Early Medieval Europe - Volume 13, Issue 3 - February 2005

The handling and interpretation of dreams and visions in late sixth- to eighth-century Gallic and Anglo-Latin hagiograph...

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The handling and interpretation of dreams and visions in late sixth- to eighth-century Gallic and Anglo-Latin hagiography and histories J  K 

Early medieval attitudes to dreams and visions have been seen either as negative, products of an ostensibly repressive theological tradition, or positive, as suggested by the apparent ease with which many narratives treat these phenomena. This article explores the relationship of early medieval views on dreams to those of the church Fathers and suggests that views on the value and handling of dreams vary in accordance with the probable audiences and aims of our sources. Instead of uniform views either repressive or permissive, we see a variety of attitudes and techniques, aiming to satisfy both practical needs and theological concerns.

Introduction The study of medieval dreams and visions has long focused on the development and functions of the longer narrative visions of the Christian Beyond.1 More recently, largely owing to Jacques Le Goff ’s initiative,2 several scholars have examined the meaning of dreams and dreaming *

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I wish to acknowledge the guidance and encouragement I have received from my teachers Tuomas Heikkilä, Matti Kilpiö, Tuomas M.S. Lehtonen and Markku Peltonen; the constructive criticism and suggestions provided by the EME Co-ordinating Editor Paul Fouracre and the anonymous referees; as well as the moral support and advice given by my family, friends and colleagues, especially Alaric Hall and Vesa-Matti Ovaska. See the fundamental P. Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 23 (Stuttgart, 1981); more recently C. Carozzi, Le voyage de l’âme dans l’au-delà d’après la literature latine V e– XIII e siècle, Collection de l’ecole française de Rome 189 (Rome, 1994); also J.J. Contreni, ‘“Building Mansions in Heaven” The Visio Baronti, Archangel Raphael, and a Carolingian King’, Speculum 78 (2003), pp. 673–706. See principally J. Le Goff, ‘Le christianisme et les rêves (IIe –VIIe siècles)’, in T. Gregory (ed.), I sogni nel medioevo. Seminario internazionale Roma, 2–4 ottobre 1983, Lessico intellettuale Europeo 35 (Rome, 1985), pp. 171–215.

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in medieval societies.3 Paul Edward Dutton has explored the politics of dreams and visions in the Carolingian empire 4 and Jean-Claude Schmitt has examined later medieval stories of ghosts and apparitions.5 Both of the latter distinguish between the ultimately unreachable reality of the described experiences, and the rhetoric and use of stories of visions as a worthwhile object of study. Examining the foundations of theological notions on the subject, Jacques Le Goff observes that the Fathers of the church, battling paganism and heresy, asserted that some dreams clearly were of satanic origin and condemned the oneiric practices of classical antiquity. 6 Since Pope Gregory the Great (590–614) warned that only saints could reliably interpret dreams, Le Goff argues that while saintly individuals and monks were thus privileged as visionaries, the ordinary Christian dreamer was abandoned without tools for dealing with his experiences: ‘the incapacity of the Church to provide Christians with criteria for discerning the origin and thus the value of their dreams led the dreamer to repress his dreams. The Christian society of the early Middle Ages is a society of frustrated dreamers.’7 Isabel Moreira has recently argued that Merovingian attitudes essentially represented a continuation of early Christian traditions of open access to inspired revelation.8 Focusing on interpretations of visionary 3

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For an overview see M.E. Wittmer-Butsch, Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum im Mittelalter, Medium Aevum Quotidianum Sonderband 1 (Krems, 1990); S.F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 14 (Cambridge, 1992). Cf. M. Aubrun, ‘Caractères et portée religieuse et sociale des “Visiones” en Occident du VIe au XIe siècle’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale X e–XII e siècles 23 (1981), pp. 109–30. P.E. Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln, NE, 1994). Cf. H.J. Kamphausen, Traum und Vision in der lateinische Poesie der Karolingerzeit, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters 4 (Bern, 1975). J.-C. Schmitt, Les revenants. Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale ([Paris], 1994). On dreams in classical and Christian antiquity see E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 37–68; J.S. Hanson, ‘Dreams and Visions in the GraecoRoman World and Early Christianity’, in W. Haase (ed.), Aufstieg und Niedergand der römischen Welt. Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung II 23.2 (Berlin, 1980), pp. 1395–427; M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 2: L’Usage des plaisirs ([Paris], 1984), pp. 17– 50; P.C. Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ, 1994); and G.G. Stroumsa, ‘Dreams and Visions in Early Christian Discourse’, in D. Schulman and G.G. Stroumsa (eds), Dream Cultures. Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming (New York, 1999), pp. 189–212. Le Goff, ‘Le christianisme et les rêves’, p. 211: ‘l’incapacité de l’Église à fournir au chrétien des critères de distinction d’origine et donc de valeur des rêves conduit à faire refouler ses rêves par le rêveur. La société chrétienne du haut Moyen Âge est une société de rêveurs frustrés.’ All translations by the present author, unless otherwise indicated. See further J. Le Goff, ‘Rêves’, in J. Le Goff and J.-C. Schmitt (eds), Dictionnaire raisonné de l’occident medieval ([Paris], 1999), pp. 950–68; J.-C. Schmitt, ‘The Liminality and Centrality of Dreams in the Medieval West’, in Schulman and Stroumsa (eds), Dream Cultures, pp. 274–87; J. Le Goff and N. Truong, Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge ([Paris], 2003), pp. 86–93. I. Moreira, Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul (Ithaca, NY, 2000), pp. 11–38 and 225–7. For an earlier approach with similar observations, see G. de Nie, Views from a Many-Windowed Tower. Studies of Imagination in the Works of Gregory of Tours (Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 213–96.

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ability and authority, she shows that Merovingian clerics at least were ready to accept the suitable visions of laymen, and suggests their approaches had positive, rather than negative, implications for the ordinary dreamer. Recently Moreira has questioned Le Goff’s assumption that there existed a ‘Christian theory of dreams’. 9 It seems clear, however, that individual writers continued to think about dreams and passed on oneiric practices to be offered as Christian.10 It also appears that extending the period under inquiry beyond the Merovingian era brings to light variations in these views. Since patristic doubts about dreams revolved around the ability to interpret, or to assess, rather than the ability to receive, the deceptive imagery of dreams, it remains to be seen how ecclesiastical writers reconciled theological scepticism and practical needs. Hagiographies and histories, 11 used to provide 9

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I. Moreira, ‘Dreams and Divination in Early Medieval Canonical and Narrative Sources: The Question of Clerical Control’, The Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003), pp. 621–42. Cf. early medieval theology of miracles; see W.D. McCready, Signs of Sanctity. Miracles in the Thought of Gregory the Great, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts 91 (Toronto, 1988); and W.D. McCready, Miracles and the Venerable Bede, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts 118 (Toronto, 1994). See generally the fundamental P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, The Haskell Lectures in the History of Religions, New Series 2 (Chicago, 1981). See also R. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990); A. Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1997). Generally, F. Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger. Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit (Prague, 1965); W. Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter II: Merowingische Biographie; Italien, Spanien und die Inseln im frühen Mittelalter, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters 9 (Stuttgart, 1988); and idem, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter III: Karolingische Biographie; 750 – 920 n. Chr., Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters Band 10 (Stuttgart, 1991); D. von der Nahmer, Die lateinische Heiligenvita. Ein Einführung in die lateinische Hagiografie (Darmstadt, 1994). Further, I. Wood, ‘Forgery in Merovingian Hagiography’, in Fälschungen im Mittelalter. Internationaler Kongreß der MGH, München, 16 –19. September 1986, Teil V, MGH Schriften 33:V (Hanover, 1988), pp. 369–84; F. Prinz, ‘Der Heilige und seine Lebenswelt. Überlegungen zum gesellschafts-und kulturgeschichtlichen Aussagewert von Viten und Wundererzählungen’, in A. Haverkamp and A. Heit (eds), Friedrich Prinz, Mönchtum, Kultur und Gesellschaft – Beiträge zum Mittelalter zum sechzigsten Geburtstag des Autors (München, 1989), pp. 251–68; I. Wood, ‘The Use and Abuse of Latin Hagiography in the Early Medieval West’, in E. Chrysos and I. Wood (eds), East and West: Modes of Communication. Proceedings of the First Plenary Conference at Merida, The Transformation of The Roman World 5 (Leiden, 1999), pp. 93–109; M. van Uytfanghe, ‘Le remploi dans l’hagiographie: une “Loi du Genre” qui étouffe l’originalité?’, in Ideologie e pratiche del reimpiego nell’alto medioevo. Settimane 46:1 (Spoleto, 1999), pp. 359–412; C. Cubitt, ‘Memory and Narrative in the Cult of Early AngloSaxon Saints’, in Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 29–66; A.-M. Helvétius, ‘Les saints et l’histoire. L’apport de l’hagiologie à la médievistique d’ajourd’hui’, in H.W. Goetz (ed.), Die Aktualität des Mittelalters, Herausforderungen. Historisch-politische Analysen 10 (Bochum, 2000), pp. 135–63. On historiography e.g. D.P. Kirby, ‘Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum: Its Contemporary Setting’, in Bede and his World. The Jarrow Lectures I–II, 1958–93 (Aldershot 1994), pp. 903– 26; H. Mayr-Harting, ‘Bede’s Patristic Thinking as a Historian’, in A. Scharer and G. Scheibelreiter (eds), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Munich, 1994), pp. 367–74. M. Heinzelmann, Gregor von Tours (538–594) ‘Zehn Bücher Geschichte.’ Historiographie und Geshellschaftkonzept in 6. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt, 1994).



