reason for the expedition to Canterbury, where the pilgrims can expect to acquire substantial indulgences, offer to the authentic relics of St.Thomas à Becket, and hear good sermons from godly men (a major improvement on the Pardoner’s

80


deficient vita, which undermines his fine verba). Forgiveness for this degree of deviancy would be hard to find. George Kittredge memorably pronounced the Pardoner as the greatest sinner among the group—“an abandoned wretch” and “the one lost soul among the Canterbury Pilgrims.”56 Yet, almost in the next breath Kittredge found some signs of grace in him, at least at the point at which the Pardoner admits to his audience that Jesus Christ’s “pardoun” is the best,“I wol yow nat deceyve” (VI[C] 916–18).57 But that could merely be the timeless ploy of the skilled salesman who assures his clients that he is utterly sincere in urging them to buy, for instance, this particular used car, despite its limitations—for what can you get for that amount of money these days? Besides, even if the Pardoner had some awareness of the spiritual risks he was running concerning the fate of his immortal soul, his contemporary judges in the tribunal of penance would have been a lot less sentimental than Kittredge and Patterson, far slower to forgive—if forgiveness were an option at all. For they were robust in their condemnation of the preacher who, even though his holy words could help others, failed to help himself. Generations of theologians cited God’s demand of the sinner, “Why dost thou announce my justice?,” together with His terrifying response,“I will accuse you and stand against your face” (Ps. 49.16, 21).True, following the Pardoner’s downfall, he and the Host do kiss and make up—but the kiss of peace may be (and certainly is in this instance) a very superficial gesture, not indicative of any fellow-feeling or frisson whatever. The appearances are saved, the social decorum restored. But there is no reason to infer any sort of authorial absolution for the Pardoner for his many crimes and misdemeanors. It may be enlightening to subject the Pardoner’s claim that he does good in spite of himself— though myself be gilty in that synne, Yet kan I maken oother folk to twynne From avarice, and soore to repente

––to moral analysis of the kind generally practiced by the schoolmen. Thomas of Bailly, who served as Chancellor of the University of Paris from 1316 until his death in 1326, presents himself as an excellent guide, because of the particularly full answer he gives to the standard question utrum predicans tenetur facere omnia que predicat.This includes an exploration of the possibility that a preacher who does not practice what he preaches may nevertheless be of some benefit to others, and in the process may earn some sort of credit for himself, even though he is living in mortal sin.58 Thomas fully endorses St. Gregory’s dictum that a preacher whose words differ from


81

his actions plants a seed that another eats, even though he himself does not feed on it. So, the Pardoner seems to be right on that score; his own viciousness does not destroy any benefit that an audience may receive from his preaching (and, it may be added, from his indulgences). But, in spiritually helping others does he help himself ? Little if any support is offered here for Kittredgean latitude. Thomas explains that an immoral person who helps others may possibly merit de congruo, for example, by giving alms or indeed by preaching. In such a case, where only an inferior type of merit may be earned (on which, more later), contrition is not necessary: attrition will suffice. Attrition may be understood as “imperfect contrition” concerning one’s wrongdoing, what Aquinas calls a definite “but not a perfect displeasure for sins committed,”59 a feeling that has its principal source in “servile fear.”60 There is nothing to suggest that the Pardoner has such a feeling. Furthermore,Thomas of Bailly imagines his attrite preacher as being motivated to preach to others by natural piety. Chaucer does not seem to have bestowed that motivation on his character. It would appear, then, that the Pardoner can hardly hope for even this inferior version of merit—and congruent merit is precisely that, a feeble thing as compared to merit in the fullest and best sense of the term, that is, merit de condigno, which cries out to be rewarded. Thomas envisages only the possibility of mere congruent merit for his sinful preacher, and actions that are meritorious in this weaker sense have far less of a claim on God’s grace.While it would be unjust for condignly meritorious actions not to be rewarded, to withhold reward for a congruently meritorious deed involves no violation of right; what matters is how generous the rewarder (i.e., God) decides to be.61 Furthermore, He can be as generous or as punitive as He wishes. In sum, even if Chaucer’s character did have some feelings of natural piety or attrition, that would not necessarily earn or purchase any part of Jesus Christ’s pardoun, or affect his status as a “lost soul.” Any reward he might theoretically receive is entirely up to God; the Pardoner himself has done little if anything to further his case—and much to diminish it. Pace Kittredge and Patterson, there are no apparent grounds for optimism concerning his redemption. If this despicable figure has no sympathy for his fellow-Christians, why should God have any sympathy for him? The Pardoner’s obsession with the material economy has utterly subverted any chance he might have of profiting from the spiritual economy. True, the medieval system of indulgences was fraught with confusion, and a humble quaestor could be excused for not having grasped the complexities with the insight of, say, an Aquinas or a Bonaventure. But the Pardoner’s rapacious greed is inexcusable, as is his failure to act on the foundational truth of the whole system: indulgences were instituted so that the spiritually rich could help the poor, sharing with them their abundant merit in acts of

82


Christian love and communion. Far from working to ensure that the grievous penitential burdens of his clients are borne by others, Chaucer’s character acts in a way that increases their burdens by relieving them of their material wealth and undermining their opportunities to lay up wealth in Heaven. More generally, he has made a market of the divine mercy, thus realizing some of the schoolmen’s worst fears. I cannot believe that the poet is offering any excuses for such behavior. At this moment on the road to Canterbury, the spiritual economy is in the ascendant, being allowed its full value and ultimate power.

CHAPTER 5 SACRED AND SECULAR IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Murray Roston

Suggests that the basic theme of the The Merchant of Venice is the clash between the precepts of Christianity denouncing financial acquisition and the demands of the burgeoning world of commerce, a conflict that Shakespeare brilliantly confronts by merging two disparate figures in the character of Antonio—the contemporary merchant engaged in profit-making with the ascetic Christ-figure, in a play reenacting the Crucifixion in a contemporary setting. By that device, Shakespeare attempted to validate his own current commercial ventures. Recognition of that purpose reveals a profound unity between the main plot and such seemingly peripheral elements as the casket scene and the exchange of rings.

lthough Bakhtin restricted his dialogic theory to the novel, his perception that there exists a tension between text and countertext applies no less effectively to drama.The tension arises, he argued, from a conflict between the “centripetal” element reinforcing traditional assumptions and the “centrifugal” impulse serving to resist or modify them.1 The mingling of sacred and secular in The Merchant of Venice conforms closely to that distinction, the sacred impulse in the play reinforcing inherited notions of behavior while the secular impulse contests or modifies them in accordance with urgent contemporary needs. The prevalence of the sacred aspects is indicated by a fact long noted— that The Merchant of Venice contains more biblical allusions than any play

A

84

M U R R AY RO S T O N

in the Shakespearean canon, echoing passages from the Gospels, from Ecclesiasticus, from Corinthians, and, if less frequently, from other books in the Old Testament.2 To an Elizabethan audience, familiar with the Bible from regular readings both in church and in the family setting, those allusions would have created a complex of connective filaments and associations, both verbal and thematic.The scriptural element is not obtrusive in a play so dramatically energized and variegated, containing as it does Bassanio’s journey to the magical world of Belmont, the contract theme building up to the tensions of the trial, the comedy of the clown Gobbo, and the amusing exchange of rings with which it concludes. But the plethora of scriptural allusions, however latent, signals the existence of a subdued yet pervasive concern with some religious or sacred theme. Shakespeare was no pietist; the religious element in his plays generally referring not to matters of doctrinal or sectarian dispute but only to the broadest moral principles of Christianity, the ideals of compassion, altruism, and forgiveness of one’s enemies, evidenced in such characters as Cordelia, Edgar, and Desdemona. Even the plays dealing most prominently with those Christian virtues lack the proliferation of biblical references that distinguish The Merchant of Venice, including as it does among numerous other elements a dispute over the theological lesson to be drawn from Jacob’s increase of his flock, the reiterated hint of whited sepulchres, the parody of Isaac’s blessing when Gobbo meets his father, and the evocation of “a Daniel come to judgment.” In that last connection, only an audience familiar with the story of Susanna and the Elders in the Old Testament Apocrypha would grasp the irony of Shylock seeing himself in the role of the innocent, vindicated Susanna while the audience perceives him more accurately as one of the corrupt elders of the story, hence empathizing with Gratiano’s triumphant echo of the phrase as Portia reverses the court’s ruling. First, then, to the centripetal. In a justly admired article, Barbara Lewalski identified many years ago the underlying theme of the play as being the victory of the New Law over the Old.3 Antonio, embodying the Christian ideals of selflessness, generosity, and love, fulfills in his loan to Bassanio the Gospel injunction: “Give to every man that asketh of thee. . .do good and lend, looking for nothing in return and your reward shall be great” (Luke 6.30–35) In that context, Shylock, associated by his Jewish ancestry with the Old Testament, represents the antithesis of Christian generosity, demanding his pound of flesh in reliance upon the lex talionis. One should add that he does not represent the Old Testament itself but the Pharisee of the New Testament, the Jew viewed in the Gospels as the perverter of the divine covenant. Within the Old Testament, God is not only the arbiter of justice and executor of vengeance but also the source of divine love and mercy. But the transfer of those more amiable qualities to Jesus left God the Father with the

S AC R E D & S E C U L A R I N T H E M E R C H A N T O F V E N I C E

85

harsher function of imposing Law and exacting revenge, attributes imposed in the Gospels upon the rabbis or Pharisees. There, they stand accused of bigotry, insisting upon the letter of the law to extract the maximum penalty from transgressors rather than granting forgiveness and love. Hence Shylock’s reliance on the precise wording of his contracts, his sole response to Portia’s query whether he has provided a surgeon to stop Antonio’s wound being the sharp rejoinder:“Is it so nominated in the bond?. . .I cannot find it, ’tis not in the bond.” Lewalski explores this theme in some detail, tracing many of the scriptural allusions to their source. But there is a problem in her reading of the play, which she herself acknowledges. For if Antonio embodies Christian virtues in the matter of the loan, he is, she points out, sadly lacking in a further and no less fundamental principle—the injunction to turn one’s cheek to the smiter:“Love your enemies” the book of Matthew enjoins,“bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which hurt and persecute you” (Matt. 5.39–44).Antonio, in contrast, spurns his enemy Shylock, calls him a dog, voids his rheum upon him, and when charged with such persecution, declares stubbornly that he will continue to do so: I am as like to call thee so again, To spet on thee again, to spurn thee too.

That, Lewalski recognizes, is a flaw, a moral blemish, which she assumes, he needs to correct by the end of the play, as he does when he waives the fine imposed on Shylock. If she is right and Antonio does learn forgiveness in the course of the play, that spiritual amelioration is, we should note, in no way prepared for, no hint of remorse on his part being suggested that would make such moral change believable. This apparently minor factor has, I believe, profound implications for an understanding of the play. For the assumption that Antonio’s harsh treatment of Shylock is un-Christian prevents Lewalski, as it has prevented later critics, from perceiving what seems to me to be the major mythological underpinning of the play. The Christian, it is true, was enjoined to turn his cheek, to submit patiently to abuse, to love and forgive those who smite him; but there was one notable exception. He was to reach no such accommodation with the Devil, as Jesus exemplified in his rejection of Satan’s temptations in the wilderness. On the contrary, with the Devil the Christian was to be ever on his guard, hostile to any approach, firm in his resistance. “Put on the whole armour of God,” the Gospels warn,“that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil” (Luke 6.11). Since it has become customary in our own day to view Shylock sympathetically as the wronged member of an oppressed minority—a reading that

86


does not accord with his identification as figuring the Devil—it may be necessary to spend a moment or two on that point before turning to my main theme.The sympathetic reading, understandable as it may be in a postHolocaust era, in a generation that has learned to deplore racism, ignores the fact that the Christian characters term him such repeatedly, with no hint of hesitation or modification. His own daughter Jessica detests him. Moreover, an Elizabethan audience, familiar with the mystery cycles and morality plays still being acted in their day, would, as Michelson notes, have immediately seen in Gobbo the comic Vice traditionally accompanying his master—the Devil.4 Lest the point be missed, Jessica remarks to Gobbo as he leaves his master’s service that their house is hell “. . .and thou, a merry devil, / Didst rob it of some taste of tediousness.” Quite apart from the numerous descriptions of Shylock, whether as a devil citing scripture for his purpose or, in Gobbo’s garbled phrase, as “the very devil incarnation,” no attempt to soften his character can mute the horror of the scene where he maliciously sharpens the knife upon his leather shoe in preparation for excising the pound of flesh, an action that prompts Gratiano’s choric protest: Not on thy sole, but on thy soul, harsh Jew, Thou mak’st thy knife keen; but no metal can— No, not the hangman’s ax—bear half the keenness Of thy sharp envy.

Sympathetic readings of Shylock’s character have, of course, based themselves upon the famed “Hath not a Jew. . .” speech, expressing his understandable resentment of the treatment meted out to him. But Shakespeare, we should recall, characteristically allows such moments of insight even into the most villainous of his characters without detracting from our ultimate sense of their villainy. Richard III, in his opening speech, confides to us his grievance against heaven for having made him a hunchback; but as he proceeds on his evil path, the crimes he commits leave no room for further compassion. Shylock’s complaint does indeed seem momentarily warranted, evoking a degree of empathy; but in a drama contrasting Christian forgiveness with Old Testament reprisal or vengeance, the chilling conclusion of his speech would scarcely have won commiseration from an Elizabethan audience: “. . .and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” One may add that those who see Shylock as a merely contemptible figure, relying on the vision of him as running through the streets crying incoherently, “My daughter! O my ducats. . .” forget that those are not Shylock’s words.They are Solanio’s parody of Shylock, who himself never behaves so ludicrously upon the stage.


87

To return, then, to Lewalski’s reading, if Shylock is a devil-figure and Antonio fully justified in spitting on his gabardine, her perception of a failing in his character falls aside, leaving him as a flawless embodiment of the Christian idea. Once that point is made, the mythological subtext becomes apparent—the play being in the fullest sense a reenactment of the Crucifixion story within the setting of the city of Venice, as the Jew attempts to shed the blood of an innocent Christ-figure. In this version there is, of course, a happy ending, constituting what Freud calls wish-fulfillment, Christ’s death replaced by the more congenial scene of a last-minute reversal of judgment. But the basic tale remains the same, together with the lessons intended to be derived from it, the text repeatedly confirming the parallel. Antonio, long before he knows of the clause in Shylock’s contract, follows Jesus in declaring himself ready to offer his body for his friend’s salvation, to sacrifice for Bassanio “. . .my purse, my person, my extremest means.” Preparing for death, he echoes the words and images associated with his forebear, opposing his “patience” to Shylock’s fury and describing himself, with hints of the Lamb of God, to be a “tainted wether of the f lock / Meetest for death.” That reading, apart from its major corollaries, illumines a facet of the play that has long proved puzzling to critics—Antonio’s unexplained melancholy in the opening scene.5 His exchange with Salerio and Solanio assures us that his sadness derives neither from financial cares nor from unrequited love; but no reason for the melancholy is proffered. Once he is seen as a Christ-figure, however, the reason becomes evident.Alone among the leading male characters, he is, like his celibate counterpart, segregated from romantic love.6 In the midst of the clowning of Gobbo, the comic exchange of rings, and the love-affairs being pursued around him, he remains grave and aloof as befits his shadowy role: I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano— A stage, where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one.

Shylock, in that reenactment of the Crucifixion, emerges as more than the devil-figure with which he is so frequently equated. For he functions, as so often in medieval drama (in conformity with the New Testament itself ), as a conflation of the Devil and Judas Iscariot. “Have not I chosen you twelve,” Jesus remarked to the disciples,“and one of you is a devil?” ( John 6.70). Hence it is that, upon Shylock’s condemnation in court, Gratiano, recalling the fate of Judas in the Gospel account, gleefully offers him a rope to hang himself. Such parallels between the Crucifixion and Shylock’s contract are pursued throughout the play, the shedding of the drop of blood on

88


which the court reversal is based offering a clear hint of both the Eucharist and the Holy Grail. The ramifications of this underpinning are extensive. Recurring throughout the play’s imagery as well as its plot are allusions to the basic conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees as recounted in the New Testament, the belief that “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3.6). If the Pharisee, scrutinizing each jot and tittle of the text, was obsessed with the outward form or letter of the law, the Christian aimed at restoring and fulfilling its inner spirit.The time had come, they argued, for the true Jew (by which was meant the new Christian) to rescue the spiritual import of ritual that had been forgotten by the legalists: For he is not a Jew which is one outwardly: neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew which is one inwardly & circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter. (Rom. 2.28)

Disparate as the comic scenes may appear, as always in Shakespeare they reflect and reinforce the play’s central message, the concluding scene of the rings relying here for its humor upon this central distinction. A wedding ring is, by its circular form and the intrinsic value of its metal, a symbol of eternal love.The oath imposed by Portia and Nerissa forbidding their lovers to part with the rings has, as she and the audience know full well, been violated by them only in the letter.They have parted with the physical objects but remained steadfast to the fidelity the rings represent. Gratiano dismisses the quarrel as concerning only: . . . a hoop of gold, a paltry ring That she did give me, whose posy was For all the world like cutler’s poetry Upon a knife,“Love me, and leave me not.”

He regards the word me in the inscription as referring to the external representative of their troth, whereas Nerissa obviously intended it to refer to herself. The same principle underlies the humor in Portia’s threat to sleep with the chimerical doctor.The word jewel, while ostensibly referring to the ring, in fact carries with it hints of the “treasure” of maidenhood, which she had been preserving for Bassanio: Let not that doctor e’er come near my house; Since he hath got the jewel that I loved, And that which you did swear to keep for me, I will become as liberal as you; I’ll not deny him anything I have, No, not my body, nor my husband’s bed. Know him I shall, I am well sure of it.


89

In their literal or outward form, her words may strike Bassanio as ominous; but their concealed inner meaning—since Portia is that doctor—emerges as amusingly harmless. The comic scenes are, however, only minor reflections of the play’s central theme. Shylock’s perverse use of the letter of his contract and his citing of scripture to effect his revenge underscore the message of the casket scene. Bassanio’s decision is to rely upon the inner, not the outer, properties of the caskets, and in doing so he identifies as the leading culprits for the reverse procedure the false interpreters of religion and of the law, the two elements dominating the play’s main theme So may the outward shows be least themselves; The world is still deceiv’d with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt But, being season’d with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text. . .

In law, Shylock has twisted the wording of the contract to suit his needs, transforming by his duplicity a “merry bond” into a vicious trap. In religion, like the Pharisee he represents, he distorts the text to justify vengeance in place of love. He is, as Antonio describes him in that same image of outer and inner worth, a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the core. The New Testament offers a different image for such duplicity, an image echoed in this play: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones. (Matt. 23.27)

Morocco, on opening the golden casket, learns that:“Many a man his life hath sold / But my outside to behold. / Gilded tombs do worms infold,” the casket, when opened, revealing a carrion Death’s head. One aspect of the play would seem to militate against the disparagement of the letter of the law; for Portia at the climax of the trial scene does, of course, employ the precise wording of the contract to frustrate Shylock’s plan. But there is no contradiction. Jesus had stated explicitly, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill,” adding: “For verily I say unto you, Till Heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matt. 5.17–18). His aim was not to nullify the Law but to restore the spirit that had, he believed, been suppressed by the legalists. And that is

90


exactly what Portia effects here. The law, she repeatedly declares, must be upheld; but she extracts from the letter of the law the quality of mercy that had been obscured. With that action performed, the contrast between the Christian and pharisaical views is demonstrated in action:“That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit,” the Duke proclaims,“I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it.” Portia then turns to Shylock’s intended victim with the query, “What mercy can you render him?” Antonio’s response being at once to waive Shylock’s fine. If the forced conversion may be distasteful to a modern audience, it marked, for the Elizabethan, the granting of his sole chance of heavenly salvation, the aspect that was emphasized and prepared for in the amusing exchange between Gobbo and Jessica on her chances of salvation. He can offer her only the “bastard” hope that she will prove not to be her father’s daughter, to which Jessica replies that she will be saved by her husband, who has made her a Christian. The play, then, is steeped in theological debate, revealing Shakespeare’s preoccupation here not just with the general aspects of Christianity but with the details of Christian precept and doctrine. It is in that sense a drama reliant upon the most sacred elements of religion, with its reenactment of the Crucifixion, its debate on the conflict between the New Law and the Old, and its employment throughout of images and phraseology redolent of the Gospels. Why, we may enquire, did Shakespeare, who is elsewhere so loath to engage in the subtleties of theology, choose such a subject? And here at last we may turn to the secular or centrifugal aspect. Much has been written on the play’s concern with the problem of interest on the assumption that the unsavory depiction of Shylock reflects Shakespeare’s condemnation of usury.7 It was indeed a subject of immediate concern, as moneylenders began to employ various subterfuges to circumvent the 10 percent limitation on interest imposed in 1571, such as linking the loan to fluctuations in foreign currency.A report submitted to Burghley in 1597, about the time this play was written, claimed that a certain William Beecher had amassed the sum of £40,000 by such circumventing of the law. But the relevance of all this for the play is, in the final analysis, minimal. Shylock may represent the worst form of moneylending, but Shakespeare seems not to have opposed the practice itself. Antonio, it is true, proudly insists that he neither lends nor borrows on such terms, but he is ready enough to waive the latter rule to aid his friend; while Bassanio, the beneficiary, not only has no hesitation in accepting the offer, but eagerly arranges its execution. Moreover, there is evidence nearer home, as Shakespeare’s family customarily loaned out money at 7.5 percent interest, and Shakespeare appears himself to have indulged in such activities. In a letter to Sturley in


91

1598, Richard Quiney informed him that Mr. William Shakespeare could probably provide the funds needed on “indifferent conditions.”8 Thus, although excessive interest and extortionist methods are deplored in the play, Shakespeare himself would seem to have indulged in the practice. There was, however, a more cogent reason for Shakespeare’s choice of this theme—his attempt to reach an accommodation between the precepts of his religion and the demands of the new Renaissance economy. Medieval Christianity, with its contemptus mundi and its advocacy of the monastic life, had left no room for doubt concerning the Church’s attitude toward worldly possessions and their acquisition. Not only usury but trade itself was viewed with grave disapproval, the term “usury” including any form of profit-making. The definitive canonical work of the Middle Ages, the Concordia Discordantium Canonum compiled by the twelfth-century Benedictine monk Gratian, condemned unequivocally not only the practice of usury but also, as no less reprehensible, the function of middle man or merchant. A craftsman, he pointed out, was justified in requesting payment for the labor he had invested in constructing a chair out of pieces of wood; but a merchant buying at that price and selling at a higher price without improving the object was a mere profiteer:“. . .that man,” Gratian declared, “is of the buyers and sellers who are cast out from God’s Temple.” As to usury itself, the Council of Vienne held in 1312 recorded its dismay at learning of the existence of certain communities that, in defiance of human and divine law, sanctioned usury and compelled debtors to fulfill usurious contracts. It announced that all rulers and magistrates knowingly maintaining such laws were to incur excommunication, and required that such legislation must be revoked within three months. Moreover, since usurious transactions were frequently camouf laged beneath various specious devices, it ordered ecclesiastical authorities to compel all moneylenders to submit their accounts for examination. Any person obstinately maintaining that usury is not a sin was to be punished as a heretic, and inquisitors were commanded to proceed against them.9 This was not, we should recall, merely a medieval view but, as Gratian’s reference to the moneychangers in the Temple confirmed, was rooted in the New Testament’s condemnation of all forms of acquisitiveness. Discarding possessions and shunning wealth formed a cornerstone of Gospel teaching, Jesus instructing his disciples: “Go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor. . .,” adding in a famous phrase,“Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matt. 19.21–23). The growth of trade in the Middle Ages had compelled the Church to modify its stand, permitting what was termed “just profit,” that is, a profit sufficient to enable the trader to earn a livelihood, but anything beyond that was, it

92


warned, avaricious and hence sinful.10 In fact, there were numerous attempts by both the clergy and laymen to find methods of circumventing the prohibition, but the very fact that they were deliberate circumventions is sufficient evidence that such activities were acknowledged to be contrary to the spirit and indeed to the basic injunctions of Christianity. The burgeoning world of Renaissance commerce could not exist on those terms, and inevitably resisted both the disparagement of trade and the more specific prohibition of moneylending so essential to the advancement of financial investment. The command in Deuteronomy 23.19–20 that warned,“but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury” had, in the fourth century, been interpreted by Jerome in his Commentary on Ezekiel as a prohibition binding on all members of the Church in the new world of universal Christian brotherhood. It was a view persisting through the centuries and confirmed by the Second Lateran Council of 1139 that went so far as to deny Christian burial to all unrepentant usurers. Under the pressure of changing times, the Church did make certain allowances in 1425, mainly to its own advantage, when it permitted public loans such as rent contracts (census utrimque redimibilis), an exception that was to arouse the ire of Luther, who saw it as a major source of the Church’s economic oppression of the poor. In 1540, Luther declared all forms of usury sinful; and if he and other Protestant leaders such as Melancthon and Bucer eventually made limited modifications to that ruling, those modifications constituted reluctant concessions to the economic crisis of the time, attempts to relieve the suffering of the indigent, rather than the encouragement of commerce itself. Calvin’s more lenient approach to the subject, important as it was in legitimizing mercantile activity, divided the Protestant camp, becoming a frequent object of attack and dissent among his peers. In two highly publicized incidents, in Rudolstadt (1564) and Regensburg (1587), preachers reverted to the earlier rulings, denying communion to all merchants on the grounds that they were comparable to thieves or murderers by flouting the scriptural prohibition of usury.11 In England, those tensions and conflicts not only found their counterpart but reached their most acute form at the time this play was written. In response to urgent business demands, interest had, in 1545, been briefly legalized under Henry VIII; but the law proved so distasteful to Christian feelings that the ruling was formally abrogated under Edward a few years later. But the repeal proved impossible to maintain. Merchants needed substantial loans in order to purchase goods, while owners of coal mines and similar concerns needed to make considerable investment in equipment before profits could be realized. As the preamble to the subsequent law of 1571 regretfully recorded, the prohibition of usury had proved ineffective, the said vice having,“much more exceedingly abounded, to the utter undoing


93

of many gentlemen, merchants, occupiers, and other, and to the importable hurt of the commonwealth.” The new law reinstated the prohibition of interest above 10 percent, again making it, as in the repealed law of 1545, criminally punishable by both imprisonment and a heavy fine, but added a declaration that interest below 10 percent was now to be legally forfeitable—that is, the borrower was empowered to take court action to have the interest cancelled.The effect of the law, however, was to generate a general impression that interest below 10 percent was now legally permissible, since no court action would be taken against the usurer unless the borrower submitted a formal complaint. In fact, no known instance of such recourse to the courts has been recorded. On the other hand, the stigma remained. The loophole was fiercely attacked by traditionalists claiming that it contradicted the word of God. Financiers tended to dismiss such attacks as emanating from religionists inexperienced in commercial dealings and therefore unqualified to intervene, but they could scarcely employ that argument when Thomas Wilson, a man extraordinarily well versed in commercial affairs, published his Discourse on Usury in 1572.12 As Master of Requests, he had been responsible for adjudicating numerous mercantile cases and negotiating major business transactions; and he now came down strongly against any form of usury. There was, he pointed out, little discernible difference between a usurer lending the sum of £500 in order to receive £600 for it a few months later and a profiteer purchasing land for £500 and selling it for £600. Commerce, which now incorporated interest-bearing loans as an essential ingredient, continued to be treated with disdain well into Shakespeare’s day, the merchant in Elizabethan popular literature being regularly classified together with the usurer as a personification or “type” of greed.13 The expansion of commercial activity reached its peak in the late 1580s, shortly before the writing of this play, when England succeeded in replacing Antwerp as the financial center of Europe.The founding of the Royal Exchange in London by Sir Thomas Gresham, Britain’s increased trade in textiles and mining, the search for foreign sources of wealth culminating in the establishment of the East India Company to encourage the silk and spice trade with the Orient, all demanded financial speculation and investment.The medieval tradition whereby villages were largely self-supporting, the craftsman or farmer supplying local needs, had been supplanted by a capitalist system requiring the obtaining of substantial loans. As an English observer of the scene remarked: “the chief merchandise now is clear and plain usury.”14 Jonson’s Volpone, we may recall, when claiming that his only peccadillo was divesting legacy hunters of their money, declared with pride the superiority of his activity to such contemptible

94


occupations as trade or usury: I use no trade. . . I turn no monies in the public bank, Nor usure private.

There was, accordingly, a compelling need for the Christian who participated in these new commercial activities to validate both financial enterprise itself and the acquisitive impulse inherent in it—that is, to attempt to remove the stigma attached to them. R.H.Tawney revealed some years ago, in the wake of a seminal essay by Max Weber, how the burgeoning of Western economy and the encouragement of the garnering of wealth arose in large part as a result of the Protestant and, even more specifically, the Puritan revolution.15 Although early Protestants such as Luther had continued to condemn the pursuit of wealth in terms no less denunciatory than their medieval forebears, there entered gradually into the Puritan consciousness, with its sympathy for the Old Testament, a recognition that, if the biblical Abraham had been blessed by God with flocks, herds, and material possessions, there could be nothing basically evil in their acquisition, provided, of course, that they are obtained honestly.Thus Richard Sibbes declared, in 1637, “worldly things are good in themselves, and given to sweeten our passage to Heaven. . .this world and the things thereof are all good, and were all made of God, for the benefit of his creatures.”16 The individual Protestant was still urged, as he had been from the first, to dissociate himself from those who aimed at “vaine pompe” or conspicuous consumption. The Protestant elect, William Harrison had declared in 1570, should avoid luxuries; they should end foreign imports and return to the simplicity of earlier days when each village was self-sufficient, producing all of its needs, seeking for no more “than was necessary for the competent maintenauns of themselves.”17 But an unintended by-product of the approval in principle of worldly things was the encouragement of capitalistic acquisitiveness. Hence, the leading position occupied by the Quakers in the banking concerns of early America. On the other hand, and most relevant to our present point, the Puritan legitimizing of commerce was a phenomenon emerging only in the midseventeenth century, as Tawney confirms, and was not yet available to the Elizabethan. Shakespeare had to find some other way of coping with the conflict between the Christian disapproval of financial gain and the Renaissance endorsement of mercantile self-enrichment. He needed, in effect, to divorce the merchant from the usurer in the contemporary imagination. In this play he did so by presenting them not merely as distinct entities but as polarized figures, mutually antagonistic, contemptuous of each other’s


95

activities and moral principles. But in contrasting those two professions, he took a further, remarkably venturesome step. In a daring move, he merged the merchant with the figure of Christ, thereby authenticating commercial enterprise by implication, while assigning to the Devil the sin of extortionist demands and the persecution of defaulters. The pursuit of wealth is not only condoned in the play but dominates it, being viewed throughout as a commendable activity. Bassanio proudly compares himself, with no hint of shame, to a Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece. Even in the realm of love, his priorities are clear. “In Belmont is a lady richly left,” he explains, adding as an afterthought: “And she is fair.” His pursuit of wealth, one notes, evokes no disapproval from Antonio, nor in any way lessens the latter’s willingness to support the project. Lorenzo welcomes Jessica’s promise of the gold and jewels she will bring to him. There is, moreover, a significant change in the symbols employed for the imaginary world beyond the commercial venue of Venice. For, the green world of Shakespeare’s early romances—the wood at midsummer night, the Forest of Arden—contrasted with the harsh legalism of the city is replaced here by a very different idealized setting, a golden Belmont flowing with untold wealth. Portia, hearing that Shylock is owed 3,000 ducats, cries,“What, no more? / Pay him six thousand. . . / Double six thousand and then treble that.” How, we may ask, does Shakespeare reconcile the two contrasting concepts and justify his merger of Christ and merchant; how, in fact, does he validate for himself as well as for his audience that contemporary acquisitive impulse despite its inconsistency with Christian teaching? The question is especially relevant if we bear in mind that Shakespeare himself was engaged at this time not only in lending money but also in augmenting his financial assets. During the year he wrote this play, he was negotiating the purchase of one of the largest houses in Stratford; a few years later, he obtained title to 107 acres of arable land; and he made his shrewdest investment in 1605 when he purchased a half-interest in the leasing of tithes for Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe, an acquisition that provided him with a substantial annual income.18 The technique he employs in the play is fascinating, its ramifications spreading throughout the action. Antonio, as we learn from the opening scene, has valuable merchandise on the seas, investments described in glowing terms as argosies sailing like signors and rich burghers on the flood, the petty traffickers seeming to curtsey to them and do them reverence. His friends Solanio and Salerio, we learn, were they in Antonio’s position would worry lest the ships founder; but Antonio is calm and unperturbed. The reason soon becomes apparent. For Shakespeare presents his commercial enterprises not as avaricious activities but as acts of Christian faith, evidence of an abiding trust in God. Where Shylock demands security,

96


the guaranteeing of his investments through signed contracts and sureties on the principle he defines as “Fast bind, fast find,” Antonio’s tradings are repeatedly described, both by him and by his friends, as “hazards” or “ventures.” He is, that terminology suggests, entrusting his ships and his merchandise to the will of heaven, committing them into the hands of a benevolent Deity who, if He so wishes, will return them to their owner laden with profit; if not, the Christian merchant will accept with due patience the Divine will.19 By that process any implication of greed or acquisitiveness is dispelled, commercial enterprise being presented thereby as a form of religious devotion. Informed later in the play that his ships have miscarried, Antonio responds with quiet fortitude and patience, free from complaint or reproach. The two words venture and hazard defining this new approach recur throughout the play, always, on Antonio’s part, with the implication of a laudatory trust in the Divine. To Solanio’s remark that he would be profoundly anxious “had I such venture forth,” Antonio replies that he is free from worry.“My ventures,” he assures him,“are not in one bottom trusted.” Bassanio, requesting a further loan from Antonio, offers as analogy his practice of shooting a second arrow to find the first, “. . .by adventuring both, I oft found both.”The concept of trade as trust in the Divine casts light on the otherwise inexplicable dispute between Antonio and Shylock over the biblical incident of Jacob’s sheep. Shylock cites the story as evidence that the scriptures approve of usury; yet as many critics have noted,20 there is in Jacob’s project no hint of the taking of interest, Jacob neither lending nor borrowing in that episode. He had, it will be recalled, reached an agreement with Laban that only such lambs as were born striped or spotted would accrue to him, an agreement readily accepted by Laban since such lambs are rare in nature. However, before the eyes of the pregnant ewes Jacob placed striped sticks to encourage them to produce the type of offspring that would fall to his lot. In Shylock’s interpretation, this is a device ensuring or guaranteeing Jacob’s profits, and hence authenticating his own insistence on contracts and security.Antonio hotly disputes that reading, seeing the story as validating a totally different conception of commerce: This was a venture, sir, that Jacob serv’d for; A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of Heaven.

From the viewpoint of the usurer,Antonio’s form of trade is contemptible, consisting, Shylock remarks, of “ventures he hath squand’red abroad”— squandered because they are left vulnerable to chance: “. . .there be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves. . .and then there is the


97

peril of waters, winds, and rocks.” But for Antonio it is precisely the element of risk involved in commercial investments that validates them as acts of trust in heaven. If Antonio is presented throughout as the epitome of Christian charity and selflessness, devout even in his commercial undertakings, Bassanio elicits a more ambiguous response. Not only is his courtship of Portia motivated by desire for monetary gain but, as he informs us early in the play, he is by nature an unconscionable spendthrift whose prodigality has plunged him into debt. He falls, therefore, considerably short of Antonio as a model of Christian comportment. Were that all, his role as the leading male lover would inevitably detract from the fundamental message of the play. But Shakespeare takes care to counter that aspect in the casket scene, where Bassanio is allowed to redeem himself and to parallel the nobler principles of Antonio.Portia prepares us for that scene by employing those two key words as she urges him to postpone the decision and protract their lovemaking: I pray you tarry, pause a day of two Before you hazard. . . I would detain you here some month or two Before you venture for me.

And venture he does. Suppressing the Jason-like tendencies that motivate him elsewhere, he rejects the attractions of the golden casket. The silver casket he spurns too, in accordance with Christian disdain for riches, money being merely, “that common drudge twixt man and man.” Instead he risks everything on the least promising casket, the one that, significantly, bears the legend “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.” The reason he offers for his final choice is, one notes, couched in markedly Christian terms, his compassion for the poor and humble of this world: But thou, thou meager lead, Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught, Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence.

At the very moment of obtaining Portia’s wealth, he thus counteracts the acquisitiveness he has displayed in Venice, employing images that, as with Antonio, lend a religious coloring to his action, endowing it with a noble hue. A moment later one might imagine that he has eschewed the principle of venturing. Dazed by his success, he declares to Portia that he had been in doubt “. . .whether what I see be true, / Until confirmed, signed, ratified by you.” Are signed contracts therefore in order? Has Bassanio resorted to

98


Shylock’s mode of commerce? His remark, it transpires, is a lover’s jest, the sole confirmation he required being the kiss from Portia that has ratified their troth after his choice, certifying to his joy that it was no dream. The rejection of bonds and guarantees on the part of the Shakespeare’s Renaissance adventurers has its echo in the closing scene of the play, where Antonio, having witnessed Portia’s berating of Bassanio for his supposed infidelity, once again offers himself as his friend’s guarantor. This time, however, he proffers not his body as security for Bassanio but his soul, an offer involving no legal compact, only mutual trust and good faith: I once did lend my body for his wealth, Which, but for him that had your husband’s ring, Had quite miscarried; I dare be bound again, My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord Will never more break faith advisedly.

“Then you shall be his surety,” cries Portia—surety acceptable to a Christian, namely surety of the spirit, not of monetary bond. By presenting us with a Shylock embodying the worst excesses of financial avarice and by identifying him at the same time with the repulsive figures of the Devil, of Judas, and of the hated Pharisee, Shakespeare elevated by contrast the activities of the Renaissance trader. The presentation of Antonio as a Christ-figure in itself served to dignify the status of the merchant, portraying him as selfless, generous, and dedicated to noble precepts. But even more effective was the imaging of commercial enterprise as evidence of trust in the Divine, a process that absolved the trader by implication of any imputation of avarice. In contrast to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, believed by many to have prompted Shakespeare’s play, the Jew here is not the central character. He serves in a distinctly subordinate capacity, as a foil highlighting the virtues of the protagonist. Shakespeare, one notes, chose not to follow Marlowe’s lead by calling his play, The Jew of Venice. Instead, transferring the focus to the Renaissance entrepreneur Antonio, he entitled it more appropriately, The Merchant of Venice, using that hybrid figure as a means of conflating Christian and commercial ethics, and of effecting thereby an accommodation between the sacred and secular impulses of his time.21

PART II MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN HISTORY: CHURCH AND STATE


CHAPTER 6 THE COMMUNAL BODY, THE CORPORATE BODY,AND THE CLERICAL BODY:AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL READING OF THE GREGORIAN REFORM Lior Barshack

The Gregorian reform has often attracted the attention of non-historians, and seemed to be of central interest to social theory because of its unique place in the history of the West as well as its general illustrative potential.This essay attempts to base different historical accounts of the Gregorian reform on a unified model of society—the corporate model of social structure. According to the corporate model, social structures are premised on a deconsecration of society through the projection of communal sanctity onto a sacred but absent collective body—the corporate body of the group (Kantorowicz)—and onto a clerical caste.The notion of the communal body will be used to refer to the group as it exists in an ideal state of communitas, a state of weak interpersonal separation and immediate encounter with the sacred.The emergence of social structure out of communitas can thus be described as a process of transformation of the communal body into corporate and clerical bodies, a transformation of immanent communal sanctity into clerical sanctity and the sanctity of the transcendent corporate body. The Gregorian reform illustrates the process of deconsecration of society and its results: consolidation of social structure, corporate-formation and separation between civil and clerical powers.The article traces in particular the intertwined processes of legalization, bureaucratization, and development of civil religion, which took place in the aftermath of the Gregorian reform, to the separation of powers and corporate-formation advocated by the reformers.