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congregations with models of Christian life, to promote cults and to safeguard privileges, form prime sources for this endeavour. Rather than look for a uniform set of views, one needs to consider the differing, if often elusive, audiences and aims of these texts,12 as well as their varying intellectual contexts, and the ways these might influence the attitudes expressed.13 This article will explore some of the techniques and procedures for handling and interpreting dreams and visions portrayed in late sixthto eighth-century Gallic and Anglo-Latin narrative sources, 14 and their relation to the oneirocritical views of the church Fathers. Rather than being simply either permissive or critical, the views on the value and authentication of dreams appear to vary in accordance to the probable authorial contexts and intended audiences of the sources. Instead of personal sanctity as a safeguard of interpretation, an idea central to many of the patristic theories, we see an emphasis on practical measures for dealing with dreams – in particular, as examined in the first two sections of this article, in texts most likely to have been intended for wider, lay, audiences. Encouraging attitudes may have existed to promote dialogue and consultation in which the authorities could then exercise their supervisory duties. Dialogues with critical theory and tradition, offering criteria for analysis of visions and a rationale perhaps also behind the more straightforward descriptions, are explored in the last two segments. Here we also examine emphasis on the supervisory 12

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Where available, the probable intended audience and authorial context will be specified in the notes for each source. Generally it appears many Merovingian texts were to have been read aloud to a wide audience, while Anglo-Latin and eighth-century continental texts were increasingly written to be read in smaller, more exclusive and learned monastic or ecclesiastical contexts. See M. van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie et son public à l’époque mérovingienne’, Studia Patristica 16 (1985), pp. 54–62; K. Heene, ‘Merovingian and Carolingian Hagiography. Continuity or Change in Public and Aims?’, Analecta Bollandiana 107 (1988), pp. 415–28; Y. Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul a.d. 481–751, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions, Medieval and Early Modern Peoples 1 (Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1995), pp. 20 –41; and W. van Egmond, ‘The Audience of Early Medieval Hagiographical Texts: Some Questions Revisited’, in M. Mostert (ed.), New Approaches to Medieval Communication, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 1 (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 41–68. See also C. Stancliffe, ‘The Miracle Stories in Seventh-Century Irish Saints’ Lives’, in J. Fontaine and J.N. Hillgarth (eds), Le septiéme siécle, changements et continuities (London, 1992), pp. 87–115, at p. 97. For a previous approach to dreams in hagiography see L.M. Bitel, ‘In visu noctis: Dreams in European Hagiography and Histories 400 –900’, History of Religions 31 (1991), pp. 39–59. Unfortunately, while pointing out the use of hagiography in perpetuating models and promoting discourse, the article is encumbered by its lack of attention to the intellectual and pragmatic contexts of the sources. See also G. Dagron (ed.), ‘Rêver de Dieu et parler de soi. Le rêve et son interpretation d’après les sources Byzantines’, in I sogni, pp. 37–56; F.E. Consolino, ‘Sogni e visioni nell’agiografia tardoantica: modeli e variazioni sul tema’, Augustinianum 29 (1989), pp. 237–56. On ambiguity between waking visions and dreams, and the necessity of studying both, see Hanson, ‘Dreams’, p. 1408; Schmitt, Les revenants, p. 252; Stroumsa, ‘Dreams’, p. 189.




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duties of ecclesiastical authorities. These latter approaches are understandably found mostly in texts from more exclusive contexts, and probably amplified by the eighth-century reforms.

The treatment and recognition of unwanted dreams and illusions One of the main concerns of late antique theologians about dreams and visions appears to have been the ability of Satan to appear ‘as an angel of light’.15 Naturally, even man’s own body and mind could produce vain dreams. Thus Pope Gregory advised his readers that only sancti viri could, charismatically, discern the origin, and thus the value, of oneiric images and voices.16 On the basis of such views Jacques Le Goff asserted that the church imbued ordinary dreamers with a fear of dreams, and left them without tools for making sense of their experiences. 17 While the task of re-examining Gregory’s dictum in context is beyond the scope of the present article,18 it must be pointed out that Isidore of Seville (556–636) at least, in reprising the passage, clearly speaks in a wider sense of electi, to whom, he says, God has given the power to uncover Satan’s frauds.19 The roughly contemporary works of Gregory of Tours (c.538–94) appear to offer practical examples of how even laymen could protect themselves from unwanted and fraudulent dreams and visions. 20 For example, he tells us of a certain lunaticus Landulf, who came to the shrine of St Martin seeking a cure. There the demon vexing Landulf appeared to him as an old man, identifying himself as St Martin and asking to be worshipped. Alerted by such a request, however, Landulf replied that he would obey only if the apparition identified itself with the sign of the cross. Incapable of this, ‘hearing the name of the sign 15 16

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II Corinthians XI.14. Grégoire Le Grand, Dialogues, tome III, IV.50.4, ed. A. de Vogüé, Sources Chrétiennes 265 (Paris, 1980), pp. 174–6: ‘Sancti autem uiri inter inlusiones atque reuelationes ipsas uisionum uoces aut imagines quodam intimo sapore discernunt.’ Note that the first time Gregory formulates his views on dreams he is commenting on a passage on Job being haunted by terrible visions, and thus seems to be offering consolation, see Gregorius Magnus, Moralia in Iob, VIII.xxiv.42, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout, 1979), p. 413. Le Goff, ‘Le christianisme et les rêves’, pp. 209–11. See Moreira, Dreams, Visions, p. 37, for a brief consideration of a related passage of Gregory’s. See Isidorus Hispalensis, Sententiae, III.5, ed. P. Cazier, CCSL 111 (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 206: ‘Saepe fraus Satanae sanctorum cordibus aperitur, quando, per speciem boni angelum se simulans lucis, dum nititur electos decipere, detegitur atque contemnitur.’ On the semantics of sanctus, see M. Heinzelmann, ‘Sanctitas und “Tugendadel”. Zu Konzeptionen von “Heiligkeit” im 5. und 10. Jahrhundert’, Francia 5 (1978), pp. 741–51. Gregory’s texts were probably intended to be read to laymen, see van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie’, pp. 58–60; Gregory the Great on the contrary was writing to teachers, and only indirectly to those taught; see e.g. R. Markus, Signs and Meanings. World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool, 1997), pp. 52–5.



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always opposed to him’,21 the demon vanished. After a while the real saint appeared and cured Landulf by making the sign of the cross over him. The episode somewhat resembles one that Sulpicius Severus (d. 397) narrates of St Martin recognizing Satan disguised as Christ. 22 In Gregory’s anecdote, however, in the place of the ascetic detector of satanic frauds, there is an everyman figure. The gesture, the sign of the cross, as a protection against all manner of demonic attacks, is a tool he likewise recommends for the clergy. 23 Gregory himself uses the cross to test a disturbing repetitive dream that finally proves to be valid. 24 However, while individuals could protect themselves, Gregory also points out the importance of senior supervision, especially in monastic settings. A certain Secundellus had begun living as a hermit with St Friardus, when one night Satan appeared to him disguised as Christ. Secundellus was told that he had been predestined to sainthood and should leave his hermitage to perform miracles. Deceived, he left, returning to brag after performing numerous miracles. Friardus immediately chastised Secundellus, who now realized his transgression. As the devil returned, the younger hermit was ready to drive it away using the sign of the cross.25 Indeed, once one knew to be wary of dreams, one could protect oneself with the sign of the cross. While the issue of Satan masquerading as an angel of light does come up, in Gregory’s texts for example, it appears as a clerical veto rather than a widespread concern.26 However, while everyone could learn to protect themselves, clerics were reminded of the importance of pastoral supervision, especially in texts written for more exclusively ecclesiastical audiences.27 One of the revealing changes the Venerable Bede (d. 735) 21

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Gregorius Turonensis, Libri IV de virtutibus S. Martini, II.18, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM I:2, 2nd edn (Hanover, 1969), p. 165: ‘audito nomine signi sibi semper contrarii’. See also St Augustine, who notes that only spirits that request worship to God, not to themselves, are to be obeyed; Sancti Aurelii Augustini De Civitate Dei libri I–X, X.16, CCSL 47 (Turnhout, 1955), pp. 289–91; cf. I Corinthians XII.3. Sulpice Sévère, Vie de Saint Martin, tome I, c. 24, ed. Jacques Fontaine, Sources Chrétiennes 133 (Paris, 1967), pp. 306–8. See P. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church In the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford, 1978), p. 156; Moreira, Dreams, Visions, pp. 57–8. Cf. Le Goff, ‘Le christianisme et les rêves’, pp. 205–6. E.g. Gregorius Turonensis, Libri historiarum decem, II.21, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM I:1, 2nd edn (Hanover, 1951), p. 67. Gregorius Turonensis, Gloria martyrum, c. 86, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM I:2, 2nd edn (Hanover, 1969), p. 96. Gregorius Turonensis, Liber vitae patrum, c. ix.2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM I:2, 2nd edn (Hanover, 1969). Gregorius Turonensis, Liber vitae patrum, c. ix.2, ed. Krusch, p. 254. See e.g. the late eighth-century Vita Amandi, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM V (Hanover, 1910), 10, p. 435. An inmudus spiritus appears and tries to drown a servant boy, who calls for Christ to help, only to be taunted by the spirit, who asks, ‘Qualis Christus?’ The saint then commands the demon in the name of ‘Christus, filius Dei vivi, crucifixus’. On dating see É. de Moreau, ‘La vita Amandi prima et les fondations monastiques de S. Amand’, Analecta




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made when re-writing the early eighth-century Life of St Cuthbert, appears in an episode portraying the saint in pastoral work. As the saint was delivering a sermon, a fire seemed to break out in the village, and the crowd departed to investigate. In the original version, seeing no smoke, they realized this was one of the illusions the saint had been warning them about.28 In Bede’s version, however, Cuthbert needs to go and banish the illusion before the villagers come to their senses, 29 a textual change that fits in well with others he made in order to underline the importance of pastoral work.30 What the anonymous hagiographer thought that the baptized villagers could accomplish was, understandably, beyond the abilities of a pagan. The late eighth-century hagiographer of St Vulframn tells us that the Frisian princeps Radbod (d. 719) had a dream where Satan appeared as an angel of light and told him not to accept the Christian faith. Vulframn, hearing of the duke’s dream, attempted to assert that this was an inlusio diaboli.31 Radbod, however, not recognizing Christianity as the only possible frame of reference for dream interpretation, believed the deception instead.32 In these stories the nature of a vision is recognized through a Christian evaluation of the message or content of the vision. It is the more exclusively monastic and clerical texts that tend to emphasize the special talents of the leaders of communities in discerning spirits and their supervisory duties. On the other hand, texts probably intended for wider audiences advocate techniques of individual protection. Dreams were potentially dangerous, but they were not to be feared. Any Christian could use the sign of the cross even when undecided, not only effectively to ward off an illusion, but also to help distinguish between

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Bollandiana 67 (1949), pp. 447–64; and A. Verhulst and G. Declerq, ‘L’action et le souvenir de saint Amand en Europe centrale. À propos de la découverte d’une Vita Amandi antiqua’, in M. van Uytfanghe and R. Demeulenaere (eds), Aeuum inter utrumque. Mélanges offerts à Gabriel Sanders, professeur émérite à l’Université de Gand, Instrumenta Patristica 23 (Hague, 1991), pp. 503–26. Vita Sancti Cuthberti auctore anonymo, c. ii. 6, ed. B. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (New York, 1969), p. 86. Beda Venerabilis, Vita Sancti Cuthberti, c. xiii, ed. Colgrave, Two Lives, p. 198. On these, C.E. Newlands, ‘Bede and Images of Saint Cuthbert’, Traditio 52 (1997), pp. 73– 109. Vita Vulframni, c. 10, ed. W. Levison, MGH SRM V (Hanover, 1910), p. 669. On composition of this monastic text see Wood, ‘The Use and Abuse’, p. 107. He might be compared to King Eadwine of Northumbria (d. 623), whose conversion is depicted as beginning by accepting Paulinus’s interpretation of a dream of his. See B. Colgrave (ed.), The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Lawrence, KA, 1968), pp. 99–100. On the text, A. Thacker, ‘Memorializing Gregory the Great: The Origin and Transmission of a Papal Cult in the Seventh and Early Eighth Centuries’, EME 7 (1998), pp. 59–84. Cf. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, II.12, eds B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 180.



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a worthwhile message and an illusion. 33 This also accords with the known rudiments of moral tuition of the laity in Merovingian Gaul. 34 The modern historian might be entitled to doubt the efficacy of such methods of protection, but as Peter Brown points out, protecting oneself with the sign of the cross was, in the case of Gregory at least, consonant with reverentia, a civilized attitude to life.35

The importance of obeying dreams Unlike the prescriptive sources, recommending suspicion of dreams, many narratives, especially in connection with the relics of saints, appear to advocate almost the reverse. Gregory of Tours tells us of a peasant who gave shelter to a passing relic dealer. The following night he was notified in a dream that the premises had been sanctified by the relics of the martyr Saturninus and could no longer be inhabited. Because of his boorishness (ut habet rusticitas) the poor man forgot the apparition, and suffered bad luck for one year before recalling the dream and moving out.36 Quite clearly a speedy acceptance of the vision’s message would have been preferable. 37 Although peasants usually appear in Gregory’s texts as stereotypical uncivilized rustici,38 he also portrays monks and clerics who unwisely 33

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E.g. Gregorius Turonensis, Gloria martyrum, c. 86, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM I:2, 2nd edn (Hanover, 1969), p. 96. Martin of Braga, for example, recommends the use of the Cross, the Credo and the Pater noster against demons; Martinus Bracarensis, De correctione rusticorum, ed. Claude W. Barlow, Martini Episcopi Bracarensis opera omnia, Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome 12 (New Haven, CT, 1950), 16, pp. 19–20. Also, Y. Hen, ‘Martin of Braga’s De correctione rusticorum and its Uses in Frankish Gaul’, in E. Cohen and M.B. de Jong (eds), Medieval Transformations. Texts, Power and Gifts in Context, Cultures, Beliefs, Tradition. Medieval and Early Modern Peoples 11 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 34–49; J. Chélini, L’Aube du Moyen Âge. Naissance de la chrétiénte occidentale. La vie religieuse des laïcs dans l’Europe carolingienne (750–900) (Paris, 1991), pp. 74–6. P. Brown, ‘Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours’, in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 1982), pp. 222–50, at p. 232. See also Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Der Kampf der Heiligen mit den Dämonen’, in Santi e demoni nell’alto medioevo occidentale (secoli V–XI), Settimane 36 (Spoleto, 1989), pp. 647–96, at pp. 677–9. Gregorius Turonensis, Gloria martyrum, c. 47, ed. Krusch, pp. 70 –1. See Brown, ‘Relics and Social Status’, p. 232: ‘reverentia [as opposite to rusticitas] meant . . . taking one’s dreams seriously even if they involved having to move out of a cottage because a relic had spent the night in its granary’. Cf. Moreira, ‘Dreams and Divination’, p. 626, who hesitates to interpret a similar story (Gloria confessorum, c. 18, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM I:2, p. 308) in this way. There also, however, the dreamer is clearly portrayed as needlessly forgetful (‘inruentibus aliis cogitationibus, tradidit oblivioni quae viderat’), rather than wisely sceptical, of the dream. Only when the apparitions returned, ‘vultu minaci terribiliter conminantes’, did the man comply. See J. Le Goff’s article of 1966, ‘Les Paysans et le monde rural dans la literature du Haut Moyen Âge (Ve–VIe siecle)’, reprinted in Un Autre Moyen Âge ([Paris], 1999), pp. 127–39; A.J. Gurjewitsch, Stumme Zeugen des Mittelalters. Weltbild und Kultur der einfachen Menschen (Weimar, 1997), pp. 18–24. On laity, Heinzelmann, ‘Sanctitas’, p. 744; Chélini, ‘L’Aube’, pp. 33–41.