102

L I O R BA R S H AC K

he Gregorian Reform was the culmination of one of the most thorough and impassioned engagements of Western society with the delineation of the sacred and the secular. The reform was propelled by a group of churchmen who strove to entrench the separation between the sacred and the secular spheres—between ecclesiastical and lay society—and give the sacred realm a solid institutional structure. However, the reform spurred processes of institutionalization not only within the Church but generally in lay society as well. It was followed by a large-scale development of temporal legal and administrative institutions. Lawyers, social theorists, and historians often refer to the Gregorian Reform as a crucial phase in the history, or rather prehistory, of the state. By virtue of its historical consequences, the reform is clearly suggestive of the broad social implications of different lines of demarcation between the sacred and the secular.The present essay is not written by a historian; its origin lies rather in an attempt by a legal and social theorist to comprehend, through various historical examples, alternative social strategies of deploying the sacred.The Gregorian Reform is adduced as a tentative illustration of general claims concerning the demarcation of the sacred and secular spheres, an illustration whose complexity incessantly opens up novel theoretical possibilities, almost to the point of defying the theoretical effort itself. In the first section of this essay, I outline a general model of the relations between the sacred and the secular in social structure.The model, departing from Victor Turner’s distinction between social structure and communitas, construes the latter as a mode of social existence in which the sacred is immanent to the social and all group members disappear into a single collective body, which I call the communal body.The communal body is sacred, and it is on account of its immediate presence in the course of communitas that the group seems then to be permeated with sacredness. As all group members disappear into the sacred communal body there is no room left for individual autonomy and spheres of worldly, secular activity. In communitas the sacred is omnipresent throughout social life; there is no separation between the sacred and the secular. By contrast, social structure is a mode of social existence in which the sacred collective body of the group is expelled from the social.The communal body is projected onto a transcendent realm and into various enclaves of sacredness within the social structure, such as the clerical body. Through projection, society is largely secularized and a separation between sacred and secular is instituted.The group’s projection of oneness and unity makes pluralism and autonomy within it possible. My notion of the corporate body refers to the absent sacred body of the group, that is, the communal body once lodged in its transcendent dwelling place. Constitutional principles such as separation of powers, rule of law, and separation between church

T

C O M M U N A L , C O R P O R AT E , & C L E R I C A L B O D I E S

103

and state secure society’s renunciation and projection of its omnipotent and lawless communal body.The projection of sacred communal fusion outside of the group and its transformation into an imaginary corporate body allow for the advanced degree of interpersonal separation and individual autonomy that is characteristic of social structures and make room for secular spheres of interaction. Social structure and communitas correspond then to the corporate and communal bodies as two alternative modes of social existence. Once the model of social structure and communitas as corporate and communal bodies, respectively, has been introduced, I turn, in the second section, to the Gregorian Reform in light of that model. The Gregorian Reform illustrates the process of consolidation of corporate structures at the expense of communal forces. The strict separation between temporal and spiritual powers advocated by the reformers expelled the mystical and omnipotent communal body from the group into the corporate realm, leaving behind temporal and clerical offices as defined and circumscribed bureaucratic functions. Within both realms, temporal and ecclesiastical, an ever-ramifying network of legal divisions and subdivisions gradually replaced ideals and practices of mystical unity. Processes of corporate-formation within the Church and lay society following the differentiation of temporal and spiritual powers were often noted by medieval historians and already by their historical protagonists.The separation of sacred and secular turned even the Church, the exclusive container of sacredness, into a rationally ordered corporate body. Within the temporal realm, the desacralization of royal power reflected general social processes of secularization, rationalization, and corporate-formation. Ostensibly in conflict with each other over ultimate power, spiritual and temporal authorities benefited from the separation between sacred and secular jurisdictions because of its contribution to structural development. They had a common archenemy—undomesticated popular religion with its threat to animate the communal body and undermine corporate structures.Through harsh political and ecclesiastical measures, communal sanctity was increasingly channeled outside of the social and confined to the domain of the clerical body, or, more specifically, the domain of regulated ritual exclusively administered by the clergy.1 At the same time, and in addition to the clerical colonization of communal sanctity, the temporal realm that emerged through divorce from the Church and suppression of irrational, localized communal forces increasingly channeled devotional fervor to the official cult of its own corporate, transcendent body: the corporate body of the king and the realm, the deity of the emerging civil religion.While the Gregorian Reform, with its secularizing effects, antedated the birth of the state, it prompted the appearance of “corporate symptoms”2 and spurred

104


the intertwined processes of structural consolidation, juridification, development of civil religion, and bureaucratization, which culminated in later periods with the emergence of the modern state.These processes and their coincidence can be viewed in the light of the structural relations among the communal, corporate, and clerical bodies.This approach to the Gregorian Reform may strike some readers not only as excessively speculative but also as teleological, rationalistic, and narrowly legal.The focus on institutionalization, let alone substantial assumptions about its social merits and repercussions, echoes an outdated paradigm in medieval historiography.3 While this impression is correct, the legal theory of the corporation demonstrates the inevitable convergence of the modernist concern with institutional history and the preoccupations of contemporary social and cultural historians. Social Structure as a Corporate Body The most familiar version of the distinction between structure and communitas is the one proposed by Victor Turner.4 His distinction had various precursors, such as the theories of the mass developed at the turn of the twentieth century to describe crises in structure and the theoretical accounts of rituals offered by Van Gennep, Evans-Prichard, Gluckman, and others.The present exposition follows Turner’s conceptualizations of structure and communitas, albeit with several additions: (a) The psychoanalytic distinction between interpersonal relations of mutual recognition among autonomous individuals, on the one hand, and relations of fusion, on the other, will be read into Turner’s distinction.5 I argue that the former mode of interaction is characteristic of structure, the latter of communitas. (b) The theological distinction between absence and presence are also read into Turner’s distinction; in communitas there is no absence, desire, or ideal: human existence is immanent and complete, marked by an unadulterated presence. (c) Social structures are further characterized by a differentiation, which vanishes during communitas, between public and private spheres; in communitas individuality dissolves in the communal experience and no room is left for private pursuit and achievement. Structure and communitas are two opposing modes of social interaction: whereas interaction in social structure proceeds between firmly separated individuals and is mediated by objective social roles and juridical categories, in communitas immediate interaction takes place between barely individuated total beings bereft of social status and identity. Individuals in social structure are embedded in networks of normative categories through which their concrete identities are defined.These categories comprise social strata, classificatory kinship, differentiated spheres of life (family/civil society/state), distinctions between structure’s inside and outside—between members


105

and strangers—and between the sacred and the temporal. Structures are articulate and divided. Clashes of interest, institutionalized competition over economic and political power, struggle over hegemony—these are inherent to social structure, whose greatest enemy is uniformity, and maintain within it a high degree of interpersonal separation and individual autonomy.6 By contrast, the situation of the “mob” is, according to George Mead, a “degradation of social structure” that involves a suspension of all social friction and an expansion of the self.7 Whereas social structure is afflicted with division, absence, and representation, communitas occasions an immanent presence of the sacred. No boundaries are recognized between sacred and secular, self and other, inside and outside, and life and death or between such different spheres of interaction as family and state. Communitas precipitates the dissolution of interpersonal boundaries and brings about interaction among barely differentiated beings. The personal self expands and coincides with the collective self. Conflicts over status, faith, or interest that enhance individual autonomy in social structure fade away in communitas.The alienation of the individual from his own and other selves, which accompanies structural individuation and legally mediated interaction, is no longer tolerated and is replaced by immediacy and fusion. Communitas is an essentially lawless form of interaction: during communitas the normative system that orders everyday life in social structure is suspended and in many cases challenged and modified. In the course of communitas, society seems to form a single communal body. By the notion of the communal body I refer to the group as an inarticulate unity that results from the dissolution of interpersonal boundaries. The communal body is the sacred fusion of all individual bodies generated during rites of passage, carnivals, natural disasters, fascist regimes, wars, revolutions, referenda, elections, and many other instances of communitas. The idea of the communal body can be identified within religious discourse, for example, in certain interpretations of the Pauline theory of the Church as the body of Christ.8 While in the course of communitas all individuals disappear into a communal body, the perfect incarnation of this collective body is the sacred leader of the group, who presides over the uncanny communal happening. Following the literature on divine kingship, Luc de Heusch distinguished between two paradigms of leadership: magical, charismatic leadership whose authority rests on heroic exploit (such as the slaying of the predecessor), on the one hand, and leadership that derives its authority from the law, on the other.9 The former type of kingship corresponds to communitas and the latter to social structure. The divine king—the modern fascist leader, for example—enacts the omnipotent communal body; the sacred permeates his body, which is thereby exempted from the rule of law. In many cases divine

106


Structure

Communitas

The Corporate Body

The Communal Body

(rational-traditional authority)

(charismatic-populist authority)

Individual a

Individual b

(relations of separation/transcendence)

Individual a

Individual b

(relations of fusion/immanence)

6.1 Horizontal and vertical relationships between the group and its authorities

kings were expected to violate fundamental interdictions (e.g., over incest or arbitrary bloodshed) and thus the very separation between the human and the sacred. By contrast, hereditary, human, administrative kingship is premised on a clear distinction between human and sacred powers and is generally congruous with the rule of law and firm structure.10 The authority of the administrative king, unlike that of the divine king, is circumscribed by the law in which it is grounded. In both structure and communitas, horizontal relations among individuals reproduce the vertical relations between the group and its authorities.The horizontal and vertical axes mirror each other. In structure, there is separation among individuals as well as between the group and its supreme authority. In Weber’s terms, authority is rational or traditional: it embodies rational normative standards that are superimposed on the community. In communitas, by contrast, nonseparation between the group as a whole and its charismatic-populist leader infects all interpersonal relations (see figure 6.1). The Corporate Body As long as social structure is intact, the sacred communal body is kept away from the group. It is removed to an external, corporate realm in order to allow for interpersonal separation within the group and for the formation of secular social spheres. I introduce the idea of the corporation through a series of general characterizations. The Classical Theory of the Corporation The corporation is an immortal legal personality. Maine, Maitland, and Kantorowicz considered immortality as the corporation’s essential and distinctive characteristic.11 The family and the crown served them as the two paradigmatic—and intimately related—instances of immortal bodies. The


107

family preserves its identity across generations; it is not restricted to the life span of a particular generation.The crown, or in Kantorowicz’s terms, the public body of the king, is indifferent to the death of individual kings and retains its identity across generations. Sovereignty is vested in the corporate personality of the family and the state, not in the private person of their living heads. Kantorowicz’s analysis implies that sovereignty resides not in the private body of the king but in his corporate, public body.The king is obliged to defend and augment the inalienable possessions of the realm—they are not his own—an obligation that received its clearest expression in the coronation oath. Maine makes this point in his discussion of the Roman family: the Pater familias embodies the abstract legal personality of the family and is in charge of its affairs. He can act only in the name of its immortal interest, not out of personal desire or passing whim. An Elaboration of the Classical Theory I would like to supplement classical accounts of the corporation with several claims, partly inspired by psychoanalytic approaches in group psychology:12 The separate corporate personality of the family and the state is associated with the mythical person of their founding ancestors. This point is hardly surprising, but I would like to emphasize its importance. The examples of the family and state suggest that corporate bodies are personified by their founding ancestors, such as the mythical, heroic founder of a Roman family or the founder of a royal dynasty.The names of descent groups, for example, refer directly or indirectly to their founding ancestors.13 In the state, the identity of the crown survives changing dynasties: the crown is then associated not with the founder of a particular dynasty but with national ancestors fictionally linked to all dynasties. In fact, a nation-state postulates as its mythical premise the shared descent of all its citizens. The corporate-ancestral personality of the group is an absent, transcendent object of worship. Through its corporate personality, its mythical ancestors, and their multiple totemic representations, the group articulates itself for itself. According to Hegel and Durkheim, notwithstanding the differences between their theories of religion, society worships its own self-representations. If the corporation is associated with ancestral figures—and ancestral law—and constitutes the self-representation of the group, it cannot fail to be sacred. Like the gods, corporations are transcendent: they are absent, invisible, external, and superior to the group, and act through representatives.14 The religious dimension of political systems and families resides in their corporate structure. National and domestic totemic symbols designate the corporate bodies of the state and the family, the respective objects of worship of civil and domestic cults.

108


The corporate body originates in the projection of sacredness outside the group. Corporations come into being through the projection of sacredness from within the group onto a transcendent realm.15 Corporate-formation secularizes society; once sacredness is projected outside the group, a realm of secular social interaction can assert itself. In the chaotic, transitional, lawless states of communitas, the social is not yet secularized. The sacred is then immanent to society, and authority sacral and boundless.The passage from divine kingship to law-bound authority should be understood in terms of projection: the private body of the king is deconsecrated and its sacredness projected onto the transcendent domain of the ancestral-corporate body. The elementary institutions of social structure—law, language, hierarchy, religion—are premised on the projection of sacredness and the ensuing separation between sacred and secular. Contrary to accepted wisdom, any accentuation of the transcendence of ultimate authority implies a further secularization of society. It is the sacred communal body that is projected by the group and transformed into its corporate body; the corporate body and the communal body correspond to social structure and communitas, respectively.We have seen that the sacred communal body amounts to an immanent presence of the unity of the group, formed through the dissolution of interpersonal boundaries. In social structure, the communal body is projected, transformed into a corporate body, and worshipped from afar by its separate individual subjects.The unity of the group is retained but deposited outside of it. Reconciling unity and division, being functionally divided into multiple organs yet seen from the outside as a single body, the corporate form is the essential form of social structure. As corporate bodies, social structures are marked by a division between an external sphere of the sacred and spheres of secular quotidian life tainted by every possible form of absence. Absence is one of the primary structural values, cherished by civil as well as revealed religions with their promises of an ever-postponed salvation. By contrast, in communitas every individual participates in the communal body and is consecrated. The absence and expectation that characterize everyday human existence are replaced by presence and immediate satisfaction. The structure of the corporate body is thoroughly legal. In the passage from communitas to social structure, from an immanent communal body to a transcendent corporate body, the law comes into being.The law is always seen as prescribed by the ancestral-corporate authority of the group, and hence cannot be found in the course of communitas as the corporate body dissolves into a communal body. Law-giving is the predominant function of the corporate/ancestral authority of a group: the more an authority is transcendent the more its function is reduced to that of law-giving. In the passage from communitas to social structure, the voice of law—the ancestral-corporate


109

voice that introduces itself as law—is recognized. Social structure emerges with the recognition of law and persists by its enforcement. Legal categories divide society into alienated spheres, groups, and individuals, to the effect that it can no longer contain its unity which finds refuge in the corporate realm. Individual rights and duties, for example, entrench the private/public distinction, anchor individual autonomy, and thereby expel the communal body.Through the law, the community is divided into antagonistic groups and individuals and its longings for fusion and the sacred are repressed. The Gregorian Reform and the Corporate Model of Social Structures According to the corporate model, social structures such as the state are premised on a removal of the sacred, accomplished through a transformation of an immanent communal body into a transcendent corporate body. The projection of the sacred gives rise to an advanced degree of interpersonal separation and to a legal order. The Gregorian Reform provides an illuminating example of the interrelated processes of desacralization of the social, structural consolidation and corporate-formation. It highlights central structural effects of corporate-formation such as bureaucratization, juridification, and separation of powers, which were merely mentioned in the preceding outline of the corporate model.The present section illustrates and elaborates on my earlier characterization of the corporation through standard, if not uncontested, historical accounts of the Gregorian Reform. The origins of the Gregorian Reform lay in the attempts led by such popes as Leo IX, Nicholas II, and Gregory VII during the eleventh century to establish the Church as the supreme sovereign power in the Christian world, distinct from and superior to the various existing types of monarchic power, which were seen as licensed by the Church. The papacy gradually claimed for itself the authority of Christ, beyond that of Peter, and deprived the emperor of his Christ-like nature and independent spiritual authority. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the papacy acquired unprecedented power: it enjoyed fiscal independence, significant political influence, and a broad jurisdiction.16 The Church trained a highly professional administration that spread throughout Europe, becoming an elaborate, formally ordered, and centralized system of offices, and according to some historians the first European state.17 The preceding lines already suggest some of the major effects of the Gregorian Reform: separation between temporal and ecclesiastical corporations, structural consolidation, and legal and administrative development that involved the impersonalization and rationalization of authority.

110


The Dialectics of Structure and Communitas Historians have argued that the Gregorian Reform constituted a dialectical response to a period marked by a rudimentary distinction between the sacred and the profane. Before the Gregorian Reform, it has been argued, the mundane was fused with the sacred to a much greater extent, magical unity was stressed at the expense of structural articulation, and temporal authority was largely sacral and magical, rooted in charisma rather than corporate principles.18 Temporal government was not self-centered but placed its raison-d’être and immediate ideals and goals in an otherworldly realm in a way that weakened its inner organization. Such generalizations call for a careful critical qualification, which far exceeds my competence and in any case cannot be undertaken in the present context. However, theoretical considerations support the suggestion of a dialectical pattern leading from communal to corporate symptoms, from magical to administrative kingship,19 even if these two types of authority form a continuum and rarely present themselves in ideal form. Corporate structures consolidate in response to communal exuberance, and once established are subject to renewed onsets of communal forces. Each pole of the continuum faces inbuilt pressures for its transformation in a way that produces a dialectic of structure and communitas.20 It is thus arguable on theoretical as well as historical grounds that the Gregorian Reform constituted a response to pronounced communal forces. The story of the Gregorian Reform may serve as an illustration of the process by which corporate bodies emerge out of predominantly communal formations. In a classic essay, Gerhart Ladner described a dialectic of sacred and temporal authority throughout the Middle Ages, identifying four major transformations in the theology of power.21

The Gelasian Doctrine According to the early Gelasian doctrine, named after Pope Gelasius I (492–96), two powers, earthly and divine, dominate the world.The earthly city is subservient to the heavenly one that is neither directly involved in the governing of society nor capable of governing it.The prince embodies the former, the pope the latter, and the relationship between the two individuals actualizes the relationship between the two realms.The inferior mundane realm must strive to meet the requirements imposed by the Church as long as it awaits redemption. Ladner refers to this doctrine as the functional conception of the state, pointing out that no proper state existed at this incipient stage of institutional development.22


111

The Carolingian Paradigm During the Carolingian age, the otherworldly commitments of temporal authority postulated by the Gelasian doctrine were further accentuated as the world in its entirety became impregnated with sacredness. According to Ladner: While for Pope Gelasius I priestly authority and kingly power had been two forces or principles by which the world is ruled, in the Carolingian age this neutral concept of the world is firmly and clearly replaced by that of the Church which, as the Body of Christ, is the only possible all-embracing community and milieu in which government temporal, that is political, as well as spiritual can function.This then was the great political idea of Christian unity in the Carolingian age, and on the whole, in the succeeding centuries down to the era of St. Gregory VII. Empire as the apex of kingship coordinated with the Papacy as the apex of priesthood, but—and this is most important for the history of political theory and reality—empires and kingdoms were in the Church, not beside the Church, as in St. Augustine and Gelasius, and not above the Church, as in the caesaro-papism of the Byzantine Empire.23

The fusion of sacred and secular reached a climax under the Carolingian doctrine. “[B]oth Regnum and Sacerdotium were in the Church, in the Church understood as the Body of Christ.”24 There was no precise division of symbolic labor between empire and papacy, nor was there a clear-cut hierarchical ordering of these two extensions of the body of Christ. Relations between these two barely distinct realms remained predominantly personal, and the magical, sacred aspects of kingship—of the king’s body as an extension of the body of Christ—were emphasized. The Gregorian Reform The political theology of the Carolingian period was followed by a gradual disentangling of spiritual and temporal powers. In place of mystical unity, each realm—temporal and ecclesiastical—gradually organized itself as a distinct, articulate institution. Separation of powers goes hand in hand with institutionalization, that is, impersonalization of authority. Temporal and spiritual authorities were increasingly vested in formally defined and circumscribed offices. According to Ladner, the two realms were no longer identified with the private persons of emperor and pope but were gradually becoming seen as corporations regulated by law. Perceptive of the role of the law in the deconsecration—and true individuation—of the subject, Ladner and Claude Lefort suggestively link the constitutional separation of powers with their impersonalization, that is, with their notional dissociation

112


from their changing individual holders: The question was no longer who was supreme in the Church, Pope or ruler, but rather who was superior in Christendom: the Church under the Pope or the kingdoms, among which it is true the Holy Roman Empire was still more closely linked to the Papacy than the others. The problem of Church and State which strictly speaking had been in abeyance for two hundred years, as it had been conceived of as the problem of Regnum-Imperium and Sacerdotium, within the Ecclesia, appeared again in a more genuine form.25 Despite the attempts made by the Othonian Emperors, the path to a complete identification with a God-made-man remains blocked.At the same time, the king comes up against another earthly force: the priest from whose hands he receives grace, and who is in a position to claim to be his superior. The division of the body of the king [into private and public bodies—L.B.] therefore goes hand in hand with the division between royal (or imperial) and papal authority. . .we can from the outset discern two simultaneous movements towards a universal authority that is both scriptural and temporal. But neither can be carried through to completion: unrestricted political domination is impossible, and so is the creation of a theocratic monarchy.26

The shift from the Carolingian to the Gregorian paradigm described by Ladner can be construed in terms of a transformation of communal into corporate bodies and the concomitant consolidation of the transcendence of authority. Separation of powers and endorsement of the rule of law attest to society’s renunciation of the omnipotent communal body. The latter is projected and transformed into a transcendent corporate body. The desacralization of the royal and the political body at large fosters individual autonomy and a distinction between private and public spheres, between individuals and their public roles: the body of the king is to a considerable extent rendered human, deficient.27 It no longer functions as an incarnation of the sacred communal body but as an organ of a corporate order occupying, as Kantorowicz suggested, an impersonal office as a private person.The king’s private body is distinguished simultaneously from the sacred clerical body and from his own public role, the royal public body. The separation between temporal and spiritual powers turns kingship into an office, hence the structural coincidence of separation of powers, impersonalization of authority, corporate formation, secularization, and consolidation of the private–public distinction.28 Let us briefly consider the implications of the separation between the spiritual and temporal powers for each realm.The Gregorian Reform kindled processes of legal articulation first and foremost within the Church. It brought about the secularization and bureaucratization not only of temporal power but of the Church itself, through its inner functional division and


113

general corporate form.According to R.I. Morris: Charisma had been replaced by institutional authority, or, in plainer language, intellectual status and access to the power it could confer were passed down from the top, instead of up from the bottom. As in so many aspects of social existence in these centuries, an old order had been superseded by a new one—the authority of the bishop by that of the corporation of masters— after a heady interval of much looser, popularly sanctioned control.29

In order to deconsecrate political power the Church had to deconsecrate itself. It would not have been able to separate itself from temporal power had it not simultaneously rid itself of the communal body and become a corporation. Permeated with sacred oneness, it would have resisted any separation of powers and sought union with the temporal order. While proscribing expressions of popular anarchic religiosity, which threatened to invigorate communal bodies,30 and consequently absorbing communal sanctity, the Church had to tame its own increasingly exclusive sanctity. In order to become one among several corporate actors in the temporal world, the Church confined sanctity to delimited areas within church life: the transcendent corporate realm, regulated ritual and the clerical body,31 and monastic life. Processes of secularization, rationalization, and bureaucratization within the Church were facilitated by the monastic reform that turned the monasteries into containers of the communal body projected outside the secular church. In the course of its own reform, preceding that of the Church, the monastic world endorsed the ascetic ideal to an extent that allowed for the growing adoption of human traits on the part of the secular clergy and for the institutionalization, legalization, rationalization, and secularization of the Church.The more the monastic world approximates the condition of communitas, the more the Church can structure itself as a network of clearly defined offices. The interdependence of the religious establishment and monastic spirituality is not unique to medieval Christianity. It reflects a basic pattern of religious institutionalization, consisting of a gradation among different levels of clerical renunciation.32 In order to accommodate and handle the sacred, social structures institute world-denying cults alongside institutions with predominantly mundane features. The emergence of ecclesiastical institutions claiming supreme sovereignty in the Christian world was not intended to bring temporal institutions to their end, nor did it ever produce such an outcome. It did mean that the Church closed itself and became a largely separate realm, in certain matters freer from temporal intervention than it used to be, purporting to exercise an authority over temporal institutions to dictate policies, depose unruly

114


kings, and command the peoples of Christendom to disobey their temporal lords.The closure of the Church as an autonomous realm had various manifestations, such as a moderate and discontinuous decrease in temporal intervention in ecclesiastic appointments and a certain immunity of the clergy from temporal jurisdiction.33 The legal manifestations of independence attest to a deep, if gradual, transformation: the relegation of the sacred to outside the realm of temporal government.The claim of the Church to unqualified authority over the inferior temporal realm was much harder to realize than its claims to separateness and autonomy. The monopoly of the Church over sacred powers implied, in fact, renunciation of temporal powers and recognition of the autonomy of the temporal realm to conduct its own affairs. The Church gradually and implicitly accepted in practice this structural principle.34 Within firm social structures, omnipotence cannot be accommodated because it threatens to precipitate the return of the communal body and the collapse of transcendence into immanence. Both temporal and ecclesiastical realms recognized that omnipotence transcends their terrestrial institutions. Processes of rationalization, juridification, and institutionalization were prompted by the endorsement of the division of labor between temporal and spiritual authorities. Temporal power, even if held inferior, could gradually establish its own monopoly over temporal affairs and develop its own institutional organization once it was separated from the Church and emptied of sacredness. Temporal society underwent a process of institutionalization and corporate formation modeled on the internal transformation of the Church.35 It could direct its evolving institutions to the pursuit of its own interests, goals, and values—sources of what would be one day called raison d’Etat.36 The relegation of spiritual and mystical concerns to the enclosed realm of the Church allowed the mundane order to pursue temporal prosperity as an independent body.37 In John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, the representative statement of the emerging political theory,38 temporal society was for the first time recognized as possessing its own body, on a par with the Church. As Ladner notes: It was, perhaps, the formation of a “corporational”-institutional aspect of the concept of the Church which gave increasing importance to the concept of a Christian “temporal” society (Christianitas, populus Christianus, politia or republica Christiana), not simply identical with the Church.39. . .The evolution of the organological or corporational or body politic theory of the state. . .marks the transition from the functional notion of the state to that of the state as self-sufficient community. . .It can hardly be an accident that in Christian times before the Gregorian era it was as a rule not applied to the state but to the Church.The Church was the Body of Christ beside which or


115

in which the “states” functioned as governments rather than as autonomous bodies. It is only from the era of Gregory VII that the states were seen as bodies politic, while at the same time the Roman Catholic Church developed its institutional-corporational side as one aspect of its being the Body of Christ.40

The apparent conflict between temporal and spiritual powers over the extent of their respective jurisdictions obscures the fact that they shared an interest in a clear division of labor.The separation between sacred and secular authorities enhanced the structural development of the two realms.The common archenemy of both realms was popular religiosity and local tradition, generally, threatening to fuse sacred and secular, revitalize communal forces, and collapse corporate structures.The separation of sacred and secular that underpinned processes of structural consolidation in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform was embedded in various dichotomies and systems of classification. The strict division between temporal and spiritual authorities was only one of the dichotomies through which the separation of sacred and secular was instituted. Others included the public–private distinction and the “trifunctional” distinction among the three orders of society.These distinctions entrenched the separation between sacred and secular and at the same time added themselves to the array of normative categories according to which society could be organized, thereby contributing to the general process of elaboration, inner articulation, and consolidation of social structure. The tripartite distinction among “those who pray, those who fight, and those who work,” which gained currency in the thirteenth century, entrenched the sacred/secular distinction by instituting the clergy as a distinct container of sanctity and at the same time gave society a general stratified structure.As the organizing ideology of a mundane, hierarchic division of labor the trifunctional distinction reinforced social structure.41 The increasing dissociation between private and public realms42 strengthened the separation of sacred and secular by turning the family into an enclosed repository of sanctity, alongside the clerical body, and constituted one of the founding dichotomies of social structure as a network of divisions and subdivisions. Across different historical periods, the corporate model governed interaction in public spheres while interaction remained comparatively communal within the family fold. Expelled from the public sphere the communal body finds refuge in the family, where it can be more easily accommodated.The social structure rests on the projection of immediacy, bodily or emotional, to the family.43 The family is sacralized at the same time that the political is desacralized: the sacramental, or “ecclesiastical” model of family life gained official priority over other models in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.44

116


The ecclesiastical model championed the integrity, purity, sanctity—and thus singularity and unbreakability—of the marital bond, thereby thwarting its economic and political utilization by the heads of the aristocratic families. It articulated and propagated the timeless ideal of the family as free from social, political, and economic exigencies, and subsumed it under separate ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The requirement of the free consent of the parties and the prohibition of bigamy and incest diminished the capacity of family heads to use marriage as a means for forging alliances and acquiring or preserving property. The ecclesiastical model proclaimed the autonomy of the family vis-à-vis economic and political pressures and endowed it with sanctity. The crystallization of the sacramental model of marriage in the twelfth century can be understood as part of an economy of the sacred in which the public sphere is increasingly desacralized and separated from spheres in which the communal body is allowed to thrive. Even if sacralization of the family complicated the economic and political instrumentalization of marriage—though according to Duby, family heads actually did not lose much of their influence—it served the structural interest of the lay aristocracy by facilitating the secularization of civic life. Prospects of Humanism Ladner concludes his account by indicating a further dialectical development in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform, namely, the gradual liberation of the secular realm from the hegemony of the Church.45 If the Gregorian Reform instituted two separate realms, it endowed one of them, at least in theory, with supreme moral and constitutional authority. The civic realm was conceived as licensed by the superior realm of the Church. It was Dante who, according to Ladner, came first to conceive of Humana Civilitas as coordinate rather than subordinate to the Church.46 In a dialectical way, the centralized organization of the Church paved the way for the ascent of equally powerful and autonomous normative and cultural realms. Corporate Symptoms in the Temporal Realm: Toward the State We have seen that according to the corporate model of social structures, separation of powers brings about the projection of the sacred communal body onto a transcendent realm, establishing an omnipotent but absent corporate body, on the one hand, and rational institutions run by organs of the corporate body, on the other. In the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform, the legal idea of the corporation became increasingly central to constitutional thought47 and corporate symptoms to constitutional practice. The


117

Gregorian separation between sacred and secular realms served as a catalyst for a set of additional interrelated processes, such as juridification of social relations, the rise of civil religion, and bureaucratic expansion, tendencies whose coincidence in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform has been noted and studied by historians such as Berman, Ladner, Leyser, and Strayer. The temporal realm exhibited each of these corporate symptoms in a rudimentary form at a different moment, and developed each of them over a long period of time. In what follows, I sketch some of the central structural developments precipitated by the Gregorian separation between the sacred and the secular that shed light on the general form of corporate bodies and on the dynamics of its historical concretization. Juridification Separation between the sacred and the secular realms and corporate-formation go hand in hand with increasing juridification of social relations. The consolidation of a legal system is a crucial step in the process of corporateformation since it is the law that enhances individuation, institutes social division, and represses the communal pursuit of sanctity. The separation between temporal and spiritual authorities is in itself entrenched in constitutional definitions of the respective powers. In order to keep the communal body away from the social, and thereby desacralize the social, numerous other divisions and subdivisions—between groups, classes, spheres of interaction, individuals—have to be implemented by the law. By implementing individual rights and duties, the law consolidates interpersonal separation and confronts the expansionist attempts of the sacred communal body. However, by dividing the social body, the law becomes the embodiment of its new, corporate unity.Through the unification of law within a realm, a common corporate law-giving authority is postulated. Communal bonds are replaced by an overarching corporate unity that is represented by the law.Any representation of the law in any medium—whether learned, figurative, ritual, or oral-popular—points to its origin in a common, corporate, law-giving authority.Through the standardization of law, individuals across the realm and their transactions are redefined by reference to a single law, a single corporate authority. By being subjected to the same laws, individuals become organs of a single body. In the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform, temporal realms embarked on a large-scale enterprise of juridification—and secularization—of social relations through the unification of law and adjudication and propagation of the law as the epitome of corporate unity and identity. Historians of the common law have written extensively on the simultaneous processes of standardization of the law and restriction of local judicial discretion,

118


increased royal dispensation of common law justice, and concomitant bureaucratization during the twelfth century.48 Royal law increasingly affirmed itself over communal custom. The alien, repressive nature of the king’s law was enhanced by the fact that it was a written law superimposed on largely illiterate communities.The incapacitation of the community through centralized law and jurisdiction was conducive to structural individuation, articulation, and consolidation. While enfeebling communal entities, the law forged a new corporate unity and identity by defining a single royal jurisdiction and postulating a single corporate law-giving authority. The unity of collectivities came to be manifested primarily through the unity of the law that regulated them.49 With law as the primary manifestation of social unity, kings propagated images of themselves as personifications of the law and guarantors of justice. The royal office became increasingly identified with the administration of justice.50 The passage from custom to written law plays a significant role in the consolidation of legal systems and corporate orders as a whole. The law book divests communal bodies and authorities of much of their power. It postulates a single transcendent law-giving authority, whose commands are encoded in it. The written, codified form as such implies the new law’s claim to sanctity, transcendent origin, and authority over the community.51 Legal scripture derives its authority from the fiction of a transcendent lawgiver.52 Its very existence establishes and publicly verifies that fiction and grounds vast institutional structures within it.The law book reifies the law and inaugurates a formalist mode of legal reasoning that replaces communal rites by the magic of the book.Through the repetitive magical exercise of certain interpretive manipulations of the text, its timeless truth is revealed. Legal scripture posits the sovereign, absent legislator as the object of civic worship and itself as a focal point of the civic cult. It becomes the magical incarnation of the threshold between the secular and the sacred, between the world of the living and that of their corporate body, their ancestral legislators, their dead. Civil Religion Separation between spiritual and temporal authorities and corporateformation foster the elaboration of civil religion. The notion of civil religion conventionally refers to the religious components of modern political systems. However, even before the enlightened doctrines and practices of separation between Church and state, political bodies had their distinct civic cults upholding their institutions and valid in their territories. They had their own political myths, totemic emblems, rituals, and spectacles of power celebrating their corporate identity and unity. Totemic representations


119

of the temporal realm that are clearly distinct from those of historical religion—the crown, the seal, the dynastic emblem—designated the corporate body, and their dignity was protected by civil taboos. Political mythology celebrated the founding events of the sovereign corporate body, reenacted by the political group in civic rituals. During and following the Gregorian Reform, worldly virtues of kings and other laymen were redefined and extolled by civil religion as the clergy refined its ascetic ideals. Needless to say, distinctions between revealed and civil religion were much less pronounced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than in the modern period, but the development of some forms of a distinctly civil religion was bound to be encouraged by the Gregorian separation of powers. Contrary to the prevailing sociological identification of civil religion with popular national myths and rituals, its core lies in the constitutional doctrines of sovereign power, in the repeated evocation and affirmation of sovereign jurisdiction in daily official rites, and in the magic of legal validity. Thus, the development of civil religion in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform occurred through the more conspicuous processes of juridification and bureaucratization.The law itself postulates and inculcates the fiction of a single transcendent corporate authority.With corporate-formation emerged a distinctly public law articulating and advocating the impersonal claims of the corporate body.53 In late-medieval civil religion, the corporate identity and unity of the realm—the objects of civic worship—were largely represented by the king. The king did not possess sovereignty but only displayed it. Such legal abstractions were expressed in doctrine and in ritual, as Kantorowicz’s work amply demonstrated. Constitutional theory was reflected in the rituals in which the body of the king was celebrated, such as coronations, funerals, and royal entries. The various rituals have to be studied in light of one another because they reflect a single underlying conception of kingship and each was devised to enact and communicate a specific aspect of the underlying idea of kingship.The different spectacles of civil religion, whether old or modern, at once mirror and complement each other. Funerals, entries, and coronations became rituals of a distinctly civic religion as they came to revolve around the political body. Even if the infiltration of corporate ideas into ritual practice was slow and gradual, it was a continuous process that laid the foundation of modern civil religion.54 In The King’s Two Bodies, Kantorowicz not only analyzes the expression of corporate continuity in funerals, but also comments on the gradual transformation of the coronation from a rite constitutive of royal charisma into a mere display of civic wealth and prowess.55 The more administrative and juridical the royal authority, the more formal and declaratory the rite of consecration. As the juridical source of royal power predominates over its

120


charismatic and sacral sources, the coronation becomes a largely symbolic gesture. Civil religion calls for the centralization of power—a process that often proved to be slower than others—since the mythical-ancestral identity of the corporate group and its shared values need a hegemonic center to represent them. The civic center constitutes a religious focus that competes with the geographical foci of revealed religion, and its emergence is related to the crystallization of national boundaries. The aggrandizement of the center takes place as part of a wider propagation of national values, identities, and symbols that is suggestive of a widening cleavage between revealed and civil religion.56 Strayer notes that one of the symptoms of state formation in the Late Middle Ages was the growing loyalty of dispersed populations to the center,57 an observation that reminds us that corporate-ancestral bodies are the objects of the love and fidelity of their organs.58 Administration The separation of powers and the consequent deconsecration of the political foster the crystallization of the idea of the office and facilitate a general process of bureaucratization. Sacral kingship is not an office. Whereas the divine king is irreplaceable and superior to the law, the office subjects its changing occupants to a normative system.59 The institution of office attests to a separation between private and public realms in addition to the separation between sacred and secular powers.The individual occupant is distinguishable from his office by virtue of simultaneously playing other roles in other, private spheres. The office, then, is an impersonal function defined and circumscribed by collective interests and occupied by deconsecrated individual bodies exercising worldly, human capacities. The separation between crown and king, between the public (corporate) and private bodies of the king, facilitates the emergence of an entire system of offices.The roles of the different members of the ruling elite increasingly consist of legally defined obligations toward an impersonal body. As office holders, their interaction is mediated and structured by constant reference to an impersonal, transcendent authority: King and Crown no longer were the same thing. . .it normally was the “community of the realm” that swore to the Crown, since king, councillors, officials, and lords spiritual and secular took consonantly the same oath to maintain the rights of the Crown; and they together and with the king as their head, after all, represented and were the “community of the realm,” the universitas. Equally, and using similar terms, they all were constrained to


121

protect the Crown as something superior to all of them and as something they all had in common.60

Juridification, bureaucratization, and the development of a civic cult, together with other structural developments, reflected and accelerated the demarcation between sacred and secular and the consolidation of corporate structures over and above communal forces.The more the legal and bureaucratic dimensions of social structure are advanced, the more the sacred is confined to the transcendent corporate realm and to strictly delimited enclaves within social structure. The development of corporate structures continued in the modern era with further sophistication of the juridical and administrative aspects of the state.61 The essentially juridical form of the corporate body receives its fullest elaboration in the modern Rechtsstaat with its separation of powers, strict definition of the powers delegated from the corporate body to its organs, and preoccupation with the impersonal execution of laws in the name of the Law. This further evolution of the rule of law in democracy provoked assaults by the communal body to which democracy is particularly vulnerable. Today, communal forces rise against corporate structures not only in the familiar guises of nationalism and fundamentalism. Their influence can be detected behind the most dispassionate arguments for either regional or global culture, for particularity or abstraction—arguments that were traditionally balanced in and by the corporate body. It remains to be seen what structural and institutional transformations will be brought about by these renewed pressures.


CHAPTER 7 SACRED, SECULAR,AND IMPURE: THE CONTEXTUALITY OF SENSATIONS Esther Cohen

Examines the question of late medieval judicial discourse and its approach to torture. Torture is problematic in the Christian context, for it pertains to the martyrological tradition. Late medieval jurisprudential texts appropriate the vocabulary of late antique martyrologies, changing the meanings of the key terms to suit suspected criminals rather than saints, thus exonerating torture from the blame of untruth and violence.

he historian who wishes to study feelings and their expression in the past must rely upon descriptions, be they written, painted, carved, or played on an instrument.1 But description, especially the description of feelings, is a literary device, crafted and constructed according to literary norms. Artistic descriptions may decree that people in pain writhe or remain motionless, scream or keep silent, tear out their hair or smile.What I study, therefore, is an artifact, not a phenomenon. Even had historians been given time machines to travel and, like anthropologists, observe the behavior of people in pain in the past, what we would observe would still be an artifact. Other than the theoretical primal scream, expressions of pain differ from culture to culture and from one context to another. The modes of behavior are deeply embedded—so much so that one cannot even discern the existence of a code. For instance, in the most banal of examples, a person sitting in a dentist’s chair may groan or complain or burst into tears.2

T

124

ESTHER COHEN

Besides the well-known codes of restraint, there are also codes of expression. Cultures allowing expressions of pain in certain situations also shape them according to specific codes, allowing some expressions and debarring others. While stressing the role of culture in shaping the expression of emotions is a truism, it is less obviously so for what we term physical sensations.These are often seen as only physically determined, that is, as primal basic reactions to raw natural forces. Recent insights into the workings of chemicals in the human brain may have somewhat altered this artificial dichotomy between feelings and sensations. Both reactions change the chemical presence in the brain, and emotions have become a physical presence.3 Historically speaking, however, I would like to argue the opposite: that within Western culture, physical sensations have always been imbued with metaphysical meanings. In his book on the end of ancient Christianity, Robert Markus argued that while pagan Rome recognized secular and sacred space, Christianity obliterated secular space, recognizing only the sacred and the profane, the holy and the impure.4 This insight can be translated into the world of subjective spirituality, where nothing can really be secular, or neutral.What is not sacred is by default profane. Numinosity, or its opposite, is all pervasive. Everything in this world is charged with the electricity of religious meaning. Within the context of late-medieval cultures, these meanings can be extremely varied. Sacred, secular, and profane do not begin to embrace the range of sensory descriptions at the time. The dichotomy of secular and sacred does not even cover all religiously contextualized presentations of pain.There were those occasions when the phenomenon crossed all recognized boundaries and categories. Following Mary Douglas’s distinctions,5 I have termed those pains “impure” rather than profane. Indeed, as we shall see, they were emphatically so. Pain was a pivotal force in the history of humankind as Paul, and later Augustine, constructed it. Original sin incurred the penalty of childbirth labor for women and manual labor for men. The pain of the Crucifixion redeemed humanity. It seems therefore natural for pain to loom large in the language and narratives of the founding myths of Christianity. Historically, the persecutions of Christians in pagan times were sporadic—few, and far apart. Nevertheless, the acta martyrum, or deeds of martyrs, became central to the construction of Christian historical identity during the Middle Ages. The fashion in which those narratives were told strongly influenced not only the “sacred pains” of later mystics, but also far more popular devotion. Unlike Christ, martyrs were supposed to have been human beings credited with superhuman accomplishments, but human beings nonetheless. Some of the most popular martyrs in Late Antiquity were emphatically human, even female. Indeed, perhaps the easiest martyrs to identify with

S A C R E D, S E C U L A R , & I M P U R E

125

were Perpetua and Felicitas. Most female martyrs belonged to the category that Father Delehaye termed “epic.” 6 Martyrs who emerged unscathed from the belly of a dragon (Margaret) or from a brothel (Agnes), who grew back mutilated breasts (Agatha), or—even more astonishing—beat learned lawyers in argument (Catherine of Alexandria) were miraculous beings, far above the common female lot.They bore about as much similarity to real medieval women as Greek goddesses did to Athenian housewives. But Perpetua was a young mother whose breasts ached with milk when she was parted from her baby, and Felicitas was a heavily pregnant slave girl at the time of her arrest.Within the small, exalted community of believers preparing for martyrdom, her greatest fear was that she would be temporarily spared until childbirth, and thus not come to face the great moment in the company of her colleagues. Owing to divine intervention, her labor came on prematurely. It was extremely painful, and Felicitas screamed loudly. When the guard warned her that childbirth was easy compared to her coming ordeal, she answered, “what I am suffering [dolo] now, I suffer by myself. But then another will be inside me who will suffer for me, just as I shall be suffering [passura sum] for him.”7 The prospective martyr thus made a clear conceptual and linguistic distinction between the sacred pain of the arena [ passio] and the neutral pain of childbirth [dolor]. Was undergoing judicial torture in a Roman court sacred pain? Contemporary Christian apologists objected to the torture of their coreligionists because of the torture’s pagan ritualistic character and flawed judicial argumentation, not because they objected to the infliction of pain.Tertullian (late second century) had already noted the paradox embedded in the torture of Christians. Normally, he maintained, people were tortured in order to make them reveal the truth, and this was legitimate practice. Christians, however, had no trouble at all admitting to the incriminating facts: they were indeed Christians. But then, maintained Tertullian, they were tortured in order to make them lie, which made no judicial sense at all.8 By the time the myth of martyrdom took shape in the fourth and fifth centuries, judge and victim had changed places. Christians sat in the judge’s seat, perhaps also occupying the much-vilified position of carnifex [executioner]. Troubled, Augustine stressed in his letter to Macedonius the importance of Christian active participation in public duty, even if it included torturing suspects and witnesses, as Roman law demanded: It is not for nothing that royal power, the swordsman’s right, the hangman’s hooks, the soldier’s weapons, the ruler’s discipline, even the severity of a good father were instituted. . .it is extremely important [to determine] in what spirit one exercises mercy. . .As it sometimes happens that mercy punishes,

126

ESTHER COHEN

just as cruelty pities. . .just like a judge or a hangman whether out of need to avoid or relieve [punishment].9

Torture was part and parcel of the law of the time. So much so, that Prudentius went so far as to describe saints questioning demons with torture before exorcizing them.10 For most of the following millennium, martyrs were held up as the epitome of heroism. For twelfth-century writers, they belonged firmly in the heroic past, and imitating them usually meant fighting pagans in distant lands. In a world of triumphant and dominant Christianity, it was impossible for Christians to emulate the courage of a persecuted minority. From the late eleventh century onward, however, the wish to identify with Christ’s death became dominant in both lay and ecclesiastical Christian spirituality.11 Imitating Christ through sensory suffering meant following the martyrs’ path. Indeed, martyrdom narratives were extremely popular in the later Middle Ages.Whether in the form of poems or sermons, these tales endowed all martyrs with an almost identical set of characteristics.This set of traits was destined to permeate all spheres of discourse on pain, nullifying any attempt at neutrality and imbuing everything with holiness or pollution. In the first place, martyrs possessed fortitude. This ability to bear pain, usually without flinching and certainly without breaking down, recurred in practically every martyrdom narrative. Already the Church Fathers had coupled fortitude with endurance of sensory pain. Jerome had contrasted fortitude with weakness of the soul [imbecillitas animi], placing it at the borderline of temerity.12 For him, it was a neutral quality, neither good nor bad: he could as easily speak of the martyr’s fortitude as that of the thief or pirate.13 Both Augustine and Gregory the Great saw it as an instrument for bearing sensory suffering.14 Fortitude began its subtle shift of meaning from a spiritual to a physical quality in the later Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas (with Aristotle’s Ethics in mind) defined it as a virtue, and one pertaining to martyrs, but mainly a physical virtue.15 Second, martyrs were constant. For Late-Antique authors, fortitude contrasted with spiritual weakness, whereas constancy was the reverse of fear of pain and the yielding to passions. The archetype of constancy, of course, was Job, who remained steadfast in his praise of God despite all his suffering. In commenting on the Book of Job, Ambrose makes it clear that constancy, unlike fortitude, was a purely spiritual quality.16 Late-medieval texts lavishly attributed constancy—the ability to conquer fear of torture unwaveringly and repeatedly—to martyrs of both sexes.17 Perseverance was the verbal expression of constancy. The term meant answering the judge before and after torture steadfastly in the same terms: I am a Christian, I shall not change or deviate; I am steadfast in my faith.