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disregard true visions. Gregory tells of a monk who, after reading the Life of St Martin, fell asleep with the book open on his face. A man appeared to him in a dream and warned him not to use the bed he lay on, for something unseemly had happened on it. The monk, however, disregarded the dream the first and the second time it occurred, until the third apparition left him so shocked he finally made a servant burn the bed.39 Such a story strengthens the impression that the negative representations of the dreamers are in the first place connected with their inability to act upon oneiric commands, rather than a general prejudice against a social group. While the thrice-occurring vision was primarily a literary topos, it is not exclusive to Christian texts. Furthermore, it seems that in eastern Christendom a belief that important dreams recurred and, furthermore, that recurring dreams were trustworthy, had become popular enough for ecclesiastical authorities to feel the need to oppose it. 40 Western narrative sources, however, only appear to perpetuate notions favouring the truthfulness of, and the concomitant need to heed, recurring dreams. The earliest extant, Carolingian, version of the Life of St Eligius portrays Waldelenus, a man the saint had put in charge of a hospice, who appropriated the deceased saint’s bed for conjugal use. That very night he fell ill with high fever. His wife was told in a dream (in visu) to restore the bed in its original shape. However, ‘because she was negligently forgetful of the vision, her husband’s pains increased’. 41 It took an apparition to Waldelenus himself before action was taken and his pains stopped. In a similar story in the mid-eighth-century Life of St Lambert, a woman stole a comb belonging to the deceased saint. One night Lambert appeared in a dream to her husband Theodoin, and demanded that the comb be returned. Theodoin’s wife, however, did not believe in her husband’s dream and held on to the comb. After a while Lambert appeared anew and hit Theodoin with his staff. In the morning it was discovered that the oneiric concussion had left a wound, and the comb was returned.42 In such stories there is scarcely any place 39

40

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Gregorius Turonensis, Virtutibus Martini, III.42, ed. Krusch, p. 192: ‘Facilis autem prima visio viro fuit, nec nec secunda commonitio valuit; tertia enim terribiliter monachum quatit.’ Cf. ibid., I.35, p. 155. On beds as secondary relics see Prinz, ‘Der Heilige’, p. 267. Augustine cites Livy on a pagan example of such a dream; see De Civitate Dei, IV.24, p. 120. Cf. Genesis XLI.32. On the triple dream as a topos see A. de Vogüé, ‘Grégoire Le Grand, lecteur de Grégoire de Tours?’, Analecta Bollandiana 94 (1976), p. 232. On Byzantine views Dagron, ‘Rêver de Dieu’, p. 41, n. 19. Vita Eligii, II.76, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM IV (Hanover, 1902), p. 738: ‘illa neglegenter visionem obliviscente, vir eius atrocius cruciatur dolore’. Cf. ibid., II.41. See Heene (‘Merovingian and Carolingian’, p. 424) who suggests that the text was intended for lay congregations. Vita Landiberti vetustissima, c. 20, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM VI (Hanover, 1913), pp. 373–4. While Krusch and Levison suggest Vita Eligii II.39 and II.41 as models for the story, the passage cited above also appears likely. On composition, e.g. W. Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil II, pp. 80–2.



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for the wise caution regarding dreams as recommended, for example, by Isidore.43 One Anglo-Latin story, however, does present an attempt, most likely due to its ecclesiastical target audience,44 to reconcile the theoretical requirement of suspicion of dreams with the importance of heeding some dreams. In the early eighth-century Whitby Life of St Gregory, there is a story about the recovery of King Edwin’s remains. Trimma, a monk and presbyter, received in a dream the command to go and gather the sainted king’s relics. Trimma, however, ‘being well aware of the multitudinous deceptions associated with dreams – for is it not written that “dreams have caused many to err”? [Ecclesiasticus XXXIV.7] – dismissed the matter’. The dream messenger soon appeared again, and Trimma, ‘more sharply warned . . . related what had been revealed to him to another of the brothers’, only to be again confronted with an admonition to scepticism. ‘[The brother] too, in the same way, looked upon it as a dream and made him dismiss the question of what it could mean.’ The apparition returned once more and ‘corrected him and reproved him violently, even using a whip . . . rebuking him . . . “Have I not twice shown you what you must do and you have taken no notice?” ’45 In this last story caution is presented as the dreamer’s proper initial reaction. In the end, however, it is shown to have limits, which one transgresses at one’s peril: cautious or not, one must be ready to take some dreams seriously. In such stories the escalating severity of the oneiric commands implies that a readier acceptance of the reality of the dream (and that of the saint) would have made everything easier. Most likely such notions, appearing both in texts for ecclesiastical, as well as for lay audiences, stem from the preoccupations of such passages with the importance of procuring and revering relics. 46 Yet they do testify to the attitudes of the custodians of cults, and appear to perpetuate the notion that especially recurring dreams should be readily accepted and, if only implicitly, brought to ecclesiastical attention. In some ecclesiastical 43

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Isidore, Sententiae, III.6, ed. Cazier, p. 218: ‘Quamuis nonnulla uera sint somnia, facile tamen eis credi non opus est.’ On the nature of Gregory’s cult and the contexts of this text, see Thacker, ‘Memorializing Gregory the Great’. Colgrave (ed.), The Earliest Life, pp. 102–5: ‘sciens esse somniorum fallatia multimoda . . . dimisit rem . . . validius admonitus, alteri e suis sicut illi monstratum est, retulit fratribus. Sed ipse eodem quo diximus modo agnoscit somnium eum fecit quid esset dimittere . . . eumque flagello satis redargutione correxit . . . increpans . . . “Nonne bis indicavi tibi quid debes facere et neglexisti?” ’ Colgrave’s translation. Cf. ibid., p. 126, for a forceful reminder of the importance of heeding apparitions. Such stories, underlining the importance of respecting ecclesiastical property, appear throughout the Middle Ages, see Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger, p. 87; G. Duby, ‘Pouvoir prive, pouvoir public’, in Georges Duby (ed.), Histoire de la vie privée vol. 2. De l’Europe féodale à la Renaissance, 2nd edn (Paris, 1999), pp. 44–5. On Carolingian instances see Dutton, The Politics, pp. 168–72.




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surroundings, however, biblical and patristic scepticism was far from being empty rhetoric, and had to be taken into consideration. Ostensibly uncritical notions, perhaps intended to mobilize congregations in the cult of a saint, but simultaneously generally promoting the importance of dreams, thus coexisted with critical theory.

The authentication of dreams As in the narratives considered so far, most dreams are represented as coming with a clear message, requiring no interpretation, only correct actions. Indeed, the main interpretational problem which the Fathers worried about appears to have been the authentication of potentially unstable oneiric imagery: ‘But evidently, as there are so many kinds of dreams, it is correspondingly difficult to believe in them, and likewise not at all easy to determine how and from what force they originate.’ 47 ‘An easy belief in dreams is therefore not to be had, so that Satan, transforming himself into an angel of light, should not be free to fool the incautious and to deceive another with the lie of an error.’ 48 According to Gilbert Dagron, some Desert Fathers even went as far as doubting all oneiric imagery but the simple sign of the cross. 49 We have already seen that many early medieval writers appear more optimistic with regard to the possibilities of uncovering demonic frauds – and concomitantly, apparently recommending the ready acceptance of some dreams. In general many texts (especially from the seventh century) appear more interested in practical miracles, such as cures, than in the scrutiny of such dreams and visions as may have accompanied them.50 Possibly, this was because they were intended for a broader 47

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Grégoire Le Grand, Dialogues, IV.50, 6, ed. de Vogüé, p. 174: ‘Sed nimirum cum somnia tot rerum qualitatibus alternent, tanto eis credi difficilius debet, quanto et ex quo inpulsu ueniant facilius non elucet.’ Isidore, Sententiae, III.6, ed. Cazier, p. 218: ‘Tam facile igitur somniis fides habenda non est, ne forte Satanas, in angelum lucis se transformans, quemlibet incautum fallat, et aliqua erroris fraude decipiat.’ Dagron, ‘Rêver de Dieu’, pp. 46–7; P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom. Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000 (Cambridge, MA, 1996), p. 249. On the shrines of saints see Brown, The Cult, pp. 106–19; on the so-called incubatio dreams see Le Goff, ‘Le christianisme et les rêves’, pp. 192–3 and 207–8; M. Wittmer-Butsch, ‘Pilgern zu himmlischen Ärtzten: “Historische und psychologische Aspekte früh- und hochmittelalterliche Mirakelberichte” ’, in Wallfahrt und Alltag in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, internationales Round-Table-Gespräch, Krems and der Donau 8. Oktober 1990, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 592 (1992), pp. 237–54; Moreira, Dreams, Visions, pp. 131–5. Gregory of Tours at least held the authentication or explication of such dreams secondary to the importance of connecting the subsequent cure to a saint; see e.g. Virtutibus Martini, II.31, ed. Krusch, p. 170; for a later example, still from a text directed to the laity, see Ursmarus, Passio II Leudegarii, c. 23, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM V (Hanover, 1910), p. 349. On date see P. Fouracre, ‘Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography’, Past and Present 127 (1990), pp. 3–38, at p. 17; cf. Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil II, pp. 69–72.



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public. In mainly eighth-century monastic texts, however, concerns regarding dreams and visions, and corresponding techniques of verification, are sometimes visible. Some texts appear to present quite clear models for analysing dreams that appear impressive or important; others, seeking to convince us of the truthfulness of their account, offer proofs revealing the authors’ criteria for oneirocriticism. This might be explicable through the functions of dream accounts in these texts. For example, post mortem apparitions to disciples are offered as proofs themselves of the protagonist’s sanctity.51 On the other hand, monastic audiences were more learned and probably aware of the theological case against trusting dreams, as well as being under the rule and supervision of their monastic leader. Here the sanctity, even in a broad sense, of a recipient, is rarely used as the sole explanation or ‘proof ’ of a vision. Instead we see a tendency to oneirocriticism, even when interpreting unclear dreams, through analysis of the imagery of the visions, supposing, in apparent contradiction to the concerns voiced by the Fathers, the existence of stable, trustworthy appearances and images. When St Gertrude died, according to her hagiographer on St Patrick’s Day in 669, her childhood friend Abbess Modesta was in her own nunnery, immersed in prayer. Finishing, she saw Gertrude, standing before her, ‘in the same state and appearance in which she was formed’. The saint’s message was clear: ‘accept that this vision is true, and know without doubt that I have today and on this hour been liberated from the humble dwelling of this flesh’. Although Gertrude identifies herself, the hagiographer tells us that Modesta kept quiet about the vision and sought further clarity on the identity – and thus the validity – of the apparition. In the morning Bishop Chlodulf of Metz visited the monastery, and Modesta ‘inquired, between other discussions with the bishop, about the habit, office and appearance of Saint Gertrude. And so he immediately described the saint’s bodily form and the appearance of her features. And then the blessed Modesta recognised from these signs she heard from the bishop that what she had seen before was true.’52 Authentication is thus not conceived of as 51

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Cf. M. Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Reliquienkultes, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental 33 (Turnhout, 1979), p. 65. However, while Gregory of Tours surely considered many dreams integral to his arguments, he rarely appears to feel a need to justify them, unlike many eighth-century authors. De virtutibus Geretrudis, c. 2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM II (Hanover, 1888), p. 465: ‘in eodem habitu atque in eadem specie, qua ipsa formata fuerat . . . “certam tene hanc visionem et sine ulla ambiguitate scias me hodie in hac eadem ora absolutae de habitaculo carnis huius” . . . inter alia conloquia . . . interrogavit episcopum de sancta Geretrude, in quale habitu vel ordine vel specie ipsa fuisset. At ille statim per ordinem narravit staturam corporis eius et speciem decoris eius. Tunc beata Modesta intellexit ex signa, que ab episcopo audierat, verum esse, quod ante viderat.’ The saint’s ascetic choice of funerary dress (see B. Effros, ‘Symbolic Expressions of Sanctity: Gertrude of Nivelles in the Context of Merovingian Mortuary Custom’,




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a charismatic process, but a practical one – even though the modern reader might be left wondering about its logic – betraying a remarkable trust in oneiric imagery. Modesta simply told the bishop when exactly she had received the vision, leaving him only to confirm that had been the time of the saint’s death. Similarly, an account in the early eighth-century Life of St Bonitus draws attention to familiar (and trustworthy) appearances. Here the monks of the martyr’s foundation in Manglieu (Auvergne), having been dispatched to fetch his remains from Lyon, return empty-handed and disappointed. Their abbot, however, comforts them: ‘on the night you entered Lyon, the man of God, clothed in vestments he used to wear from time to time, appeared to me and said . . . “Do not disturb me in any way, for I will notify you when I wish to return.” From this I held it to be certain that our petition did not deserve to succeed.’ 53 Instead of simple reliance on the authority or sanctity of the abbot, the clothing of the apparition is used to reinforce the notion of the dream’s authenticity. For some, perhaps more sophisticated, ecclesiasts, however, this familiarity of the oneiric image – apparently for the same reasons as for the late antique theologians – was not enough. Bede tells us how the Anglo-Saxon monk Ecgbert, having begun to organize a mission to the Frisians, was one morning approached by a disciple of the late St Boisil, who related a vision he had witnessed: ‘When the mattin [sic] hymns were finished and I had lain down on my bed, I fell into a light sleep and there appeared to me my late master and much loved tutor Boisil who asked if I recognised him. I answered, “Yes, you are Boisil.” ’ After this, Boisil had told him to inform Ecgbert that the voyage was not meant to be and that he should instead go to teach in Iona. The monk had diligently accepted and delivered the oneiric message. However, Ecgbert forbade him from telling anyone ‘for fear the vision should be an illusion’. ‘He himself silently considered the matter and feared it might be true; but, nevertheless, he was unwilling to cease his preparations for the journey.’54 The senior monk understandably hesitated, as

53

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Viator 27 (1996), pp. 1–10) might have influenced the author’s focus – probably identical to that of the vita – on her appearance in the vision, although there is no overlap here with the vocabulary used in the vita to describe her funerary apparel. Vita Boniti, c. 32, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM VI (Hanover, 1913), p. 135: ‘mihi in eadem nocte, qua vos oppido Lugdunense introistis, vir Domini in visum veste, qua aliquando solitus erat indui, apparuit, qui et dixit mihi . . . “Noli me”, ait, “inquitare modo, quia, cum redire voluero, ego nuntiabo.” Unde certum tenui, quod peticio nostra non meruisset effectum.’ On the text, perhaps written for the protagonist’s translation, and the saint see I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 (London, 1994), pp. 81–2 and 234–44. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, V.9, eds Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 476–8: ‘cum expletis . . . hymnis matutinalibus in lectulo membra posuissem, ac leuis mihi somnus obrepsisset, apparuit magister quondam meus et nutritor amantissimus Boisil, interrogauitque me, an eum cognoscere possem. Aio: “Etiam; tu es enim Boisil.” . . . ne forte inlusoria esset uisio.



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he had apparently hoped to go to Frisia, and had already set the preparations in motion. According to Bede, however, Ecgbert acted as the responsible ecclesiast he was and, while taking the message seriously, did not accept appearances at face value but wished to scrutinize and test the vision first. A few days afterwards, the same brother came and told that Boisil had appeared to him again and implied that Ecgbert should already have been convinced of the matter. After the dream had thus recurred, Ecgbert, ‘[t]hough he was now sure of the vision’, 55 still needed further proof to present the dream to his companions as reason to abandon the venture. Only after their boat, while at dock and ready to set sail, was capsized, did he tell his companions his plans had no divine approval. In the background there also appears to be the notion of an important dream recurring with increasing intensity. While the story points out the need to scrutinize apparently truthful dreams, it also implies the existence of three levels of oneirocriticism: that of the simple monk, based on his teacher’s appearance; that of Egbert, based on considering the vision’s message and possibly its repetition; and that of the monastic community, supported by external signs. Indeed, if information provided by a vision could be externally shown to be correct, then that was naturally the best proof of all, especially if a vision was to have communal importance.56 In his version of how the dispute between Mainz and Fulda on the remains of St Boniface (d. 754) was settled, Eigil of Fulda tells his monastic audience how the saint appeared in a vision to a deacon. The dreamer went and reported Boniface’s request to be translated, first to St Sturmi of Fulda (d. 779), then to the other clergy gathered in Mainz. St Lull (d. 786), Archbishop of Mainz, ‘at first by

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Ipse autem tacitus rem considerans, ueracem esse timebat; nec tamen a praeparando itinere . . . cessare uolebat.’ Colgrave’s translation. Cf. Bitel, ‘In visu noctis’, p. 55, for an arguably mistaken reading. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, V.9, eds Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 478: ‘tametsi certus est factus de uisione’. Colgrave’s translation. The Carolingian description of the translation of St Germanus of Paris ‘proves’ a vision instigating the translation with external ‘facts’. An unnamed Parisian woman had gone to the then extra muros church of St Vincent (St Germain des Prés), intending to pray. Following an apparition into the locked church, she witnessed an angelic multitude around the sepulchre of St Germanus. She approached the most handsome figure, ‘cui quasi recognito ait: “sanctissime domine Germane” ’, apparently identifying the figure through the context. The saint told her to remind the abbot how already twenty years ago he had appeared and demanded to be moved behind St Stephen’s altar. Tellingly the author presents two indices as proof of the authenticity of the vision. First, the number of years since the saint’s last apparition was only known to the abbot. Second, ‘seu quia etiam omni tunc congregationi, quod in altare sanctae cruces beati Stephani reliquae fuerint, adhuc manebat incognitum, nisi eas postmodum sagax inquisitio prodidisset’, i.e. that the authorities had in fact been able to find something that could be claimed as the forgotten relics of St Stephen. Translatio Germani vetustissima, c. 1, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM VII (Hanover, 1920), pp. 423 – 4. See also Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte, p. 96; and J. Dérens, ‘Les origines de Saint-Germain des Prés. Nouvelle étude sur les deux plus anciennes chartres de l’abbaye’, Journal des savants (1973), pp. 28– 60.




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no means wanted to believe in the revelation of the holy martyr’. Finally the deacon was made to give an oath, with his hand on the altar, as to what he had seen. After this, says Eigil, everybody was satisfied that the saint’s will would best be served by taking his remains to Fulda.57 Interestingly, the doubts of the clerics of Mainz are represented as disbelief, not caution, and as focusing on the veracity of the deacon’s report of his dream, implying an acceptance of his ability to interpret it. That such descriptions of critical processes and proofs appear in eighth-century texts is probably explicable through their increasingly exclusively monastic and ecclesiastical intended audiences, rather than any change in practice. However, the texts also betray differences in the level of care deemed necessary, suggesting nuances in approach perhaps between levels of ecclesiastical hierarchy, and a variety of attitudes between patristic scepticism and the most pragmatic approaches.