127

One could display fortitude at any time, but constancy and perseverance were definitely tied to the judicial situation. Constancy was a “speech act” in the sense that it meant verbally maintaining one’s identity under threats and real torture. This brings us to the final salient trait of martyrs, for which Church fathers had no term: they answered back. The story is repeatedly one of a judicial verbal duel between the pagan judge and the Christian martyr. It was not a learned argument: the judge exhorted the martyr, threatened her, ordered the torturers to use ever crueler techniques, lost all self-control and practically jumped into the arena to torment the martyr with his own hands. By contrast, the martyr goaded the judge with jibes, taunts, and jokes.The martyr not only showed the ability to withstand torture, but also invited more, belittling the judge and his power with insults and challenges. Throughout a millennium of pulpit discourse, preachers continued drawing upon the sermons of Augustine and Prudentius for the best stories. All the same, the martyrdom narrative told in a fifth-century sermon or poem was far less dramatic than the one available to a thirteenth-century audience. If we take Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend—a late-medieval bestseller, if there ever was one—as a model, martyrs emerge as heroic figures, almost all drawn with one brush, and that brush is no longer the Late-Antique one. As an example, one can consider the dialogue between St. Vincent—cool, aristocratic, arrogant, and self-assured—and the blustering, furious, bumbling judge, Dacian, as told in the Golden Legend.18 This dialogue is not derived from Late-Antique or early medieval sources, but belongs well and truly in the thirteenth century. For the sake of comparison, one should turn to Jacobus’s source—Prudentius’s Peristephanon.19 It is difficult to strip Vincent’s story down to its basic components, for we first meet it in the Peristephanon, already highly ornate and imaginative.The bare-bones telling that we find in a modern encyclopedia is quite different from the Late-Antique version of Prudentius or the late-medieval versions of Jacobus de Voragine and his followers. Nevertheless, the encyclopedia entry story runs thus:Vincent, born of noble family, deacon to Bishop Valerius of Saragossa, was arrested together with his superior during the Diocletian persecution. Both were brought from Saragossa to Valencia, but since Valerius had a speech impediment, it was Vincent who argued with Governor Dacian, and Vincent who suffered martyrdom and death, while Valerius was merely exiled. Prudentius omitted all the background information from his hymn and began the drama in the arena, with the assumption that his readers were familiar with the story.The only detail he provided was that Vincent was a deacon [levita]. The rest is a paean of victory, interspersed with the verbal and physical duel between Vincent and Dacian.The reader is almost made

128

ESTHER COHEN

to feel sorry for the inept, uncouth pagan governor who is upset, angry, furious, foaming at the mouth, and grinding his teeth. He is the archetypal weak man, swayed by his own passions. In a sense, it is Vincent who tortures Dacian, not the other way around.Vincent is the most invincible soldier, stronger than the strongest [Miles invictissimus, fortissimorum fortior]. When racked and pierced with metal hooks, he laughed serenely “as though unconscious of the pain” [tamquam dolorum nescius], and openly provoked Dacian to try harder. If passio is being passive, being acted upon, then Vincent was not the one undergoing a passio—Dacian was;Vincent was the actor, not the patiens. Barring his substitution of Christianity for stoicism,Vincent acts like a perfect stoic Roman gentleman. Jacobus de Voragine followed Prudentius in two ways. First, he portrayed Vincent’s martyrdom as a duel, and an unequal one:Vincent was still cool, collected, unafraid, and Dacian still furious, prey to fears and attacks of impotent anger. Second, the details of the torture and Vincent’s reactions to it remained unchanged, forming the basis of the martyr’s portrayal in subsequent sermon literature.20 Though the gory details remained the same, Vincent’s discourse had changed. Prudentius’s Vincent was something of a theologian. He began by expounding to Dacian the difference between the worship of material idols and the cult of God and his son.21 By contrast, the late-medieval Vincent taunts Dacian in a style far less dignified than his Late-Antique predecessor: “Oh happy me! The harder you try to frighten me, the more you begin to do me favors! Up, then, wretch, and indulge your malicious will to the full! You will see that by God’s power I am stronger in being tortured than you are in torturing me!” “The way you talk, Dacian! What you’re saying proves me right and my torturers wrong!”22 One can almost hear Vincent mockingly chiding Dacian for his foul language. For Jacobus de Voragine, unfamiliar with the late–Roman arena, the inversion of judge and judged, active and passive, was meaningless, so he deleted the creedlike declaration, turning Prudentius’s dignified drama into a farce. The patrician Roman gentleman had become an impertinent brat. Martyrs were anything but meek, silent victims. An exasperated prefect in the Peristephanon ordered St. Romanus’s tongue excised, just to shut him up. Still, Romanus kept speaking again at length, even without a tongue.23 Turning the other cheek was definitely not their style. Nor did they ignore torture by singing psalms, as some early medieval martyrs did.24 And yet, the texts never described them as impudent and rash, unless they were so portrayed by the other side. As far as late-medieval narrative goes, they had the same virtues as ever: fortitude, constancy, and perseverance.What they definitely lacked was the gift of suffering in silence. Sacred pain, then, was rife in late-medieval spiritual imagination. The pictures of crosses (though only for Christ!), blood, wheels, whips, hooks,


129

and various other real and imaginary instruments of torture were part and parcel of the furniture of everybody’s mind at the time.25 No wonder that mystics, both male and female, often resorted to instrumental aid in inflicting pain upon themselves, praying to be tortured as a prize for telling the truth of their revelations, just like the martyrs they had grown up hearing about.26 The religious associations of pain were explicitly grounded in the judicial vocabulary and practice of the late–Roman Empire, as filtered through late-medieval martyrdom narratives. These images existed side by side with opposite images of illness and pain. It was quite possible for an ill, suffering Christian to beg a martyr notorious for her pains and spectacular fortitude to grant him both cure and relief from pain.27 The pain of the saint was good, the pain of the worshipper was bad, and the first won over the second. Sacred pain and the vocabulary of martyrdom permeated ostensibly unrelated fields, mostly judicial torture. The practice, which had probably not been in use during the early Middle Ages, was revived in the course of the twelfth century.28 By the thirteenth century, it had become a perfectly orthodox tool of investigation in secular courts, and between the thirteenth and the seventeenth century a whole literature of torture tractates came into being. These tractates discussed the circumstances under which a judge might resort to torture, what type of torture he might use and how many times he might do so, what categories of people could be tortured or were exempt from “questioning,” and so forth. There is no question that the torture of suspects was always problematic. Ulpian, the classical second-century Roman jurist, had already termed it “a chancy and risky business” [res fragilis et periculosa],“For there are a number of people who, by their endurance [ patientia] or toughness under torture [duritia tormentorum] are so contemptuous of it that the truth can in no way be squeezed out of them. Others have so little endurance [inpatientia] that they would rather tell any kind of lie than suffer torture; so it happens that they confess in various ways, incriminating not only themselves but others also.”29 By the later Middle Ages, when it was applied to almost all and sundry, the risk was not only of getting false answers extorted by pain, but worse, the danger of killing the suspect. The impurity of this pain can be seen primarily by the circumstances that surround it. Unlike Late-Antique torture, which was a spectacle performed in the arena,30 medieval judicial torture was hedged by secrecy. The place of torture, locus torturae, was secret and private—so private that the judge must make sure every word is taken down,“otherwise he will not be believed.”31 Conversely the courtroom, where the suspect must repeat his or her confession freely, is public and open, locus publicus et honestus. Openness equaled honestas—the term usually applied to individuals whose

130

ESTHER COHEN

status was above reproach or suspicion. Personae honestae were usually people whose word was accepted without the need for torture, the opposite of the vilissimi, whose very status made them liable to torture when implicated in some crime.The contradiction between the honestas of the place of confession and the secrecy of the preceding torture is only one indication of the problematic position of medieval torture.32 The terminology of torture is equally confusing. In this discourse the vocabulary of martyrdom reemerged, totally transformed.The same words once used to describe martyrs now applied to suspects, but their meaning had shifted. Fortitude now meant, quite literally, the physical endurance enabling a suspect to survive torture, thus making him or her a “safe” candidate, not likely to land the judge in trouble by dying. Hardly a virtue in the martyrological sense, but definitely an asset to a judge bent upon securing a confession without finding a corpse on his hands. Countless tractates warn that the judge must make sure during torture “that the tortured should survive in fortitude of body and soul so that he might be delivered either to innocence or to the gallows unharmed.”33 Similarly, before deciding to torture someone, the judge must take into account, among other factors, the suspect’s fortitude, as distinct from bodily weakness.34 Baldus de Ubaldis (d. 1400) told in a probably putative consilium of the nightmare of each and every judge: a suspect who died under torture. Baldus was posing the question whether, under certain circumstances, the judge should be prosecuted.The suspect had been accused of counterfeiting, which was by definition a crime of lèse-majesté. Under questioning, the man had prevaricated. Furthermore, according to credible witnesses [ fide dignorum virorum] he was of evil reputation.This was sufficient proof for legally submitting the man to torture.Thus far, the judge had displayed no lethal overenthusiasm.The torture, however, was harsh: the man was lifted on the strappado; when he refused to confess, he was lifted again and dropped this time, a procedure which was then repeated.The judge did not believe the suspect would die of the torture, “even though he could not tolerate the pain in the said third torture,” though the executioners did warn him of the man’s state. They did give the man some water to revive him, but he died later on.35 The problem of extracting confessions from people who lacked fortitude brings us to constancy, or the ability to display fortitude under all circumstances. The term was still associated with a resistance to fear, but in a completely different sense. According to late-medieval laws of procedure, suspects could not be tortured unless there were solid grounds for incrimination before torture, and threats of torture were tantamount to actual torture. Practically, this meant that threatening a suspect without any incriminating evidence could invalidate the trial, and this is where constancy came in.


131

The constant man (in law, constancy was invariably gendered male) was he who would not be intimidated or coerced by threats into changing his mind.36 When fear and pain were both tools of investigation, however, some standards had to be set.The standard was a construct invented earlier in Roman law—the constant man. What, therefore, would be considered the sort of fear to move even the constant man? The Codex said that the prospect of death and torture frightened all men.The Digest added threats of enslavement or rape to the list, but made it clear that a mild fright [levis territio] did not count as the sort of coercion that would move the constant man.37 These standards carried into medieval legal discourse within a different context. Whereas the original article concerned mainly individuals who had been coerced into signing contracts against their will, medieval jurists were wondering whether evidence extorted under threats was considered as having been forced out by means of torture, which might sometimes invalidate it.Again, the nature of nonphysical pressure was measured against the same constant man. If he disregarded threats, they were not torture. Exactly how fearless was the theoretical constant man? According to Thomas Aquinas, he had his limits. Faced with the choice of two evils, the constant man, being also rational, will choose the lesser.Also, being rational, he will be able to assess the dangers soberly rather than magnifying them through panic. Conversely, the inconstant man must bear the greater rather than the lesser evil, such as committing a sin through fear of pain. Unlike his constant colleague, he would be unable to weigh the reasons for his decision. In short, only sufficient reason would sway the constant man, and the reason would not necessarily be self-protection.38 Thomas’s abstract definitions were of no help to jurists trying to decide how far they could go in pressuring their suspects. Since the constant man in question was rather hard to locate in reality, medieval jurists had to spell out what would frighten even him.As time progressed, the requirements of constancy rose. According to the Albertus Gandinus (thirteenth century), threats of torture, the tying of one’s hands behind one’s back, jail, cold, and hunger already constituted torture.39 Baldus de Ubaldis (d. 1400) added manacles to the list of genuinely frightening items.40 Later jurists agreed with Francesco Bruno, the fifteenth-century jurist who rated the constant man much higher.Verbal threats would fail to make him cave in and confess. Even leading him to the dungeon “to the rope” was only levis territio for this heroic gentleman. Only actually tying him to the strappado “so that nothing was lacking but the lifting” was a situation sufficiently frightening to move a constant man.41 In this case, the fear was tantamount to pain in the scale of judicial suffering, for the fear of torture [ formido tormentorum], constituted genuine torture, albeit in the mildest degree. Only the nearest

132

ESTHER COHEN

simulation of torture constituted sufficient fear to move a constant man, and thus qualify as the first degree of torture. Does this mean that the constant man was he who persevered in his statement, just as the martyrs did? Not at all. Perseverance had also changed beyond recognition. Since confessions were extracted in the darkness of the semijudicial, indeterminate space of the dungeon, they were invalid unless repeated in open court.The one who persevered was the suspect who had confessed under torture and repeated his confession afterward in court, without retracting it once the torture had ceased. Perseverance was no longer a virtue, merely a judicial convenience.There was serious doubt as to the validity of a freely offered, self-incriminating confession. Such a confession, said jurists, ought not to incriminate a person; however, it was customary in Italy to incarcerate those who made it, just as though their confessions had followed the usual route of suspicion, evidence, and torture before the truth became apparent.42 Spontaneous confessions out of the blue lacked not only the element of secret interrogation and pain: they lacked perseverance. Even in standard cases, most jurists insisted that confessions be repeated time and again, and not only once in court. Unlike constancy, which had its roots in Roman legal discourse, perseverance was new to legal parlance. It could not have appeared had free will not become such an important part of confession. Sponte, et non coacte: of one’s own will, and not coerced, said jurists, both civil and canon, in various versions.The word sponte appeared almost automatically after perseverare.43 Once again we are faced with the paradox of secrecy and openness, coercion and freewill. Perseverance, then, was the exhibition of the ostensibly freewill of a suspect who had previously broken down under confession. Finally, speech and silence had changed places.The suspect, who despite torture, refused to confess did not behave so because he had the gift of martyrological constancy. He was using witchcraft, the maleficium taciturnitatis, which made him insensible to pain. Martyrs invariably had an answer or a joke, but the really frightening suspect was the one who uttered no sound at all, neither cries nor avowals. Judicial texts abound with explanations: criminals are too primitive to sense pain (an idea that survived as late as the time of Lombroso); criminals are too used to pain and too well trained to break down under torture; criminals had spells, incantations, and magical stones that removed all sensation of pain. Judges were urged to search suspects bodily, even shaving all their body hair, to find the protective charm that rendered them immune.44 Unlike the impertinent and subversive speech of the martyrs, silence was neither brave nor holy. It was corrupt, impure, and demonological. Confession and testimony were originally religiously charged terms. Martyrs were literally witnesses who confessed to their faith. Even those


133

who did not testify with their deaths purified their souls by confession.The sacramental rite was not quite the same as the judicial admission. Both may have been secret, but one freed the soul whereas the other condemned it; one was worthless without contrition, whereas the other was validated by perseverance in court. The entire context of judicial torture assumed a dreadful similarity to sacred pain. It was a distorted mirror image, in which the just and the guilty changed places and words no longer had the same meaning. Fortitude had become physical survival, constancy had turned into obduracy, and perseverance had become a manifestation of nonexistent freewill. Judicial texts are fraught with martyrological overtones, all inverted. Sacred pain had crossed its boundaries, and in so doing, it became not secularized, but dangerous, secret, and impure.


CHAPTER 8 SECULAR AND SACRED: THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC AND RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES Rita Copeland

This essay considers how the history of rhetoric provides a test case for the stability of the boundary between the sacred and the secular. It looks at the ways in which sacred discourse might register an uncomfortable consciousness of its own formation through systems of rhetoric.These questions are pursued through Hegel’s analysis of sophistic in his Philosophy of History, and through the sacred discourses of the Lollard-Wycliffite community, where the figure of the sophist emerges as a form of the dialectical culture at the heart of reformist theology.

he field of the sacred is not interior to the history of rhetoric.This is not to suggest that rhetorical theory and practice do not keep company with the sacred, but rather that the history we might write of rhetoric would not be the same as the history we might write of religious belief in the Christian West.These fields present competing historiographies, for the terms on which the history of rhetoric has been written are exactly the terms against which religious communities would define their own notions of the sacred.Yet, as I suggest here, the history of rhetoric can yield some surprising truths about the construction of sacred history as it emerged in the Christian Middle Ages.

T

136

R I TA C O P E L A N D

The histories of rhetoric and of the sacred intersect at various crucial junctures; but it would be mistaken to claim that any of these intersections, or any borrowing or accommodation of rhetorical thought to Christian religious thought, constitute an identity between the two histories. There has always been a rhetoric of religion, as is clear from any history of rhetoric or religion; but to borrow the language of rhetoric to speak about religious discourse does not change the fundamental outlook of either the rhetorical or the sacred tradition. The modern historiography of rhetoric as a discipline has been resolutely secular because the study of rhetoric always posits classical norms as the fons et origo of the whole European tradition: the formal codification of rhetoric is historically anterior to the emergence of Christianity and the spread of Jewish–Christian thought across Europe.This does not exclude recognition of rhetoric as a factor in religious discourse or analysis of the belief in the efficacy of speech or logos that rhetoric shares with theology. Thus, for example, the Christian notion of “faith” or pistis can be linked with the classical Greek rhetorical concept of pistis, persuasion, conviction, and belief in an argument or position: here a theological concept has its origins in a rhetorical concept.1 Similarly, the Christian notion of communia, that is, friendship, community, or commonality in faith, as well as the sacrament of communion, can be traced to Pythagorean and Platonic teaching about koinonia, a communal discourse that forms the grounds of love, citizenship, and justice.2 Yet, the history of the discipline of rhetoric is on a different axis from the histories of theology and discourses about the sacred. While at certain historical moments (early Christianity, the Renaissance, and the Reformation) theological discourse turned to rhetoric and provisionally accommodated or co-opted it, rhetoric never travels the same historical road as theology for very long. For example, it is certainly accurate to think of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana as a breakthrough text, the first systematic Christian rhetoric, whose impact on medieval and Renaissance hermeneutics and homiletics was incalculable. But it is also a conversion from the classical rhetorical tradition as definitive as Augustine’s own conversion from paganism to Christianity. Augustine writes his Christian rhetoric as a transformative purification, a purging of classical rhetoric, erasing its claims to authority in favor of a new spiritual authority: “Thus there is a kind of eloquence fitting for men most worthy of the highest authority and clearly inspired by God. Our authors speak with eloquence of this kind, nor does any other kind become them” (4.6.9);3 or, as he also suggests, rather than a purging of classical rhetoric it is an escape from pagan tradition, just as the Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt, and a justified appropriation of valuables wrested from the hands of unjust possessors, like the gold and silver that the Israelites took with them from

RHETORIC & RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

137

Egypt when they fled their captivity, and, which they put to better use (2.40.60). Such a moment of origin, the birth of a Christian rhetoric, is written not as continuity with the past (however much Augustine and other early Christian theorists of discourse may actually take over from classical teaching), but as a new beginning, the complete conversion and baptism of a secular rhetoric into a new life—an erasure and negation of the past.Thus, in the Middle Ages, where a Christian thinker, such as Bede in the eighth century, lays claim to rhetoric on theological grounds, what he may claim is just one component of the classical canon, such as elocutio or stylistic adornment, not the whole system. A comparable story might be told of the plain style, a formal tradition whose origins lie in ancient rhetorical practice and theory, which attained its definitive ethical codification in Cicero’s Orator. The plain style was entirely reinvented on Christian theological terms in the notion of the sermo humilis.4 Augustine quotes from Orator in Book 4 of the De doctrina christiana (without naming Cicero as the source of the quotations) in order to elaborate a new theory of the plain style as appropriate to the fundamental work of teaching [docere], but the Ciceronian doctrine is submitted to so surgical an evisceration as to constitute a complete revaluation of its meaning—a wholesale conversion to a new purpose—rather than a continuity of thought from pagan to Christian. Indeed, in Late Antiquity, Christian apologists claimed to have no rhetoric, finding increasingly eloquent ways of disclaiming rhetorical learning in favor of the sermo humilis that now set Christian discourse apart from worldly pagan culture.5 The plain style firmly disavowed its own roots in rhetoric. From antiquity, rhetoric is “secular” in that it represents the inverse of idealism. Socrates’ attempts, especially in the Phaedrus and the Gorgias, to define “good” rhetoric as that which serves the apprehension of ideal forms has profound consequences for the way that the art of rhetoric was received and remembered, but makes little impression on the fundamental self-definition of rhetoric as the discovery of the best means of persuasion (Aristotle) or speaking well in civic matters (Cicero and Ciceronianism). In postclassical periods, the discipline of rhetoric is bound up with classical or classicizing humanist systems of language use and literary composition. In modern historiography, sacred rhetorics constitute subfields attached to the humanist outlook of the historiography as a whole. Debora Shuger has argued compellingly for the “intersections” of a Renaissance sacred rhetoric with the diachronic tradition of a classical rhetoric that is in league with philosophy rather than opposed to it (i.e., a nonsophistic rhetoric), a grand-style rhetoric in which the passions are the key to true moral conviction and sacred rhetorics draw on central philosophical traditions that are essentially religious.6

138


This is a convincing argument, but chiefly because it is period and genre specific: there is a sacred rhetoric of the Renaissance, just as there is certainly a sacred rhetoric of the Middle Ages, but rhetoric is not identical with the sacred. Rhetoric is thus the place where religious conviction is no different, in effect, from various forms of aesthetic conviction. In this way, it cannot be identical with the sacred. Richard McKeon notes that rhetoric had no disciplinary autonomy in the Middle Ages, that it was carried through the Middle Ages attached to various disciplines—grammar, dialectic, and even theology.7 Here McKeon is reformulating Socrates’ objections to Gorgias (that rhetoric is nothing more than a knack, like cooking) and writing these objections as history. But the positive valence of the Socratic objection, which McKeon’s own controversial argument might be said to have recognized and Aristotle’s Rhetoric certainly did recognize, is that the very nonidentity of rhetoric with any other discourse preserves it as a distinct form.That rhetoric is almost always understood to be without its own content (not of language but about the efficacy of language) is the stigma that has ensured its survival. For the relationship between the secular and the sacred, the medieval historiographical paradigm is the City of God, in which the governing narrative is an inward and spiritual one in which events are subsumed under the central topic of God’s design for human salvation, in which two cities— one of man and one of God—are less institutional entities than two kinds of love, self-interested and divine. In the terms of the Augustinian paradigm, rhetoric and its history are contained within the greater history of the geist. Rhetoric was part of, or characterized, the city of the saeculum, and the city of God is—and is to be—triumphant over the secularity of rhetoric. John Ward, writing about principles of rhetorical historiography in the High Middle Ages, notes that the writing of history flowed from antiquity into the Middle Ages “with something of an undertow”: Augustine had declared the writing of human history an inauthentic activity precisely because it concerned the saeculum and was a rhetorical exercise. Thus, the vast production of learned historical narrative was always anomalous because historiography must shape itself through the very principles that the reigning paradigm rejects.8 In keeping with the Augustinian paradigm in which rhetoric stands outside the city of God, the medieval historiography of rhetoric itself was mainly a secular one.This is true, of course, to the extent that medieval theorists gave expression to an idea of rhetoric’s diachronic history. We find such a notion in limited or localized historical perspectives—for example, the institutional history of a Ciceronian text, or the place of the art of rhetoric among the other arts of the trivium—where there is an interest in the nature of the discipline as a whole, not just in a portable theory to be


139

applied to different practices. The best examples of this might be found in the commentary convention of the “extrinsic art” that was part of a prologue introducing a text to be studied.The “extrinsic art” describes how the text being introduced fits into the discipline as a whole; the “intrinsic art” describes how the content of the text itself contributes to the doctrine in question. In the prologue to his commentary on Cicero’s De inventione, Thierry of Chartres offers “extrinsic art” that shows a considerable knowledge of theoretical history: how the ancients defined the genus of rhetoric and how they described the purpose of rhetoric, the technical components of the system, and the relation between rhetoric and dialectic: The ancient rhetoricians called the work of defining this art, and dividing it into its parts and proving it by reasons, the “extrinsic art,” because it is outside and is reached before the precepts for practice, and thus must be known in advance.They called the “intrinsic art” the art of eloquence itself, because the prior knowledge is introductory to this. . . .The genus of the art of rhetoric is the quality of artifice according to its effect.This is because this art is a greater part of civil science. Now, it is called civil reasoning because any civil entity either speaks or acts according to reason. . . .The same civil reasoning is called a science of both speaking and acting according to reason, and this very reasoning is called civil science, of which a certain integral and major part is called rhetoric. Now wisdom, that is, the comprehension of things according to their nature, and rhetoric comprise civil science. Thus, unless one were both wise and eloquent, one could not be said to have mastery of civil science.The greater part of civil science is called rhetoric, since it plays the greater role in civil affairs than wisdom, although, without wisdom, it would be of no use. . . .Let us also note that according to Boethius the genus of the art of rhetoric is the very faculty of rhetoric, that is, producing eloquence, which is the greater part of civil science. . . .Rhetoric is not said to be logic or part of logic, given that logic is concerned with the thesis alone, that is, only with general propositions, whereas rhetoric is concerned with the hypothesis alone, that is, only with particular propositions. The definition of the art of rhetoric according to the ancient rhetoricians is various and multiple. Certain authors define it this way: the art of rhetoric is the science of speaking well. Others offer this definition: rhetoric is the science of employing copious and perfect eloquence in private and public causes. But others define it in the following way: rhetoric is the science of speaking in a manner that is suited to persuade in the causes at hand. And philosophers define rhetoric in yet other ways, and anyone wishing to know about these should read Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.9

The range of reference in this prologue is classical and late classical (Cicero, Quintilian, Victorinus, Boethius), with no mention of a spiritual

140


teleology. Indeed, even though Thierry’s prologue shows that he made use of Victorinus’s Neoplatonist commentary on the De inventione, which might have steered him toward a theological assessment of rhetoric’s historical role, he prefers not to take this possible direction. Thus, the history and historiography of rhetoric seem to provide a perfect test case for assessing the strength and stability of the boundary between the sacred and the secular. My interest here is not where rhetoric would show its applicability to sacred discourse, for example, that Pauline thought about the spiritual sense of Scripture can be shown to derive from legal-rhetorical notions of the literal sense of documents, as laid out in Roman and Hellenistic rhetoric.10 Rather, I am interested in where sacred discourse registers an uncomfortable consciousness of its own formation through or descent from the system of rhetoric. In other words, how might sacred discourse be forced to acknowledge the presence of rhetoric at the roots of its own history? Here I turn to another historiography, one that is, strictly speaking, outside the history of both rhetoric and the sacred: Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. The Lectures, which were delivered in various forms between 1805 and 1831, represent Hegel’s attempt to extend the science of history to the history of philosophy. For Hegel, history—the philosophy of history but also the history of philosophy—is to be written as the process of becoming ourselves, the tracing of the whole course of the World Spirit. His is a notoriously idealist teleology, but it also takes the teleological and dialectical principles of his Philosophy of History to a historicist project that describes the stages of philosophy’s self-discovery by examining each philosophical moment on its own terms. I propose that Hegel’s historicism, and in particular one link that he makes between antiquity and the Middle Ages, can help to open certain doors or unpack certain paradoxes in the competing narratives of the secular and the sacred. My interest here begins with Hegel’s treatment of the sophistic “school” in ancient Greece.The sophists were a group of teachers, more or less contemporary with Socrates, from whom Plato sought continually to distinguish Socrates.The sophists were known for their rhetorical and dialectical methods and are commemorated in Plato as the promulgators of the art of rhetoric. Through Plato, the best known of the sophists are Gorgias and Protagoras; in modern historiography, the origins of a systematic art of rhetoric are usually associated with the sophists, in particular Gorgias.11 Hegel’s attention to the sophists was to a great extent responsible for their modern rehabilitation in terms of their contribution to ancient thought and their importance for contemporary philosophy. Most important, Hegel recognizes the role of the sophists as among the earliest practitioners and teachers of rhetoric.The sophists, he points out, recognized the highest reality (spirit, notion, absolute idea) as culture itself, to be applied to worldly


141

objects and human relations. Culture is the highest reality applied in actuality, and thus for the sophists,“culture,” in all its manifold content, became the general aim of education: that is, understanding, or philosophical truth, was not to be separable from worldly relations. Culture came into existence in Greece through the sophists, who as teachers took the place of poets and rhapsodists.12 According to Hegel, the contribution of the sophists was finding a way to actualize universal critical principles in individual particularities on their own account, and to this end their concern with the teaching of eloquence was especially valuable: A man of culture thus knows how to say something of everything, to find points of view in all. Greece has to thank the sophists for this culture, because they taught men to exercise thought as to what should have authority for them, and thus their culture was culture in philosophy as much as in eloquence.13

The sophists’ practical aim was “to give a consciousness of that which is involved in the moral world and which satisfies man.”14 Since, as Hegel observes, it is rhetoric that teaches how circumstances may be made subject to such forces, the sophists were more especially the teachers of oratory. . . .For the particular characteristic of eloquence is to show the manifold points of view existing in a thing and to give force to those which harmonize with what appears to me to be most useful; it thus is the art of putting forward various points of view in the concrete case, and placing others rather in the shade.15

The sophists were the first to apply themselves to knowledge of categories or thought determinations—that is, the things that must be before us in order for us to learn to speak. Hegel’s point about the contribution of the sophists to the history of rhetoric may seem to us, in retrospect, self-evident, but it was a radical historiographical move. His emphasis on the rhetorical teaching of the sophists is also tied to his interest in their method, that is, their formal manifestation. The sophists were masters of argument and reasoning, moving from the particular to the universal, appealing to human notions of what is right by means of human experience, that is, examples and illustrations.The Greek world, Hegel implies, was not ready for the formal terms of sophistic, which depended on contingencies rather than a universal determination, with its process of reasoning based on the particular and individual rather than the absolute idea determined in and for itself. Perhaps most interesting to us, for an understanding not only of the sophists but of Hegel, is his perception about their dialectical method: they knew that all was contingent because

142


the power of thought treats everything dialectically. This was, in Hegel’s words, their “formal culture.”16 We are all sophists when we reason dialectically. It is their “formal culture,” not their reflection, that gives them a place in philosophy, and with dialectic as their object they were truly Socrates’ predecessors in philosophy, despite the latter’s endless repudiations of them and their methods.17 Hegel’s treatment of the sophists represents the beginning of a historiography of philosophy that acknowledges the place of rhetoric in that history. It is also a historiography of rhetoric as a dialectical or philosophical method. Because of the incremental repetitions that are necessary in Hegel’s historiography, it is inevitable that the sophists would reappear in his narrative; and they recur in his account of medieval scholastic philosophy. The link with the sophists is one of method, or to put this in more Hegelian terms,“form,” although he also finds a likeness in terms of content. In both sophistic and scholastic philosophy, thought applies itself to the intelligible world. In the case of scholasticism, the intelligible world is that of Christianity and God and his attributes, and understanding spans the phenomenal and perceived world.18 Scholastic determinations are also finite and particular, like sophistic determinations: Philosophy thus consists of a methodical and syllogistic reasoning. Just as the sophists of Greece wandered about amongst abstract conceptions on behalf of actuality, so did the scholastics on behalf of their intellectual world.To the former [the sophists] Being had validity; it they had rescued and delivered as against the negativity of the [Notion/Absolute Idea], while along with that they had justified it through the same. The principal endeavour of the scholastics was in the same way to vindicate the Christian intellectual world as against the confusion of the Notion, and through the latter to demonstrate its conformity with the same.19 The universal form of the scholastic philosophy thus consisted in this—that a proposition was laid down, the objections to it brought forward, and these contradicted through counter-propositions and distinctions. Philosophy was hence not separated from theology, as it is not in itself, for Philosophy is the knowledge of absolute existence, that is to say, theology. But to that theology the Christian absolute world was a system which was held to be an actuality, as was ordinary actuality for the Greek sophists.20

Thus, sophistic and scholasticism contribute in the same way to the history of philosophy as form: they offer similar chapters in what we might call (borrowing another Hegelian term) “the prose of philosophical history.” Scholastic theology, as Hegel observes, is nothing but philosophy;21 scholastic dialectic is philosophical content realized as form. It is not perverse that Hegel should have found this connection between sophistic and scholasticism, for the sophist played a contextual role in


143

scholastic training. Hegel’s history of philosophy, and the often unexpected connections that he makes, helps to draw our attention to the competing impulses within historiographies.The sophist lies at the heart of scholasticism. One of the key texts read in schools from the twelfth century onward, and canonized in university arts curricula, was Aristotle’s De sophisticis elenchis, the Sophistical Refutations, which had long been available in Boethius’s Latin translation. Aristotle’s adversarial representation of sophistical reasoning, along with his identification of sophistical methods with rhetoric (183b. 25), became the unsurpassed resource for training in logical argumentation—both how to recognize a sophistical syllogism and, more important, how to produce one. Countless commentaries on Aristotle’s Refutations by arts masters such as Jean Buridan and theologians such as Robert Grosseteste, Simon of Faversham, and Giles of Rome testify to the centrality of sophistic logic in the scholastic curriculum, as do the equally countless collections of model sophismata or logical enigmas that were produced for the aid and edification of arts students.22 The enthusiastic embrace of sophistic techniques of argumentation determined the very form of scholastic thought and the teaching of logic. But sophistic was also what could not be accepted on its own terms, or for itself. As much as it was visibly, indeed conspicuously and unabashedly, part of the curriculum, it had to be continually disavowed, its study circumscribed with fastidious apologies. Simon of Faversham prefaces his quaestiones on Aristotle’s Refutations with a classic disavowal: sophistic is necessary to learn so that one may recognize a sophist and refute a sophist, not be one.23 This dynamic of disavowal can be described in Hegelian terms as a kind of negative dialectic, whereby the scholastics find their own truth in a statement of nonbeing or nonidentity, sublating or superseding the false stage in theirs, the next stage. But in canceling or suspending sophistic, scholasticism also elevates and preserves it—that is the other, crucial part of the dialectical system.As Hegel perceptively noted, scholastics are much like their sophistic counterparts, and they keep the sophists present in their own formal system. I suggested earlier that the Middle Ages has only a limited historiography of rhetoric, and that this is secular. But from another perspective, there is a medieval historiography of rhetoric that resides within theology itself. This is an unofficial history, but no less persistent and forceful for that. It is the history and presence of sophistic within late-medieval philosophy, the scholastic training within universities that feeds directly into theological discourse.This historiography is built upon disavowing the form of philosophy as continuous with rhetoric, that is, the beginnings of rhetoric with the ancient sophists. It is predicated on disavowing that, as Hegel put it, theology is no different from philosophy. It is here that the history of

144


rhetoric meets the sacred within the sacred’s own self-conception, indeed within its own self-defining method. Wycliffite discourse can exemplify this dynamic in a particularly powerful and pointed way. Here we see in stark terms how a religious community discovers its political identity and its counteridentity in the image of the sophist and the history of rhetoric that sophistic carries with itself.The terms “sophist” and “sophister” appear many times throughout Wycliffite writings, both Latin and English, beginning in Wyclif ’s own writing. There are numerous references to sophists and sophistry throughout Wyclif ’s De veritate sacrae scripturae, and various uses among Lollard sermons.24 William Thorpe condemns “prowde sofestris” and “clerkis which deliten hem so in curious and so sotil sofestrie” in his defiant answers to the interrogations of Thomas Arundel, and even John Oldcastle, no cleric, accuses his interrogators of “sophistrie.”25 Why is the word sophist so very common in Wycliffite and Lollard writings? By comparison, Chaucer uses it once or twice; and it occurs once in the B text of Piers Plowman (passus 19.349) and once in the C text (passus 17.311). The Wycliffites were first and foremost university men, trained in the ways of the arts faculty at Oxford and bringing that training to their theological work either within or beyond the university. At some point in his academic career, every Oxford-trained Wycliffite had been a sophist, quite literally. During the early years of the arts degree (the prerequisite to theology study), one spent a whole year as a sophister, learning how to formulate and evade sophistic arguments, learning the ropes of questioning de sophismatibus.To be called a sophister designated one as a student in the early years of logic training. But it was an epithet that could be used insultingly, to designate someone whose development was arrested, as someone overly invested in pretentious, juvenile puffery or intoxicated with the pleasure of logical subtleties. In Wycliffite discourse the term sophist appears as a derogatory label, a term of opprobrium either applied directly to their immediate adversaries or more generally to signify those “proud sophisters” who chop logic to such a degree that they are obscure even to themselves, as in Thorpe’s general contempt for clerkis which deliten hem so in curious and so sotil sofestrie that thei mouen ofte so defficult materis and straunge, and waden and wandren so in hem fro argument into argument with pro and contra to the tyme that they witen not ofte where thei ben neither vndirstonden clerli hemsilf.26

The sophist thus becomes the counterimage of the Lollard “trewe man,” who speaks a plain truth that needs no university training to be understood, as in Thorpe’s famous dismissal of “scole-mater aboute whiche I neuer


145

bisied me for to knowe in.”27 The sophist distinguishes the Lollard from a generalized opposition, an arrogant and self-mystifying clerisy, those “worldly clerks” who might claim that it takes ten years of university training to know how to read the Bible: But wite 3e, worldly clerkis and feyned relygiouse, that God bothe can and may, if it lykith hym, speede symple men out of the vniuersitee, as myche to kunne hooly writ, as maistris in the vniuersite; and therfore no gret charge, thou3 neuer man of good wille be poisend with hethen mennis errouris ix. 3eer either ten, but euere lyue wel and stodie hooly writ, bi elde doctouris and newe, and preche treuly and freely a3ens opin synnes, to his deth.28

The “sophist” can also designate individualized opponents whose twisted logic belies their claims to pious orthodoxy. Thus, for example, Wyclif labeled one of his particular opponents a sophist, the Carmelite John Kenningham, in a debate from the 1360s (recorded in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum), although Kenningham returned the compliment with the same gusto.29 Thus, the sophist can take on specific connotations as a religious enemy. It signifies not just adolescent puffery: it is also dangerous, destructive falsity. It is closer to Socrates’ wholesale condemnation of sophistic in dialogues like the Sophist than to the more playful engagement in dialogues like the Phaedrus (where sophistic is presented as something one can grow out of, as in the hopes that Socrates pretends to hold for the “still youthful” Isocrates, who, he says, has time to pursue greater things than sophistic rhetoric [279a]). The sophist is a figure to be extruded from the company of “trewe men.”Yet at the same time, crucially, training in sophistic is a fundamental resource of Lollard strategies of defensive argumentation. Strategies for resisting interrogation, evading the penetrating questions of inquisitors, are preserved in the list of errors of the Lollard John Purvey, collected in the Fasciculi zizaniorum, in which Lollards are instructed as to exactly how much to say, how to finesse an answer, and at what point to stop talking: Item quando Antichristus, vel aliquis suorum mundialium clericorum, interrogat te, simplex christiane, numquid hoc sacramentum sit verus panis, concede hoc aperte. Et si quaerat an sit panis materialis, aut quis alius panis, concede quod est panis talis, qualem Christus intellexit in proprio verbo suo, et talis panis qualem Spiritus Sanctus intellexit in S. Paulo vocante illud veraciter panem quem frangimus; et non vadas ulterius hic. [When Antichrist, or one of his worldly clerics, interrogates you, simple Christian, about whether the host is truly bread, concede this candidly. If he inquires whether it is material bread, or some other kind of bread, concede that it is the kind

146


of bread that Christ in his own words understood it to be, and such bread that the Holy Spirit meant in Saint Paul, saying that it is truly the bread that we break; and don’t go any further than this.]30

Such an argumentative tactic, “do not go further than this,” along with the other strategies of evasion detailed here in which the answer can be at once doctrinally truthful and legally defensive, may seem obvious. But the precision and nuance with which they are set forth here bear all the marks of university exercises in dialectical disputation, procedures that by the early fourteenth century depended directly upon the academic influence of Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations and the industry of commentary, quaestiones, and sophismata that it inspired.Aristotle’s text illustrated the techniques by which a sophist could confound his opponent through overly complex propositions or subtle confusions of logical categories, and taught how to recognize and counter these techniques.31 Strategies of argumentative entrapment and evasion, taking their shape and direction from the centrality of sophistic in the scholastic curriculum, constituted the formal currency of intellectual self-awareness, a currency that could be translated from academic preparation to legal self-awareness among members of a reformist ecclesiological movement. Thus, the sophist is not just an image or a moral category: it is a form— in Hegel’s sense. On the terms of Hegel’s historiography, the scholastics reproduced ancient sophistic in terms of form or method, the dialectical culture that takes the phenomenal and perceived world as its object. As Vivek explains Hegel’s thought about form and essence, form is the agency that individuates essence, which provides the specific determination of essence, which makes a thing what it is. Form makes matter determinate, or form is the way that “content” is actualized.Thus truth resides, not in essence, but in a determinate form. The “essence” or content of scholasticism is its very form, its dialectical method, which determines it.32 Moreover, on Hegel’s terms, that method is precisely what scholasticism, and its academic training, shares with ancient sophistic.To put this back into scholastic terms, form is not the “accident,” but the substance or essence itself.What makes this an important and, I believe, a compelling issue is not that Hegel “discovered” or posited a recurrence of sophistic in scholasticism; indeed, his positing of the connection is hardly evidence at all. What is important, rather, is the historical fact—coincident with Hegel’s historiographical narrative—that scholasticism grafted itself onto sophistic thought and method through Aristotle’s representation of it in his Sophistical Refutations. Hegel’s curious but remarkable historiography helps us to unpack—or to see—a node of meaning that was already there in the history of philosophy.


147

This sophistic–scholastic “form” is at the heart of Lollard selfunderstanding, of the Lollard “refutation” of orthodox theology and ecclesiology. Lollardy cannot adopt the form of sophistic, its strategies of argumentation, derived from academic exercises in sophistic refutation, without being determined by sophistic. Lollardy is argumentation, and the ground of Lollard sacrality, of its community of the sacred, is in fact sophistic and its argumentative form.That form, in turn, stands at the beginning of the history of rhetoric. Does this mean that Lollardy was the site of a history of rhetoric, that a sacred community that claims to have purged itself of all but “plain reason” and “common sense” is the locus of the history of what it most violently disavows? Lollard sacrality, and the definition of this religious community around reformist refutation, has its roots in the same origin as the history of rhetoric, in the outlook and method of the ancient sophists. The relationship of Lollardy to those methodological origins is necessarily more indirect and mediated than the trajectory back to sophistic that is traced by the history of rhetoric: that is, postclassical rhetoric descends more or less directly from its origins in sophistic, whereas the dialectical method of late-medieval scholasticism grafted itself onto the ancient method as mediated through Aristotle. But that grafting was interior to scholasticism, interior to theological training, and as form ultimately interior to the theological movement, the community of “trewe men,” that Oxford scholasticism produced. What I have traced here is more than a conjunction in history of two competing discourses—rhetoric and the sacred. It is indeed a common point of origin that cannot be erased, even if the community of the sacred violently denies it. It is also more than an appropriation of rhetoric to the purposes of the sacred, a “purging” of its secularity and investment with new value. It is a formal commonality that reaches back through history, a homology of form between the history of rhetoric and a radical manifestation of the sacred that cannot be expunged without undoing the very identity of the community of the sacred. Rhetoric—or sophistic—can be violently extruded from the precincts of religion, as we see in Lollard polemic, but only as if through profound self-recognition.The sacred delivers itself from the secular history of rhetoric, only to make the tracing of that history possible. Rhetoric’s history is the “formal ground” of sacred narrative.


CHAPTER 9 SACRED AUTHORITY AND SECULAR POWER:THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT OF THE GESTA EPISCOPORUM CAMERACENSIS Robert M. Stein

In 1024, along with the rebuilding of the cathedral, Gerard I bishop of Cambrai commissioned the compilation of a huge three-part chronicle,The Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai.This text is not only an important witness to contemporary affairs; it is itself a political weapon in the bishop’s attempt to achieve governmental supremacy over his secular and ecclesiastical rivals. Although the language of the chronicle is conservative, what is in fact narrated is a record of great political innovation.At the very moment that various ecclesiastical reform movements begin to create the sharpest possible separation— legal, sexual, and so forth—between the clergy and the laity, the church begins to claim for itself an ever wider authority over ever more intimate aspects of secular life. By the end of the century this process eventuates in a transformed sense of secular society as the societas christiana, ideologically universal but in practice local, exclusionary, and embattled.

n 1023, after a decade of tumultuous and contentious rule, Gerard, bishop of Cambrai, began a project he had dreamed of since the day he first entered the city in February 1012. Finally free from enemies at home and abroad, he began to rebuild the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Cambrai. Fearful of never finishing the great task that circumstances had forced him to defer for so long, he was especially grateful for what he considered to be the miraculous discovery of two quarries of beautiful stone a mere quartermile from the city, and the work was completed in just seven years.

I

150

RO B E RT M . S T E I N

In November of 1030 the church was ready for consecration, and Gerard planned an extraordinary ceremony. Gerard and Richard, abbot of St. Vaast, both dressed in their most splendid robes, entered the church in solemn procession carrying the relics of St. Géri, founding bishop of Cambrai. While the clergy and the lay people, weeping with joy, sang the Laudes to greet the saint, Gerard placed him directly on the bishop’s throne. To his right and his left, the relics of the sainted Merovingian bishops Aubert, Vindicien, and Hadulf had already been arranged as if to assist St. Géri in officiating at the ceremony, and in their midst were the bishop’s staff that had belonged to St. Vaast along with that saint’s physical remains. Around the altar,in order of their ranks,were the sainted dead of the diocese—martyrs, confessors, and virgins—so that they all appeared to join the living members of the congregation in the holy ceremony: Who is able to describe worthily the splendor of such glory, or who—even the most eloquent—could encompass such a great office in words? When you see the bodies of the saints in a single congregation with the clerics and people of our diocese; and the chorus of monks mixed with the voices of the canons; and not only the inner city but even the whole surrounding countryside overflowing with crowds of men and women. [Quis enim tantae gloriae pompam digne sufficit enarrare, aut quis dicacissimus verborum ambitu tantam dignitatem poterit cohibere? ubi videlicet sanctorum corpora nostrae dioceseos cum plebe et clero in unum congregata, ubi choros tam monachorum quam et canonicorum catervatim commixtos, ubi etiam non tantum urbem interius, verum et campos exterius passim utriusque sexus multitudine pernatare videres.] (III.49.40–45)1

The chronicler presents this dedication ceremony as a culminating vision of the unity and hierarchy of the world as manifest in the community of Cambrai.The whole history of the diocese participates with the living congregation in a display of order, continuity, hierarchy, and just power. In the miraculously completed building, the founding bishops seem to live again to officiate for a congregation that joins the dead with the living, the clergy with the people, monks living under a rule with secular canons, the urban population with the rural, and men with women. The sainted dead of the diocese, each in their own rank, make hierarchy and order visible and present. In this powerful ideological representation, the community is imagined as the outcome of a continuous past overseen by an unbroken succession of just authorities stretching from the founders of the town to its current bishop. Of course, this representation is a dream. Moreover, like all dreams it speaks also in spite of itself: by summoning up its vision of order and social harmony it tells us, as well, of social division, competing interests, and conflict—between cleric and lay, canon and monk, man and woman,

S A C R E D AU T H O R I T Y & S E C U L A R P OW E R

151

city and country, the old and the new, the bishop and his flock—and these are not the only conflicts within Cambrai at the turn of the eleventh century. Cambrai By the year 1000, the old Gallo-Roman city of Cambrai stood at the climax of a complex political and economic development. Located right on the line of division between the two halves of the Carolingian Empire, Cambrai had passed from Francia into the Eastern Empire in 925. In 948, the emperor granted the bishop comital rights over the urban domain, and in 1007 over the Cambresis as well, effectively ousting the Carolingian urban and provincial counts, the secular lords with whom the bishop had shared power.As prince of the church, the bishop oversaw the more than eighty religious communities in his diocese.2 As secular prince he coined money, administered justice, regulated markets,3 and controlled defense. He was surrounded by a court, originally his hall servants, who by the eleventh century had become a distinct urban nobility. In the Empire, the bishop of Cambrai was a great secular lord with no secular peers in his realm. He was an imperial functionary, dependent directly on the emperor for his election and answerable to the emperor in whose name he collected taxes, enforced the law, and organized military defense. Like Liège at the same period, Cambrai around the year 1000 had become an ecclesiastical principality, and the bishop-count was its prince.4 At the same time, the diocese of Cambrai and its bishop were equally part of a completely different sphere of power. As head of one of the most extensive dioceses within the thoroughly French archdiocese of Reims, the bishop of Cambrai was a figure to be reckoned with, not only in the contentious ecclesiastical politics of Reims but also in the secular affairs of the Capetian world. Moreover, until 1094 the diocese of Cambrai was also conjoined to the diocese of Arras, a smaller but economically and strategically an equally important territory, and the Artois had never been other than part of France.5 In brief, Cambrai was an imperial diocese and an imperial principality, and its bishop was an imperial appointment and a great prince of the empire, but in political culture, economic development, kinship ties, and language it was equally a part of France. There were those who were very aware of the complex identity of Cambrai and attempted to exploit it in the interests of French domination. In 1024, Robert the Pious was deterred from invading the Cambresis—but only by the receipt of lavish gifts and tribute from Bishop Gerard. Baldwin IV, count of Flanders, eyed the borders of Cambrai eagerly. He built castles in the border territories and attempted to erect fortifications even within the Cambresis. In his attempts on the territory, Baldwin made use of a new political force in the person of the castellan of the city. Mentioned for the

152


first time in the documents in 972,6 the castellan was officially a nonnoble dependent of the bishop, in charge of overseeing those secular matters prohibited for the bishop by ecclesiastical law, such as manning the fortifications of the city and overseeing urban defense. However, his control of weapons, money, and above all of a standing garrison, made his position a powerful point of independent opposition to the bishop’s authority.7 In effect, the castellan held virtually the same power as the former secular lord, the urban count of Cambrai. Historians have long noted the significant emergence of castellans in France in the last decades of the tenth century. Officially they are representatives of more distant, legitimate authority—indeed, documents often designate them as vicarius, vicedominus, or vicecomes. But from their castles or strong houses in strategic locations, they easily dominated the surrounding countryside, which they treated as a possession. They set themselves up as arbiters of local justice and collectors of local revenue for themselves, equipped themselves within one generation with titles such as comes, regalia, and often a genealogy tracing their ancestry back to a mythical or a Carolingian origin as signs of their territorial legitimacy. They were men of power, essentially kings in their own realms, able to pass their territorial control on to their offspring.8 By the time Gerard came to power, the castellany of Cambrai had become essentially a hereditary office belonging to a Vermandois family with ties to the counts of Flanders.The castellan,Walter of Lens, was subordinate to the bishop in theory but in practice was a creature of the count of Flanders and entirely out of the bishop’s immediate control.9 He was, in fact, powerful enough to have seriously disrupted the funeral of Gerard’s immediate predecessor, and even to have occupied the bishop’s house, using it as a stronghold prior to Gerard’s arrival. Indeed, Henry II appointed Gerard as the successor to the seriously ill Herluin, days before the latter’s death, precisely in order to avoid what was shaping up to be a coup by a candidate specifically chosen by the castellan and Baldwin IV. During the early years of his reign Gerard used several strategies to gain power over his castellan. Most significantly, he managed to bind Walter and his immediate associates into a web of mutual personal obligations and dependencies by means of what the chronicler calls “a new custom,” a series of oaths of personal loyalty to the bishop and a pledge under threat of excommunication to administer justice to the city and people of Cambrai and to provide for their defense under the bishop’s direction. In return for these oaths the bishop pardoned Walter for all previous offenses against his sovereign rule.The oaths were sworn on relics in the presence of witnesses, and they were repeated in several venues.There was an exchange of hostages. The agreement, carefully recorded verbatim and preserved, included some of the most powerful people in the Capetian world; among others


153

involved in the elaborate public occasions were the bishop of Noyons, the counts of Burgundy and Flanders, and King Robert the Pious himself.10 Georges Duby recognized exactly what this all amounted to: in a ceremony that was only just beginning to be used in France for similar purposes, Gerard made Walter his vassal.11 The decision to rebuild the cathedral of Cambrai was clearly prompted by what seemed at the time to be Gerard’s decisive victory over his castellan. To this point it would seem that I have been simply filling in background, describing a state of affairs around the year 1000 and a set of events that led up to the rebuilding of the Cathedral in 1024. What I have actually been doing, in fact, is retracing the main narrative line of the strikingly rich text that both presents the events that I have described and, more significantly, was itself an active intervention in them. Furthermore, in simply retracing this account, I virtually unwittingly tell the story from a very particular position—that of the bishop’s secular legitimacy. For the power to write, disseminate, and preserve his own particular account of events was itself among the most important weapons in the bishop’s arsenal. Accordingly, in 1024, along with the rebuilding of the cathedral, Gerard embarked on a huge and, I think, unprecedented historiographical enterprise: he began to have compiled the historical rights of the bishops of his diocese. Or shall we say he began to have them invented? The centerpiece of this enterprise is the single work of historical composition whose narrative I have been tracing, the Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensis, the Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai, and it is therefore to the historiographical argument of this text that we must now turn our attention. The Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai Begun in 1024, the Gesta Episcoporum is disposed in three books.The first traces the history of the city from its primitive founding to the consecration of Gerard I in 1012. Its chronological framework is provided by the succession of bishops, the spiritual and temporal power being handed from one to the other genealogically, as if in an unbroken chain.At the beginning of the chain stand the sainted founders and patrons of the city and at the culmination stands Gerard.The second book self-consciously interrupts the chronological presentation in order to survey, as if by means of an itinerary, the wide network of monasteries and monastic foundations subject to the diocese of Cambrai. The third book returns to chronology and is entirely occupied with the present on which the historical narrative of the first and the geographical exposition of the second converge, namely, the deeds of Bishop Gerard himself.The book begins with his consecration and ends, as originally planned, with his triumph over Walter the Castellan and the rebuilding of the church.

154


The extant version of the Gesta Episcoporum is the product of two rewritings.The exhaustive research of Erich van Mingroot has demonstrated that the whole work—Books I and II and in Book III till chapter 50—was planned and executed between 1024 and 1025 by a single writer, a canon of Cambrai personally close to Bishop Gerard, who remains otherwise unidentified.Around 1036 the chronicle may have been updated to include the events of the decade after 1025, very likely by the original writer. Later, during the reign of Bishop Lietbert, who succeeded Gerard in 1049, a Vita Lietberti was added to Book III to create the text as we find it in all the eleventh-century manuscripts.To make the addition seamless,Van Mingroot argues, around 1055 the writer of the Vita Lietberti rewrote the text following chapter 50 of Book III.The notice of the beginning of the rebuilding of the cathedral in 1023 was certainly part of the original chapter 49; the description of the dedication in 1030 had to have been added later, most likely in the original updating.12 Along with the composition of the Gesta Episcoporum, Gerard also seems to have ordered the construction of the textual archive on which the book was based, for the work demanded a library. Existing material had to be gathered together for the benefit of the chronicler, while new texts had to be composed to fill gaps in the historical record. Thus, the writer of the Gesta Episcoporum began, under Gerard’s instructions, in 1023, by writing a Life of St. Géri, the city’s founder.13 At the same time Gerard also commissioned the writing of several other saints and miracle collections relevant to the enterprise. Digested in the Gesta Episcoporum, the newly composed lives appear as if they were ancient and venerable texts that had long since recorded the origins of the authority of the bishops of Cambrai. The climactic moment of the Gesta Episcoporum is reached with the dedication of the church and the display of order, continuity, hierarchy, and power that it celebrates.This moment is first of all a narrative climax: all opposition is quelled, the bishop is firmly in control, and the building having been begun in fear is completed in joy. More importantly, it also represents the climax of an argument that had been pursued in different modalities throughout the many and various events narrated by the chronicle. The argument concerns primarily the relation between sovereignty and justice. In brief, the text uses a variety of strategies to contend that the achievement of justice on earth is due to the providential coming into being of a hierarchically ordered society—specifically Christian society, ruled over by a bishop. Modern acquaintance with the chronicle has largely been shaped by Georges Duby’s powerful examination of trifunctional social taxonomy in The Three Orders, which carefully analyzes Gerard’s speech against the proponents of the Peace of God as the chronicle represents it. In his reading of this speech, which provides a very early instance of the proposition that


155

human society is naturally divided into three reciprocally dependent orders (oratores, bellatores, and laboratores), Duby was, for various reasons, most concerned with its immediate occasion, Gerard’s opposition to the so-called Peace of God.The emergence of the peace movement was undoubtedly an extremely important stimulus to the historiographical concern with the bishop’s power, but was by no means a primary focus of the chronicle. It enters as a small part of a rather extensive concern not with peace but with the nature of sovereignty. The narrative ends with the dedication of a church. Where does it begin? It does not begin with Adam as does Gregory of Tours, for example, or with a story of foundation by an eponymous relative of Aeneas, a story that became virtually the standard procedure of later-medieval chroniclers. The Gesta Episcoporum opens rather with a general account of why people began to live in cities.At first, writes the chronicler, men lived scattered and wandered about like wild beasts.They were uncivilized, having no social life [neque mos neque cultus], and neither ruled by reason nor knowing anything of the Divine, they were dominated entirely by blind desire. After some time, they built protective walls for themselves, and having thus come together, learned to keep their word and to serve justice, and became accustomed to submitting their own desires to the desires of others [fidem colere et iustitiam retinere discerent, et aliis parere sua voluntate consuescerent]. Indeed, writes the chronicler, they not only thought it right to labor for the common good, but even to sacrifice their own lives for it [ac non modo labores excipiendos communis commodi causa, set etiam vitam amittendam estimarent].Thus, the prudential building of the city is the immediate cause for the coming into being of a just civil society obedient to imperatives higher than blind need. Now, this hard primitivist myth of the naturally savage state of humanity is a commonplace of classical antiquity14 very rarely found in medieval texts, first of all, because it conflicts on the literal level with the Genesis version of the original human state—Adam is placed in paradisal garden, not in a savage wasteland—and more importantly it conflicts with the moral readings commonly made of it. Indeed, Lactantius’s Institutiones, from which the chronicler seems to have taken this account (his text often echoes it) presents the classical myth precisely as an illustration of the folly of classical philosophy. For Lactantius, justice, piety, and mercy are part of the original human essence: what needs to be explained is not why people help others and seek help from them but why they refuse.15 Whereas Lactantius imagines justice as an origin and an essence from which humanity has unnaturally fallen, the hard primitivist myth posits fear, suspicion, and mutual aggression as the natural state of humanity and justice as a historically fragile prize that humanity painfully seeks to attain.

156


With a simple change in explanatory direction, the chronicler seems to go out of his way to answer Lactantius’s argument by taking the words out of Lactantius’s mouth. For, says the chronicler, this change in the human condition from savagery to civilization and the building of cities that brought it about are providential in themselves. Exactly what Lactantius called a base and absurd fantasy—that wild and dangerous people hiding in fields and foliage became thus gentle and civilized as an outcome of prudential activity—is not only explicitly embraced [non enim vile aut absurdum fuerat, homines agris et tectis silvestribus abditos ex feris et inmanibus mites reddi ac mansuetos, writes the chronicler], but it even more profoundly is said to signify much higher things [longe altior rerum causa portendebatur]. Unknowingly, these builders of cities usefully served a future posterity; namely, that by these walls they thought to construct nothing but what I might call royal edifices. But soon the future holy Mother Church would obtain in them the principal fortress of its dignity and its apostolic seat. [Superventurae posteritati utiliter ministraret; videlicet ut ipsis suis moenibus nihil aliud pretendere viderentur, nisi quaedam ut ita dicam regia aedificia construere, in quibus mox futura sancta mater aecclesia principalem suae dignitatis arcem et apostolicam sedem obtineret] (I.1.37–40). The ternary figure that so intrigued Duby is already articulated here at the beginning of the chronicle, not, as a social typology of simultaneously dependent functions, but rather as a diachronic chain of social production. Humanity labors, institutes secular order, and in building the secular city creates the conditions for a radically new future. The appearance of the church transforms the royal city into its own “principal fortress and apostolic seat,” and thus provides human work with its true cause and ultimate goal. At the end of the process the Church emerges as sole governor, described in military and imperial language. Like Gerard’s ceremonial dedication of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, this myth of origin gathers up all of humanity in a single representation that materializes the double significance of the word ecclesia: the material building itself and the lawful structure of the community that it calls into being to assemble there in ritual celebration of itself. In the process, the emperor and his sovereignty over the bishop disappear.The bishop is supreme over all. Violence and Historical Time One reason for the appeal to the writer of the Gesta Episcoporum of the rarely invoked classical commonplace of primitive society is undoubtedly its evocation of the devastation following the Viking raids of the tenth century, a social trauma that was still part of living memory. As such, the primitivist


157

myth serves psychologically to contain violence by locking it away in a past absolutely other than the present—it is savage, pagan, and unruled. The first book of the Gesta Episcoporum is filled with origin stories of the various institutions connected to the diocesan governance of the bishop of Cambrai. Abbeys are founded, churches are erected, and shrines fill the landscape. The text is accordingly peppered with miracles—the blind see, the lame walk—that manifest the spiritual gifts of founding individuals and the sacred presence of the places they found. Procedures that are institutional and routine in the present of the chronicle are thus represented as at their origin exceptional performances by charismatic individuals. The sudden eruption of the sacred into ordinary life creates the past qua past, utterly different from the present that charisma inaugurates, and this separation gives birth to history.The third book of the Gesta Episcoporum, on the other hand, is at pains to stress the absolutely routine and institutional basis of the bishop’s power. From the perspective of power derived from election and public rituals of consecration, charisma is disruptive and dangerous. Indeed, charismatic individuals appear in the third book only as enemies of social order, whether they claim to have a “letter from Heaven” like the proponents of the Peace of God or claim access to a special revelation outside of the institutional church like the so-called Manicheans, who appeared in Arras in 1025.16 The chronicler negotiates the passage from charismatic founding to contemporary legitimacy by filling time and making it continuous. Historically full and unbroken time is the mark of the continuous presence of the sacred in the institutional regularity of the church and its governance by the bishop.The charismatic act is once and for all, and it is constitutive; the continuity of the church is its guarantee. In no place is the significance of chronological continuity for social legitimation more apparent than in the chronicler’s treatment of the death of St. Vindicien, third bishop of Cambrai after St. Vaast, precisely because here we find one of the only places in the first book where the regular chronology of the narrative breaks apart. Prompted by the historian’s anxiety over present social disorder and violence, the narrative rupture leads to a lament for lost time.When he reaches the moment to tell of Vindicien’s death, the chronicler addresses his reader directly to deplore the absence of written records about the sainted bishop. Much writing has surely been lost, he says, on account of the civil violence [seditionibus procellosis] by which the church has been frequently shipwrecked. He then poignantly goes on to insist that there must have been a large volume, no longer extant, containing an account of Vindicien’s life and miracles.This volume, he imagines, has disappeared, its leaves disbound and scattered to the winds [Fieri enim potest, ut cum tantis subversionibus aecclesiarum una etiam volumina, quibus series vitae et miraculorum huius

158


sancti viri continebatur, auris quidem ridentibus, disperirent] (I.28.48–51). All we know about Vindicien is that he is buried in a church on Mount St. Eloi (I.28.56–58). At this point, the narrative suddenly leaps forward several hundred years to the tenth century to tell of the discovery of Vindicien’s tomb.The young sons of a nobleman of Arras who were being taught to read and write were sent into the woods by their writing master to find the wherewithal to make ink. Picking their way through the dense growth of thorns and brambles, the boys come upon a ruined church. While the older boys pray, the younger ones investigate the interior. One of them begins to dig under the floor when he is suddenly struck blind. He screams for help and says that he is being punished because he violated the tomb. Vowing to become a monk, the young boy soon recovers his sight and returns home “thoroughly chastized” [puer haud mediocriter castigatione rediit] (I.29.60).The news of the event spreads throughout the region and people begin to venerate the site. Finally, the whole affair is reported to the bishop, who has the body raised and rebuilds and reconsecrates the burial place as a monastic church. The motif of blindness and sight is elaborated in two subsequent miraculous cures at the newly created monastic shrine. These two thoroughly conventional miracles remind the chronicler of a third, and the narrative makes yet another sudden and even more unexpected leap forward to the chronicler’s own days and the year 1006.17 Emperor Henry II, Robert the Pious, and Richard, duke of Normandy, form an alliance to aid Baldwin IV in a struggle with the count of Valenciennes. Richard’s Normans arrive in the Artois and raid the monastery with horrific violence mercilessly slaughtering the monks and pillaging the treasury, even stealing the ecclesiastical vestments.When they begin to divide the treasure among themselves, however, they are suddenly miraculously struck down in a scene reminiscent of romanesque paintings of the torments of Hell: “Some were seized by a demon and twisted; some had their tongues on fire; some bit themselves, others were folded back on themselves, their thighs burned out, a miserable torture.” [“Plerique arrepti a daemonio torquebantur; alii linguis adusti, alii proprio morsu precisis, plerique cruribus exustis, misero cruciatu plectebantur”] (I.33.38–40). This sequence of stories begs to be read as a meditation on history itself. The discovery of Vindicien’s burial place, including the motifs of clearing away the undergrowth and digging into the ground, and the series of miraculous cures is entirely about the process of bringing the buried past to light and preserving it in writing. Moreover, as Monika Otter has taught us to see,18 the desire for the past is not without peril. The manifest dangers narrated here are merely screens for a much greater fear: the fear of present violence that threatens the historiographical scheme and triumphal structure


159

of the chronicle itself. Violence refuses to stay safely buried in the prehistoric past. It erupts again and again into the historian’s consciousness of the present. Things fall into ruin, books disappear, churches are pillaged and destroyed, and it is not only Franks and Vikings—what the chronicler tellingly lumps together as “gentilitas”—but above all the Christian princes of the contemporary world who turn cities into wastelands and cause people to live like beasts.Who can govern them? The Power of the Prince-Bishop The answer to the crisis of violence that the chronicle proposes with ever increasing urgency is clear.The hybrid figure of the prince-bishop in whose daily activities the sacred is institutionalized and routinized is the last and only hope for secular justice. It is thus the secular affairs of the bishop that are dwelt upon with great attention in the third book. The language is entirely conservative—Bishop Gerard is said to reform deteriorated institutions to their former prosperity and spiritual dedication or to restore good customs that had been long in disuse. He is represented as standing last, heir to the long accumulation of spiritual goods that he wisely invests. But what is in fact narrated is a record of great political innovation. More and more, the bishop uses the full panoply of coercive spiritual weapons at his disposal to rule and regulate secular affairs. In the process, a new being for the church—identical to secular society—and a new sense of the meaning of Christianity itself emerge as the bishop claims an ever wider authority over ever more intimate aspects of secular life. I have already remarked on the negative light in which any instance of spiritual privilege is treated in the third book, and have attributed this to the need to ground the bishop’s power in institutional legitimacy. It is not the charismatic gifts of the individual bishop but rather his legitimate election and consecration that invest him with the power to rule.What make him a good bishop, in fact, are his abilities to be a good governor.19 Accordingly, with only one exception the third book is entirely free of the miraculous.20 During the account of Bishop Gerard’s efforts to reform the Abbey of St. Ghislain, possessed at the time by the count of Mons, there is a cluster of three miracles. Only the first is in the chronicle’s main narrative line; the other two are prompted by the first and reported immediately after it as stories that Bishop Gerard liked to tell. All three are stories of miraculous punishments, and all three are involved with the bishop’s relations with lay people and his control of a nexus of institutional procedures—penance, excommunication, burial, and above all the offering of the Eucharist— rather than with the revelation of special spiritual gifts.Together, the three stories form a very concentrated inventional place, pulling the various

160


aspects of ecclesiastical power together into a single thematic unity. Let me summarize the three stories briefly. 1. A thief, dependent on Count Rainer of Mons, who is described as “himself a thief accustomed to cherish thieves” [ipse raptor raptoribus favere consueverat], is in the habit of despoiling the Abbey of St. Ghislain at Celles. (One desperately wants to look through the text here—I take it that what is being described is the collection of taxes by a knight acting as the agent of a secular lord. The monastery, however, claims the land to be immune). He is arrested by Bishop Gerard, handed over to the bishop of Utrecht for a year, and then released after his relatives intercede. He swears [promittentem videlicet et sancte deierantem] to Bishop Gerard “that he will withdraw from his thievery and remain faithful to the church with all devotion” [quod rapinis se subtraheret, fidelis aecclesiae cum omni devotione mansurus] and then goes back on his oath. He dies, and again at the intercession of his family and unbeknownst to the bishop he is buried in the monastery’s cemetery. Two years later, his tomb is opened for another burial and, except for one shoe, not a trace of his body or his clothes is found there (III.20). 2. In the days of Bishop Adalbaldus of Utrecht (viz. 1010–27), the Maritime Frisians had the custom of not taking the Eucharist on Easter. Offered the Eucharist, one of them,“prompted by the devil” [instinctu diabolico agitatus] said he’d rather have a big glass of beer than “that banquet from the celestial table” [illud celestis epulum mensae] and further added that anyone who ate of it would surely die during the coming year. All the people depart in fear, and he goes to the local tavern to drink. Coming home drunk, he falls off his horse, breaks his neck, and dies. Owing to his stature in the town, the “blasphemer” (that is all he is ever called) is buried in the cemetery (in atrio). Bishop Adalbaldus hears of this while he is in Saxony with Emperor Henry and is outraged. He orders the body to be disinterred, but since no one will do it out of fear of retribution from the family, the bishop journeys home, orders a rope put around the feet of the corpse, and has the body dragged from the tomb to a place along the road outside of the town. Dragged for the space of a mile, the dead man, although already buried for fifteen days, vomits up the prodigious amount of beer he drank on Easter (III.21). 3. Albert of Vermandois, brother of Count Odo of Vermandois, characterized as a liar, perjurer, and blasphemer, is struck with a grave illness, and at the urging of Waleran, provost of the Monastery of St. Hunegonde, becomes a monk. As his health improves, and at the urging of his mother and friends, who think he is insane to have given up wealth and power, he goes back to secular life. His health deteriorates again, and when he is at the


161

point of death “stupid canons” [stulti canonici] bring him the Eucharist. When he tastes it, Albert cries out with his last breath, “the sword that the clerics brought me has killed me” [Ferrum, inquit, quod mihi clerici detulerunt, me occidit].Waleran and other bystanders pry his mouth open with a knife and show his mother and friends that his tongue has been incinerated [moribundum os difficillime cultello reclusit, et linguam usque ad palatum, miserabile visu, crematam matri ac fratri et ceteris adstantibus aperte monstravit]. The chronicler comments on the appropriateness of the punishment for one who had always used his mouth to lie and swear falsely (III.23). All three stories narrate vivid acts of retribution against lay people who refuse to be subject to the sovereign bishops whom the chronicle presumes they are supposed to obey.The stories do not involve the bishop’s position within the closed world of the Church; rather, all three involve secular lords who have defied him, and they present a conflict between ecclesiastical and secular structures of power, which are represented as if they were strictly separable: powerful families and territorial princes on the one hand, bishops and monastic foundations on the other. Moreover, all three assert the bishop’s right to regulate the conduct of secular life and secular individuals from a position of power that extends even beyond the grave. At the very moment that various ecclesiastical reform movements are beginning to attempt to create the sharpest possible separation—legal, sexual, and so forth—between the clergy and the laity (to “clericalize the church” as Jo Ann McNamara recently remarked21) the Church begins to claim for itself an ever larger arena of secular power and to assert itself as the authoritative governor of the conduct of secular life. In the ensuing conflicts with other structures of secular power—familial, territorial, and political—with which it is in fact entirely entangled, the secular power of the Church is conceptualized by ecclesiastical writers as occupying the highest position in a hierarchical ladder of power and the secular power of the bishop is posited as absolute.22 Although the Gesta Episcoporum is entirely occupied with his daily affairs, the prince-bishop does not come before us as an imperial functionary but rather as a transcendent entity. Created by his ordination and anointing, he is himself a “twinned being” like Christ.23 His power is centered in his special relationship with the institutional practices represented in the cluster of stories I have just paraphrased: at this time excommunication, the imposition of public penance, and the regulation of proper burial are all being put to intensive and new uses. At the very center of this conceptualization is the Eucharist, the only sacrament with biblical precedent, which the bishop alone can offer or deny. By the end of the century, innovative formulations

162


about the nature of the Eucharist and its innovative uses as a real social practice will eventuate in a transformed sense of secular society as the societas christiana. Like the church building in which the congregation gathers to see it displayed, the Eucharist too is a figure of the bishop’s power to which we now must attend. The Eucharist and Power As Miri Rubin among others has pointed out, until the eleventh century and the famous dispute between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc over the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, eucharistic practices and theological issues such as “the nature of sacramental change, the nature of Christ’s presence, the moment of transformation, the symbolic link between matter and God”24 remain rather loosely formulated. However, scholars have remarked a discernible drift in the course of the tenth century toward realism in the general notion of the Eucharist’s substance.25 It seems to me that this drift in the direction of realism—sufficiently marked that when the dispute between Berengar and Lanfranc arose, the realist Lanfranc took up what had clearly become the orthodox position—is inseparable from the need to distinguish the bishop’s power from the power of any other secular lord on ontological and absolute grounds. Furthermore, the need for the bishop to make this distinction is urgent, for this moment when the bishop has become institutionally identical to any other secular lord is the moment when various secular lords are themselves becoming able territorial administrators. Rather than looking to the few strictly theological discussions of the sacrament to understand the process of drift, one needs to consider eucharistic practice as it appears in bishops’ lives and other historical and hagiographical writing. Deployed in the miracles we have been considering, the Eucharist acts as a powerful conceptual center, not only symbolically demonstrating the authority of those who were empowered to administer it,26 but physically bodying it forth as a fully materialized spiritual presence with all too real material effects. In the miracles under discussion, the power of the Eucharist is visible solely in the context of excommunication and in its baleful effects on those who doubt its power or partake of it without being worthy. Rather than leaving the material world behind to show forth spiritual presence in visions of bodily transformation (such as the famous Gregorian miracles of a baby rising above the altar or a finger floating in the glass of wine27), it manifests itself in the real bodily effects of spiritual retribution against those who contemn it or doubt its power.The Eucharist shares this special power with the representation of the church building itself as a sacred place where the community, of which the Eucharist is both a sign and a manifestation,


163

assembles to see it displayed. This is a place that one violates to one’s extreme peril.28 I have already discussed the spectacular vengeance meted out to the Norman soldiers who despoiled Arras. Individuals similarly laying claim to what abbeys or churches consider their own property or privileges meet similarly dire fates if they ignore excommunication.29 As I noted earlier, the context of all these stories is the rapidly increasing use of excommunication as a tool of governance of lay society.To be effective, the mysterious power of the Eucharist had to become an object of fear and desire, its deprivation a matter of great consequence to the laity. It thus becomes no mere symbol of spiritual union, but the very place where the spiritual intersects with the material world, its proper use a matter of literal life or death.That the transformation was in fact successful is attested to nicely by the Gesta Episcoporum’s Aquitanian contemporary Adhemar of Chabannes. He writes of the “new observance” employed by the bishop of Limoges in the last years of the tenth century: to punish the depredations of the warriors and the devastation of the poor [rapina militum et devastatione pauperum], the bishop ordered the cessation of “the divine service and the holy sacrifice” in all the monasteries and churches of his diocese; this, Adhemar adds, was considered excommunication.30 As Richard Landes points out, this new observance is the old practice of the interdict, put to the new use here of coercing a secular lord “through arousing the innocent to protest”31 by depriving them of the sacrament, a protest that would have been unthinkable in the centuries before the Eucharist had become so ardently desired. Reality Fictions In considering the miracles of the Gesta Episcoporum, I have at several points called attention to them as inventional places. Monastic pedagogic and meditative practice, as is well known, developed from Roman topical invention. Images—the more vivid the better—form nodal points that can connect long chains of textual and experiential associations, making them memorable and forming powerful emotional starting places for further associational activity.32 Vivid scenes of retribution and punishment, for example, furnish prime instances of rhetorical enargeia and beg to be read as what Mary Carruthers has called “cognitive fictions” with no stake in their literal or mimetic truth. (The classic instance of this distinction between cognitive and mimetic truth can be found in the visual representations of the New Jerusalem in the Beatus commentaries, in which architectural detail varies from copy to copy of the same original: a copy from Spain, for example, shows Mozarabic keyhole arches, while a thirteenth-century English copy of the same original shows Gothic points.33) The truth of cognitive

164


fictions lies rather in their pedagogic or ethical efficacy, not in their mimetic value. The sacraments and elements of the liturgy serve similar pedagogic purposes as starting points for meditative exercises intended to end in an intuition of the absolute that lies beyond all such images. Moreover, the church building itself is a generally useful receptacle and indexing system of commonplaces for a variety of memory systems.34 Yet, in the Gesta Episcoporum, these strikingly efficient memory places cannot be simply called “cognitive fictions,” for their inventional and associational efficacy depends on their claim to mimetic truth value, just as the Eucharist is, in these texts, not merely symbolically efficacious as a starting point for meditation on Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice but their real reiteration. In the Gesta Episcoporum, the church building is a meditational place precisely because it is also a real building. So, too, the city of Cambrai— reflection on its temporal order is a vehicle by which to perceive mystically the order in heaven. In the historical vision of the Gesta Episcoporum, Cambrai thus stands symbolically for Christianity itself. Its emergence from the past that is imagined alternatively as pagan and as bestial is a promise of the future in which all humanity will be saved because all are Christian. The city ruled in historical time by its bishop is a temporal symbol of the New City, the heavenly Jerusalem ruled without mediation by Christ in the reality of his majesty. In the present of the text, Bishop Gerard is the central figure, not because he is exceptionally endowed with charismatic grace but because through his ordination and consecration he holds the keys to inclusion in this promised future. Yet, Cambrai can never be only a sign; to bear its symbolic weight, Cambrai is always the historical Cambrai, where the bishop coins money, grants privileges to the merchants, collects revenue from his dependents, judges malefactors, and struggles for supremacy with all the resources available to him against those who effectively challenge his power. In this Cambrai, the bishop’s supremacy qua bishop is not a universally held certainty: it is a polemical position wielded by the bishop himself in his struggle with others. To show him repeatedly triumphing over his adversaries is at the same time to show him constantly being challenged by other powers. Even within the affairs of the church, the bishop is in constant struggle, not only with his collegial peers over questions ranging from succession to the Peace of God but with his manifest inferiors. For example, the chronicle contains a long letter—itself a small legal treatise on excommunication—addressed by Gerard to the archdeacons of Liège, angrily reminding them that when a bishop excommunicates someone, he stays excommunicated even if he should go to another diocese.For it seems that Gerard had excommunicated a certain Erlebaldus for incestuous marriage, whereupon the latter left Cambrai and returned with his wife to his ancestral


165

domain in the diocese of Liège, where he enjoyed the privileges of his wealth and power and was subsequently ceremoniously buried “inter fideles”(III.28). To win in these constant struggles required very powerful weapons, such as those we have been considering here: first of all, a magnificent building, where the bishop could sit in public display on a splendid throne and make the claim of his own authority visible; second, the power over a sacrament that was imagined to be no mere symbol but a vehicle of the most awesome might; and third, the city itself, which is to say, not only the institutional position of sacred authority legitimated by Divine sanction, but the control of an effectively coercive governmental apparatus that could administer land, collect income, extract labor, mount defense, hand down judicial rulings, and intimidate those who would prefer not to listen—and, not least important, a big book that tells this very story.