The interpretation of dreams Most descriptions of dreams present authentication as the central oneirocritical problem. In a minority of cases, however, the vision is presented as symbolic or unclear, yet considered important by the dreamer. The interpretation of such dreams seems to be based on the same trust in the stability of oneiric imagery attested in the portrayals of authentications. Descriptions of dreams to the mothers of the saints, the most numerous of the symbolic dreams in Merovingian sources, have recently been examined by Isabel Moreira, who notes the use of biblical imagery in the interpretation of such dreams. 58 She also observes that some of the accounts seem to recommend that laymen leave the interpretation of their unclear dreams to ecclesiastical personnel, but that this model does not appear constant. Possibly the idea of (even pagan) laymen interpreting their allegorical visions did not appear alien to at least one seventh-century writer. In 57

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Eigil Fuldensis, Vita Sturmi, c. 16, ed. P. Engelbert, Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Komission für Hessen und Waldeck 29 (1968), p. 149: ‘revelationem sancti martyris credere prius nullatenus voluit’. On composition see also W. Heßler, ‘Zur Abfassungszeit von Eigils Vita Sturmi’, Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 9 (1959), pp. 1–17. Lull’s refusal to believe could be seen as an attack on his character. On hostilities between Fulda and Mainz see Wood, ‘The Use and Abuse’, p. 106. Moreira, ‘Dreams and Divination’, pp. 634–41. For biblical models see e.g. Luke I.26–38; cf. Judges XIII.3–9. See also L. Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben im 10. Jahrhundert, Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 1 (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 40–53; E. Gianarelli, ‘Sogni e visioni dell’infanzia nelle biografie dei santi: Fra tradizione classica e innovazione cristiana’, Augustinianum 29 (1989), pp. 213–35; von der Nahmer, Das lateinische Heiligenvita, p. 75; Rohr, ‘Hagiographie als historische Quelle. Ereignisgeschichte und Wunderberichte in der Vita Columbani des Ionas von Bobbio’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 103 (1995), pp. 229–64, at p. 263, n. 174.



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the Chronicle of Fredegar we read of Childeric and Basina, the parents of Clovis I (481–511).59 Childeric was purportedly exiled for his sexual profligacy; Basina, in this story already the queen of Thuringia, was attracted to him for the same reason. On their wedding night she suggested they refrain from copulation and instructed him to rise and report what he saw through their window. Doing so, he saw lions, unicorns, and leopards. Again she invited him to look, and he saw bears and wolves. As she asked him for the final time, he reported seeing a pack of dogs. They abstained for the rest of the night, and in the morning she interpreted the visions: the images represented their offspring.60 It would be tempting to see in the description the Christian author’s conception of pagan or ‘secular’ oneiromancy. In fact, if we accept that the story represents a seventh-century, biblically influenced, attempt to comment on the origins of, or perhaps criticize, the Merovingian family,61 it seems that we should assume it meant to stand as a legitimate prophecy from a Christian point of view. Furthermore, this might also be seen as an early instance of the via regia of dreams that Dutton62 argued appeared in the Carolingian era. However, what seems a model of clerical interpretation of unclear dreams appears in clearly ecclesiastical contexts, especially towards the end of the eighth century. For example, when describing a prophetic dream (oroma) to the mother of St Willibrord, Alcuin, Bishop of Tours (d. 804), 59

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On the first Merovingians see E. Ewig, ‘Die Namengebung bei den ältesten Frankenkönigen und im merowingischen Königshaus, mit genealogischen Tafeln und Notizen’, Francia 18 (1991), pp. 21–69. Chronicon quae dicuntur Fredegarii scholastici, III.12, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM II (Hanover, 1888), p. 97. On the composition see J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (ed.), The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (London, 1960), pp. ix–lxiii. As argued by A.C. Murray, ‘Post vocantur Merohingii: Fredegar, Merovech, and “Sacral Kingship” ’, in idem (ed.), After Rome’s Fall. Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1998), pp. 121–52, at pp. 150 –2; cf. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, p. 39. Already B. Krusch pointed to Daniel VII as the source for the animals. The emphasis on Childeric’s virility need not have magical connotations; the idea that abstinence could bring forth visions is known also in Christian ascetic literature, cf. Stroumsa, ‘Dreams’, p. 204; Moreira, Dreams, Visions, pp. 43–5. I. Wood notes that the chronicler in general seems to acknowledge the active and influential role of women in politics, and suggests the text was composed for a female ruler, perhaps Chimnehild of Austrasia; see his ‘Fredegar’s Fables’, in A. Scharer and G. Scheibelreiter (eds), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Munich, 1994), pp. 359–66, here p. 362. Note also that the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity the notion of women as seers, see e.g. Schmitt, ‘The Liminality and Centrality’, p. 277. Later this was exemplified by the so-called ‘Sibylla Tiburtina’, appearing in Latin probably in the eleventh century; see Robert McGinn, ‘The “Sibylla Tiburtina” in the Middle Ages (With Particular Reference to the Newberry Library Version)’, in I. Chirassi Colombo and T. Seppilli (eds), Sibille e linguaggi oracolari. Mito, storia, tradizione. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Macerata–Norcia 20–24 Settembre 1994, (Pisa and Rome, 1998), pp. 603–49. See Dutton, The Politics, pp. 35–6, for pre-Carolingian royal dreams, where this story does not appear.




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is careful to point out that the interpretative help of a cleric had been sought. In a dream, she saw the new moon growing full and plunging down her gullet. Frightened, she went and told her dream to a pious priest who proceeded to interpret it. After inquiring whether she had had conjugal relations with her husband that night – and she answered in the affirmative – he explained that the dream signified the conception (the growing moon) of her son, now growing inside her (having plunged into her), who would eventually shine (like the celestial body) to many peoples, as the events subsequently proved. 63 Interestingly this interpretation is not explicitly biblical, but rather practical, 64 and reads almost as a guide for monks and clerics to this sort of interpretation. One suspects that it is because these dreams are allegorical, rather than simply because they are the dreams of laywomen, that they are often described as clerically interpreted.65 When a ‘pregnancy dream’ is represented as a straightforward apparition, it does not appear to require authoritative interpretation.66 In monastic environments, however, the control of the religious dreams of laymen seems to have been viewed in stricter terms: in his famous story of the lay brother Caedmon, who oneirically received the gift of composing Christian poetry, Bede details how the reeve (uilicus) took Caedmon to St Hild, who in turn summoned a board of learned men to examine the story of the dream, try the compositional talent and finally deem all this to be of heavenly origin. 67 Many Anglo-Latin texts appear more aware of biblical and theological criticisms and correspondingly seem to agree on the necessity of authoritative supervision of visionary experience. As already suggested, such a difference may simply reflect the ‘higher sophistication’, in the sense of biblical

63

64

65

66

67

Alcuinus Turonensis, Vita Willibrordi, c. 2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM VII (Hanover, 1920), p. 117. The text was written for a monastic congregation, see Heene, ‘Merovingian and Carolingian’, pp. 421–2. While there is no reason to suppose any manual was used here, note that the moon appears also in pagan and pseudo-Christian oneiromancy; cf. ‘Somniale Danielis’ (M. Semeraro (ed.), Il ‘Libro dei sogni di Daniele’. Storia di un testo ‘proibito’ nel Medioevo (Rome, 2002), p. 158), an oneiromantic manual that seems to appear in the west in the ninth and tenth centuries (ibid. pp. 16–20) and thus fall beyond the scope of the present paper. Some authors imply that the mothers who sought no counsel failed to understand the real significance of their symbolic dreams: see e.g. the apparently seventh-century Vita Rusticulae, c. 2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM IV (Hanover, 1902), p. 340; on dating see Pierre Riché, ‘Note d’hagiographie mérovingienne: La vita S. Rusticulae’, Analecta Bollandiana 72 (1954), pp. 369 –77. Also Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, IV.23, eds Colgrave and Mynors, p. 410, on the dream of the mother of St Hild, where Bede gives the mother’s interpretation, followed by what he considers the dream’s conclusive meaning. See the late seventh- / early eighth-century Adomnán’s Life of Columba, III.1, eds A.O. Anderson and M.O. Anderson (Oxford, 1961), p. 464; the (late) eighth-century Vita Eucherii, c. 1, ed. W. Levison, MGH SRM VII (Hanover, 1920), p. 47; and Anso of Lobbes’s late eighthcentury Vita Ursmari, c. 1, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM VI (Hanover, 1913), p. 454. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, IV.24, eds Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 414–18.



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and patristic learning, of the authors and their target audiences. 68 It might also reflect the existence of a ‘vernacular visionary culture, stirred by Christianity but unamenable to ecclesiastical control’, 69 although the present evidence permits nothing beyond a hypothesis. It seems that the eighth-century reforms may have also spread patristic and biblical ideas about the problematic nature of dreams with new vigour on the Continent,70 and the resulting awareness, rather than an actual change in practices, coupled with the gradual change 71 in the authorial contexts of our sources, might well explain the somewhat more careful approach to dreams in many eighth-century texts. Descriptions of clerical interpretation of dreams remind one of a model differentiating between vision and interpretation, as formulated by St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), and reprised by Alcuin around 798 in a letter to Fridugis, an Anglo-Saxon monk. Alcuin reminds his recipient that there exist the corporal sight (visio corporalis), ‘which is apparent to us all’, the spiritual sight (visio spiritalis), ‘likewise habitual to all’, and the intellectual sight (visio intellectualis), ‘unknown to most people, who fail to discern between spiritual and intellectual’. Illustrating the theory with the biblical accounts of the prophets Daniel and Joseph interpreting the dreams of pagan rulers, he explains: ‘[The dreamer] was given information in spirit, so he saw; the mind of [the interpreter] illumined, so that he understood . . . So the prophet, who understood, was greater than the king, who saw in spirit.’ 72 68

69 70

71 72

As submitted, regarding representations of clerical control in Anglo-Latin other world visions, by P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–800, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 3 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 247. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, p. 230. Generally, see R. Markus, ‘From Caesarius to Boniface: Christianity and Paganism in Gaul’, in Le septiéme siécle, pp. 154–72. Anti-oneiromantic legislation first appears in the so-called Penitential of Theodore, section 1.15.4, ed. P.W. Finsterwalder, Die Canones Theoderici Cantuarensis und ihre Überlieferungsformen (Weimar, 1929), pp. 285–334, that quotes an elaborated Latin version of the Acts of the Council of Ancyra, c. xxiiii, ed. C.H. Turner, Ecclesiae Occidentalis Monumenta Iuris Antiquissima, canonum et conciliorum Graecorum interpretationes Latinae II (Oxford, 1907), here p. 112. With the eighth-century missions and reforms such passages appear also on the Continent. See for example Excarpsus Cummeani, c. 7.16, ed. F.W.H. Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche (Halle, 1851), pp. 460–92, here p. 482, that takes up the quote from the Acts of Ancyra; Pirmin, ‘Scarapsus’, II.22, ed. G. Jecker, Die Heimat des hl. Pirmin, Beiträge zur Geschichte des alten Mönchtums und des Benediktinerordens 13 (Münster, 1927), pp. 34–73, that uses anti-oneiromantic passages from Leviticus (XIX.26), Deuteronomy (XVIII.10–11) and Jeremiah (XXIX.8 ff.), and Admonitio Generalis, c. 65, ed. A. Boretius, MGH Leges II: Capitularia regum Francorum I (Hanover, 1883), pp. 52–62, here pp. 58–9, that only quotes Deuteronomy. It seems that, as also in the context of the Old Testament passages, only extra-ecclesiastical oneiromancy is meant (pace e.g. Wittmer-Butsch, Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum, p. 109; Moreira, ‘Dreams and Divination’, pp. 629–33; cf. Semeraro, Il ‘Libro dei sogni’, pp. 37–72). However, the emergence of such passages may well have heightened a need to underline the correctness of Christian dream interpretation. See e.g. Heene, ‘Merovingian and Carolingian’. MGH Epistolae IV, no. 135, ed. E. Dümmler, (Berlin, 1895), p. 204: ‘omnibus notissimum est . . . aeque cunctis consuetum . . . a plerisque ignoratum, quia discernere nequeunt, quid sit




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The passage points out that little prestige attaches to having visions, as opposed to interpreting them. In many of the stories examined, inspired interpretation seems to have been considered a clerical prerogative. The charisma held up in Alcuin’s paraphrase as the prerequisite of correct interpretation might then have been considered to reside in the ecclesiastical office, rather than in the person of the visionary, or that of the interpreter. After all, even an authoritative interpretation seems to have required a transparent method. A letter of Pope Hadrian I’s (d. 795) reveals that even when the message was unclear or disturbing, an analysis of the oneiric imagery might be undertaken. He comments on the case of John, a monk and a cleric, who had complained to Charlemagne (d. 814) of diverse ecclesiastical and administrative wrongs, and had also seen a dream which he apparently interpreted as calling for reform, but which featured disturbing imagery and quite a stark proclamation of the death of Christianity. While Hadrian conceivably could have either dismissed dreams as mostly empty, or declared this message untrue, he instead began going through the imagery of the dream. After all, the monk claimed to have seen angels descending (cf. Genesis XXVIII.12) and other things suggesting a genuine revelation. Hadrian was ready, on the basis of theological tradition, to accept that a human form with the wings of an eagle represented the evangelist John. Conversely, another figure in the monk’s dream, one with the wings of a dove, did not pass this test. For while the Holy Spirit is represented as a dove, ‘certainly never do we read of a human figure with the wings of a dove’. The comparison of its imagery to tradition thus proved this putative revelatio to be a fantasma.73 Not only do these examples suggest differences of opinion as to which sets of images could be used in interpretation; they also reveal different opinions regarding the suitable performer of the said action. It seems that trust in familiar appearances or intuitive symbolism, perhaps the basis of personal attention to dreams, may not have had currency

73

spiritale, quid intellectuale? . . . Illius spiritus informatus est, ut videret; istius mens inluminata est, ut intellegeret . . . Ideo magis fuit propheta, qui mente intellexit, quam rex, qui spiritu cernebat.’ For the biblical stories see Genesis XL.5–XLI.37; and Daniel II. On the Carolingian context see Dutton, The Politics, pp. 39–43; cf. Wittmer-Butsch, Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum, p. 109. For Augustine’s original see De Genesi ad litteram, XII.11, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 28.iii:1 (Prague, 1894), e.g. pp. 392–4, and Moreira, Dreams, Visions, p. 18, n. 14, and pp. 29–33; and on the Old Testament stories e.g. p. 95. MGH Epistolae III, ed. W. Gundlach, no. 88, p. 625: ‘nam numquam legimus speciem hominis alas columbe indutum’. Dutton (The Politics, pp. 39–40) refers also to Hadrian’s commentary to the acts of Nicaea II (787; MGH Epistolae V, no. 2, p. 20). On images and dreams in eastern texts see Dagron, ‘Rêver de Dieu’, pp. 42–3. Western churches also featured suggestive imagery; see C. Hahn, ‘Seeing and Believing. The Construction of Sanctity in Early Medieval Saints’ Shrines’, Speculum 72 (1997), p. 1104.



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in all ecclesiastical contexts, in the more learned of which the bible and exegetical tradition, authoritatively interpreted, were considered to supply both the authentic images and their meanings.

Conclusion Many of the texts examined imply that to evaluate oneiric messages correctly – and, more broadly, the world as text – one had to be a Christian.74 Conclusive understanding might be quite another matter, but the church had quite clear notions of the methods which every Christian could use to protect himself from Satan’s plots, whether they came in dreams or otherwise. The custodians of saints’ cults appear, quite understandably, readier than theologians to recommend the speedy – almost easy – acceptance of dreams of cultic importance. Although often at best approximations, the probable target audiences of our texts appear to offer a useful model for understanding the variety of views on these issues. Most of the stories hide the actual assessment, modification and possible rejection of experiences. Instead, dreams and visions are described as having a clear and straightforward message. Tellingly, these are the types of images that appear most likely to have reached wider lay audiences. It appears that often both the layman and the monk were simply expected to react (and to report) swiftly and leave the essential scrutiny of their experiences to their seniors. Yet, unlike a monk whose very thoughts the monastic ideal submitted to the scrutiny of his abbot, a layman could probably privately make what he wanted of his dreams.75 However, the ‘public’ authenticity of dreams was often a matter of politics: power decided authenticity in the end. 76 In Anglo-Latin and (late) eighth-century continental texts, the immediate audiences of which are more likely to have been monastic or clerical, a number of representations of learned, rather than charismatic, proofs emerge. In the monastic milieu scrutiny of visions appears quite understandably to have been more intensive than in secular surroundings. In the east the trustworthiness of oneiric images, as also that of recurring dreams, had its critics, and although none of our sources 74 75

76

Cf. e.g. Markus, World and Text, pp. 65–70. See also Moreira, ‘Dreams and Divination’, p. 642; cf. Wittmer-Butsch, Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum, p. 112: ‘Die wiederholten Ermahnungen durch Kirche und Herrscher lassen sogar darauf schließen, daß das Volk dieser besonderen Erfahrungsform sehr große Bedeutung beimaß.’ Cf. sanctity and politics, e.g. Fouracre, ‘Merovingian History and Hagiography’; and idem, ‘The Origins of the Carolingian Attempt to Regulate the Cult of Saints’, in J. HowardJohnston and P.A. Hayward (eds), The Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1999), pp. 143–65.