CHAPTER 10 THE SPACE OF THE ALTAR Miri Rubin

Focuses on the efforts invested in the design of the Mass from the twelfth century and the array of dilemmas and questions that the priest’s role at the altar raised for theologians and practitioners alike. Approaching the eucharist from the critique of the Mass offered by Luther in the early sixteenth century, the essay identifies tensions which vexed designers of liturgy and audiences: the role of priest, the nature of transubstantiation, the appearance and nature of the space of sacramental action at the altar.Was the Mass a reenactment, a miracle, or a sacrifice? The questions which Luther raised so dramatically and unremittingly, were not new; they were expressed and debated in the late medieval centuries making the Mass not only the most powerful and engaging sacrament, but an obstacle in attempts to construct sacramental communities.

ll areas of Christian thought and administrative acumen seem to have been mobilized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries toward the construction of an all-embracing sacramental system to underpin Christian identity and adherence.Theologians in the schools who formed the doctrinal frameworks, officials charged with the design of liturgy, canon lawyers who defined the norms of sacramental practice and the penalties for infraction, artists who created the chalices, pyxes, and altarpieces with which the ritual was celebrated, and priests who both taught and celebrated the sacraments, all contributed to the making of the sacramental world—in idea and in practice. Among the seven sacraments the Eucharist soared, understood as a privileged ritual among them, the reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice, and

A

168

M I R I RU B I N

the making of His historic body at every altar, at every Mass. There was vision behind the pronouncement, made under Pope Innocent III, in the words of canons 1 and 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215):1 the Mass was to be understood in a particular way, through the concept of transubstantiation, and participation by believers was to follow, at least once a year, through reception of communion. Here was a robust statement, an opportunity and a test for every person involved in provision of the sacrament—bishops, priests, churchwardens, and sacristans—as well as for every Christian expected to receive it.A sacramental space was thus created, governed by distinctive rules of access, of appearance, by a hierarchy of signs, by telling liturgical colors, and by distinctive sounds.The space around the altar was a stage; the sole protagonist was the priest, at whose side some helpers set the scene.The fruits of his toil at the altar were carefully shared, in communion, received by lay people— deserving, well-prepared folk—in the form of bread alone.2 No such powerful statement, no such exacting set of procedures so heavily laden with meaning could fail to elicit criticism.The elaborate ritual and its meanings led to the creation of a related literature of advice and guidance, and also led to questions about its underlying logic. Why communion with the bread and not the wine? Why keep consecrated hosts for eight days—no less and no more? How often should a lay person receive communion? Why limit the frequency? In what follows, I discuss medieval materials that express the many questions raised by the unique design of the ritual and its space. I work not in linear fashion, but rather move to another stage in which the Mass and its space were designed, with the critique of the medieval Mass of the Roman system voiced over decades by Martin Luther (1483–1546).3 The contrasting visions of Christian life—that of Innocent III and that of Luther—offer a multitude of points for focus, but I concentrate on the ritual and performative aspects of the ritual of the Mass. I have suggested that the sacrament of the altar offers us a privileged vantage point onto the whole Christian cosmology and the world view related to it. I thus concentrate on it as an opening toward a better understanding of the ecclesiastical project, one that so crucially affected the images of orthodoxy and the expectations of normative Christian conduct throughout the ensuing medieval centuries, and beyond. In those vignettes of conversation that came to be collected by his associates and have become known as the Table Talk, Martin Luther opined: What signifies it to dispute and wrangle about the abominable idolatry of elevating the sacrament on high to show it to the people, which has no approbation of the fathers, and was introduced only to confirm the errors touching the worship thereof, as though bread and wine lost their substance,

T H E S PA C E O F T H E A LTA R

169

and retained only the form, smell, taste.This the papists call transubstantiation, and darken the right use of the sacrament.4

The elevation of the host epitomized for Luther all that was ill with the Roman Church. If the Eucharist stood at the head of the Roman sacramental system as the sacrament that every Christian must experience at least once a year while adhering to the belief in transubstantiation, it also bore the weight of the worst abuses and excesses and demonstrated the fundamental error of their ways. Moreover, at the heart of the sacrament of the altar there was an elevation, which crucially captured the error: it marked the moment at which it was alleged that the bread and the wine gave way to Christ’s body, leaving behind their accidents; it lacked all scriptural grounding, and it called forth an attitude that could only be seen as idolatrous. Elevation marked transubstantiation, the very specific doctrine that described the manner by which Christ became present in the sacrament. But this doctrinal claim lacked any support from the Fathers of the Church—in other words, it was an innovation, an invention. Luther was, of course, quite right in claiming the novelty of transubstantiation, and the invention of the elevation. Each was the product of that most fertile and creative period of medieval theological, liturgical, and canonistic reflection; the century that preceded Innocent III’s lifetime. For, it was probably around 1140 and in Paris that the terms transubstantio and transubstantiatur emerged, in the circle of Robert Pullen,5 while the substantive noun, transsubstantiatio was first officially used in the Lateran IV decree.6 These informed a new concept and a new ritual moment to match it. Transubstantiation became the preferred and necessary mode of thinking about the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist; it gave new meaning to the remaining materials of bread and wine, through which the priesthood and the laity came to partake in that body.7 If transubstantiation occurred at the altar through the enunciation of Christ’s own words, the change wrought was so dramatic, and so total—a change of substance—that this required a visible marking in the ritual chronotope. The significance of such knowledge was crucial to the pastoral impact of the Mass: as bread and wine were offerings at the altar, known intimately to members of the congregation who often offered bread by rote, but as Christ’s body this was the most hallowed substance, the most prayer-worthy object in Christian experience. The movement from one to the other and the avoidance of confusion between the two stages were crucial for the promotion of faith and the avoidance of error.8 It was such pastoral awareness that was exhibited by the group of leading Parisian theologians in the latter decades of the twelfth century around the question of the moment of the elevation.9 A heated discussion led by Peter

170

M I R I RU B I N

the Chanter and Peter of Poitiers examined the appropriate moment at which the conversion of bread and wine was completed. For, they asked, what if a priest suffered a seizure after the first consecration? What would then be the nature of the bread and wine? Were they both transformed? Was the bread in any meaningful sense just flesh without blood, an abhorrent thought? On the other hand, if the first blessing converted bread into Christ’s body, in what sense was the second part of the consecration, over the wine, necessary? And would its relegation to a secondary position not imply disrespect to Christ’s own words as recorded in scripture? The position that ensued and that was directed at the parishes was clearly that after the first consecration, of the bread, was fully pronounced, the host was Corpus Christi and as such was raised and shown to the congregation in the hands of the priest.The moment of the elevation was thus created, further enhanced by the symmetry of the second consecration and the gentle raising of the chalice of blood under the appearance of wine. It is perhaps to clarify this consensus and to disseminate it into parochial practice that Odo of Sully, bishop of Paris, ordained in his synodal statutes ca. 1200 that the elevation be made after “this is my body.”10 It was these Parisian doctors and the corresponding episcopal legislation, which led to an elevation after the first consecration that Luther saw as the source of deep error. In conjunction with the passage cited above on the elevation, the Table Talk pithily records Luther’s view that it is not in the hands of one bishop over others (meaning the pope) to ordain over the others.The doctrinal invention and the liturgical innovation that followed are thus unauthorized, an error. His deep rejection of the Roman interpretation of the Mass was expressed first in Latin in 1521 in his De abroganda missa private Martini Lutheri sententia, translated and widely circulated in 1522 as The Misuse of the Mass, a book of which Luther was especially proud.11 Luther knew the world of practice and celebration intimately. Indeed, in his Table Talk discussion of the sacrament he invokes the memory of fifteen years of celebration of the Roman Mass: Moreover, the words were to be spoken, without any abstraction of thought, in such a way that only he must hear them that spake them, and none of the people standing by. Such an honest friar was I fifteen years together; the Lord of his mercy forgive me.The elevation is utterly to be rejected by reason of the adoring thereof. Some churches, seeing we have put down the elevation, have followed us therein, which gives me great satisfaction.12

In attacking the elevation, Luther was targeting the vision that emerged in the papal circle and that was supported by much episcopal and university activity: a sacramental-sacerdotal order, which was to be provided to all


171

Christians through a network of parishes covering the whole of Christendom and even areas yet to be converted or lost to other religions. Central to this conception of a societas christiana was the role of the priesthood—celibate, ordained, and informed—through which grace, the only means of salvation was mediated.Luther also saw grace as the only remedy for sin,but,in his view, access to it was much more circumscribed. The sacramental-sacerdotal system privileged the ordained individual, just as it placed a ritual at the heart of Christian life and identity. It made the priest the prime ritual performer and, above all, the only purveyor of the Eucharist, the only channel toward that unique union with God, through the sharing in and fusion with His body. An imagined Christian society, societas christiana, in reality a collection of local communities associated by the vision of a shared heritage and framed through interlinked polities—came into being through the sacramental order and its implantation.The basic requirement for inclusion—for those born into it—was adherence, in the parish of birth or of adoption, to a civic year that culminated in communion at Easter. Some people found that they wanted more; and those who could afford to accumulated Masses, erected altars to favored saints, and sought opportunities for seeing the sacrament or participating in the Mass. But for most people annual communion was a rare occasion, and far more accessible was attendance at the Mass as an observer.13 At the heart of the Mass was its most poignant moment—the elevation—the subject of Luther’s attack. The elevation was clearly the priest’s great moment.To it were attached improving effects, such as lights and bells.At the elevation, the priest standing with his back to the congregation, raised a small white disk aloft, to be seen by all. It became the custom for all but the priest to kneel at this moment. He alone stood erect, arms stretched high.14 He then stretched his arms out to his sides, so that his body took the form of the cross.15 He alone was to touch the consecrated bread (it was offered straight into the mouths of those receiving communion), and he alone would be sipping from the chalice of consecrated wine,16 although a widespread custom favored the provision of unconsecrated wine at communion, for the sake of symmetry.17 Some priests even strove to improve on the basic formula. In his fascinating handbook for priests, the Secreta sacerdotum, the Parisian and then Viennese philosopher/theologian Henry of Langenstein (ca. 1325–97) reported a whole series of practices related to the Mass. Some priests made repeated elevations, to satisfy all, some made exaggerated gestures, others bent back so far while gazing at the elevated host that they were in danger of losing their balance and falling over.18 Clearly the ritual was a central and beneficial thing, for like all ritual it enacted and gave form to ideas and ethical teaching. But too much of it could be counterproductive, exposing the

172

M I R I RU B I N

fallibility and vulnerability of the all too frail humanity of the priest claimed to be handling God. It is the human frailty of the ritual performer that struck Luther so forcibly; he reported awe and trembling faced with the task of making God’s body.19 By making performance so central, an impressive ritual that enacted rather than memorialized the drama of salvation, the problem of the priest became acute. How close a scrutiny could most priests bear as their congregations watched them confect God at the altar? Theological-pastoral thinking tended to insist that if an ordained priest celebrated at the altar, uttering the words of consecration, then the effect was ensured, ex opere operato. That the elevation came to be seen as the essential moment of the Mass is evident from a profusion of sources. It was the moment dealt with most extensively by handbooks for the laity and prayers and recommended meditations, in Latin and in the vernacular, were attached to it. When artists were pushed to choose a suitable scene for the illumination of the initial “T” of Te igitur, the beginning of the canon of the Mass, it was very often one of elevation. Furthermore, when they pondered a suitable image for the illustration of the initial “C” of Cibavit eos, the Mass for Corpus Christi, many chose the elevation as the quintessence of the meaning of the eucharistic feast.20 Vernacular handbooks directed people to fall to their knees and try to view the consecrated host, while summoning to mind the crucifixion.Whereas reception of communion while not in a state of grace was a mortal sin, viewing the host could only do good. Benefits of viewing were expounded and popularized throughout the thirteenth century. The Parisian theologian William of Auxerre presented devotion to the consecrated host as a form of salvific participation in Christ’s body as part of a community.21 Vernacular ditties reminded the laity that on a day when they viewed the consecrated host they would not lose their sight or suffer sudden death.22 Thus for many, their experience of the Eucharist was a brief, though intense, moment.This problem was noted by several reformers, who criticized the avid and noisy, greedy taste for viewing the Eucharist, which made people jostle and push and peer, or even come into the church at this moment and for this purpose alone.23 This imbalance in the unfolding ritual is a mere instance of the greater one that was introduced into the Mass by the assertion of transubstantiation. This focus on a privileged moment of action had come, according to Catherine Pickstock, at the expense of the narrative of the Mass.24 The elevation was offered as the core of orthodox faith and eucharistic experience for most believers. It thus attracted attention from those intent on parody and mockery, from whose traditions Luther may be seen as partaking.The craftsman who drew and colored the image into the bas-de-page


173

of a Flemish Book of Hours ca. 1300 situated a monkey, elevating a sheep’s head at a washstand.25 There were seemingly loving renderings of a complex and demanding symbolic system that were actually parodies of the Mass, mostly in Latin, for clerical amusement.26 The voices that questioned authority and scripture became far more sustained, sometimes regionally dominant, and expressed a tension not dissimilar to Luther’s own vociferous and vehement critique. Luther valued above all the two sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist: in the Eucharist God’s presence offered the occasion for a dramatic encounter between God and the individual.27 That encounter was informed and represented in Christ’s words.The rituals that came to surround the sacraments were distracting inventions: “Pearls, mitres, red hats, tonsured heads, golden rings with big, broad, seals,”28 and it was wrong to present them as necessary: “We do not condemn the practice of conducting the sacrament with chasubles. . .but we do condemn the idea that they are necessary and indispensable.”29 Above all the attention to such external, man-made forms detracted from Christ’s own words. Luther summons Christians to Christ’s solemn promise: “This is my body.” He adds acerbically: “Even Paris, that mother and source of all error, cannot say otherwise than that these are words of promise. . . .To this promise belongs faith.”30 The ritual demands on the priest were clearly great, and although some of the privileges of that life came with them, the fragility of coupling a man trying to remain celibate and maintain ritual in what were often strained spaces and circumstances was considerable.Visitation records attest to a lack of provision of the basic tools and vessels, books and lights. The distance between the idealized design of the Mass and what was probably practiced in parishes must have been enormous.Yet the episcopal institutions continued to visit, report, and survey, and the theological-pastoral experts continued to produce guidebooks and handbooks to assist the priest in his difficult task. A dialectic of proximity/distance–inclusion/exclusion developed around the celebration of the Mass, its celebrant, and the space of the altar. Screens that were originally meant to allow a line of vision were erected to mark off the area between the chancel and the nave. But they soon became intricate affairs, often adorned and sculpted and hardly transparent at a mere glance.31 The screens were removed during the Reformation, and when Archbishop Laud restored them in England in the 1630s, it was seen as a major attack on Protestantism—an act of Catholic renewal.32 The resources, attention, and devotional energy directed at the erection of eucharistic shrines and memorials further deflected from the issue of faith that should have been at the heart of its experience.33

174

M I R I RU B I N

Most members of the clergy were very close to the laity, but they were observed and tested, appreciated, and sometimes despised. An anticlerical tone was evident in most late-medieval religious reform movements, which often came to be named “heresies” by ecclesiastical authorities. The questions that such groups addressed concerning clerical status almost always attached to the clerics’ role as performers of ritual. The words, as recorded and translated into Latin by the clerk serving the court of Bishop Alnwick of Norwich during the heresy trials of the 1420s convey some of these understandings. In 1427 John Skylly of Flixton believed that: “Also that any man living in true charity is a priest of God, and that no priest has greater authority to administer all sacraments in the church than does any lay, un-ordained person.”34 In the same year Margery Baxter was reported to have claimed about the Eucharist: “That which you say is the sacrament of the altar will never be my God by the grace of God, because such a sacrament was falsely and deceitfully ordained by priests in the Church in order to lead simple folk to idolatry, because that sacrament is nothing but material bread.”35 She also claimed that “any man or woman who holds views such as hers is a good priest.”36 John Burwell, servant to Thomas Mone, said that he had been taught by his brother Thomas that No priest has the authority to prepare (confect) Christ’s body in the sacrament of the altar; and that God created all priests, and that in each priest there is a head and eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, a tongue for speaking and all the parts of a man; and such a sacrament that such priests claim to be the true body of Christ has no eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, a mouth for speaking, neither hands for touching nor feet for walking for it is only a cake of bread made of wheaten flour.37

There was a strong strain of skepticism about the priest placed at the center of salvific sacramental action. Luther derided the obsession with clerical mediation: “The papists here also made it an unforgivable sin if anyone touches the sacrament except with anointed fingers or tongue, although it does not move them at all if a fly creeps over it, or if it is touched by the chalice or the corporal.”38 The extraordinary claim for ritual power left the clergy exposed. From another direction altogether, the rigorous communities of the Low Countries (which included a large number of laymen and women), whose devotions are known as devotio moderna, shunned ordination. It was as if ordination was tainting and detracted from the personal engagement in faith and selfscrutiny.They seemed to be afraid that the repetitious, preordained nature of the eucharistic ritual detracted from a clerical spiritual vocation. Eschewing ordination had a measure of purity, even charisma, attached to it.39 Devout


175

layfolk were also distanced from devotional dependence by the liturgical thinking that inspired, for example, the ideas of Wessel Gansfort (1419–99) and favored a more individual form of spiritual communion at the Mass.40 It was in these devotional and theological circles that Luther’s sensibility was nurtured.41 During this same period the papacy was attempting to resolve liturgical-performative issues in order to promote a rapprochement between the Roman and the Greek churches: the schism saw several of the divergences related to eucharistic practices.42 The operational aspects of the Eucharist also gave rise to the fear that faith was not sufficiently tested by it; indeed that it was displaced; it appeared to some that it should “not [be] received with chewing of teeth but by hearing with ears.”43 Early scholastic discussants of the Eucharist were fully aware of the issue of faith and sought to integrate its testing and confession into the very belief in transubstantiation. James of Vitry at the beginning of the thirteenth century and John Peckham at the end both saw the appearance of bread and wine as an occasion for people to test their faith, just as it was a means of avoiding abhorrent appearances of bleeding flesh that might make one think of the immolation of a human body.44 But for Luther what was at issue was the eliciting of personal faith, such as the faith that was tested in every believer as he or she came to accept the promise inherent in “this is my body.”45 Or in other words: “When Christ commanded us to do this in remembrance of him he wanted nothing more from us than that with the promise and pledge we should exercise ourselves daily in faith.”46 Seeing the sacrament as a sacrifice—indeed the very name of the eucharistic bread hostia meant the sacrificial offering—was fundamentally alien to a system of grace. In sacrifice, argued Luther, you offered something of yourself, your own, in expiation of God.The God of sacrifice is thus an angry and vengeful God who must be placated, by offerings, by works. It is in such an understanding that mercy loses its centrality, God’s goodness its vital place in animating faith: But he who wishes to reconcile God considers him to be angry and unmerciful. And whoever does this does not expect grace or mercy from him, but fears his judgement and sentence.Whoever is to go to the sacrament with profit must believe and firmly insist that he has a kind and gracious God who loves him so deeply that He has voluntarily given to him His greatest and dearest treasure.47

To accept God’s promise in his words as rendered in Scripture requires faith; it calls forth, nurtures, and tests faith; and thus allows the individual a role in a relationship with God. The claim that promise and faith are

176

M I R I RU B I N

bound together was made in the slightly earlier Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520). You have seen that the Mass is nothing else than the divine promise or testament of Christ, sealed with the sacrament of his body and blood. If this is true, you will understand that it cannot possibly be in any way a work; nobody can possibly do anything to it, neither can it be dealt with in any other way than by faith alone.48

The distancing from sacrificial ritual—and Luther likens the elevation to the raising of the remains of the animal offering in the Temple in Jerusalem—is not only a central point in his understanding of grace, of priesthood, and of faith; there is a polemical content that is little spoken of in these early texts, but none the less evident in them: the distancing from Jewish practice. This is, after all, exactly what Innocent III and thinkers whose ideas and discussion he disseminated had in mind when they placed the Eucharist at the heart of the experience of Christian identity. For eucharistic belief came to be the touchstone of Christian identity and the single most improbable and perplexing area of that belief for European Jews.49 Through powerful eucharistic narratives that developed in latemedieval Europe, these Jews were made to be seen as the quintessential enemies threatening the rituals that made God present in the midst of Christians.The Eucharist remains that type of touchstone for Luther as well, and his abhorrence of Jewish practice will animate the far more disturbing and destructive writing on Jews that he produced in his later life.50 What is missed in this sharp distinction between ritual and sacrifice is the whole area of creative appropriation, imagination, and irony that developed around the Mass and the Eucharist in Europe after 1215.51 Bossy and Duffy, for example, see in these vestiges of the very charity that Christianity sought to teach, the communion the sacrament was meant to impart.52 Yet the powerful strands of critique that we have found in Luther’s writings preexisted, echoing throughout the late-medieval centuries not only in the vernacular utterances that earned official condemnation, but at the center of scholastic discussion and in homiletic yearnings. Once placed at the heart of Christian thinking about Christ’s presence, the Eucharist powerfully structured Christian identities: the hates, fears polemics, persecution, as well as love and devotion, for centuries, some bloody centuries, to come.53

NOTES

Preface 1. As expounded in a classic essay by G.E.M. De Ste. Croix,“Suffragium: From Vote to Patronage,” British Journal of Sociology 5 (1954): 33–48. 2. See Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (1952; repr. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1967), pp. 64–67. 3. On the sacralization of secular activities of various kinds, see Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959; first publ. as L’homme et le sacré [1939], 2nd edn. [Paris: Gallimard, 1950],“to which have been added three Appendixes on Sex, Play, and War as related to the Sacred”); Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, eds., Secular Ritual (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977); and on the sacralization of sports in particular, see John J. Macaloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Macaloon, ed., Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984); Robert J. Higgs, God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); and Charles S. Prebish et al., Religion and Sport: The Meeting of Sacred and Profane, Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture 36 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993). 4. See Max Weber’s classic study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958; German ed. 1904–06); and for Weber’s theory of secularization (or “disenchantment”), developed in successive German editions of his major work on the sociology of religion, see his The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, Social Science Paperbacks 8 (London: Methuen, 1966; German editions, 1921–22, 1925, 1948).Weber’s theories about religion and the rise of secular modernity are given a postmodern spin in Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World:A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; first publ. as Le Désenchantement du Monde [Paris: Gallimard, 1985]). For Hans Blumenberg’s two major attempts to trace the intellectual origins of modern Western secular culture, see: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

178

NOTES

1983; first publ. as Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 2nd rev. edn., 3 vols. [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973, 1974, 1976]); and The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M.Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987; first publ. as Die Genesis der Kopernikanischen Welt [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975]). For the claim (congenial to Blumenberg’s principal contentions) that the rise of philosophical nominalism played a major role in closing the gap between the sacred and the secular in the dawning of “modernity,” see Heiko A. Oberman, “The Shape of Late Medieval Thought:The Birthpangs of the Modern Era,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Mediaeval and Renaissance Religion, Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A Oberman, eds., Studies in Mediaeval and Renaissance Thought 10 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), pp. 3–25. 5. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1883; repr. New York:AMS Press, 1970), p. viii. 6. See Richard Rorty,“Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” Common Knowledge 3 (1994): 1–6; and Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York:Anchor Books, 1994). For a “postmodern” theologian’s defense of religion in the public sphere, realized through some form of “liberation theology,” see Harvey Cox, Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), updating and correcting Cox’s The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, revised edn. (1965; New York: Macmillan, 1966). For a cogent analysis of the complexity of contemporary relations between the religious and secular spheres, see José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 7. Karl F. Morrison, Holiness and Politics in Early Medieval Thought (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985), p. vii.

Introduction Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: Issues and Approaches 1. The definition of terms in this paragraph draws on Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 1–31; and John Bossy, “Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community, and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History 10 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1973), p. 129 [129–43]. On terminology in the field of sacred/secular studies (with special reference to Ancient Greece), see also Jan N. Bremmer, “ ‘Religion,’ ‘Ritual,’ and the Opposition ‘Sacred’ vs. ‘Profane,’ ” in Ansichten Griechischer Rituale: Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert, ed. Fritz Graf (Stuttgart: B.G.Teubner, 1998), pp. 9–32. 2. See the relevant entries in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, ed. G. Botterweck et al., 10 vols. (in progress) (Stuttgart:W. Kohlhammer, 1973), vol. 6, ed. George W.Anderson et al., 1989), cols. 1179–1204.

NOTES

179

3. The angelic hymn in Isaiah 6.3 is sometimes referred to by its early Christian Greek name, the ‘Trisagion.’ In postbiblical Hebrew the verse came to be known as the Kedushah and achieved prominence in the Jewish liturgy (see the unsigned article in Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., Encyclopedia Judaica, 16 vols. [Jerusalem: Keter, 1972]), 10:875. In Liturgical Latin the Trisagion was called the Sanctus (see Adrian Fortescue, “Sanctus,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, 16 vols. (1912; repr. New York: The Encyclopedia Press, 1913, 13:432–34). On the Trisagion as credo, prayer, and talisman in early Judaism and Christianity, see David Martinez, P. Michigan XIX. Baptized for Our Sakes: A Leather Trisagion from Egypt (P. Mich. 799), Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 120 (Stuttgart: B.G.Teubner, 1999). On the use of the term ‘Trisagion’ with reference to a different hymn in the Greek liturgy (the so-called Agios O Theos), see H.T. Henry, “Agios O Theos [O Holy God],” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1:211–12. 4. See Owen C.Whitehouse, “Holiness (Semitic),” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings et al., 13 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913–27), 6:cols. 751–59; and Baruch A. Levine, “The Language of Holiness: Perceptions of the Sacred in the Hebrew Bible,” in Backgrounds for the Bible, ed. Michael Patrick O’Connor and David Noel Freedman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987), pp. 241–55. 5. On the Holiness Code, see discussion and references in Levine, “The Language of Holiness,” in Backgrounds for the Bible, pp. 219–20. 6. See Baruch A. Levine, “Biblical Concepts of Holiness,” in Etz Hayim:Torah and Commentary, ed. David L. Lieber et al. (New York: Jewish Publication Society [for The Rabbinical Assembly], 2001), p. 1441 [1440–41]. 7. See the unsigned articles on “Holiness” and “Holy Spirit,” in Illustrated Dictionary and Concordance of the Bible, gen. ed. Geoffrey Wigoder ( Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Publishing House, 1986), pp. 451–53; and R.H. Coats, “Holiness (New Testament and Christian),” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 6:cols. 743–50. 8. See “Holy Spirit,” in Illustrated Dictionary, p. 453. 9. On Greek and Roman conceptions of the sacred, see, respectively, Jan N. Bremmer, Greek Religion, New Surveys in the Classics 24 (1994; repr. with Addenda, Oxford: Oxford University Press [for the Classical Association], 1999); and Jorg Rüpke, Die Religion der Römer: ein Einführung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001). 10. Ramsay Macmullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (1981; repr. with corrections, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 34–42. 11. Macmullen, Paganism, p. 43. 12. Macmullen, Paganism, pp. 105–06. 13. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic, and Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, cited in the “Preface,” p. 177, n. 4, above. 14. Gauchet, Disenchantment, p. 77. 15. See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” Representations 1 (1983): 1–25.

180

NOTES

16. See Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 141. 17. Examples are cited by Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 165–66. 18. R.A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (1990; repr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 16. 19. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, p. 17. 20. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, p. 228. 21. R.A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 58. 22. See E.K. Rand, Founders of the Middle Ages (1928; repr. New York: Dover, 1957), pp. 3–68, 102–34; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953; first publ. as Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter [Bern: A. Francke, 1948]), pp. 72–74, 446–48; D.W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 340–42; and, more recently, Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 22–23, 205–06. 23. Jerome, “Letter 70 (to Magnus),” in Epistulae, ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1910), 1:702; trans. W.H. Fremantle, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 14 vols. (1892; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, n.d.), 6:149. 24. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 2.40.60–61, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 124–27. 25. On desecularization in Late Antiquity, see R.A. Markus, “The Sacred and the Secular: From Augustine to Gregory the Great,” ch. 2, in Markus’s collected essays, Sacred and Secular: Studies on Augustine and Latin Christianity, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS465 (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Variorum, 1994; repr. from Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 36 [1985]: 84–96). 26. Augustine, De civitate Dei xv.8.1; quoted in Markus, “The Sacred and the Secular,” in Sacred and Secular, p. 84. 27. Markus,“The Sacred and the Secular,” p. 87. 28. Markus,“The Sacred and the Secular,” p. 96. 29. As demonstrated by Peter Brown in Brown, Cult of the Saints; R.A. Markus, “How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 257–71; Peter W.L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places?: Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 30. Markus,“How on Earth,” p. 259. 31. Cited by Markus,“How on Earth,” p. 263. 32. Markus,“How on Earth,” p. 259, n. 8, citing Eusebius, Dem. ev. 3.2.10. 33. Markus, “How on Earth,” p. 259, n. 9, citing Eusebius, Dem ev. 4.12.4 and 10.8.64; and Walker, Holy City, Holy Places?, p. 69. 34. Markus,“How on Earth,” p. 259, n. 11, citing Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. 13.22.

NOTES

181

35. Markus, “How on Earth,” p. 261. Joan E.Taylor sums up the first Christian emperor’s role in fostering the rise of holy places thus:“Constantine brought to Christianity a pagan notion of the sanctity of things and places” (Christians and the Holy Places: the Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], p. 308). 36. Markus,“How on Earth,” pp. 260–61. 37. Patrick J. Geary, “The Ninth-Century Relic Trade,” in Religion and the People: 800–1700, ed. James Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 18 [8–18, 289–91]. 38. Geary,“Relic Trade,” in Religion and the People, p. 18. 39. Geary,“Relic Trade,” p. 19. 40. In addition to the studies by Peter Brown cited in p. 179, n. 15, above, see hisThe Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Caroline Bynum’s Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Holy Feast and Holy Fast:The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,The New Historicism, Studies in Cultural Poetics 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, Lectures on the History of Religions, n.s. 15 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001); and Bynum, Steven Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). On medieval pilgrimage, see Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975);Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); and Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck and Gerda Möhler, eds., Wallfahrt kennt keine Grenzen: Themen zu einer Ausstellung des Bayerischen Nationalmuseums und der Adalbert Stifter Vereins (Munich: Schnell and Steiner, 1984). 41. As noted in Markus,“How on Earth,” pp. 264–67 (summarizing arguments in Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]; and Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 2nd edn. [London: Dacre Press, 1945]). 42. Markus,“How on Earth,” p. 268. 43. For the quotations in this paragraph, see Markus,“How on Earth,” pp. 270–71. 44. R.C. Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa, 1981; New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), p. 41 [40–60]. On medieval death rituals, see also

182

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

NOTES

Jane H.M. Taylor, ed., Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 1983 Manchester Colloquium,Vinaver Studies in French 1 (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984); and Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death:The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Brown, The Cult of the Saints, p. 3. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, p. 4. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, p. 5. As Thomas F. Mathews writes: “Like his pagan predecessors, the devout Christian trembled in awe of the Divine presence that looked out through the eyes of the icon, while he offered flowers and candles in veneration” (The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, rev. edn. 1993; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 190). Aviad Kleinberg writes: “The most important ‘symptom’ of sainthood, one that the historian can use, is the treatment of the saint as a source of supernatural spiritual power” (Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 8). Nevertheless, the notion that a saint is not merely a means of access to miraculous power but also a model for behavior can be traced back to Late Antiquity (see Brown,“Saint as Exemplar”).Tracing related cultural phenomena, Jacques Le Goff sums up the late-medieval move away from miracles as follows:“After the thirteenth century the marvelous seems to me to gain ground on the miraculous and the magical. Miracles become rarer, and magic is hotly contested. Does it make sense to speak of a ‘secularization’ of the supernatural?” (“Introduction,” in his The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988]; first. publ. as L’imaginaire médiéval [Paris: Gallimard, 1985]), p. 12 [1–17]. The notion that an earlier Christian belief in saints-as-intercessors gave way to a later belief in saints-as-exemplars—with the shift occurring around the year 1150—was maintained by André Vauchez (in his Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997]; first publ. as La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age [Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1988]); but Vauchez later modified his position (see his “Saints admirables et saints imitables: Les Fonctions de l’hagiographie ont-elles changé aux derniers siècles du moyen âge?” in his Les Fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (IIIe–XIIIe siècle) [Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1991], pp. 161–72. On saints’ images, “idolatry,” and iconoclasm in the West, see David Freedberg’s two important studies: Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen: G. Schwartz, 1985); and The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. pp. 378–428, 498–503; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image:An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; first publ. as L’image interdite: une histoire intellectuelle de l’iconoclasme [(Paris): Librairie

NOTES

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

183

Arthème Fayard, 1994]). On the pervasive but conflicted late-medieval manifestations of image-worship (with special attention to the Lollards and their opponents), see Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). See Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927; Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1972); Marie-Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; first publ. as La Théologie au XIIe siècle [Paris: J. Vrin, 1957]); the essays by various hands in Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, with Carol D. Lanham, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and R.N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). See Chenu, Nature (as in n. 50, above), p. 65; and André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. with an Introduction by Daniel J. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993; first publ. as Les Laïcs au moyen âge: pratiques et expériences religieuses [Paris: Cerf, 1987], pp. 15–17). Jacques Le Goff, “The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage,” in his Time,Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans.Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; first publ. as Pour un autre Moyen Age:Temps,Travail, et culture en Occident, 18 essais [Paris: Gallimard, 1977]), pp. 237–87, 354–67. Le Goff,“Symbolic Ritual,” in Time,Work and Culture, pp. 242–43. On the blending of sacred and secular motifs in medieval romance, see Derek Pearsall,“John Capgrave’s Life of St. Katharine and Popular Romance Style,” Mediaevalia et Humanistica 6 (1975): 121–37; and Jocelyn WoganBrowne, “ ‘Bet. . .to. . .Read on Holy Seyntes Lyves. . .’: Romance and Hagiography Again,” in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol Meale (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1994), pp. 83–97. On the way in which “medieval poets expertly and consciously manipulated erotic, secular, and sacred motifs, conventions, and registers,” see Gail Sigal, Erotic Dawn-Songs of the Middle Ages:Voicing the Lyric Lady (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996; quotation on p. 10). On the appropriation of sacred motifs in the secular poetry of Chaucer and some of his contemporaries, see Lawrence Besserman, Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Texts by these and other important churchmen are discussed in Freedberg, Power of Images, pp. 161–91 and 469–74. On the pervasive but conflicted late-medieval manifestations of image-worship (with special attention to the Lollards and their opponents), see Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art. See Jœrgen Andersen, The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture in the British Isles (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1977); Edward Lucie-Smith, Sexuality in Western Art, rev. edn. (1972; London: Thames and

184

57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

NOTES

Hudson, 1991); and Alexandre Leupin, Phallophanies: La Chair et le Sacré (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2000). Leupin, Phallophanies, p. 41. For images of Christ with an erection, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd edn., revised and expanded (1983; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); but for a different interpretation of the pictures Steinberg adduces, see Caroline Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages:A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 399–439. More recently, however, Steinberg’s theory regarding the phallically marked sexuality of Christ has found support in the work of Leupin (as in n. 56), who has discerned additional “phantom” images of Christ’s erect phallus in Christian art from the second century CE, and into the modern period. See Margaret R. Miles, “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 193–208; Camille, Gothic Idol (as in p. 182, n. 49, above), pp. 220–41; and Klaus Schreiner, “ ‘Deine Bruste sind süsser als Wein’: Ikonographie, religiöse Bedeutung und soziale Funktion eines Mariensymbols,” in Pictura Quasi Fictura: Die Rolle des Bildes in der Erforschung von Alltag und Sachkultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Forschungen des Instituts für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Diskussionen und Materialien 1 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), pp. 87–127. Quoted in Freedberg, Power of Images, p. 361, citing Irma A. Richter, ed. and trans., Paragone:A Comparison of the Arts by Leonardo da Vinci (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 65 (Codex Urbinas 1270,Trat. 25). (I have restored several words omitted in Freedberg’s quotation from Richter.) On the veneration of Christ and Mary from 800–1200, see Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). On late-medieval “affective piety” focused on the sufferings of Christ and Mary, see Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages; and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). On the popularity of “affective piety” in England in particular, see Andrew D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury 1250–1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, ca.1400–ca.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Ann Clark Bartlett and Thomas Bestul, eds., Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) (a collection of translated “affective” texts with commentary).

NOTES

185

62. See Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); and Henry Ansgar Kelly,“Sacraments, Sacramentals, and Lay Piety in Chaucer’s England,” Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 5–22. 63. See Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 221–37 (trans. Anna Cancogne, from La casa dell’eternità; [Milan: Garzanti, 1987]); and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 64. See Kelly, “Sacraments”; Duffy, Stripping, pp. 91–130; and Rubin, Corpus Christi. On “sacramentals, see R.W. Scribner,“Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-Industrial German Society,” in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), pp. 1–16 (repr. from Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. K. von Greyerz [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984], pp. 17–33); and R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, ca. 1215– ca. 1515 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 183–85. 65. On the spread of ideas such as these in the later Middle Ages, see Vauchez, Laity, pp. 23–26. 66. See Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages:The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent ca. 1250–ca. 1450, 2 vols. (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 494–605; and (more recently, and definitively) Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation:Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), especially ch. 6, “The Ideology of Reformation: (i) Theology,” pp. 278–313 and ch. 7, “The Ideology of Reformation: (ii) Ecclesiology,” pp. 314–58. On Lollard pedagogy as a challenge to the hegemony of the clerical establishment, see Rita Copeland, “Childhood, Pedagogy, and the Literal Sense: From Late Antiquity to the Lollard Heretical Classroom,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 125–56. 67. See (in addition to references in nn. 61–66, above) Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Réalité matérielle et réalité symbolique:A propos du soulier du Christ,” in Pictura Quasi Fictura (as in p. 184, n. 59, above), pp. 73–85. 68. Thus David Aers and Lynn Staley (in The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996]) stress the vernacular religious devotions of late-medieval English men and (especially) women, and criticize an alleged bias in favor of an idealized Christian orthodoxy in the work of Bynum and Duffy (cited in p. 181, n. 40 and p. 184, n. 61, above), and others. 69. Trexler,“Reverence and Profanity in the Study of Early Modern Religion,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. von Greyerz (as in n. 64, above), p. 259 [245–71]. 70. Trexler,“Reverence,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, pp. 258–59.

186

NOTES

Chapter 1 The Imitation of Hagiographic Formulas in Occitanian Vidas (Lives of the Troubadours) This paper is part of a research project conducted on the “Sacred and Secular in Medieval English and Medieval French Poetry” supported by a three-year grant awarded by the Israel Science Foundation (2002–05). 1. The most complete edition of these texts is that of Jean Boutière,Alexander H. Schutz, and Irénée-Marcel Cluzel, eds., Biographies des troubadours:Textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris:A. G. Nizet, 1964). 2. See William E. Burgwinkle, Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo Corpus (New York: Garland, 1997) and his “Chansonniers as Books,” in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. S. Gaunt and S. Kay (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 246–62. 3. Analogies between the vidas and the hagiographic genre have already been noted by Saverio Guida,“Vita monastica e vidas trobadoriche,” in Religione e letterature romanze (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1995), pp. 105, 127–28. Guida focuses primarily on those biographical sketches in which the troubadour is said to have retired from the world. It is in this context that he alludes to the didactic and paradigmatic function of the vidas. In the present study, I would like to indulge in a more detailed and more factual consideration of the analogies between the vidas and hagiography. 4. See Giulia Barone, “Legenda aurea,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters, ed. RobertHenri Bautier, 9 vols. (Munich: Artemis and Winkler/LexMa: 1980–98), vol. 5, p. 1796. 5. See Alexander H. Schutz, “Were the Vidas and Razos Recited?” Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 565–70. 6. For a synthetic presentation of the first hagiographies in Gallo-Romance, see William-Dennis Elcock, The Romance Languages, 2nd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 357–60, 376–78, 384–94, 411–14. 7. See George Wolf and Roy Rosenstein, The Poetry of Cercamon and Jaufre Rudel (New York: Garland, 1983), p. 95. 8. See Boutière, Schutz, and Cluzel, Biographies des troubadours, pp. 21–28, 68–69. For an interpretation of the retirement of these troubadours from the world, see Guida,“Vita monastica e vidas trobadoriche,” in Religione e letterature romanze, pp. 130–36. 9. The pragmatic status of the quotation has been studied in Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 87–92. 10. See Boutière, Schutz, and Cluzel, Biographies des troubadours, pp. 10–11; Ruth E. Harvey, The Troubadour Marcabru and Love (London:Westfield Publications in Medieval Studies, 1989), p. 15. 11. See Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 70–75; Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love:Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 32–36; Bernard Cerquiglini, La parole médiévale (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), pp. 117–23; Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 43–69.

NOTES

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

187

See Schutz,“Were the Vidas and Razos Recited?” pp. 565–70. See Boutière, Schutz, and Cluzel, Biographies des troubadours, p. ix. See Cerquiglini, La parole médiévale, pp. 37–77. See Cyril Aslanov,“Récit historique et discours poétique dans l’Estoire de la guerre des Ibelins contre les Impériaux de Philippe de Novare,” Le Moyen Age 103 (1997): 67–81. See Burgwinkle, “The Chansonniers as Books,” in The Troubadours, pp. 253–54. See Gerald A. Bond, The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Aquitaine (New York: Garland, 1982), p. 15. Matt. 2.18. See, e.g., Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York:Vintage, 1991), pp. 112–13. Dante Alighieri,“Inferno,” La divina commedia XXVIII. See Boutière, Schutz, and Cluzel, Biographies des troubadours, pp. 65–67. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (1–95) (New York: New Directions, 1934), Cantos 6 and 36, pp. 21–23, 30. François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand, “Génie du christianisme,” in Œuvres complètes, 11 vols. (Brussels: A. Deros, 1852), BK. 1, Part IV, chap. 3, 1:334–35. See Hendrik Van der Werf, “The Music of Jaufre Rudel,” in The Poetry of Cercamon and Jaufre Rudel, pp. 178–81. See Laura Minervini,“La poesia ispano-araba e la tradizione lirica romanza,” in Lo spazio letterario del medioevo, 3. Le culture circostanti, ed. Mario Capaldo, Franco Cardini, Guglielmo Cavallo and Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2003), 2:710.

Chapter 2 “Quid Hinieldus Cum Christo?”: The Secular Expression of the Sacred in Old and Middle English Lyrics 1. Donald A. Bullough, “What Has Ingeld to Do with Lindisfarne?” AngloSaxon England 22 (1993): 122 [93–125]. 2. Quoted from p. 124 of Bullough’s English version of Alcuin’s letter to Bishop Speratus in Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993): 122–25. 3. Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 7.9: quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? ed. R.F. Refoulé, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), p. 193, lines 32–33. 4. Jerome, Epistulae, 22.29: quid facit cum psalterio Horatius? cum evangeliis Maro? cum apostolo Cicero?, ed. I. Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 54, 2nd edn. (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1996), p. 189, lines 2–3. 5. See S. Benko,“Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II, 31.1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), pp. 646–705, esp. 670. Lactantius (ca. 300 CE) is the first Christian author to

188

NOTES

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

give a Christian Messianic interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue (Divinae Institutiones, 5.5 and 7.24). See also Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 96–97, 154–57, 164. See the copy of the letter sent by Pope Gregory to Abbot Mellitus on his departure for Britain [601 CE] in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, pp. 91–93 in the English translation, Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by Leo Sherley-Price, revised by R.E. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). The dreamer speaks of the cross as min mundbyrd, “my protection”—see M. Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), p. 130. MEL, 67, lines 1–4. In references here, MEL and LMELC are abbreviations for Medieval English Lyrics, 1200–1400 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995) and Late Medieval English Lyrics and Carols, 1400–1530 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), both editions by Thomas G. Duncan. MEL, 70. MEL, 85. MEL, 88, lines 9–22. LMELC, 70. See D. Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London:Thames, 1972), Illustration 2, opposite p. 23, and Rosemary Woolf, English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), Plate I, opposite p. 186. LMELC, 71, lines 16–17. LMELC, 71, lines 20–24. LMELC, 72, lines 33–35. A translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi into English is to be found in Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961; repr. 1977), referred to here as Meditations. For this passage, see Meditations, pp. 69–71. LMELC, 72, lines 43–49. In Meditations, pp. 104–05, Christ on His journey from Nazareth to His baptism in the river Jordan is described as traveling barefoot “asking for alms along the way for love of poverty, since He did not carry money” (Meditations, p. 106). Psalm 103.13. Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood, lines 90–94. [For the reader’s convenience, in the transcriptions of Old and Middle English here and in other essays, modern usage has been followed for u, v, and w; but ash, thorn, yogh, and eth have been retained, in order to forestall a false sense of total familiarity. LB]. “Symle sigores full, sancta maria,” Advent Lyric IV, line 18 in J.J. Campbell, ed., The Advent Lyrics of The Exeter Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 53. MEL, 80, lines 5–8.

NOTES

189

23. Charlotte D’Evelyn, ed., Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, EETS o.s. 158 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 151–60. 24. MEL, 83, lines 7–12. 25. MEL, 81, lines 8–17. 26. MEL, 81, lines 28–32. 27. LMELC, 67, lines 25–28. 28. MEL, 91, lines 1–3. 29. MEL, 91, lines 4–6. 30. MEL, 91, lines 61–66. 31. LMELC, 75. 32. LMELC, 75, lines 17–24. 33. LMELC, 54, lines 1–8. 34. Gray, Themes and Images, p. 64. 35. Dante, Inferno II.56. 36. See Gray, Themes and Images, p. 64, where this translation is given of the Latin et bene dicit, quia sermo divinus est suavis et planus, non altus et superbus sicut sermo Virgilii et poetarum, quoted in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis,The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated from German by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 155. 37. CT, IV, 16–18. 38. MEL, 1, lines 1–10. 39. MEL, 76.The lines quoted are 5–8, 13–16, 21–24, and 35. 40. LMELC, 51, lines 1–3. 41. LMELC, 51, lines 15–21. 42. MEL, 69, lines 1–10. 43. MEL, 69, lines 11–14. So also MEL, 105, another lyric that in its first stanza has the conventional opening of the secular chanson d’aventure but, in the course of its second stanza, turns into a poem on the five joys of the Virgin. 44. MEL, 69, lines 41–44. 45. Rosemary Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 13 (1962), 1 [1–16]. 46. MEL, 71. 47. MEL, 73. 48. MEL, 73, lines 25–32, 41–56. 49. See Woolf, The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight, pp. 12–13. 50. “The most kyd knyghtes under Krystes selven,” Gawain and the Green Knight, line 51. 51. Robert de Gretham composed the Anglo-Norman Miroir, a thirteenthcentury sermon cycle translated into English in the later fourteenth century. See Thomas G. Duncan, “The Middle English Translator of Robert de Gretham’s Anglo-Norman Miroir,” in The Medieval Translator, ed. R. Ellis, R. Tixier, and B. Weitemeier (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 211–31, and Thomas G. Duncan and Margaret Connolly, eds., The Middle English Mirror: Sermons from Advent to Sexagesima (Heidelberg: Middle English Texts, 2003).

190

NOTES

52. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 400 [399–439]. 53. A reproduction of this painting may be found on p. 401 in Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages.” 54. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother, in Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) and “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages.” 55. MEL, 73, lines 107–12. 56. William of St.Thierry, Exposé sur le Cantique des Cantiques, ed. J. M. Déchanet, Sources Chrétiennes, 82, série des textes monastiques d’Occident, 8 (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1962), chapter 38, pp. 122–24, quoted by Bynum in “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” p. 414.

Chapter 3 Reading Radical Metonymy in Pearl 1. See Terrence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 77–80. 2. Metonymies thus may be thought of as elaborated macro instances of what happens at a microlevel when an individual word signifies, where a word stands in for what it signifies. 3. For further commentary on metonymy and its classic definition, see John R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 122–30. 4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 60 vols. (Blackfriars edn., London/ New York: Eyre and Spottiswoode/McGraw-Hill, 1964–76), 1: 40–41 (I.I.10 ad 3); for further discussion, see Ian Bishop, Pearl in its Setting (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), p. 53. On the exegesis of Aquinas, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 300–06. 5. Alastair J. Minnis and A.B. Scott, with David Wallace, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism ca. 1100–ca. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 205. Metonymy, however, was already a known term; compare Thomas de Chobham’s use of it ca. 1200 in his Summa de arte praedicandi, ed. F. Morenzoni, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 82 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), p. 6. 6. For a standard introduction to the field, see Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’écriture, 2 vols. in 4 parts (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64).The increasing focus on the sensus litteralis as the fundamental sense is noted in Gilbert Dahan, L’exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval (Paris: Éditions de Cerf, 1999), pp. 436–37. 7. As did William of Nottingham, e.g., or Nicholas of Lyre. Lyre was himself heavily influenced by Aquinas in terms of exegetical practice. 8. And why not, since, let alone how the theologians might prepare to reckon with it, metonymy’s investment in the figurative made it a favored trope of the poets, whose domain figurative language was preeminently recognized

NOTES

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

191

to be and who had similarly elaborated a large body of new and inherited theoretical writing about rhetorical and poetic uses of language.Also, it might be noted that figurative language was also being considered particularly germane to the ars poetica. Bishop, Pearl in its Setting, is one of the few outstanding exceptions. See W. Vantuono, ed., The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus Edition, 2 vols. (New York/London: Garland, 1984), 1:xxiv–v, for a survey of critical opinion on whether the poet was clerical or lay.The majority verdict, however, is that he was clerical: see Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1985), p. 1; and more recently, Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian,” in A Companion to The Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and J. Gibson,Arthurian Studies 38 (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1997), p. 299. Again Bishop, Pearl in its Setting, is a shining exception. Although as I argue here, its influence on his style is pervasive. Bishop, Pearl in its Setting, pp. 55–58. By the “method of the theologians’ ” he meant professional theological exegesis. E.V. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 7, line 185. All references to Pearl are to this edition; however, in all citations I have changed the Middle English letters yogh and thorn to their modern equivalents, as appropriate. And see H.L. Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 410, n. 159. Thomas H. Bestul, ed., Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2000), p. 176, line 1129. Bishop, Pearl in its Setting, pp. 55–58. The fourfold analysis of “Jerusalem” goes back as far as St. John Cassian (ca. 360–435); see de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 1:190–98.The fourfold Jerusalem exegesis appears in several medieval texts (to cite but two: Innocent III uses it in his sermon for the second Sunday in Advent; see Patrologia Latina 217, col. 330A and following; and so does William de Montibus in his collection of distinctiones; see Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 419, fol. 48v col. b). The traditional fourfold Jerusalem exegesis becomes the subject of song in at least one late-twelfth- or early thirteenth-century song, the conductus Jerusalem accipitur (recorded in 1998 by Gothic Voices, Jerusalem: Vision of Peace, Hyperion CDA67039). On distinctiones, see Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse,“Biblical Distinctions in the Thirteenth Century,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 41 (1974): 27–37. For example, the Dominican friar Nicolas de Gorran, in a distinctio on “Agnus,” includes several Bible lemmata concerning “Agnus” similarly occurring in Pearl. He says “Agnus dicitur Christus,” and distinguishes in a lamb the qualities of being “mitis, utilis, nobilis, terribilis, et liberalis.” The quality of being “mitis” includes the Isa. 53.7 lemma used in Pearl;“nobilis” the Rev. 14.1 lemma; and “liberalis” lemmata from Rev. 7 and Rev. 21.

192

NOTES

21. I note the appearance of the three Lambs serially in a homily of Rabanus Maurus (see Patrologia Latina 110, cols. 159A–B). And for an example of a continued readership for Rabanus in the fourteenth century, compare Nicholas de Aquevilla, who cites Rabanus in the course of his sermon for the Holy Innocents (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud lat. 94, fols. 153 col. b–154 col. b; see fol. 154 col. b).This sermon, incidentally, provides an interesting analogue for one of the central discussions of Pearl, the question of who merits the reward of the Kingdom of Heaven (see further Alan J. Fletcher, “Pearl and the Limits of History,” in The Key of All Good Remembrance: Essays in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature in Honour of John Scattergood, ed. Anne Marie D’Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005], forthcoming). 22. Conceivably he generated the exegesis himself by using a concordance (on late-medieval Bible concordances, see Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “The Verbal Concordance to the Scriptures,” Archivum Fratrum Predicatorum 44 [1974]: 5–30). The association of the Pearl-author with the culture of preaching has been noted by several critics, especially in connection with Cleanness and Patience. Different uses of the figure of the Lamb in a sermon collected and preached by the early fifteenth century Franciscan friar Nicholas Phillip are set out in Spencer, English Preaching, pp. 335–41. See also Bishop, Pearl in its Setting, p. 56. 23. And after all, vernacular biblical exegesis is what the poem substantially purveys elsewhere in the Pearl-maiden’s exposition of the parable of the Vineyard. 24. For example, the dream vision, the lapidary, and the romance are but three of the literary genres with which Pearl connects. 25. In an important article, David Aers, “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl,” Speculum 68 (1993): 54–73, argues (p. 72) that the Pearl-author makes “the strange claim that it is ‘ful ethe’ [very easy] to be reconciled to God as a good person,” and this without reference to the Church’s mediation of grace, a process traditionally seen as central in human redemption. Developing this point further in his essay “Christianity for Courtly Subjects” in A Companion to The Gawain-Poet, pp. 100–01, he characterizes the Pearlauthor (p. 101) as “Pelagius redivivus,” i.e., as Pelagius reborn. But this attribution of Pelagianism seems to me problematic. First, the Pearl-author has been misquoted as saying “Hit is ful ethe to be god Krystyin” (p. 101), whereas in fact he says “Hit is ful ethe to the god Krystyin,” which alters the sense completely. It is not that the Pearl-author is saying that it is easy to please God; rather, he is saying that it is easy for the good Christian to please God; but he does not imply that it is easy to be a good Christian; quite the contrary, as the poem demonstrates. It seems possible that the line “Hit is ful ethe to the god Krystyin” owes some of its inspiration to Matt. 11.30, “Iugum enim meum suave est, et onus meum leve.”The conclusion that the Pearl-author was a Pelagian thus seems difficult to sustain. 26. Bishop, Pearl in its Setting, p. 40. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (London: Arnold, 1978), p. 35, note the

NOTES

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

193

poem’s similarity with debate, while Ad Putter, An Introduction to the GawainPoet (London and New York: Longman, 1996), pp. 161–62, minimizes that similarity. Though quasi-metonymy is based on unresolvable tension, or perhaps this might alternatively be called a harmonious polysemy. Most nearly John 12.24–25: “nisi granum frumenti cadens in terram, mortuum fuerit, ipsum solum manet: si autem mortuum fuerit, multum fructum affert” [unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, / Itself remaineth alone. But if it die it bringeth forth much fruit]; but also compare 1 Cor. 15.35–38. Might we say, indeed, his coercion of meaning, for his pearl image releases ancient meanings that escape his absolute control. This side-taking could be a sign of the author’s profound orthodoxy; also, it might be noted that the narrating jeweler is guilty of this sort of literalism elsewhere in the poem, when he cannot get past the sensus litteralis of Jerusalem, as Bishop, in Pearl in its Setting, has noted. Edward Wilson, The Gawain-Poet (Leiden: Brill, 1976), p. 31, is quite right to observe that “The girl’s use of the rose image. . .is primarily drawn from homiletic discourses on the theme of transience,” yet his reasons deserve fuller substantiation; for a group of late-medieval sermons in which the rose features as an emblem of the stages of the life of man, see Alan J. Fletcher, “Variations on a Theme by Robert Holcot: Lessons for Late-Medieval English Preaching from the Castle of Prudence,” Mediæval Studies 66 (2004): 27–98. As indeed most critics read it, although Wilson, The Gawain-Poet, p. 9, swims against the tide in trying to pin down a dead-end sensus litteralis of a different sort, where in his reading, pearl pearl and nothing else. Putter, Introduction to the Gawain-Poet, pp. 147–98, contains useful commentary on heaven as the great defamiliarizer. But one can make a similar case for the author, too, being in turn figured into meaning by his very act of writing.The self-reflexive power of the text upon its author is traced further later on. It is also interesting to compare with this a possible analogue, the egalitarian community of the delectable orchard described in the letter of 1395 by Philippe de Mézières to Richard II (Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II, ed. G.W. Coopland [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975], pp. 127–28). I use the word “hatches” here in a twin sense in deliberate mimicry of Pearl’s characteristic way with words, both as meaning “brings forth into life” and as meaning “striates.” Although the poem ends in the hope of his incorporation within such a network of figurations, since he now lives in prospect of becoming a precious pearl himself. For example, in Pearl we are aware of Christ’s most humanly vulnerable moments that are often exploited to the full elsewhere in affective spirituality, rather obliquely, as, e.g., in the allusions to the Passion in lines 646–52.

194

NOTES

39. Critics have often spoken of Pearl’s puns and word play (e.g., Wilson, The Gawain-Poet, pp. 30–45), but my task here is to observe the hermeneutic culture that I believe powers them. Putter, Introduction to the Gawain-Poet, pp. 176–77, catches in modern terms something for which we can find medieval ones and puts his finger on an important principle of the poem’s motivation: “What I have said about puns applies to the Pearl-maiden’s accommodating revelations as a whole.They baffle the Dreamer, not because he is literal-minded—for that would imply that other levels of meaning were visible to him—but because he does not ‘notice their aspect.’ Like a person staring at the duck/rabbit picture and only seeing a duck, he listens to the maiden’s talk of heavenly brides, queens, or cities without being able to take them for anything else. If we can, this is so because we trust, against the grain of our logic, that these words indeed contain a deeper meaning.As in the pun, it is only a ‘conversion’ that allows the interpreter of revelation to see and to perceive, to hear and to understand.” 40. The unvoicing of the voiced bilabial plosive consonant [b] to [p] in wordfinal position was common in his region (as was a similar unvoicing of the voiced alveolar plosive [d] to [t]), hence the likely homophony of “lamb” and “lamp” in his spoken dialect. 41. Pearl’s condensing of multiple meanings into one word or, as in this case, into one compound word, has been much observed (e.g., Andrew and Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, p. 103, note to line 1046, simply speaks of “lombelyght” as being a pun), but without reference to the impetus of exegesis. 42. The lines take their substance from 1 Cor. 15.36–38 and John 12.24–25. Note, too, that the death of the grain, of which they speak, matches superbly the poem’s immediate dramatic situation, which is the death of the pearl; the Middle English Dictionary, “grain,” subsense 3b, distinguishes the sense “precious stone” for this word, so grain may be taken to intimate “pearl.” Further, the multiple meanings of the word grain could be taken as a figure in small of the simultaneity of the sensus litteralis and sensus spiritualis that I have argued the poem to be celebrating and participating in, in the way that it signifies. The death of the grain, of course, also produces the wheat from which the Eucharist, the poem’s final englobing circular image, is made. 43. One of the best accounts of the status of the jeweler in the poem is that of A.C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970); see pp. 96–170. Though I develop my arguments in different directions, Spearing’s account makes for essential reading. 44. Wilson, The Gawain-Poet, p. 1. 45. Gordon, Pearl, pp. 43–44, lines 1205–12. 46. Evidently, popular misbelief about the presence of Christ in the transubstantiated bread antedated the Wycliffite heresy of the later fourteenth century (e.g., the sermon for the fourth Sunday after Easter of the Franciscan friar Nicholas de Aquevilla, written earlier in that century, gives evidence of this: “Arguet mundum de peccato infidelitatis quia non crediderunt in me, id est,

NOTES

195

quia non habuerunt veram fidem de me quod essem in sacramento altaris. Vere, omnes illos qui non crediderunt verum corpus Christi quod traxit de Virgine esse sub illa specie panis in sacramento altaris, arguet Spiritus Sanctus in die iudicii, unde Psalmus, ‘Arguam te et statuam contra faciem tuam.’ O infidelis, qui non credis vere sacramentum altaris!” [“He accuses the world of the sin of unfaithfulness because they have not believed in me, that is, because they have not had true faith in me, that I was in the sacrament of the altar. Indeed, on the Day of Judgment the Holy Spirit will accuse all those who have not believed that Christ’s true body that he took from the Virgin is present under the appearance of bread in the sacrament of the altar. Whence the Psalm says, ‘I will accuse you and stand before your face.’ O faithless one, who do not truly believe in the sacrament of the altar!”]; (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud lat. 94, fol. 43). Nevertheless, the Wycliffite heresy is likely to have stimulated a frequent reiteration in orthodoxy of the formula that Christ was present in the Eucharist “in form of bread.”There are many instances.To cite but three: Gillis Kristensson, ed., John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, Lund Studies in English 49 (Lund: GWK Gleerup, 1974), p. 83, lines 290–91:“Ihesu, Lord, welcome thow be,/ In forme of bred as I the se”; Carlton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 180–81: “Worchyp we bothe more & leste / Crystes body in furme of bred”; and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Barlow 24, fol. 176v: “et hoc oblacionis est sacramentalis que quotidie fit sub forma panis et vini per manus sacerdotum” [“and this is of the sacramental oblation that is made daily by the priest’s hands beneath the form of bread and wine”], from a Corpus Christi sermon of ca. 1400; here, the resemblance to the end of Pearl is particularly striking. For the possibility that other works of the Pearl-author refract a consciousness of heresy, see Francis Ingledew,“Liturgy, Prophecy, and Belshazar’s Babylon: Discourse and Meaning in Cleanness,” Viator 23 (1992): 247–79.

Chapter 4 Purchasing Pardon: Material and Spiritual Economies on the Canterbury Pilgrimage 1. Cf. the Middle English Dictionary [hereafter cited as MED], ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis (Editor-in-Chief) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954–2001), s.v. purchasen, 1 (d). 2. On this treasury see especially Robert W. Shaffern,“Images, Jurisdiction, and the Treasury of Merit,” Journal of Medieval History 22.3 (1996): 237–47. An indulgence was concerned solely with the satisfaction due for the requisite penitential punishment. It alleviated the “temporal” punishments that the sinner would have to undergo whether in this life or in the next, i.e., in purgatory; its power certainly did not extend to the eternal punishments of Hell. A plenary indulgence remitted all of the pena, whereas a partial indulgence remitted part of it (the exact amount being specified in the bull that promulgated the pardon).

196

NOTES

3. In IV Sent., dist. XX, E, art. 17; A. Borgnet, ed., S. Alberti Magni opera omnia (Paris, 1890–99), xxix. 849. 4. In IV Sent., dist. XX, E, art. 17, ad 7 and 8; Alberti opera, xxix. 852. 5. De sacramento ordinis, xiii; in Guilelmi Alverni Episcopi Parisiensis Opera omnia (Paris, 1674), i. 550–51. William taught first arts and then theology at the University of Paris and became bishop of Paris in 1228. 6. In IV Sent., dist. XX, qu. 1, art. 3, sol. 3; S. Thomae Aquinatis opera omnia (Parma, 1852–72), vii.2. 845. Cf. Summa theologiae, Suppl. qu. 25, art. 3, resp.; Aquinatis opera, iv. 482. 7. In IV Sent., dist. XX, E, art. 17, ad 6; Alberti opera, xxix. 852. 8. Pars IV, qu. 83, mem. 3, resp.; Summa theologica: pars quarta (s.l., 1516), fol. 132r. 9. In IV Sent., dist. XX, E, art. 16, sol.; Alberti opera, xxix. 848. 10. In IV Sent., dist. XX, qu. 1, art. 3, sol. 1; Aquinatis opera, vii.2. 843–44. Cf. Summa theologiae, Suppl., qu. 25, art. 1, resp.; Aquinatis opera, iv. 481. Durandus of St Pourçain O.P. (ca. 1275–1334) remarks that the amount of merit available in the spiritual treasury is sufficient to afford satisfaction not only for the sins of our entire world but also for those of other worlds, should they exist. In IV Sent., dist. XX, qu. 3, resp.; In Petri Lombardi Sententias theologicas commentariorum libri IIII (Venice, 1571, repr. Ridgewood, NJ, 1964), fol. 353r. 11. Extravagantium communium, v: de simonia, tit. ix, cap. 2; Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E.A. Friedberg (Leipzig,1879–81), ii. 1304. 12. In IV Sent., dist. XX, E, art. 17, resp.; Alberti opera, xxix. 850. 13. In IV Sent., dist. XX, pars 2, art. un., qu. 4, resp.; S. Bonaventurae opera omnia (Quaracchi, 1882–1902), iv. 537. 14. Alexandri summa, pars IV, qu. 83, mem. 4, fols. 132v–3r. 15. Alexandri summa, pars IV, qu. 83, mem. 8, fol. 134r. 16. In IV Sent., dist. XX, E, art. 17, sed contra, 3; Alberti opera, xxix. 850. Cf. Alexandri summa, pars IV, qu. 83, mem. 1, art. 1, fol. 130v. 17. In IV Sent., dist. XX, qu. 1, art. 3, sed contra and sol. 1; Aquinatis opera, vii. 2. 843–44. Cf. Summa theologiae, Suppl. qu. 25, art. 1, sed contra and resp.; Aquinatis opera, iv. 480–81. 18. In IV Sent., dist. XX, art.un., qu. 2; Bonaventurae opera, iv. 533. 19. Pars IV, qu. 83, mem. 1, art. 1, resp., fol. 131r. Cf. also Aquinas, In IV Sent., dist. XX, qu. 1, art. 3, sol. 1; Aquinatis opera, vii.2. 843–44. 20. In IV Sent., dist. XX, pars 2, art. un., qu. 6; Bonaventurae opera, iv. 539–41. 21. However, the “character issue” was to be raised by the young King Henry VIII of England, during his time as fidei defensor, in the “assertion of the seven sacraments” that he wrote against Luther, no doubt with some help from his learned advisors. Luther’s violent reply (Contra Henricium) ridiculed the defense of indulgences afforded by “the Thomistic king” as having no more substance than: “indulgences are not impostures because Leo (i.e., Leo X, who as pope issued indulgences) is a good man.” Here Henry’s words have “been perverted by this scoundrel,” exclaims Sir (later Saint) Thomas More, who took on the task of defending his king in a Responsio ad Lutherum. In fact, Henry had “proved both by the gospel and by reason that the successor of Peter can remit the punishment of purgatory.” The king’s point about the

NOTES

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

197

relationship between a good pontiff and good indulgences was that: “if indulgences are nothing other than impostures,” then “not only Leo X, whom Luther himself praises, but all the past pontiffs” would consequently have been impostors, and “the whole Christian people for so many ages” would “have been liable to blame.” Luther has nothing at all to say “about the other pontiffs of so many ages,” declares More; neither does he answer anything “about the people whom, deceased now for so many ages, together with the bishops and clergy,he tumbles down to Hell in a common damnation.” Thus, More spells out the shocking consequences of Luther’s devaluation of indulgences. R. Sylvester, C.H. Miller et al., eds., Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976–97), pp. 326–31. In IV Sent., dist. XX, qu. 1, art. 3, quaestiunc. 2, sol.; Aquinatis opera, vii.2. 844–45. Cf. Summa theologica, Suppl. qu. 25, art. 2; Aquinatis opera, iv. 481–82. Aquinatis opera, vii. 2. 845. Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1998), p. 179. See Arne Jönsson, ed., St. Bridget’s Revelations to the Popes: An Edition of the So-Called “Tractatus de summis pontificibus” (Lund: Lund University Press, 1997), p. 44; cf. Aron Andersson, Saint Bridget of Sweden (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1980), pp. 99–100. The picture of decline painted in some recent accounts is dubious, to say the least. Nilson’s judicious account (Cathedral Shrines, esp. pp. 147–54, 234) stresses the incompleteness of the evidence and the difficulties incumbent on its interpretation. While it is true that the priors’ rolls indicate a drastic drop in offerings in the early fifteenth century (the 1420 jubilee year being atypical), the single surviving feretrarians’ (i.e., keepers of the shrine) account of 1398–99 and the “Customary of the Shrine of St.Thomas” suggest that “offerings were considerable in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries” (pp. 150–51). “It seems clear,” Nilson concludes, “that a great deal of the shrine income was not reaching the prior’s accounts in the fifteenth century” (p. 152); this accounting technicality can by no means be taken as evidence of decline. Speaking more generally of shrine offerings, he suggests that “the point of highest offerings was roughly contemporary with the writing of The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s” (p. 180). By contrast, the account given by Sumption, Pilgrimage, pp. 150–53, is unclear and in some ways misleading—not least the strange remark that the jubilee indulgence of 1370 brought “the poet Chaucer” to Canterbury. The previous Canterbury jubilee years were 1220, 1270, 1320, and 1370. This treatise has been edited by Raymonde Foreville, Le Jubilé de Saint Thomas Becket du XIIIe au XVe siècle (1220–1470): Études et documents (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1958), pp. 115–60. Foreville discusses the issue of authorship on pp. 109–13. The Church of St. Mary of the Portiuncula was a small chapel near Assisi that had been made over to the use of St. Francis and his followers; the saint died there in 1226. In his vita St. Bonaventure says that Francis loved it

198

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

NOTES

“before all other places in the world; for here he began in humility, here he made progress in virtue, here he ended in happiness, and, dying, commended it unto the Brethren as a place most beloved of the Virgin.” Trans. E.G. Salter in The Little Flowers of St Francis,The Mirror of Perfection, and St Bonaventure’s Life of St Francis, intro. by H. McKay (London/New York, 1910; repr. 1966), p. 315. This indulgence is not mentioned in any of the oldest legends of St. Francis, and remains a matter of scholarly controversy. For further discussion see Alastair Minnis, “Reclaiming the Pardoners,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 311–34. Here I discuss the fourth part of the treatise, in which a full theological defense of the Canterbury plenary indulgence is offered, cited in n. 28 above, pp. 147–55. In IV Sent., dist. XX, qu.1, art. 3, sol. 2; Aquinatis opera, vii. 2. 844–45. Cf. my earlier account of Aquinas’s discussion. Foreville, ed., Traité, pp. 150–51,; previously quoted on p. 132. On the Pontigny vision see William FitzStephen, Vita Sancti Thomae (76), in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J.C. Robertson, Rolls Series (London, 1876), iii. 83. Godmersham also quotes to the same end a similar passage from another life of Becket, by Herbert of Bosham:“O Thomas, how much glory I have given to Peter the prince of apostles, I will not give less to thee.” Foreville, ed., Traité, p 132; cf. FitzStephen, Materials, iii. 515. Foreville, ed., Traité, p. 119. It is admitted, however, that “difficult questions and opinions” concerning the plenary indulgence had also arisen many years before this present jubilee from “those who are of tried worth, that is, of proven splendour of thought.” One did not have to be a Lollard to be suspicious of the Canterbury plenary indulgence. See the graphs printed by Nilson, Cathedral Shrines, p. 234, and also his discussion on pp. 147–54. For these and later testimonies see J.F. Davis, “Lollards, Reformers and St. Thomas of Canterbury,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal 9 (1963): 1–15; and R.E. Scully, “The Unmaking of a Saint: Thomas Becket and the English Reformation,” Catholic Historical Review, 86.4 (2000): 579–602. Becket’s conflict with Henry II was “regarded as prefiguring the crisis of the Henrician Reformation,” as A.G. Dickens notes; The English Reformation, 2nd edn. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 162. Little wonder then that the Becket cult became such an object of opprobium in the Tudor period. Trans. in R.N. Swanson, Catholic England: Faith, Religion and Observance before the Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 292. See further Margaret Aston, “William White’s Lollard Followers,” repr. in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon, 1984), pp. 71–99. Erasmus, Peregrinatio religionis ergo [A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake], in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, i.3 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1972),

NOTES

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

199

p. 486; trans. C.R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, xl (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 641. De utilitate colloquiorum; Opera omnia, i.3, p. 743; trans. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, xl, p. 1104. Peregrinatio, pp. 487–88; trans.Thompson, pp. 642–43. Peregrinatio, p. 491; trans.Thompson, p. 647. Pace John V. Fleming, I see no evidence of “a dissenter’s scorn” in “the several overt and covert references to the shrine of Becket in Chaucer’s poem”: “Chaucer and Erasmus on the Pilgrimage to Canterbury:An Iconographical Speculation,” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), p. 153 [148–66]. However, it should be noted that Chaucer’s identification of his character as a pardoner “of Rouncivale” (I[A], 670) may have been intended to call to mind scandals involving that hospital: during the 1380s warrants were issued for the arrest of impostors who claimed mendaciously to be collecting alms for the Charing Cross establishment. Cf. J.M. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer (London: G. Bell, 1926), pp. 124–30; Samuel Moore, “Chaucer’s Pardoner of Rouncival,” Modern Philology 25 (1927/1928): 65–66 [59–66]; Alfred L. Kellogg, Chaucer, Langland,Arthur: Essays in Middle English Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), p. 227; David K. Maxfield, “St. Mary Rouncivale, Charing Cross:The Hospital of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Chaucer Review 28 (1993): 148–63 (esp. pp. 153–54, 157–59). On the other hand, he is reported to have been a recent returnee from the papal court at Rome, where he would have obtained genuine pardons. The “patente” bearing his “lige lordes seel” (VI[C], 337) could refer to a papal license. Alternatively, the Pardoner could be carrying a copy made from the master papal license held in the Rouncesval hospital, or indeed the sealed letter of a bishop that gave a quaestor the right to operate within a particular diocese. All of these interpretations serve to defend the authenticity of the Pardoner’s indulgences, though there is much cause for concern in what he does with them. But the doubt raised by the reference to “Rouncivale” remains.The Pardoner is best understood as a composite figure, a conflation of different discourses relating (inter alia) to the use and abuse of the system of indulgences. See further my article, “The Construction of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” in Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Robert Swanson (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). De votis temere susceptis, in Opera omnia, i.3, p. 150; trans. C.R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, xxxix, p. 39. De utilitate colloquiorum, p. 743; trans.Thompson, p. 1100. Provinciale, lib. III, tit. 23; Provinciale seu constitutiones angliae (Oxford, 1679; repr. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Gregg International, 1968), pp. 231–32. A brief discussion of this passage can be found in Margaret Harvey, England, Rome and the Papacy 1417–1464 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 237. Provinciale, lib. III, tit. 23, p. 231.

200

NOTES

48. This was the normal Latin term for a Pardoner—designating one who “sought out” alms from sundry folk; cf. the anonymous Memoriale presbiterorum, iii. 43: “Questores dicitur a querendo, eo quod mittuntur ad querendum elemosinas fidelium. . . .” Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 148, fol. 77r. The Memoriale goes on to explain that the alms collected in this way are used in the service of hospitals and the sick people therein, and for the repair of churches, together with bridges and roads (to ensure easy access to hospitals and churches).This treatise dates from the mid-fourteenth century and has a connection with Norwich Cathedral Priory. 49. In particular, Erasmus’s Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake was soon pressed into the service of Protestant propaganda.The preface that was added to the work’s first English translation declares that Erasmus has revealed here “the supersticyouse worshipe and false honor gyuyn to bones, heddes, iawes, armes, stockes, stones, shyrtes, smokes, cotes, cappes, hattes, shoes, mytres, slyppers, saddels, rynges, bedes, gyrdles, bolles, belles, bokes, gloues, ropes, taperes, candelles, bootes, spoores with many other soche dampanable allusyones to the duuylle to use them as goddes contrary to the immaculate scripture of gode.” Henry de Vocht, ed., The Earliest English Translations of Erasmus’s Colloquia (Louvan, 1928), pp. 104–05. 50. In IV Sent., dist. XX, pars 2, art. un., qu. 1; Bonaventurae opera, iv. 530–31. 51. See The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 78. 52. Thomae de Chobham, Summa de arte praedicandi, ed. F. Morenzoni, Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaevalis, 82 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), pp. 59–61. 53. Cf.William of Auvergne’s exploration of the distinctions among pro pecuniam per pecuniam, and non sine pecuniam, discussed earlier. 54. Cf. his other statement concerning intention:“myn entente is nat but for to wynne, / And nothyng for correccioun of synne” (VI[C] 403–04). 55. See “Reclaiming the Pardoners,” and “Chaucer’s Pardoner and ‘The Office of Preacher,’ ” in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds., Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 88–119. 56. G.R. Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915), pp. 21, 180. 57. Cf. Lee Patterson’s reading, which links the Pardoner’s acknowledgment of the “values he subverts in his working” with the suggestion that “he is by no means as unambiguously impenitent as he claims”; Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison,WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 400. But the evidence from scholastic theology would seem to suggest that this link is neither a necessary nor a compelling one. 58. Quodlibet iv, qu. 13, in Thomas de Bailly, Quodlibets, ed. P. Glorieux, Textes philosophiques du moyen âge (Paris: J. Vrin, 1960), pp. 319–24. In the following discussion I draw on Aquinas’s explanations of some of the technical terms involved.

NOTES

201

59. In IV Sent., dist. XVII, qu. 2, art. 1, sol. 2, ad 3um; Aquinatis opera, vii.2. 784. Aquinas derives both contritio and attritio from terendo [crushing], explaining that things are said to be attrite when they are worn away only to a certain extent and contrite when all the parts are crushed minutely. He has the crushing of sins in mind, of course. 60. In IV Sent., dist. XVII, qu. 2, art. 1, quaestiunc. 3, sed contra; Aquinatis opera, vii. 2. 782. 61. See further Thomas Aquinas’s comments on the two categories of merit: In IV Sent., dist. XV, qu. 1, art. 3, quaestiunc. 4 and solutio 4; Aquinatis opera, vii.2. 709, 710–11, and also Summa theologiae, 1a 2ae, qu. 114, art. 6; Blackfriars edn. (London/New York: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964–81), xxx. 216–19. In the earlier of these discussions he stresses that a good deed that is performed without charity does not merit condign reward (p. 711), the point being that acting out of charity means acting from an established disposition to do good, rather than some kind of fluke being involved or a good deed being done for a bad reason: such morally dubious actions are by no means convincingly meritorious.

Chapter 5 Sacred and Secular in The Merchant of Venice 1. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), pp. 76, 272. 2. See Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327–43; and Douglas Anderson, “The Old Testament Presence in The Merchant of Venice,” Journal of English Literary History 52 (1985): 119–32. 3. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice” (as in n. 2, above). 4. Hijman Michelson, The Jew in Early English Literature (Amsterdam: B. Paris, 1926). 5. Joan O. Holmer, The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard, and Consequence (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 131. 6. Paul Gaudet,“Lorenzo’s Infidel,” in The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Wheeler (New York: Garland Press, 1991), p. 352. 7. E.C. Pettet, “The Merchant of Venice and the Problem of Usury,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 31 (1945): 19–33. Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), offers a detailed account of the situation in sixteenth-century England; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 532–38, records both the insolvency of the upper classes and the consequent proliferation of moneylending.There is a useful summary in Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 144–54.

202

NOTES

8. S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 32. 9. R.H.Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1948), pp. 37, 58. 10. G.G. Coulton, The Medieval Panorama (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 332. 11. Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 29–30, 93–94. 12. Thomas Wilson, Discourse on Usury, with an historical introduction by R.H.Tawney (London: G. Bell, 1925), orig. 1572. 13. Laura C. Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 97. 14. Quoted in R.H.Tawney’s introduction to Wilson’s Discourse. 15. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, especially pp. 179–96. 16. Richard Sibbes, The Saints Cordials (London, 1637), p. 188. 17. G.J. Parry, A Protestant Vision:William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 282. 18. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, p. 33. 19. Shakespeare may have taken the idea from the Merchant Adventurers, the chartered company founded to encourage trade with the Netherlands, which was particularly active at this time. 20. Holmer, The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard, and Consequence, p. 157. 21. In 1598, the play was entered in the Stationers’ Register as The Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce, an entry suggesting that the public linked it to Marlowe’s play and that the official at the Stationers’ Register wished the connection to be acknowledged. But that was not the title Shakespeare himself chose.

Chapter 6 The Communal Body, the Corporate Body, and the Clerical Body: An Anthropological Reading of the Gregorian Reform 1. In his book The First European Revolution, R.I. Morris accords the repression of communal forces pride of place in the twelfth-century construction of a new social order. “If any single aspect of the twelfth century revolution in government was of decisive importance for the future it was the capacity developed by both secular and ecclesiastical power to penetrate communities of every kind vigorously and ruthlessly, overriding the restraints of custom, and enlisting, or destroying, men of local standing and influence in the name of order, orthodoxy and reform” (The First European Revolution ca. 970–1215 [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], p. 172). 2. The expression is used by Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 401. 3. On the theoretical biases of influential historians such as Strayer and their students, see Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old

NOTES

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

203

and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” The American Historical Review 103 (1998): 686–89 [677–704]. See in particular Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).The term communitas was of course coined by Turner himself. Different psychoanalytic schools formulated this distinction in their own terms. Fromm, e.g., depicted authoritarianism as a state of violent fusion; see Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941), p. 141; and Man for Himself (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1947), p. 151.According to Fromm, weak selves seek empowerment simultaneously through fusion with powerful figures and through assertion of violence, whether as its perpetrators or as victims who experience empowerment by disappearing into violent aggressors. Fromm developed his basic intuition concerning the sadomasochistic nature of symbiotic relations throughout his oeuvre and applied it in the analysis of diverse forms of cultural regression. For Melanie Klein, the earliest phase in the life of the infant—the schizoid–paranoid position—consists of violent fusion of mother and child. According to Klein’s object-relations theory, violence in social or interpersonal relations often indicates a reenactment of primary symbiotic relations. For a comprehensive contemporary account of individuation and recognition, see Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995). According to Engels, the state derives its vitality and very justification from its capacity to contain and regulate permanent social conflict. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans.Alick West and Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 229. Engels did not conceive of such social conflict or of the capacity of the state as necessary conditions for social life, as the proposed account of social structure takes them to be. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. 213, 218. In the history of its interpretation, the Pauline doctrine came to refer to the Church alternately as structure and ritual. See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 194. Luc de Heusch,“Pour une dialectique de la sacralité du pouvoir,” in his Écrits sur la royauté sacrée (Brussels: Editions de l’université de Bruxelles, 1987), pp. 215–62. Even advocates of absolute monarchy, such as Bodin, recognized that the hereditary king is subject to the two Leges Imperii: the order of succession and the inalienability of the realm. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 293. It is these or analogous laws, which in different societies, create a corporate structure by erecting a lineage—an immortal collective body that is placed above the private person of the king—and ancestral authority and law. According to Maine,the definitive characteristic of the corporation is continuity across generations; see Henry S. Maine, Ancient Law (London: Murray, 1930),

204

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

NOTES

p. 207. For Meyer Fortes, the corporate organization “is the institutional medium through which the metaphysical dogma of the perpetuity and unity of the lineage blood is translated into jural and moral process” (Kinship and the Social Order [Chicago:Aldine, 1969], p. 184). For an elaboration of these suggestions, see my paper “Notes on the Clerical Body of the Law,” Cardozo Law Review 24 (2003): 1151–81. Since ancestors inhabit the world of myth their own timelessness and capacity to secure the immortality of the corporate body is not in the least diminished when they can in fact be traced to a fairly recent generation.“[I]t is a common experience to find an informant who refuses to admit that his lineage or even his branch of a greater lineage did not at one time exist. Myth and legend, believed, naturally, to be true history, are quickly cited to prove the contrary. But investigation shows that the stretch of time, or rather of duration, with which perpetuity is equated varies according to the count of generations needed to conceptualize the internal structure of the lineage and link it on to an absolute, usually mythological origin for the whole social system in a first founder” (Meyer Fortes,“The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups,” in Kinship, ed. Jack Goody [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971], p. 264 [263–75]). The proposed vertical and hierarchic account of the corporate body is at variance with Gierke’s horizontal, communitarian view of the corporation as an immanent totality. Berman convincingly criticized Gierke’s theory in Harold Berman, Law and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 220. Various general theories in group psychology and theories of sacrifice and divine kingship, such as Burkert’s and Girard’s, conceive of authority and the social order at large as constituted by a founding projection of destructive urges onto a central authority that is placed above the social. According to Wilfred R. Bion, “. . .identification of the individual with the leader depends not on introjection alone but on a simultaneous process of projective identification” (Experiences in Groups [New York: Routledge, 1961], p. 177). The different accounts of founding projection, including the proposed notion of the corporate body as a projected communal body, are not mutually exclusive but complement each other. On sacrifice as an inaugural projection of aggression, see Walter Burkert, Homo Necans.The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 42; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 4–10, 110–11. Richard Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 91–169. A widely quoted formulation of this observation is John N. Figgis’s remark that, “In the Middle Ages the Church was not a State, it was the State; the State or rather the civil authority (for a separate society was not recognized) was merely the police department of the Church” (Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1624 [New York: Harper, 1960], p. 5). On the

NOTES

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

205

church as state see, e.g., Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 243; Fredric L. Cheyette,“The Invention of the State,” in Essays on Medieval Civilization, ed. Bede K. Lackner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 163 [143–78]. Kantorowicz referred to a process of “clericalization of the royal office” (The King’s Two Bodies, p. 89). For an account of pre-Gregorian pontifical kingship, its divine aura and episcopal status, see Karl F. Morrison’s introduction to Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 3–40. See also Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 77–107. On the rise of administrative kingship in the twelfth century, see C.Warren Hollister and John W. Baldwin, “The Rise of Administrative Kingship: Henry I and Philip Augustus,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 867–905. Luc de Heusch has described a dialectical alternation of divine and hereditary kingship and offered numerous illustrations of this process.The magical leadership of early Roman history, e.g., which gave way to law-bound power, eventually returned in a dialectical movement. See de Heusch,“Pour une dialectique de la sacralité du pouvoir” in his Écrits sur la royauté sacrée, p. 238. Gerhart B. Ladner, “Aspects of Mediaeval Thought on Church and State,” The Review of Politics 9 (1947): 403–22. Ladner,“Mediaeval Thought,” 406. Ladner,“Mediaeval Thought,” 407–08. Ladner,“The Concepts of ‘Ecclesia’ and ‘Christianitas’ and their Relation to the Idea of Papal ‘Plenitudo Potestas’ from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII,” in Sacerdozio e Regno da Gregorio VII a Bonifacio VIII, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae 18 (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1954), p. 50 [49–77]. Ladner,“ ‘Ecclesia’ and ‘Christianitas,’ ” p. 54. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political,” in his Democracy and Political Theory trans. David Macey (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988), p. 252 [213–55]. On the impersonalization of authority, see Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 6. According to Cheyette, the distinctions between office–person, rule of law–rule of man, public–private crystallized simultaneously in the second half of the eleventh century (“The Invention of the State,” pp. 149, 163). For a wealth of illustrations of secularization and professionalization of kingship in the course of the twelfth century, see Karl J. Leyser,“Some Reflections on Twelfth-Century Kings and Kingship,” in Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London: Hambledon Press, 1982), pp. 241–67. Alain Boureau has described the Gregorian Reform as a process whose principal outcomes—secularized kingship and consolidated social structure— were inseparable: [L]a dynamique du processus hiérarchique construit une conception contractuelle de la royauté, une autonomisation purement terrestre du

206

NOTES

pouvoir monarchique. En effet, la distribution hiérarchique, à partir d’un point focal religieux hors du monde pratique, implique, de la part des classes sacerdotales, un renoncement à la puissance temporelle. . .la réforme grégorienne du XIe siècle, qui promeut l’indépendance supérieure du spirituel et dégage ainsi l’espace nécessaire à la construction des monarchies occidentales, tout en les privant de toute possibilité de légitimation sacrale. (“Un obstacle à la sacralité royale en occident—le principe hiérarchique,” in La royauté sacrée dans le monde chrétien, ed.Alain Boureau and Claudio-Sergio Ingerflom (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1992), p. 32 [29–37]). 29. R.I. Morris, The First European Revolution, p. 190.As Berman writes: It is generally recognized that prior to the late eleventh century the material and corporative sides of the Church were fused, to a much greater extent than they were later, with its spiritual and sacramental sides. . . .Distinctions between the sacred and the profane were much less pronounced. The jurisdictional element of the Church’s law was viewed as an integral part of the sacramental element, which embraced not only such liturgical events as baptism, marriage, and ordination but also an undefined variety of moral and spiritual acts and rites. (Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 201)

30.

31.

32.

33.

On the inner constitutional organization of the Church see Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 213. According to Morris,“All the practices and rituals which we have encountered as mechanisms for the articulation and expression of communal sentiment were firmly suppressed. Priests were forbidden to perform the rituals which preceded the ordeal. Preachers and holy men were ruthlessly subordinated to episcopal authority. Canonization was conferred by ecclesiastical process instead of popular acclaim; miracles were confined to properly supervised shrines; and shrines themselves were orchestrated and ranked from village upward to mirror and affirm the new order. . .” (Morris, The First European Revolution, p. 174). While the church instituted the clerical body as a repository of sanctity through the articulation of its sacramental powers, rules of clerical abstinence, and the symbolism of the ordination, the sanctity of the clerical body was tamed and rationalized by being strictly regulated and encoded in administrative and legal terms as a set of privileges, interdictions, and administrative functions. On the complementarity of the Brahman establishment and monastic renunciation in India, see Louis Dumont, Religion/Politics and History in India (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), p. 43. For an account of the ramifications of the investiture controversy under Gregory’s successors, see Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture

NOTES

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

207

Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 135–74. Ladner,“ ‘Ecclesia’ and ‘Christianitas,’ ” p. 76. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 273. On raison d’Etat see Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 241–309. According to Strayer, “. . .the victory of the Church in the Investiture Conflict had unforeseen consequences. By asserting its unique character, by separating itself so clearly from lay governments, the Church unwittingly sharpened concepts about the nature of secular authority” (Medieval Origins, p. 22). On secularization and state formation, see Ernst Wolfgang Bockenforde, “The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization,” in his State, Society and Liberty, trans. J.A. Underwood (New York: Berg, 1991), pp. 27–33 [26–46]. See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 94–97. Ladner,“Mediaeval Thought,” 412. Ladner,“Mediaeval Thought,” 413–14. According to Duby, the trifunctional scheme served the interests of secular power; Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 305–53.While Duby’s account of the theme of the three orders prior to the thirteenth century has been challenged, it is accepted that the tripartite scheme was propagated by royal power from the early thirteenth century onward. Cheyette, “The Invention of the State,” in Essays on Medieval Civilization, pp. 149, 163; On the crystallization of the separation between public and private law see Peter J. Riga,“The Influence of Roman Law on State Theory in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: A Study of the Roman Glossators and their Influence on Modern State Theory,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 35 (1990): 178–79 [171–87]. Lior Barshack, “The Holy Family and the Law,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 18 (2004), 214–34. Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 1–23. Ladner,“Mediaeval Thought,” 420. Drawing on an analysis of variations in royal ritual, Ralph Giesey has suggested a historical development from sacral to humanistic kingship through a stage of juristic kingship. See Ralph E. Giesey, “Models of Rulership in French Royal Ceremonial,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 51 [41–64]. On the corporation theories of the Middle Ages, see Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 302–409; Post, Medieval Legal Thought, pp. 27–50; Joseph P. Canning, “Law, Sovereignty and Corporation Theory, 1300–1450,” in

208

NOTES

The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 453–76. 48. Parallel processes occurred in France and in Norman Sicily that seem to have been guided by a highly effective if inarticulate idea of reason of state. On the parallel expansion of royal jurisdiction and administration in England and France, see Hollister and Baldwin,“The Rise of Administrative Kingship,” 867–905; and Alan Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 109–46. 49. Alongside political myths and emblems and dynastic cults, law figures prominently in Colette Beaune’s survey of the sources of national identity in the Middle Ages, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in LateMedieval France, trans. Susan Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), esp. pp. 245–65. Alan Harding explains the significance of the law as the defining, unifying, and solidifying force within each realm as follows: In a Rechtsbook, constitutional description which placed all members of society in relationship through jurisdiction and brought clergy and laity into harmony under the Crown was combined with a record of the king’s law-making for a community to produce a myth of national unification which was most potent when a country’s territory was under attack.” (“Regiam Majestatem amongst Medieval Law Books,” Juridical Review 29–30 [1984]: 110 [97–111]) 50. As Strayer notes, “. . .the Investiture Conflict reinforced a tendency. . .to consider the lay ruler primarily as a guarantor and a distributor of justice” (Medieval Origins, p. 23). 51. On Gregory’s own view of law, as opposed to custom, as the reservoir of the divine truth according to which the Church and society at large should be organized, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy:Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 37. 52. This fiction remains implicit in the legal codes of modern democracies. In his essay on Artaud’s theater, Derrida unearths a fiction of transcendent authorship that is implied by any performed or interpreted text: The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text [emphasis mine] and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas.” ( Jacques Derrida,“The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], p. 235 [232–50]) In religion as in entertainment the expansion of literacy encroaches upon the domain of ritual presence and immediacy. On literacy and the eucharistic debates, see Stock, The Implications of Literacy, pp. 241–315.

NOTES

209

53. Post, Medieval Legal Thought, pp. 415–93; on the entrenchment of the separation between public and private law, see Riga, “The Influence of Roman Law,” 178–79. 54. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 409. Once civil religion is established, the category of the sacred and symbols of sanctity often refer to the political body even when they seem to propagate the personal sanctity of the king. 55. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 317–29. See also Giesey,“Models of Rulership,” p. 46. According to Bryant, the political ideal encoded in royal entries in the High Middle Ages was that of juridical kingship, Lawrence M. Bryant, “The Medieval Entry Ceremony at Paris,” in Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 111 [88–118]. The gestures and symbols of the entry evoked and affirmed the constitutional principles in which monarchic power was grounded and by which it was conditioned; see also Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1986), p. 77. 56. On late-medieval nationalism, see Strayer, “The Laicization of French and English Society in the Thirteenth Century,” in Change in Medieval Society, ed. Sylvia L. Thrupp (New York: Appleton, 1964), p. 111 [103–15]; and Post, Medieval Legal Thought, pp. 434–93. 57. Strayer, Medieval Origins, pp. 10, 45, 54. 58. On the love of ancestral deities, see Meyer Fortes, “Pietas in Ancestral Worship,” in Time and Social Structure and Other Essays (London: Athlone, 1970), p. 165 [164–200]. 59. Kantorowicz attaches great theoretical significance to the “oath of office urging the king as well as his officers to protect an impersonal institution which ‘never dies,’ the crown” (The King’s Two Bodies, p. 354). On the growing size and sophistication of the administration in most European countries in the thirteenth century, see Strayer, Medieval Origins, p. 34; on the modernity of medieval administration, see Udo Wolter,“The Officium in Medieval Ecclesiastical Law as a Prototype of Modern Administration,” in Legislation and Justice, ed. Antonio Padoa-Schioppa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 17–36. Since the bureaucracy saps the vitality of charismatic authority and the community at large, and epitomizes the structural values of the rule of law, separation between private and public spheres, and separation of powers, it became in the twentieth century one of the prime objects of populist resentment. 60. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 360–61. 61. The distant roots of the modern rule of law lie in the consolidation of the corporate organization of society in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform. See Laurent Mayali,“De la juris auctoritas à la legis potestas.Aux origines de l’Etat de droit dans la science juridique médiévale,” in Droits savants et pratiques françaises du pouvoir, ed. Jacques Krynen and Albert Rigaudière (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1992), pp. 129–49.

210

NOTES

Chapter 7 Sacred, Secular, and Impure: The Contextuality of Sensations 1. I have deliberately avoided the term ‘physical pain’, since for most of European history, pain was perceived as a faculty of the soul, not the body. See my article,“The Animated Pain of the Body,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 36–68. 2. For anthropological literature on pain and behavior, see Mark Zborowski, People in Pain (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969), pp. 18–48; Wulf Schiefenhövel,“Perception, Expression and Social Function of Pain,” Science in Context 8 (1995): 31–46; Paul Ekman, “Biological and Cultural Contributions to Body and Facial Movement,” in The Anthropology of the Body, John Blacking, ed., ASA Monograph 15 (London: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 67–71; Berthold B.Wolff and Sarah Langley,“Cultural Factors and the Response to Pain: A Review,” American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 404–501;Weston LaBarre, “The Cultural Basis of Emotions and Gestures,” Journal of Personality 16 (1947–48): 49–68. 3. William M. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 4. Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 139–55. 5. Mary T. Douglas, Purity and Danger:An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). 6. Hippolyte Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1921), pp. 287–302. 7. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Herbert Musurillo, ed. and trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 123–25. See also Tertullian, De Pudicitia 22.6, “Christus in martyre est” in Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera, ed. E. Dekkers, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina [henceforth CCSL] 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), p. 1329. 8. Tertullian, Apologeticum 2.6, in Tertulliani Opera 1, ed. E. Dekkers, CCSL 1:88. See also Tertullian, De spectaculis, in Tertulliani Opera 1, CCSL 1:227–253. 9. Augustine, Epistola 154, in Sancti Aureli Augustini Hipponensis episcopi Epistulae, ed. Al. Goldbacher, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum [henceforth CSEL] 44 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1904), 3:395–427. See also Edward Peters, “Destruction of the Flesh—Salvation of the Spirit: The Paradoxes of Torture in Medieval Christian Society,” in The Devil, Heresy, and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 131–48. 10. Prudentius, Peristephanon 1.11, in Aurelii Prudentii Clementis carmina, ed. I. Bergman, CSEL 61 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1926), pp. 97–111 (SS Emeterius and Chelidonius). 11. This phenomenon was usually attributed to the thirteenth century, with the influence of Beguine spirituality and St. Francis. I am indebted to Piroska Nagy’s pathbreaking Le don des larmes au moyen âge (Paris: Albin Michel,

NOTES

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

211

2000), for tracing emotional spirituality beyond St. Bernard to St. Peter Damian and his circle. “Quanto enim inter se distant pertinacia et perseverantia, parsimonia et frugalitas, liberalitas et profusio, prudentia et calliditas, fortitudo et temeritas, cautela et timiditas?” Dialogus adversus Pelagianos, in S. Hieronymi presbyteri opera 3, ed. C. Moreschini, CCSL 80 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), p. 112. “Velut si quis fortitudinem latronis et piratae et furis diripiat, infirmosque eos reddat prodest illis sua infirmitas.” S. Hieronymi presbyteri opera 1, Commentariorum in Sophoniam prophetam liber unus, ed. M. Adriaen, CSEL 76A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970), p. 671. Augustinus, De civitate Dei 5.20, ed. E. Hoffmann, CSEL 40 (Vienna, 1899), pp. 254–55; Gregorius Magnus, Moralia in Iob 3.12, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), pp. 127–28. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics, trans. C.I. Litzinger, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 2:687–97; Summa Theologiae, 2a–2ae, q. 124, a. 4. Ambrosius Mediolanensis, Expositio in psalmi David CXVIII 10.28 et passim, ed. Michael Petschenig and Michaela Zelzer, CSEL 62 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1999); p. 220. For example, Leonardus de Utino [Udine], Sermones aurei (anni 1446) de sanctis (Strassbourg, n.p., ca. 1481), fol. 77r “Vicit autem ista certamina maxima mentis constantia” (de sancto Vincentio); fol. 269v “et quia maximam gratiam in superatione tormentorum a deo obtinuit ut plus posset ipse qui torquebatur quod tortores qui in eum seviebant, ideo destinavit in corde suo sic constanter persistere. . .” (de sancto Laurentio). Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, ed. G.P. Maggioni (Firenze: SISMEL, 1998), Millennio medievale 6, Testi 3, pp. 174–79; the English translation, The Golden Legend, trans. W.G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,: 1993), 1:105–08 is based on the old edition, Jacobi a Voragine Legenda Aurea vulgo historia lombardica dicta, ed. Theodore Graesse (Leipzig, 1850), pp. 113–20. Prudentius, Peristephanon 5.11, pp. 334–54. See n. 17, above. ‘Tibi ista praesint numina, tu saxa, tu lignum colas, tu mortuorum mortuus fias deorum pontifex, nos lucis auctorem patrem eiusque Christum filium, qui solus ac uerus deus, Datiane, confitebimur’. Prudentius, Peristephanon 5.11, pp. 33–40. “O felicem me, quo mihi irasci te grauius putas, eo melius incipis misereri. Insurge ergo miser et toto malignitatis spiritu debacchare: Videbis me dei virtute plus posse, dum torqueor, quam possis ipse qui torques.”“Quid dicis, Daciane? Ecce, tu ipse me uindicas de apparitoribus meis” (Varazze, Legenda Aurea, p. 175).

212

NOTES

23. Prudentius, Peristephanon 10, pp. 370–412. 24. See, for example, “Vita vel passio Haimhrammi episcopi et martyris Ratisbonensis,” in Passiones vitaeque sanctorum, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SSRM 2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1896), pp. 477–91, and Paul Fouracre, “Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography,” Past and Present 127 (1990): 3–38. 25. Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 26. For examples, Giles Constable, Attitudes Toward Self-Inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages (Brookline, MA: Public Lecture, 1982); Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast:The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 209–11.André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 1981), pp. 174–83; Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 89–149; Richard Kieckhefer,“Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male Saints,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 288–305; Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 108–36;Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 185–230. 27. Cohen, n. 1. 28. The earliest mention of civil judicial torture appears in the letters of Hildebert of Lavardin (1056–1133) Patrologia Latina 171: cols. 277–78, and in twelfth-century Italian urban legislation. See Piero Fiorelli, La tortura giudiziaria nel diritto commune, 2 vols. (Milan: Giuffré, 1953–54), 1:117. 29. Digesta 48.18, Corpus iuris civilis, ed. Paul Krueger,Theodore Mommsen, and Rudolph Scholl, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1884–95), 1:23. “Quaestioni fidem non semper nec tamen numquam habendam constitutionibus declaratur: etenim res est fragilis et periculosa et quae veritatem vallat. Nam plerique patientia sive duritia tormentorum ita tormenta contemnunt, ut exprimi eis veritas nullo modo possit: alii tanta sunt inpatientia, ut quodvis mentiri quam pati tormenta velint: ita fit, ut etiam vario modo fateantur, ut non tantum se, verum etiam alios criminentur” (trans. Alan Watson, The Digesta of Justinian [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985], p. 840a). 30. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995) esp. pp. 104–23; Brent D. Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christianity 4 (1996): 269–312; Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans:The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 31. D. Bonifacii de Vitalinis Mantuani, I.U. doct. clarissimi, Tractatus Maleficij cum additionibus & Apostillis D. Hieronymi Chuchalon Hispani, in Tractatus diversi

NOTES

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

213

super maleficiis, nempe Do.Alberti de Gandino, Do. Bonifacii de Vitalini, Do. Pauli Grillandi, Do. Baldi de Periglis, Do. Jacobi de Arena (Lyon, apud haeredes Iacobi Iuntae, 1555), p. 457. Mario Sbriccoli, “ ‘Tormentum id est torquere mentem’: Processo inquisitorio e interrogatorio per tortura nell’Italia communale,” in La parola all’accusato, ed. Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1991), pp. 17–32. For example, Tractatus de tormentis sive de indicijs et tortura, attr. Guido de Suzaria, in Decimum volumen tractatuum e variis iuris interpretibus collectorum (Lyon, 1599), 84v;Albertus Gandinus, Tractatus de maleficiis, vol. 2 of Hermann Kantorowicz, Albertus Gandinus und das Strafrecht der Scholastik, 2 vols. (Berlin: Guttentag, De Gruyter, 1907–26), 2:156;Vitalinis, Tractatus Maleficij, p. 454. Tractatus de tormentis, 85v; Gandinus, Tractatus, in Albertus Gandinus, p. 266; Vitalinis, Tractatus Maleficij, p. 454; Franciscus Brunus, Tractatus de indicijs et tortura (Siena, ca. 1480), 222v. Baldus de Ubaldis, Consiliorum sive responsorum. . .5.61.1 (Venice, 1580). Stephan Kuttner, Kanonistische Schuldlehre von Gratian bis auf die Dekretalen Gregors IX Studi e testi, 64 (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1935), pp. 301–13; Johannes Fried, “Wille, Freiwilligkeit und Gestädnis um 1300,” Historisches Jahrbuch 105 (1985): 388–425. Digesta 47.10,15,41. Summa Theologiae, Supplementum q. 47 a. 2, quoted in Fried,“Wille,” 422. Gandinus, Tractatus, in Albertus Gandinus, pp. 161–62, 168. Baldus, Consilia, 5.479.1. Franciscus Brunus, Tractatus de indicijs et tortura (Siena, 1480?), fol. 95ro. (According to the Cambridge University Library Catalogue it is Siena, 148.) “[s]i quis ultro et sine tormentis confiteatur, secundum quosdam non potest damnari, nisi perseveret, et saepe interrogetur per diversos dies, si velit perseverare vel non. . .Tu dic contra, secundum Azo, et haec est communis opinio, quod si quis confiteatur sponte, statim est carcerandum et sine alia praesumptione damnandus. . .Sed tutius puto, si iudex faciat eum perseverare in confessione sua. . . .Sed si confiteatur in tormentis, vel formidine tormentorum, tunc non statur dicto eius, nec debet haberi pro confesso, nisi postea sponte perseveret” (Vitalinis, Tractatus Maleficij, pp. 452–53). “Nisi postea sponte perseveret.” Vitalinis, Tractatus Maleficij, p. 453;“vel perseveret sponte et no coacte” Vitalinis, Tractatus Maleficij, p. 456;“nisi perseveretur sponte. . .” Baldus de Ubaldis, consiliorum sive responsorum. . .3.364.6 (Venetiis, apud dominicum nicolinum, 1580);“Ideo dicit versus sponte. Hoc autem ideo dictum est: quia si prae magna angustia tormentorum quis confiteatur, non obest ei, nisi in confessione perseverarit post depositionem tormentorum.” Henrico de Segusio [Hostiensis], Summa Aurea 2 (Basel, apud Thomam Guarinum, 1573), p. 471. Paulus Grillandus, Tractatus de questionibus, in Tractatus diversi super maleficiis, nempe Do.Alberti de Gandino, Do. Bonifacii de Vitalini, do. Pauli Grillandi, do. Baldi de Periglis, Do. Jacobi de Arena (Lyon, 1555), pp. 671–73; Fiorelli, 1: 218–23.

214

NOTES

Chapter 8 Secular and Sacred: The History of Rhetoric and Religious Community in the Middle Ages 1. See James L. Kinneavy, Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 2. See Kathy Eden, “Koinonia and the Friendship Between Rhetoric and Religion,” in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 305–22. 3. On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). 4. For a recent, comprehensive study, see Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style:The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). 5. See Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire:The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 19–33, 47–88; Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 41–47, 74–77. 6. Debora K. Shuger,“The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric,” in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, pp. 47–64; see also Shuger’s Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), chs. 3, 4. 7. Richard McKeon,“Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 17 (1942): 1–33. 8. John O.Ward,“Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century,” in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), p. 104 [103–65]. 9. K.M. Fredborg, The Latin Rhetorical Commentaries by Thierry of Chartres (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), pp. 49–51 (translation my own). 10. See Boaz Cohen,“Note on Letter and Spirit in the New Testament,” Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 197–203; more generally, see Paul Ricoeur, “Nommer Dieu,” Etudes théologiques et religieuses 52 (1977): 489–508. 11. For a recent reevaluation of this view, and for extensive bibliography, see Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). See also Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Jacqueline de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 12. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, 3 vols. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1:353–55. 13. Hegel, Lectures, 1:356–57. 14. Hegel, Lectures, 1:357. 15. Hegel, Lectures, 1:358.

NOTES

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

215

Hegel, Lectures, 1:369. Hegel, Lectures, 1:368, 384. Hegel, Lectures, 3:43–44. In terms of Hegel’s general thought we might gloss this in the following way: the ultimate negative or negation is the Absolute Idea, but the Absolute is also infinite self-affirmation: its “confusion” or paradox is that it unites negation and affirmation.The content of the Absolute is dialectic itself, and according to Hegel, the scholastics use dialectic to resist negation as an abstraction outside the self. Hegel, Lectures, 3:44–45. Hegel, Lectures, 3:39. See Rita Copeland, “Sophistic, Spectrality, Iconoclasm,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 112–30. For general background, see Gordon Leff, “The Trivium and the Three Philosophies,” in Hilde de RidderSymoens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 307–36; P. Osmond Lewry,“Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric 1220–1320,” in J.I. Catto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 401–33. Simon of Faversham, Quaestiones super libro elenchorum, ed. Sten. Ebbesen et al. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), pp. 29–30. See, for example, De veritate sacrae scripturae, ed. Rudolf Buddensieg, 3 vols. (London:Trübner, 1905), 1:10, 20, 23, 28, 29, 105, 182; 2:206;Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, eds., English Wycliffite Sermons, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–96), 1:348, 3:225. The Testimony of William Thorpe 1407, in Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Anne Hudson, EETS o.s. 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55; for Oldcastle, see Fasciculi zizaniorum, ed. W.W. Shirley, Rolls Series (London: Longman, 1858), p. 268. For more such examples, see Copeland,“Sophistic, Spectrality, Iconoclasm”; Copeland,“Sophistique, hérésie et discours médiéval du savoir,” in Ethos et pathos: le statut du sujet rhétorique, ed. François Cornilliat and Richard Lockwood (Paris: Champion, 2000), pp. 93–105. Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts, p. 55. Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts, p. 55. Josiah Forshall and Fredric Madden, eds., The Holy Bible. . .Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), 1:52. Fasciculi zizaniorum, ed. Shirley, pp. 53–54, 64; app. 1 and 2, pp. 453, 457, 462, 464, 478. Fasciculi zizaniorum, pp. 384–85; my translation; italics added. For an example of medieval application of the teachings in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, see Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, ed. and trans., “The Anonymous De arte obligatoria in Merton College MS 306,” in Medieval Semantics and Metaphysics: Studies Dedicated to L.M. de Rijk, ed. E.P. Bos (Nijmegen: Ingenium Publishers, 1985), pp. 239–80. For further details on Lollard self-defensive strategy and university disputation, see Rita Copeland,

216

NOTES

Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 176–83. 32. Slavo÷ ^i6ek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 134–36, with specific reference here to Hegel’s Logic.

Chapter 9 Sacred Authority and Secular Power: The Historical Argument of the Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensis A version of this essay was first presented at the Columbia University Seminar on Medieval Studies, November 2001.A longer version is also scheduled to appear as a chapter in my book, Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority 1025–1180 (University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming, Spring 2006. I want to thank all the seminar participants, and especially the late John Mundy to whom I dedicate this essay for their lively comments and suggestions. My research on the Gesta Episcoporum was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 1. All references to the Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai are from Ludwig Bethmann, ed., Gesta Pontificum Cameracensium, in Monumenta Germaniae Historia, Scriptores, vol. 7 (Hanover: Hahn, 1846; repr. New York: Kraus, 1963). In the manuscripts, the first book is rubricated, Liber primus de gestis episcoporum, and this has given modern scholars the name for the whole, Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensis. The second and third books each are rubricated separately: secundus de monasteriis quae infra episcopium constant and liber tercius de rebus gestis Gerardi episcopi (Bethmann, p. 393, n. 1).Translations are my own. 2. R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 214. 3. In 1001, for example, the Emperor Otto gives to Cambrai the right to establish a market at Cateau-Cambrésis, to coin money there, to hold exchange there, to have the ban, and to institute officers there for public affairs.This same diploma gives the merchants at Cateau the same rights as “the merchants at Cambrai” enjoy, and it subjects any merchant there who breaks the peace to the same sanctions as are visited against the merchants of Cambrai. The diploma is quoted in Fernand Vercauteren, Etude sur les civitates de la Belgique Seconde: Contribution à l’histoire urbaine du Nord de la France de la fin du XIe siècle, Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres et des Science Morales et Politiques, Memoires 33 (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1934), p. 228.Vercauteren argues that this diploma implies that by the end of the tenth century, the merchants at Cambrai were numerous enough to demand such special notice. 4. See Michel Parisse, “L’évêque d’empire au XIe siècle: L’exemple Lorrain,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale (Xe–XIIe Siècles) 27 (1984): 95–105. 5. Heinrich Sproemberg,“Die Gründung des Bistums Arras Im Jahre 1094,” in Mittelalter Und Demokratische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Manfred Unger (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1971), pp. 119–54.

NOTES

217

6. Sub eodem tempore erat vir quidam Johannes nomine, potens tam in Cameracensium quam Vermandensium genere, qui majordomatu ceteris prestabat in urbe sub pontificati auctoritate. A bit later in the text he is referred to as “praedictus castellanus” [At that same time there was a certain man named Johannes. He was powerful because his family came from both Cambrai and the Vermandois. As Castellan, under the authority of the bishop, he was more important than all the others in the city.] (I.93). 7. See Vercauteren, Etude sur les civitates, pp. 422–23. 8. See among others, Jean François Lemarignier, Le gouvernement royal aux premiers temps Capétiens, 987–1108 (Paris:A. et J. Picard, 1965), pp. 69–70. 9. Vercauteren, Etude sur les civitates, p. 423. 10. Gesta Episcoporum III. 42. 40–43. 11. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 24. Indeed, the Gesta Episcoporum provides a very early witness of the ritual of homage in this connection. Count Otto swears his oath to God, St. Mary, and the bishop “in the hands of the bishop”: Promisit Otto comes Deo sanctaeque Mariae et episcopo Gerardo in manu sua. . .(III.46). 12. For dating and composition see E. van Mingroot, “Kritisch Onderzoek Omtrent de Datering Van de Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 53 (1975): 281–332.There is very strong evidence for the 1036 updating by the original writer brought forward in David C. Van Meter,“The Peace of Amiens-Corbie and Gerard of Cambrai’s Oration on the Three Functional Orders: The Date, the Context, the Rhetoric,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 74 (1996): 633–57. In The Three Orders Duby seriously overstates the reorganization caused by the final rewriting; see The Three Orders, p. 21. 13. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, 2 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica 6 (Brussels: Bollandist Society, 1949), 3289. 14. See the classic studies, George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (NewYork: Octagon Books, 1965); and, especially, Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 15. The whole argument is made in Institutiones 6.10; Patrologia Latina, vol. 6, cols. 666B–71A.Translations are my own. 16. Michel Sot, Gesta Episcoporum, Gesta Abbatum, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age Occidental 37 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), argues that in general bishops’ lives as a genre are relatively free of miracle stories because they are concerned with contemporary affairs. I argue rather that the particular deployment of miracles stories is due to the particular struggle with competing authorities that brings the eleventh-century bishops’ lives into being in the first place, a struggle in which the lives as a genre intend to make an intervention. It is no accident that the earliest of these texts, the Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai and the Deeds of the Bishops of Liège, are composed in

218

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

NOTES

intimately connected dioceses that experience similar conflicts among competing authorities. Gesta Episcoporum I.33.23. For the date see Bethmann’s marginal note. Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 923–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) discusses the figure of the prince-bishop in connection with the growth of the courtly ideal. For a good description of the obligations of an imperial prince-bishop see Michel Parisse,“Les hommes et la pouvoir dans la Lorraine de l’An Mil,” in Religion et culture autour de l’An Mil: royaume Capetien et Lotharingie;Actes du Colloque Hugues Capet 987–1987, la France de l’An Mil, Auxerre, 26 et 27 Juin, Metz, 11 et 12 Sept. 1987, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat and J.Ch. Picard (Paris: Picard, 1990), p. 264. Miri Rubin has pointed similarly to the receding of the miraculous in the face of the routinization of power. See Rubin, Corpus Christi:The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 13. See Jo Ann McNamara,“Women and Power through the Family Revisited,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 22. In the Acta Synodi Attrebatensis, by the same writer as the Gesta Episcoporum, the sexual division between cleric and layman is sharply articulated: “Indeed just as between secular and clerical men there is a particular distinction of order, so even in their intercourse, a particular kind of distinction ought to be preserved. For once he has left the service of the world and is counted in the ranks of the lord; without violating the military belt of his profession, a cleric cannot deliver himself up again to the conjugal couch. But for secular men, who are not bound by any yoke of ecclesiastical discipline, neither evangelical nor apostolic law forbids legitimate marriage, provided that they know that sexual pleasure ought always to be subject to their control, and they also understand that there are definite occasions for sex, when they ought to join and when they ought to abstain from their wives.” [Porro sicut inter saeculares et ecclesiasticos viros quaedam ordinis discretio est, ita et conversatio eorum quadam discretionis ratione servanda est. Nam vir ecclesiasticus, postquam relicta saeculi militia in sortem domini computatur, non potest, salvo professionis suae cingulo, coniugali toro se iterum mancipare. At viris saecularibus, qui nulli ecclesiastici regiminis iugo sunt obnoxii, nec evangelica, nec apostolica decreta legitima praeiudicant connubia, si tamen sciunt omni tempore sibi debere esse subiectam coniugii voluptatem, et si discernunt certa concubitus tempora, quando coeundum, et quando ab uxoribus sit abstinendum.] Patrologia Latina, vol. 142, cols. 1299D–1300A.All translations from the Acta synodi are my own. Cf. Acta synodi, Patrologia Latina, vol. 142, col. 1294B:“For the head designates the ruling of the mind; and just as the body is ruled by the mind, so the

NOTES

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

219

Church, which is the body of Christ, is ruled by the bishop.” [Caput enim principale mentis designat; et sicut mente corpus regitur, ita per episcopos Ecclesia, quae est corpus Christi, regitur.] As we shall see, in the argument of the Gesta Episcoporum all of secular society is subsumed in the church. The classic study is Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies:A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 14. See in addition to Rubin’s, Corpus Christi, Robert Boenig, Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991); Jean de Montclos, Lanfranc et Bérenger, la controverse eucharistique du XIe siècle (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1971); Kenneth Hein, Eucharist and Excommunication: A Study in Early Christian Doctrine and Discipline (Bern: Lang, 1973); Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Charles E. Sheedy, The Eucharistic Controversy of the Eleventh Century against the Background of Pre-Scholastic Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1947); C.R. Shrader, “The False Attribution of a Eucharistic Text to Gerbert of Aurillac,” Medieval Studies 35 (1973): 178–204. Cf. Acta synodi, Patrologia Latina, vol. 142, col. 1294C: “For a secular man does not have the power to fulfill the office of a priest, since he neither holds his office nor knows his duty, and he cannot teach what he has not learned.” [Non enim valebit saecularis homo sacerdotii magisterium implere, cuius nec officium tenuit, nec disciplinam cognovit, sed neque docere potest quod non didicit.] The Gregorian miracles, including the story of the appearance of a finger in the wine, the bleeding host, and the priest Plegild who sees angels dividing the body of a baby while he divides the bread, were included by Paschasius Radbertus in the earliest treatise on the Eucharist. See Paschasius Radbertus, De Corpore et Sanguine Domini: Cum Appendice Epistola ad Fredugardum, ed. Paulus Beda, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis,Vol. 16 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1969). They are universally cited in eucharistic discussion throughout the Middle Ages.That these miracles are adduced in the Acts of the Synod of Arras makes their omission in the Gesta Episcoporum all the more strikingly deliberate. Compare the continual association in theological literature among the composition of the host, of the church building, and of the community that assembles there. For one example among many, see Master Simon, De sacramentis:“Truly, just as one bread is made from many grains, so the mystical body of Christ, that is to say, the Church, is made of many persons just like a collection of grain.” [Sicut vero unus panis ex multis granis fit. . .sic misticum Christi corpus, id est Ecclesia, ex multis personis velut granis collecta.] (Simon, De sacramentis, pp. 27–28, quoted in Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 23.) Master Simon wrote in the Lower Rhineland ca. 1145, but as Rubin points out, he employed traditional terms. In Gesta Episcoporum I.48 we find the first instance of a bishop excommunicating a layman.

220

NOTES

30. Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon, ed. P. Bourgain and R. Landes, CCSL, Continuatio Mediaevalis,Vol. 129 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), III.25. 42–45: “Alduin, too, on account of the rapine of the knights and the devastation of the poor, instituted a new observance, namely that the churches and monasteries cease the divine cult and the holy sacrifice, and that the people, as if pagans, cease the divine praises, and he considered this observance to be excommunication.” [Sepe idem Alduinus, pro rapina militum et devastatione pauperum, novam observantiam constituit, scilicet ecclesias et monasteria cessare a divino cultu et sancto sacrificio, et populum quasi paganum a divinis laudibus cessare, et hanc observantiam excommunionem censebat.] 31. Richard Allen Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 36. Landes notes as well the connection of this sort of use of the interdict to the practice of humiliation of relics, which also dates from this period. See Patrick Geary,“Humiliation of Saints,” in Saints and Their Cults, ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 123–40. 32. See Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature,Vol. 10 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 33. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, p. 120. 34. In the Acta synodi, Patrologia Latina, vol. 142, col. 1306D, Gerard answers the heretics’ iconoclasm by developing, through concrete examples, the Gregorian proposition that images are the Bible of the illiterate. He thus provides instruction in how to make just such a contemplative chain from the image of the crucified Christ: “Indeed, simple and illiterate people in church, because they cannot look on the Scriptures, contemplate this by means of the features of a certain picture, that is, Christ in his humility when he wished to suffer and die for us. When they venerate this image, Christ ascending onto the cross, Christ suffering on the cross and dying on the cross, they adore Christ alone and not the work of the hands of men. For a wooden stock is not adored, but by means of that visible image the interior mind of a man is aroused, in which the suffering of Christ and the death undergone for us is inscribed on the page of the heart so that each one of us may recognize in himself how much he owes to his Redeemer.” [Simpliciores quippe in ecclesia et illiterati, quod per Scripturas non possunt intueri, hoc per quaedam picturae liniamenta contemplantur, id est, Christum in ea humilitate, qua pro nobis pati et mori voluit. Dum hanc speciem venerantur, Chistum in cruce ascendentem, Christum in cruce passum, in cruce morientem, Christum solum, non opus manuum hominum adorant. Non enim truncus ligneus adoratur, sed per illa visibilem imaginem mens interior hominis excitatur, in qua Christi passio et mors pro nobis suscepta tanquam in membrana cordis inscribitur, ut in se unusquisque recognoscat quanta suo Redemptori debeat.] It is worth noting in passing

NOTES

221

that Gerard does not use this contemplative exercise to emphasize the gloria passionis but rather to evoke in affective terms “how much each of us owes the Redeemer for his suffering,” a kind of devotion that will occupy a central place in lay spirituality in the next centuries.

Chapter 10 The Space of the Altar I am grateful to audiences at the University of Münster and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for thoughtful comments on this paper. 1. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils I, ed. Norman P. Tanner (London/ Washington, DC: Sheed and Ward/Georgetown University Press, 1990), pp. 230–31, 245. On Innocent III’s theology, see Christoph Egger,“Innocenz III: als Theologe. Beiträge zur Kenntnis seines Denkens im Rahmen der Frühscholastik,” Archivum historiae pontificiae 30 (1992): 55–123. 2. For the ideas that in later centuries advocated reception in two kinds see Hieromonk Patapios, “Sub utraque specie: The Arguments of John Hus and Jacoubek of St7ıˆbro in Defence of Giving Communion to the Laity under Both Kinds,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 53 (2002): 503–22. 3. Luther’s ideas about the sacraments pervade many of his numerous writings. I concentrate here on the early work of which he was proud, De abroganda missa privata Martini Lutheri sententia of 1521, which was translated into German in the following year as Vom Missbrauch der Messe. I have used the Weimar edition D. Martin Luthers Werke VIII (Weimer: H. Bohlau, 1888), pp. 411–76, 482–563. I cite from “The Misuse of the Mass,” in Luther’s Works, ed.Abdel Ross Wentz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), pp.133–235. 4. Martin Luther, Table Talk, trans. William Hazlitt (London: Fount, 1995), ca. 361, p. 184. For Luther’s dismissal of transubstantiation as “a monstruous word and a monstruous idea,” or as “babble” see Luther’s 1520 “Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in Luther’s Works XXXVI, pp. 31, 44–45 [11–126]; or in “De Capitivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium,” in D. Martin Luthers Werke VI (Weimar: H. Bohlau, 1888), pp. 509, 518 [464–573]. 5. Joseph Goering, “The Invention of Transubstantiation,” Traditio 46 (1991): 147–70; see also Gary Macy, “The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994): 11–41. 6. Gary Macy,“A Re-evaluation of the Contribution of Thomas Aquinas to the Thirteenth-Century Theology of the Eucharist,” in The Climate of the Early University: Essays in Honor of Otto Gründler, ed. Nancy Van Deusen, Studies in Medieval Culture 39 (Kalamazoo, MI: Pontifical Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1997) p. 54. 7. David Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74/3 (Philadelphia:American Philosophical Society, 1984). 8. Some of the difficulties in imparting belief in transubstantiation are articulated in G.E.M. Anscombe, “On Transubstantiation,” in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe III (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) p. 107

222

NOTES

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

[107–112]: “It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying: little children should be taught about it as early as possible.” For the fundamental discussion see V.L. Kennedy, “The Moment of the Consecration and the Elevation of the Host,” Mediaeval Studies 6 (1944): 120–50. It is for scholastic discussions such as this that Luther inveighed against a church committed “to abandon God’s Word and works, and cling to human word and works. They cry out: the fathers, fathers, fathers; the church, church, church; the councils, councils, councils; the universities, universities, universities!” (Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” pp. 163–64; “De abroganda,” pp. 432–33;“Vom Missbrauch,” p. 507). Statuts synodaux de Paris, ed. O. Pontal, Statuts synodaux français du XIIIe siècle 1 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1971), p. 83. Luther,“The Misuse of the Mass,” pp. 131–32. Luther, Table Talk, ca. 362, p. 185. For Luther’s thinking on the elevation see Jürgen Diestelmann, Actio Sacramentalis: Die Verwaltung des Heiligen Abendmahles nach der Prinzipien Martin Luthers in der Zeit bis zur Konkordienformel (Gross Oesingen: H. Harms, 1996), pp. 24–38. On spiritual communion, as opposed to sacramental communion, an experience developed in the twelfth century and favored in enclosed communities, see David F. Appleby, “The Priority of Sight according to Peter the Venerable,” Mediaeval Studies 60 (1998): 126–36 [123–57]. G.J.C. Snoeck, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 63 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 240–41. On elevation practices, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England ca. 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 95–107. For an image see a Franciscan missal from ca. 1340–60, reproduced in Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi:The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 151. Lay Folks’ Mass Book, ed.Thomas F. Simmons, Early English Texts Society 71 (London: N. Trübner, 1879), p. 42. For an excellent image, see a fifteenthcentury antiphonary in M.G. Ciardi Dupre, I Corali del Duomo di Siena (Milan: Electa, 1972), no. 141. For Thomas Aquinas’s approval of this custom see Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, ed. Thomas Gilbey (London/New York: Blackfriars with Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959), q. 80 a. 12, p. 84, “potest autem a populo corpus sine sanguine sumi. . .et sub utraque specie totius Christus continetur.” Against this view see Luther, Table Talk, ca. 357, p. 183. For an image representing Luther and Hus administering communion of both kinds, see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwartzbart (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1989), p. 239. Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 95–98. On the formation and training of clergy see Giampaolo Cagnin, “Ad adiscendum artem et officium clericatus: Note sul reclutamenton e sulla formazione del clero a Treviso (sec. XIV),” in Preti nel medioevo, Quaderni di storia religiosa 4 (Verona: Cierre, 1997), pp. 93–124.

NOTES

223

20. Cagnin, “Ad adiscendum artem,” pp. 206–07; Miri Rubin, “Ein neuer Feiertag im liturgischen Buch: Das Fronleichnamsfest,” in Das Codex im Gebrauch (Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums 11–13 Juni 1992), ed. Christel Meier, Dagmar Hüpper, and Hagen Keller (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), p. 37 [31–40]. For earlier, and different, iconographical conventions in illustrating the environment of Te igitur, see Rudolf Suntrup, “Te igitur-Initialen und Kanonbilder im mittelalterlichen Sakramentarhandscriften,” in Text und Bild. Aspekte des Zusammenwirkens zweier Künste im Mittelalter und frühen Neuzeit, ed. Christel Meier and Uwe Ruberg (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1980), pp. 278–382. 21. Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period:A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According to the Theologians ca. 1080–1220 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), p. 136, n. 24. On Luther’s attitude toward scholastics, see Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 163. 22. On such promises, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 108; for the power to heal, see Lay Folks’ Mass Book, p. 126; and for prayers at the elevation, see pp. 40–42. Luther abhorred the belief that seeing the elevated host could ward off death; see Richard Marius, Martin Luther:The Christian between God and Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 253. 23. On behavior at the elevation, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 103–08. 24. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On a Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 158–66. On desire for the Eucharist and the effect of transubstantiation in structuring that desire, see Pickstock’s “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist,” in Catholicism and Catholicity: Eucharistic Communities in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Sarah Beckwith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 47–68. On rupture and discontinuity see Luther’s critique of the Corpus Christi liturgy in Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” pp. 181–82. 25. Cambridge,Trinity College MS B.11.22, fol. 4r. Luther opined that prelates without their finery would have “as much of a bishop’s character as the miller’s donkey,” Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 168; “Ad abrogandam,” p. 435;“Vom Missbrauch,” p. 511. 26. See parodic masses, in Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1963), pp. 233–50; see also Pascal Ladder, “Narrentum und Liturgie: Religiöse Parodie im Mittelalter,”in Der Narr: Beiträge zu einem interdisziplinären Gespräch, Studia ethnographica friburgensia 17 (Freiburg: University of Freiburg Press, 1991) pp. 33–37 [29–40]. 27. Marius, Martin Luther, p. 333. 28. Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 168; “Ad abrogandam,” p. 435; “Vom Missbrauch,” p. 511. 29. Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 168; “Vom Missbrauch,” p. 511. On Christ’s foundation and promise in the sacrament see Henri Strohl, La Pensée de la Réforme, Manuels et Précis de Théologie 32 (Neuchatel/Paris: Delachaux/Niestlé, 1951), pp. 177–79. 30. Luther,“The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 169;‘Vom Missbrauch,” p. 511.

224

NOTES

31. Eamon Duffy, “The Parish, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval East Anglia: The Evidence of Rood Screens,” in The Parish in English Life, 1400–1600, ed. K.L. French, G.C. Gibbs, and B.A. Kümin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 133–62. 32. See Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 6; Peter Lake, “The Luadian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 161–85. 33. See, for example, the discussion of the elaborate edifices for eucharistic care and display in Doris Carl, “Der Hochaltar des Benedetto da Maiano für die Collegiata von San Gimignano: Ein Beitrag zum problem der Sakramentsaltäre des Quattrocento,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 35 (1991): 21–60;Achim Timmermann,“Eucharistie und Architektur: Sakramenthäuser der Parlerzeit,” Das Münster 55 (2002): 2–13; “Two Parlerian Sacrament Houses and their Microarchitectural Context,” Umeni 47 (1999): 400–12. 34. “Item quod quilibet homo existens in vera caritate est sacerdos Dei, et quod nullus sacerdos habet maiorem potestatem ad ministranda aliqua sacramenta in Ecclesia quam habet aliquis laicus non ordinatus,” Norman P. Tanner, ed., The Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich 1428–31, Camden Fourth Series 20 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 52. 35. “Iillud quod vos dicitis sacramentum altaris nunquam erit Deus meum per graciam Dei, quia tale sacramentum fuit falso et deceptorie ordinatum per presbiteros in Eccelsia ad inducendum populum simplicem ad ydolatriam, quia illud sacramentum est tantum panis materialis,” Tanner, Heresy Trials, p. 45. 36. “ ‘Omnis homo et omnis mulier qui sunt de opinione eiusdem Margerie sunt boni sacerdotes,”Tanner, Heresy Trials, p. 49. 37. “Nullus sacerdos habet potestatem conficiendi corpus christi in sacramento altaris; et quod Deus creavit omnes sacredotes, et in quolibet sacredote capud et oculos ad videndum, aures ad audiendum, linguam ad loquendum et omnia membra cuiuslibet hominis; et illud sacramentum quod tales sacerdotes asserunt esse verum corpus Christi nec habet oculos ad videndum, aures ad audiendum, os ad loquendum, manus ad palpandum nec pedes ad ambulandum, sed est torta panis facta de farina frumenti,” Tanner, Heresy Trials, p. 73. On the survival of such ideas among so-called Lollards in England up to the Reformation see J.A.F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). On the meanings that sermons aimed to impart, see Otto Gescer, “The Social Significance of Communion Eucharistic Preaching in the Fifteenth-Century Hungarian Sermon Collection Sermones Dominicales,” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 7 (2001): 113–34. 38. Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 165; “De abroganda,” p. 433; “Vom Missbrauch,” p. 508.

NOTES

225

39. See, for example, a case in John Van Engen,“Late Medieval Anticlericalism: The Case of the New Devout,” in Anti-clericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 51 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), p. 34 [19–52]. 40. Charles M.A. Caspers, “Magister Consensus: Wessel Gansfort (1419–1489) en de Geestelijke Communie,” Trajecta 5 (1996): 97–110. 41. Heiko A. Oberman, Masters of the Reformation: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe,trans.Dennis Martin (Cambridge,UK:Cambridge University Press, 1981), especially ch. 4. 42. On the efforts to resolve these at the Council of Ferrara-Florence 1438–39, see Miguel Arranz, “Circonstances et conséquences liturgiques du concile de Ferrare-Florence,” in Christian Unity: The Council of Ferrara-Florence 1438–39, ed. G. Alberigo, Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium 97 (Louvain: Peeters, 1991), pp. 407–27. 43. Mary C. Erler, “Palm Sunday Prophets and Processions and Eucharistic Controversy,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 62 [58–81]. 44. Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 359–60. 45. Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 169; “De abroganda,” p. 436; “Vom Missbrauch,” p. 511. 46. Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 169; “De abroganda,” p. 437; “Vom Missbrauch,” p. 512. 47. Luther, “The Misuse of the Mass,” p. 175; “De abroganda,” p. 441; “Vom Missbrauch,” p. 517. 48. Luther,“Babylonian Captivity,” p. 47;“De Captivitate,” p. 520. 49. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1999), ch. 2. 50. On the debates of Luther and other reformers on these issues see Heiko A. Oberman, The Roots of Anti-semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation, trans. James I. Porter (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 51. See, for example, the rich literature on the Passion, which was imbued with eucharistic understandings in the later Middle Ages,Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion. Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); for the Eucharist as the focus of mystical life, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 52. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Eamon Duffy, “Lay Appropriation of the Sacraments in the Later Middle Ages,” in New Blackfriars (1996), pp. 63–65 [53–68]; see also Pamela M. King,“Calendar and Text: Christ’s Ministry in the York Plays and the Liturgy,” Medium Aevum 67 (1998): 30–59. 53. See, for example,William T. Cavanaugh,“The Word in a Wafer:A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization,” in Catholicism and Catholicity, pp. 69–84.


INDEX

acta martyrum, 124 Adalbaldus, Bishop, 160 Adriaen, M., 211nn13–14 Adrian VI, 75 Advent Lyrics, 35, 39 Aers, David, 185n68, 192n25 Alberigo, G., 225n42 Albert of Vermandois, 160, 161 Albert the Great, 65, 66, 67 Alcuin, 29, 30, 41, 46, 187n2 Aldhelm, 6 Alighieri, Dante, 11, 21, 25, 26, 40, 187n20 Aline, Dame, 46 allegory, 6, 7, 30, 49, 50, 53, 201n2 Ambrose, 126 Amoretti, Biancamaria Scarcia, 187n25 Andersson,Aron, 197n25 Anderson, Douglas, 201n2 Anderson, George W., 178n2 Andersen, Joergen, 183n56 Andrew, Malcolm, 193n26 Anscombe, G.E.M., 221n8 Anselm, 11, 31, 34, 40, 46 anthropology and the sacred, 9, 101–21, 181n40, 204n15, 210n2 anticlericalism, 13, 14, 174 Antonio, 84–85, 87, 89, 90, 95–98 Appleby, David F., 222n13 Aquinas,Thomas, 11, 48, 53, 54, 57, 66, 69–71, 81, 126, 131, 190n4, 196n19, 200n58, 201n59, 201n61, 211n15, 221n6, 222n16, 223n24 Aristotle, 138, 143, 146–47, 215n31

Arranz, Miguel, 225n42 art, 4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 33, 46, 182–83n48, 183–84n56, 184n58, 209n55, 217n14, 220–21n34 Artaud, 208n52 Arundel,Thomas, 71, 144 asceticism, 5–6, 8, 22 Aslanov, Cyril, 8, 19–27, 187n15 Assumption and Coronation lyrics (Middle English), 39, 40 Aston, Margaret, 198n37 attrition, 81 Aubert, Merovingian bishop, 150 Auerbach, Erich, 189n36 Augustine, 6–8, 30, 41, 124, 126–27, 136–38, 180n24, 180n26, 210n9 Augustinus, 211n14 Auksi, Peter, 214n4 aureate style, 40 Baechem, Nicholaas, 75 Bak, János M., 209n55 Baker, Derek, 178n1 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 83, 201n1 Baldwin IV, 151, 152, 158 Baldwin, John W., 205n19, 208n48 baptism, 14, 65, 66, 137, 173, 178n1, 188n18, 206n29 Barone, Giulia, 186n4 Barshack, Lior, 101–21, 207n43 Bartlett,Ann Clark, 184n61 Barton, Carlin A., 212n30 Bassanio, 84, 88–90, 95, 96, 97, 98 Baswell, Christopher, 188n5

228

INDEX

Baxter, Margery, 74, 174 Beaune, Colette, 208n49 Beckwith, Sarah, 223n24 Beda, Paulus, 219n27 Bede, 30, 137 Benko, S., 187n5 Benson, Robert L., 183n50 Berengar of Tours, 162 Berman, Harold, 117, 204n14, 206n29, 207n35 Besançon,Alain, 182n49 Besserman, Lawrence, 1–15, 183n54 Bestul,Thomas, 184n61, 191n16, 225n51 Bethmann, Ludwig, 216n1, 218n17 Bible, 20, 23 Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha, 2–4, 25, 84, 94 Deuteronomy 6–7, 21.10–13; 23.2, 23.19–20; 3, 4, 6, 92 Ecclesiastes, 4.10; 60 Ecclesiasticus, 84 Exodus, 11.2–3, 19.6, 33.20; 3, 7 Isaiah, 1.4, 6.3–7, 48.17, 53.7; 2, 3, 51, 179n3 Jeremiah, 31.14; 25 Job, 126 Joel, 2.16; 4 Judges, 13.22; 3 1 Kings, 19.13; 3 Lamentations, 1.12; 33 Leviticus, 10.1–7, 17–26; 3 Numbers, 4.20, 16.30; 3, 73 Psalms, 49.16, 21; 77.31; 103.13; 35, 73, 80, 188n19 2 Samuel, 6.3–9; 3 Song of Songs, 5.2; 44 Susanna and the Elders, 84 New Testament, 3–5, 87–88 Acts, 17.24; 8 Colossians, 1.22, 3.11; 4 1 Corinthian, 15.10, 15.35–38; 53, 73, 84, 193n28, 194n42 2 Corinthians, 2.10, 3.6, 5.10, 6.16; 8, 72, 76, 88 Galatians, 5.2; 77 Gospels, 25, 84, 90

John, 6.61–67, 1.29, 12.24–25; 3, 51, 53, 193n28, 194n42 Luke, 4.34, 6.11, 6.30–35, 10.7; 3, 78, 84, 85 Mark, 1.24, 7.1–8, 15; 11.17; 3 Matthew, 5.17–18, 5.39–44, 12.32, 15.1–20, 16.19, 19.21–23, 23.27; 3, 66, 73, 84, 89, 91 1 Peter, 1.11–12, 1.15–16, 2.5; 4 Philemon, 1.18, 2.21; 78 Revelation, 3.20, 5.1; 7, 21; 21.23; 44, 51, 58, 191n20 Romans, 2.28, 8.9–11; 4, 88 Bion,Wilfred R., 204n15 Birrell, Jean, 182n49 Bishop, Ian, 48–50, 190n4, 191n9, 191n11, 191n13, 191n17, 192n22, 192n26, 193n30 Blacking, John, 210n2 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, 212n26 Blumenthal, Uta-Renate, 206n33 Boas, George, 217n14 Bockenforde, Ernst Wolfgang, 207n36 body, 9, 60, 61, 66, 77, 87, 98, 102–21, 130, 132, 158, 160, 168, 169, 171–72, 174, 176, 181n40, 184nn58–59, 190nn52–54, 56, 194–95n46, 203n10, 210n2, 218–19n22, 219nn27–28; see also Corporate Body Boenig, Robert, 219n25 Boethius, 139, 143 Boitani, Piero, 200n55 Bond, Gerald A., 187n17 Boniface VIII, 71, 205n24 Boniface IX, 73 Borgnet,A., 195n3 Bornstein, Daniel J., 183n51 Bos, E.P., 215n31 Bossy, John, 176, 178n1, 225n52 Botterweck, G., 178n2 Boureau,Alain, 205n28 Bourgain, P., 220n30 Boutière, Jean, 186n1, 186n8, 186n10, 187n13, 187n21 Breisach, Ernst, 214n8

INDEX

Bremmer, Jan N., 178n1, 179n8 Brewer, Derek, 191n10 Brown,Andrew D., 184n61 Brown, Carlton, 195n46 Brown, Peter, 10, 179n15, 180n29, 181n40, 182nn45–47, 182n49, 214n5 Browning, Robert, 25 Brunus, Franciscus, 213n34, 213n41 Bucer, Protestant leader, 92 Buddensieg, Rudolf, 215n24 Bullough, Donald A., 187nn1–2 bureaucratization, 101–21 Burgwinkle,William E., 19, 186n2, 187n16 Buridan, Jean, 143 Burkert,Walter, 204n15 Burns, J.H., 207n47 Burr, David, 221n7 Burwell, John, 174 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 46, 181n40, 184n58, 185n68, 190nn52–54, 212n26, 225n51 Cagnin, Giampaolo, 222n19, 223n20 Calvin, 92 Cameron,Averil, 214n5 Camille, Michael, 182n49, 184n59 Campbell, J.J., 188n21 Camporesi, Piero, 185n63 Camus,Albert, 187n19 Canning, Joseph P., 207n47 Canterbury pilgrimage, 71–75, 197–99nn26–42; see also pilgrimage Canterbury Tales, 73, 74, 197n26 Capaldo, Mario, 187n25 Capgrave, John, 183n54 Cardini, Franco, 187n25 Carducci, Giosua, 25 Carl, Doris, 224n33 Carruthers, Mary, 163, 220nn32–33 Caspers, Charles M.A., 225n40 castellan, office of, 151–53, 217n6 Catto, J.I., 215n22 Cavallo, Guglielmo, 187n25

229

Cavanaugh,William T., 225n53 Cerquiglini, Bernard, 186n11, 187n14 Charles of Anjou, 26 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 40, 71–82, 144, 180n22, 183n54, 185n62, 197n26, 199nn42–43, 200nn55–57 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 183nn50–51 Cheyette, Fredric L., 205n17, 207n42 Christ, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 29, 30–41, 43, 44–46, 51, 57–58, 60–61, 64, 66–67, 71–73, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 87, 89, 95, 98, 105, 111, 114–15, 126, 128, 162, 164, 167–68, 169, 174, 175, 184nn58, 61, 188n18, 189nn45, 49, 190nn52–54, 56, 193n38, 194–95n46, 194–95n46, 220n34 Christ I, see Advent Lyrics Chrysostom, John, 6 Cicero, 30, 137, 138, 139 civic religion, see civil religion civil religion, 103–4, 116–20, 209n54 civil society, 104, 155 Clement VI, 67 Clement VII, 75 Cluzel, Irénée-Marcel, 186n1, 186n8, 186n10, 187n21 Coats, R.H., 179n6 Cohen, Boaz, 214n10 Cohen, Esther, 123–33, 212n27 Cole,Thomas, 214n11 Colet, John, 74 Communal Body, 102–21, 204n15 communitas, 102–10, 113, 203n4 confession judicial, 129–33, 213nn42–43 sacrament of, 13, 14, 66, 133 Connolly, Margaret, 189n51 Constable, Giles, 183n50, 212n26 constancy, see fortitude contrition, 81 conversion, 22, 90, 136, 137, 194n39 Coopland, G.W., 193n35 Copeland, Rita, 135–47, 185n66, 215n22, 215n25, 215n31

230

INDEX

Coronation lyrics, see Assumption lyrics Corporate Body, 102–21, 204nn13–15 corporation, theory of, 106–9 Corpus Christi, see Eucharist Cornilliat, François, 215n25 Coulton, G.G., 202n10 Count Rainer of Mons, 160 Crucifixion, 87, 90 Crucifixion lyrics (Middle English), 37–39 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 180n22 Dacian, 127–28 Dahan, Gilbert, 190n6 da Imola, Benevuto, 40 Daniel, 84 Daniel,Arnaut, 26 Danson, Lawrence, 201n7 D’Arcy,Anne Marie, 192n21 da Varazze, Jacopo, 211n18 Davies, Julian, 224n32 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 12 Davis, J.F., 198n36 de Aquevilla, Nicholas, 192n21 death rituals, 9, 10, 181–82n44, 223n22; see also ritual de Born, Bertran, 22, 25, 26 Déchanet, J.M., 190n56 de Chateaubriand, François-René, 26, 187n23 de Chobham,Thomas, 190n5 de Gretham, Robert, 46, 189n51 de Heusch, Luc, 105, 203n9, 205n20 Dekkers, E., 210n7 Delehaye, Hippolyte, 210n6 de Lille,Alain, 11 de Lubac, Henri, 190n6, 191n18 de Mézières, Philippe, 193n35 de Miraval, Raimon, 22 de Montclos, Jean, 219n25 de Montibus,William, 191n18 de Nostredame, Jehan, 25 de Novare, Philippe, 24 de Romilly, Jacqueline, 214n11 Derrida, Jacques, 208n52 desacralization, 11, 103, 109, 111–12

desecularization, 6, 7, 161–62, 180n25 de Segusio, Henrico, 213n43 de Ubaldis, Baldus, 130, 131, 213n35, 213n40, 213n43 D’Evelyn, Charlotte, 189n23 de Ventadorn, Bernard, 22, 26 Devil, 6, 14, 31, 33, 85–87, 93, 95, 98, 160, 210n9, 222n17 de Vitalinis Mantuani, D. Bonifacii, 212n3 de Vocht, Henry, 200n49 de Voragine, Jacobus, 20, 127–28 devotio moderna, 13, 174 Dickens,A.G., 198n36 Dimmick, Jeremy, 215n22 distinctiones, 51, 191nn18, 20 Dix, Gregory, 9, 181n41 Douglas, Mary T., 124, 210n5 Dream of the Rood, 30–31, 32, 35 Duby, Georges, 116, 153, 154, 155, 156, 207n41, 207n44, 217n11 Duffy, Eamon, 176, 184n61, 185n64, 222n14, 224n31 Dumont, Louis, 206n32 Duncan,Thomas G, 29–46, 189n51 Dupre, M.G. Ciardi, 222n15 Durkheim, Emile, 107 Dykema, Peter A., 225n39 Ebbesen, Sten., 215n23 Eden, Kathy, 214n2 Egger, Christoph, 221n1 Ekman, Paul, 210n2 Elcock,William-Dennis, 186n6 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 46 Ellis, R., 189n51 emotions, 31, 46, 123–24, 210nn2–3 Engels, 203n6 Erasmus, Desiderius, 74–76, 198n38, 199n42, 200n49 Erler, Mary C., 218n21, 225n43 Ernst, Max, 46 Eucharist, 13, 14, 60–61, 88, 159–64, 167–76, 185n63, 194n42, 194–95n46, 208n52, 218n20, 219nn25, 27, 28, 221nn6–7,

INDEX

222nn9, 14, 223nn21, 24, 224nn33, 37, 225nn43, 51, 53 Evans-Prichard, 104 exegesis (biblical), 47–61, 72 family (secular and sacred ideas of), 106–16, 203n6, 207n43, 218n21 Fasciculus Morum, 44 feelings, see emotions Feher, Michel, 185n63 Felicitas, 125 Figgis, John N., 204n17 Finucane, R.C., 10, 181n44 Fiorelli, Piero, 212n28 Fleming, John V., 199n42 Fletcher,Alan J., 47–61, 192n21, 193n31 Foreville, Raymonde, 197n28 Forshall, Josiah, 215n28 Fortes, Meyer, 204n11, 209n58 Fortescue,Adrian, 179n3 fortitude, xv, 126–33 Fouracre, Paul, 212n24 Fox, Robin Lane, 180nn16–17 Francis, St., Franciscans, 13, 41, 71, 192n22, 194–95n46, 197–98n29, 198n30, 210–11n11, 221n7, 222n14 Fredborg, K.M., 214n9 Freedberg, David, 182n49, 183n55 Freedman, David Noel, 179n4 Freedman, Paul, 202n3 French, K.L., 224n31 Fromm, Erich, 203n5 Fulton, Rachel, 184n61 Gandinus,Albertus, 131, 213n33, 213n39 Gansfort,Wessel, 175 Gauchet, Marcel, 5, 179n14 Gaudet, Paul, 201n6 Gaunt, S., 186n2 Geary, Patrick J., 9, 181nn37–39 Gelasius I (Pope), 110 gender, 9, 14, 55, 131, 181n40, 185n68, 218n21

231

Gerard, bishop of Cambrai, 149–56, 159–60, 164, 220–21n34 Gescer, Otto, 224n37 Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensis, 149–65 Gibbs, G.C., 224n31 Gibson, J., 191n10 Giesey, Ralph E., 207n46, 209n55 Gilbey,Thomas, 222n16 Giles of Rome, 143 Girard, René, 204n15 Glorieux, P., 200n58 Gluckman, 104 Godmersham, Richard, 71–73 Goering, Joseph, 221n5 Golden Legend, see Legenda aurea Goldhammer,Arthur, 182n49 Goody, Jack, 204n13 Gordon, E.V., 191n14, 194n45 Gradon, Pamela, 215nn24 Graesse,Theodore, 211n18 Graf, Fritz, 178n1 Gratian, Benedictine monk, 91 Gratiano, 87–88 Gray, Douglas, 40, 188n13, 189n36 Greeks, 2, 4, 125, 136, 141, 142, 178n1, 179n9, 204n15, 214n1 Green, Rosalie B., 188n17 Gregorian Reform, 101–21, 205n28, 209n61 Gregory the Great (Pope), 6, 7, 11, 21, 30, 80, 126, 180n25, 188n6, 208n51 Gregory VII, 109, 205n24 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 92 Greyerz, K. von, 185n64, 185n69 Grillandus, Paulus, 213n44 Grosseteste, Robert, 143 Guida, Saverio, 186n3, 186n8 Hadulf, Merovingian bishop, 150 hagiography, see saints Harding,Alan, 208nn48–49 Harrell, Steven, 181n40 Harvey, Ruth E., 186n10 Haskins, Charles Homer, 183n50 Hastings, James, 179n4

232

INDEX

Hawkes,Terrence, 190n1 Heffernan,Thomas J., 199n42, 212n26 Hegel, G.W.F., 107, 140–43, 146, 214–15nn12–21 Hein, Kenneth, 219n25 Heine, Heinrich, 25 Hell, 73, 74, 86, 196–97n21 Henry II, 151, 158 Henry VIII, 92 Henry, H.T., 179n3 Henry of Langenstein, 171 heresy, heretical, 13, 14, 61, 75, 91, 174, 185n66, 194–95n46, 210n9, 220n34, 224nn34–37 Herluin, 152 Hilton,Walter, 50 Holcot, Robert, 193n31 Hollister, C.Warren, 205n19, 208n48 Holmer, Joan O., 201n5, 202n20 holy, holiness, xvi, xvii, 1–4, 5, 8, 126, 177–78n4, 179nn4–7, 212n26, 224n32 Holy Grail, 88 Holy Land, xviii, 8, 9, 67, 180n29 holy places, 4, 8, 9, 10, 180n29, 180n33, 181n35 Holy Spirit, 4, 5, 69, 73, 146, 179nn7–8, 194–95n46 Homer, 4 Honneth,Axel, 203n5 Honorius III, 71, 72 Horace, 30 Host, see Eucharist Hudson,Anne, 185n66, 215nn24–27 Hüpper, Dagmar, 223n20 Hus, Jan, 13 Hus, John, 221n2 Hutton, Ronald, 185n67 Hygbald, Bishop, 29 Hypostatic Union, 5, 30, 32, 46 iconoclasm, 14–15, 182–83n49, 215nn22, 25, 220–21n34 impure, impurity, 2, 124, 129, 132, 133; see also pure, purity Incarnation, 5

indulgences, see pardons Ingeld, 29–31, 41, 45, 46 Ingledew, Francis, 195n46 Innocent III, 71, 72, 168–69, 176, 221n1 Investiture Conflict, Investiture Controversy, xvii, 113–18, 206–7n33, 207n37, 208n50 Iogna-Prat, Dominique, 218n19 Isaac, 84 Isaiah, 2, 3, 51 Islam, xvii, 1, 14, 23 Isocrates, 145 Israelite holiness, 2–4 Jacob, 84, 96 Jacoubek of St7îbro, 221n2 Jaeger, C. Stephen, 218n19 Jakobson, Roman, 47 James of Vitry, 175 Jerome, 6, 7, 8, 23, 30, 92, 126, 180n23, 187n4 Jerusalem, 8, 9, 30, 33, 50–51, 57, 58, 65, 74, 163, 164, 176, 180n29, 191nn18–19, 193n30 Jesus, see Christ Jew(s), xviii, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 84, 87, 88, 98, 176, 201n4, 225n49 Job, 126 John XXII, 73 John of Fecamp, 32 John of Grimestone, 31 John of Salisbury, 114 Jones, Norman, 201n7 Jonson, 93 Jönsson,Arne, 197n25 Joseph, husband of Mary, 35 Jost,Walter, 214n2 Judas Iscariot, 87, 98 judicial torture, 123–33; see also torture Julian of Norwich, 46 juridification, 104, 109, 114, 117–21 kadosh, kedushah, 2–3, 4 Kamerick, Kathleen, 183n49

INDEX

Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig., 106, 107, 112, 119, 202n2, 203n8, 205n18, 207n38, 207n47, 209nn54–55, 209nn59–60, 219n23 Kay, S., 186n2 Keller, Hagen, 223n20 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 185n62, 185n64 Kendrick, Laura, 186n11 Kennedy,V.L., 222n9 Kenningham, Carmelite John, 145 Kieckhefer, Richard, 184n61, 212n26 King, Pamela M., 225n52 King David, 3 King Henry VIII of England, 196n21 King of Naples, 26 kingship (divine, sacral, administrative, secular, etc.), 105–20, 204n15, 205nn18–20, 27–28, 207n46, 208n48, 209n55; see also monarchy Kinneavy, James L., 214n1 Kittredge, George, 80, 81, 200n56 Klein, Melanie, 203n5 Kleinberg,Aviad, 182n49 Kowaleski, Maryanne, 218n21 Kretzmann, Norman, 215n31 Kriss-Rettenbeck, Lenz, 181n40 Kristensson, Gillis, 195n46 Krueger, Paul, 212n29 Krusch, Bruno, 212n24 Krynen, Jacques, 209n61 Kuhn, Sherman M., 195n1 Kümin, B.A., 224n31 Kurath, Hans, 195n1 Kuttner, Stephan, 213n36 Laban, 96 LaBarre,Weston, 210n2 Lackner, Bede K., 205n17 Lactantius, 155–56, 187n5 Ladder, Pascal, 223n26 Ladner, Gerhart B., 110–14, 116, 117, 205nn21–25, 207n34, 207nn39–40, 207n45 Landes, Richard Allen, 163, 220nn30–31 Lanfranc, 162

233

Langland,William, see Piers Plowman Langley, Sarah, 210n2 Lanham, Carol D., 183n50 Late Antique, Late Antiquity, xv, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 137, 179n15, 180n25, 182n49, 185n66, 214n5 Latham, R.E., 188n6 Laud,Archbishop, 173 Lawrence M,. Bryant, 209n55 lay piety, 13, 183n51, 185n62, 210–11n11 Leff, Gordon, 185n66, 215n22 Lefort, Claude, 111, 205n26 Legenda Aurea, 19, 20, 21–22, 27, 127, 211n18 Le Goff, Jacques, 11, 182n49, 183nn52–53 Lehmann, Paul, 223n26 Lemarignier, Jean François, 218n17 Leo IX, 109 Leo X, 196–97n21 Leupin,Alexandre, 12, 184nn56–58 Levine, Baruch A., 179n4, 179n6 Lewalski, Barbara K., 84–85, 87, 201nn2–3 Lewis, Robert E., 195n1 Lewry, P. Osmond, 215n22 lex talionis, 84 Leyser, Karl J., 117, 205n18, 205n27 Liber Meditationum, 32 Lieber, David L., 179n6 Liège, 151, 164, 165 Lietbert, Bishop, 154 Little, Lester K., 183n50 liturgy, 9, 13, 164, 167–76, 179ns, 181, 185n62, 194–95n46, 223n24, 225n52 Lockwood, Richard, 215n25 Lollardy, 13, 73, 76, 135; see also Wyclif, John;Wycliffites Lombard, Peter, 11 Lorenzo, 95 Love, Nicholas, 34 Lovejoy,Arthur O., 217n14 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 183n56

234

INDEX

lullaby lyrics (Middle English), 36–37 Luther, Martin, 92, 94, 168–76, 196–97n21, 221nn3–4, 222nn11–12, 222n16, 223nn24–25, 223nn28–30, 224n38, 225nn45–48, 225n50 Lydgate, 40 Lyndwood,William, 76 MacMullen, Ramsay, 4, 179nn10–12 Macy, Gary, 221n6, 223n21 Madden, Fredric, 215n28 Maine, Henry S., 106, 107, 203n11 Maitland, 106, 107 Manly, J.M., 199n43 manuscripts, 33, 154, 216n1 Bodleian Library MS Barlow, 24, 194–95n46 Bodley, 419, 191n18 Harley, 2253, 41 Laud lat., 94, 192n21, 194–95n46 Merton College MS, 306, 215n31 Paris BN fr.12473, 22 Trinity College MS B.11.22, 223n25 Vercelli, 31 Marcabru, 22–23 Marius, Richard, 223n22, 223n27 Markus, R.A., 5–6, 8–9, 124, 180nn18–21, 180–81nn25–36, 181nn41–43, 210n4 marriage, 14, 116, 164, 206n29, 207n44, 218n21 Martinez, David, 179n3 martyrs, martyrdom, 5, 9, 21, 27, 66, 71, 73, 124–33, 150, 210nn6–7, 212n30 Marxism, xvii, 203n6 Mary, mother of Jesus, 11, 12, 13, 34–43, 46, 184n61 Mass, 104, 168, 170–73, 176, 222n15, 223n22 Mathews,Thomas F., 182n48 Maurus, Rabanus, 51, 192n21 Maxfield, David K., 199n43 Mayali, Laurent, 209n61 McKay, H., 198n29

McKeon, Richard, 138, 214n7 McNamara, Jo Ann, 218n21 Mead, George Herbert, 105, 203n7 Mediolanensis,Ambrosius, 211n16 Meditationes Vitae Christi, 34, 35, 188n18 Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, 189n23 Meier, Christel, 223n20 Melancthon, Protestant leader, 92 Merback, Mitchell B., 212n25 Merchant of Venice, 83–98 Metonymy, 47–61 Michelson, Hijman, 86, 201n3 Middle English lyrics Brother, abyde, I the desire and pray, 34, 39 Edi be thou, hevene queen, 41 Goe, lytyll byll, and doe me recommende, 42 In a vaile of restles mynd, 44, 46 Love me broughte, 31–32 Now I se blosmë sprynge, 42 O man unkynde, 33 Wofully araide, 33–34 Worldës blissë, Have God Day, 32–33 midrash, 25 Miles, Margaret R., 184n59 Miller, C.H., 197n21 Minervini, Laura, 187n25 Minnis,Alastair J., 63–82, 190n5, 198n30 miracles, 8–10, 157–59, 162, 163, 182n49, 206n30, 217–18n16, 219n27 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christ, 34 Möhler, Gerda, 181n40 Mommsen,Theodore, 212n29 monarchy, 111, 203n10, 206–7n33; see also kingship monasticism, 5, 22 Mone,Thomas, 174 moneylending, see usury Moore, Samuel, 199n43 More,Thomas, 196–97n21 Morenzoni, F., 190n5, 200n52

INDEX

Moreschini, C., 211n12 Morris, R.I., 113, 202n1, 206nn29–30 Morrison, Karl F., 205n18 mouvance, 22–23, 186n11 Muslim, see Islam Musurillo, Herbert, 210n7 mysticism, 14 Naddaff, Ramona, 185n63 Nagy, Piroska, 210n11 nationalism, 121, 208n49, 209n56 Nelson, Benjamin, 202n11 Nerissa, 88 New Law, 4, 84, 90 Newman, Barbara, 212n26 Nicholas II, 109 Nicholas IV, 73 Nicholas of Lyre, 190n7 Nilson, Ben, 70, 197n24, 197n26, 198n35 Obelkevich, James, 181n37 Oberman, Heiko A., 222n17, 225n39, 225n40, 225n50 O’Connor, Michael Patrick, 179n4 Old and Middle English religious lyrics, 29–46 Oldcastle, John, 144 Old Law, 22, 90 Old Testament, see Bible: Hebrew Bible Olmsted,Wendy, 214n2 Otter, Monika, 158, 218n18 Padoa-Schioppa,Antonio, 209n59 pain, 123–33 painting, see art Pardoner, 74, 75, 77–82 pardons, 63–82 Parisse, Michel, 216n4, 218n19 Parker, Robert, 178n1 Parry, G.J., 202n17 Patterson, Lee, 80, 200n56 Paul, St., Pauline, 8, 30, 41, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 105, 124, 140, 145–46, 203n8 Paul II (Pope), 73

235

Pauline, 140 Paxton, Frederick S., 182n44 Pearl, 47–61 Pearsall, Derek, 183n54 Peckham, John, 175 penance, 14, 26, 63–82 Perdigon, 22 Perkins, Judith, 212n30 Perpetua, 125 Peter of Poitiers, 170 Peters, Edward, 210n9 Peter the Chanter, 169–70 Petschenig, Michael, 211n16 Pettet, E.C., 201n7 Pfaff, Richard W., 185n62 Pharisees, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 98 Phillip, Nicholas, 192n22 Picard, J.Ch., 218n19 Pickstock, Catherine, 172, 223n24 Piers Plowman, 64, 76, 144 pilgrimage, 9, 13, 14, 64, 65, 69, 71, 73–75, 79, 181n40, 197n26, 198n38, 199n42, 200n49; see also Canterbury pilgrimage Plato, 41, 140 pollution, 2 pope, xvii, 9, 13, 30, 65, 67, 68, 69–73, 75 Pontal, O., 222n10 Portia, 84, 85, 88–90, 95, 97, 98 Post, Gaines, 207n36, 209n53 Pound, Ezra, 21, 25, 26, 27, 187n22 profane, xvii, 2, 3, 7, 8, 15, 19, 110, 124, 177n3, 178n1, 181n44, 206n29 prosometric texts, 24 Protestant(s), Protestantism, 14, 77, 92, 94, 173, 177n4, 179n13, 200n49, 202n17 Prudentius, 6, 126–28, 210n10, 211n18, 212n24 psychoanalysis, 104, 107, 203n5; see also psychology psychology, 54, 107, 157, 204n15; see also psychoanalysis Pullen, Robert, 169 Pullus, Gratian, 74

236

INDEX

Quia amore langueo poems, 44 Quiney, Richard, 90

Ruberg, Uwe, 223n20 Rubin, Miri, 162, 167–76, 185n63, 218n20, 219nn24–25, 219n28, 222n18, 223n20, 223nn22–23, 225n44, 225n49 Rudel, Jaufre, 21–22 Rüpke, Jorg, 179n8

Ragusa, Isa, 188n17 Rand, E.K., 180n22 rationalization, see bureaucratization Reddy,William M., 210n3 Refoulé, R.F., 187n3 Reidy, John, 195n1 relics, 8–9, 13, 14, 30, 67, 74–75, 79, 150, 152, 220n31, 222n14 religious conflicts, xvii–xviii, 76–77 repentance, see penance rhetoric, pagan and Christian/secular and sacred (history and historiography of), 135–47 Richard II, 193n35 Richard III, 86 Richard, abbot of St.Vaast, 150 Richard, duke of Normandy, 158 Richard, H., 191n20, 192n22 Richman, Paula, 181n40 Richter, Irma A., 184n60 Riga, Peter J., 207n42, 209n53 Rigaudière,Albert, 209n61 ritual, 2, 3, 4, 9–11, 14, 42, 88, 103, 113, 119, 156, 167–76, 177n3, 181n41, 182n44, 183n52, 185n67, 203n4, 204n15, 206n30, 208n52, 217n11 Robertson, D.W., Jr., 7, 180n22, 214n3 Robertson, J.C., 198n33 Robert the Pious, 151, 153, 158 romance, 23, 183n54 Roman de la rose, 78 Roman Empire, xvii, 4, 112, 129, 179n10 Roman sacredness, 4–5, 179n9 Rosenstein, Roy, 186n7 Roston, Murray, 83–98 Roth, Cecil, 179n3 Rouse, Mary A., 191n20, 192n22

sacralization, xvi, 115, 116, 177n3 sacramentals, 13, 14, 185n62 sacraments, 13, 14, 66, 164, 167, 173, 174, 185nn62–64, 196n21, 221n3, 225n52 saints, xv, 9, 10, 12, 13, 19–27, 64, 66, 67, 70, 76, 123, 126, 129, 150, 154, 157, 171, 179n15, 180n29, 182–83nn45–49, 184n61, 186nn3–6, 196n21, 197–98nn25–29, 202n16, 212n26, 219n25, 220n31 Salerio, 87, 95 Satan, 85; see also Devil Sbriccoli, Mario, 213n32 Scale of Perfection, 50 Schiappa, Edward, 214n11 Schiefenhövel,Wulf, 210n2 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 185n67 Schneider, Margery J., 183n51 Schoenbaum, S., 202n8, 202n18 scholasticism, 142–47 Scholl, Rudolph, 212n29 Schreiner, Klaus, 184n59 Schutz,Alexander H., 23, 186n1, 186n5, 186n8, 186n10, 187n12, 187n21 Scott,A.B., 190n5 Scribner, R.W., 185n64 Scully, R.E., 198n36 sculpture, see art secularization, xvi, 5, 7, 11, 27, 102–3, 105–20, 133, 177n4, 178n6, 182n49, 205nn27–28, 207n37 secular love lyrics, 41–43; see also Middle English lyrics sensations, physical, 124; see also emotions

pure, purity, 2, 3, 4, 35, 174; see also impure, impurity Purvey, John, 145 Putter,Ad, 193n26, 193n33, 194n39

INDEX

sensus litteralis, 48, 49, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 190n6, 193n30, 193n32, 194n42 sensus spiritualis, 54, 56, 57, 194n42 sermons, 13, 46, 67, 79, 126, 127, 128, 144, 189n51, 193n31, 215n24, 224n37 seven vices and virtues, xv sexual imagery, 12, 183n56, 184n58 sexuality, 5, 12, 161, 184n58, 218n21 Shaffern, Robert W., 195n2 Shakespeare,William, 89–90, 97, 98, 202n19 Shaw, Brent D., 212n30 Sheedy, Charles E., 219n25 Shirley,W.W., 215n25 Shrader, C.R., 219n25 Shuger, Debora K., 137, 214n6 Shylock, 84–90, 95–98 Sibbes, Richard, 94, 202n16 Simmons,Thomas F., 222n15 Simon, Master, 219n28 Simon of Faversham, 143, 215n23 simony, xv, 66 Simpson, James, 215n22 Skinner, Quentin, 203n10 Smalley, Beryl, 190n4 Smith, Jonathan Z., 9 Snoeck, G.J.C., 222n14 Socrates, 137–38, 140, 142, 145 Solanio, 86, 87, 95, 96 sophists, 140–47 Sordello, 26 Sot, Michel, 217n16 Southern, Richard, 204n16, 216n2 Spearing,A.C., 194n44 Spencer, H.L., 191n15 Speratus, Bishop, 187n2 Spiegel, Gabrielle M., 202n3 spiritual power, 103, 112, 115, 182n49 spiritual treasury, see treasury of merits sports, xvi, 3, 177n3 Sproemberg, Heinrich, 216n5 St. Bernard, 21, 34, 40, 46, 211n11 St. Bonaventure, 11, 67–69, 77, 81, 197n29

237

St. Bridget of Sweden, 70 St. Francis, 71, 197n29, 198n30, 210n11 St. Géri, 150, 154 St. John, 51, 191n18 St. Paul, 41, 72, 73, 76, 78 St. Peter, 66, 73, 211n11 St.Thomas à Becket, 71–75, 79, 198n36, 199n42 St.Vaast, 150, 157 St.Vincent, 21, 127–28 St.Vindicien, 157 Staley, Lynn, 185n68 Stein, Robert M., 149–65 Steinberg, Leo, 184n58 Stevenson, Laura C., 202n13 Stock, Brian, 208nn51–52 Strayer, Joseph R., 117, 120, 202n3, 205n27, 207n37, 208n50, 209nn56–57, 209n59 Stump, Eleonore, 215n31 Sturley, 89 suffragium, xv Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 184n59 Summa Theologiae, 48 Sumption, Jonathan, 181n40 Suntrup, Rudolf, 223n20 Swanson, Robert, 183n50, 185n64, 198n37, 199n43 Swanton, M., 188n7, 188n20 Sylvester, R., 197n21 Szell,Timea, 212n26 Tanner, Norman P., 221n1, 224nn34–35, 224n37 Tawney, R.H., 94, 202n9, 202n12, 202nn14–15 Taylor, Jane H.M., 182n44 Taylor, Jerome, 183n50 Taylor, Joan E., 181n35 Taylor, John R., 190n3 Tazi, Nadia, 185n63 temporal power, 111–14, 153 Tertullian, 30, 125, 187n3, 210nn7–8 Thomas of Bailly, 80, 81 Thomas of Chobham, 78 Thomson, J.A.F., 224n37

238

INDEX

Thorpe,William, 144 Thrupp, Sylvia L., 209n56 Timmermann,Achim, 224n33 Tixier, R., 189n51 Todd, Jane Marie, 182n49 Torr, Dona, 203n6 Torti,Anna, 200n55 torture, 123–33, 210n9, 212n28; see also judicial torture transubstantiation, 13, 61, 168, 169, 172, 173, 194n46, 221–22nn4, 5, 8, 223n24 treasury of merits, 64, 67, 70, 71, 195n2, 199n43 Trexler, Richard, 14, 184nn69–70 trivium, 138, 215n22 troubadours, 19–27 Turner, Edith, 181n40 Turner,Victor, 102, 104, 181n40, 203n4 Twelfth-Century Renaissance, 11, 183n50, 202 Uhland, Ludwig, 25 usury, 90–96, 201n7, 202n11 Valerius, Bishop, 127 Van der Werf, Hendrik, 187n24 Van Deusen, Nancy, 221n6 Van Engen, John, 225n39 Van Gennep, 104 Van Meter, David C., 217n12 van Mingroot, Erich, 154, 217n12 Vantuono,W., 191n10 Vauchez,André, 182n49, 183n51, 184n61, 185n65, 211n26 Vercauteren, Fernand, 216n3, 217n7, 217n9 Vindicien, Merovingian bishop, 150 Virgil, 4, 30, 40, 41

Waldron, Ronald, 193n26 Waleran, 160–61 Wallace, David, 190n5 Walter of Lens, 152, 153 Ward, John O., 138, 214n8 Weber, Max, 5, 94, 106, 179n13 Weitemeier, B., 189n51 Wentz,Abdel Ross, 221n3 West,Alick, 203n6 White,William, 198n37 Whitehouse, Owen C., 179n4 Whyte,William, 73–74 Wife of Bath, 74 Wigoder, Geoffrey, 179n3, 179n6 Wilentz, Sean, 207n46 William, Harrison, 94 William of Aquitaine, 24, 26 William of Auvergne, 65, 66, 200n53 William of Auxerre, 172 William of Nottingham, 190n7 William of St.Thierry, 46, 190n56 Wilson, Edward, 193n31, 194n44 Wilson,Thomas, 92, 202n12 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 183n54 Wolf, George, 186n7 Wolff, Berthold B., 210n2 Wolter, Udo, 209n59 Woolf, Rosemary, 44, 188n13, 188n45, 188n49 Wyclif, John, 13, 73, 144–45 Wycliffite(s), 185, 194, 195, 215nn24–30; see also Lollardy Zborowski, Mark, 210n2 Zeeman, Nicolette, 215n22 Zelzer, Michaela, 211n16 Vivek, Slavo÷, 145, 216n32 Zumthor, Paul, 186n11

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays (The New Middle Ages)

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays (The New Middle Ages)

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays

Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature (The New Middle Ages)

Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (The New Middle Ages)

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics (The New Middle Ages)

Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (New Middle Ages)

Langland's Early Modern Identities (The New Middle Ages)

Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature (The New Middle Ages)

Fairies in Medieval Romance (The New Middle Ages)

Fairies in Medieval Romance (The New Middle Ages)

Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (The New Middle Ages)

Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature (The New Middle Ages)

Outlawry in Medieval Literature (The New Middle Ages)

The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (The New Middle Ages)

Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England: Collected Essays (The New Middle Ages)

Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman (The New Middle Ages)

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (The New Middle Ages)

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (The New Middle Ages)

Narrative And History in the Early Medieval West (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 16)

Margaret Paston's Piety (The New Middle Ages)

Julian of Norwich's Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception (The New Middle Ages)

Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (The New Middle Ages)

Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (The New Middle Ages)

Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England

Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays (The New Middle Ages)