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exhibit such specific criticisms, a level of learned scepticism owing to the western Fathers clearly existed. Biblical and patristic doubts, and sensitivity brought by the evident use of visions in (ecclesiastical) politics, may have emphasized the already existent need for credible interpretations and authentications, and perhaps created a need to restrict interpretation. Alcuin, for example, while prepared to accept a variety of visions, repeated the biblical and patristic warning against too easy a belief in dreams.77 Throughout the period, oneiric images appear to have retained more stability than we would expect from the criticism directed at them in patristic literature. Unlike Augustine, who chose to explain apparitions of the dead as angels appearing in their image, early medieval writers appear to have regarded saints appearing in dreams as much more concretely present.78 St Paul’s dictum on the benign disguises of the devil and patristic warnings to the same effect appear to have influenced the handling of dreams, yet ultimately some, mainly biblical, images seem to have been considered trustworthy. While some authentications are based on familiar likenesses, the more learned interpretations appeal to imagery authenticated through tradition. One is inclined to see a difference in sophistication between an interpretation through familiarity and one involving theological proofs. Generally senior ecclesiasts – like Bede’s Ecgbert – are more likely to have had stricter notions, or even to have considered some practices, tolerated or encouraged as Christian by the ‘lower’ fringes of ecclesiastical culture, as compromising orthodoxy. 79 In fact, the repeated appearance of warnings and injunctions, from the middle of the eighth century onwards, against observing dreams seems to imply this may have been the case here. The apparent rift between patristic caution and early medieval practice is certainly in part explicable by the nature of their respective contexts, yet these thoughts and texts by no means existed separately or in a vacuum. Critical notions and more encouraging ones were not mutually exclusive, but dependent on the audience and aims of the 77

78

79

For Alcuin’s warnings, inspired by Ecclesiastes V.6, see Commentaria super Ecclesiasten, ed. J.-P. Migné, PL 100, col. 689; and Dutton, The Politics, pp. 43–5; cf. Wittmer-Butsch, Zur Bedeutung von Schlaf und Traum, pp. 108–12; who seems to overstate the extent of clerical scepticism. Moreira, Dreams, Visions, e.g. pp. 74–5, broaches the subject of a difference between ascetic and ‘clerical’ attitudes, without delving deeper into the problem. For Augustine see Schmitt, Les revenants, pp. 31–6. Cf. H. Kleinschmidt, Understanding the Middle Ages. The Transformation of Ideas and Attitudes in the Medieval World (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 18–20. Many practices, condemned as pagan by reform-minded ecclesiasts, were considered quite Christian by the practitioners; see e.g. Markus, ‘From Caesarius to Boniface’; A.L. Meaney, ‘Anglo-Saxon Idolators and Ecclesiasts from Theodore to Alcuin; A Source Study’, AngloSaxon Studies in Archaeology and History 5 (1992), pp. 103–25.



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individual texts. Ecclesiasts appear to have been aware of the patristic and biblical legacy of scepticism, formulating systems and practices to reconcile the uses of dreams with practical concerns. It does not seem that clerics meant to leave Christians alone with their dreams but, while recommending practices of protection, devised methods and interpretational criteria to harness useful dreams to the religious frameworks of their communities. Department of History, University of Helsinki



The ‘vigorous rule’ of Bishop Lull: between Bonifatian mission and Carolingian church control J  P 

This paper argues that the reputation of St Boniface, one of the ‘founders of Christian Europe’, needs to be understood in relation to the career of Lull of Mainz, the saint’s pupil and successor. It analyses Lull’s literary, pastoral and missionary interests, as well as his political networks, to illustrate how he helped give form to the legends of Boniface and, in particular, Willibald’s Vita Bonifatii and the Bonifatian letter collections. Study of the commemoration of Lull, principally in Mainz, Fulda, Hersfeld and Malmesbury, also reveals much about the ways Lull used the cult of Boniface to pursue a ‘vigorous rule’ over his flock in Mainz and in the process alienate many contemporaries. Divine portents were seen in Germany in 786: a sharp chill froze birds mid-flight; bows of light were seen in the sky; and the snow in March fell red as blood.1 People saw in these signs the foretelling of turbulent times ahead, of Charlemagne’s victory in Bavaria, or even of the end of the world. To some annalists, however, the significance of the signs was more modest: they foretold the death that winter of Archbishop Lull of Mainz (754–86), one of the last figures of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon missions’ to the continent that helped to shape Christendom in the north.2 In Fulda, the community of monks committed Lull’s name to

*

1

2

My thanks to Sarah Foot, Martha Riddiford and the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their help and comments. An early version of this paper was read at the International Medieval Congress on 16 July 2003, and I am grateful for those present for their thoughts and advice. Annales Laureshamensis, s.a. 786, ed. G.H. Pertz, MGH Scriptores 1 (Hanover, 1826), pp. 30 – 9, at p. 33; Annales Petiaviani, s.a. 786, ed. Pertz, MGH Scriptores 1, pp. 16 –18, at p. 17; Fragmentum annalium Chesnii, s.a. 786, ed. Pertz, MGH Scriptores 1, pp. 33–4, at p. 33. On Lull see M. Tangl, ‘Studien zur Neuausgabe der Briefe des hl. Bonifatius und Lullus, Teil 2’, in W. Eggert (ed.), Das Mittelalter in Quellenkunde und Diplomatik. Ausgewählte Schriften 1

Early Medieval Europe   () 249 –276 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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their institutional memory,3 while in Salzburg the Irishman Virgil added Lull’s name into his Liber vitae.4 The archbishop had for nearly forty years continued the work of the martyr St Boniface, shaping the memoria of the saint and challenging standards in the Carolingian church. He was, as Michael Tangl argued in 1917, ‘no insignificant successor [to Boniface] as bishop of Mainz’. 5 Yet while saints’ cults and literature quickly emerged to commemorate other prominent heirs of Boniface – figures such as Willibald and Wynnebald in Bavaria, Leoba and Sturm in Hesse, and Gregory in Utrecht – Lull’s own career was not subject to similar treatment until the eleventh century. This uneven treatment of Lull hints, not at a lack of interest in the bishop, but rather at long-running debates about the nature of a career once described in the ninth century as ‘vigorous’.6 In what ways, then, had Lull developed the work of Boniface to provoke such debates? And how did Lull’s own interests affect the image of Boniface evident in the eighth-century sources? Tracing the influence of Lull on the representations of Boniface contributes to a growing historiographical trend which emphasizes the contextualization of narratives, like Willibald’s Vita Bonifatii, over the subjects of those accounts.7 These contexts may be no less ‘constructed’ than their narratives, but the juxtaposition of the two creates new possible interpretations of texts. St Boniface has attracted sustained interest from generations of modern scholars as one of the medieval founders

3

4

5 6

7

(Graz, 1966), pp. 178 –240, at pp. 178 –95 (originally in Neues Archiv für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 41 [1917], pp. 23 –101); T. Schieffer, ‘Angelsachsen und Franken. Zwei Studien zur Kirchengeschichte des 8. Jahrhunderts’, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Socialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Jahrgang 1950 20 ( Wiesbaden, 1951), pp. 1327–1539. Some useful observations about Lull were also made by Wilhelm Levison in his England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford in the Hilary Term 1943 (Oxford, 1946). See also J.T. Palmer, ‘Warwickshire and the Eighth-Century Missions to Germany’, BBC Legacies , September, 2003. Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG 7 (Hanover, 1891), pp. 136 –8, at p. 137; R. Corradini, ‘The Rhetoric of Crisis: Computus and the Liber annalis in Early NinthCentury Fulda’, in R. Corradini, M. Diesenburger and H. Reimitz (eds), The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources and Artefacts, The Transformation of the Roman World 12 (Leiden, 2003), pp. 269 –321, at pp. 287– 8. Monumenta necrologica monasterii s. Petri Salisburgensis, ed. S. Herzberg-Fränkel, MGH Necrologia Germaniae 2 (Berlin, 1904), pp. 3 – 64, at p. 26; R. McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), p. 178. Tangl, ‘Studien . . . 2’, p. 179: ‘er war als Bischof von Mainz kein unbedeutender Nachfolger’. Ex Megenharti Fuldensis sermone de sancto Ferrucio, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores 15.1 (Hanover, 1887), pp. 148 –50, at p. 150. Amongst the ever-growing bibliography, see: P.J. Geary, ‘Saints, Scholars and Society: The Elusive Goal’, in P.J. Geary (ed.), Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London, 1994), pp. 9 –29; Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000); I.N. Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evanglisation of Europe 400 – 1050 (Harlow, 2001); W. Pohl, ‘History in Fragments: Montecassino’s Politics of Memory’, EME 10:3 (2001), pp. 343 – 74; McKitterick, History and Memory.



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of Europe but, even in the most positive analyses of his career, Lull’s role in promoting that reputation in the first place has remained sketchy at best.8 It was, however, Lull who commissioned the first Vita Bonifatii and perhaps also encouraged the first collection of Boniface’s correspondence. The bishop was indubitably influenced by his predecessor and maintained some continuity of purpose in his work. None the less, times change and the situation Lull faced in the 770s, for example, scarcely compared with Boniface’s in the 730s, even if the intentions of the two bishops were similar.9 The increasing strength of the Carolingian family; the development of royal Kirchenpolitik; the expansion of the Frankish frontiers; all these things changed the world in which the ‘Anglo-Saxon missions’ functioned. To study Boniface, therefore, one first needs to understand the relationship between Lull, the cult of the Boniface, and the changing Carolingian world of the eighth century.

Sources and contexts for remembering Lull A wide range of sources facilitate the study of Lull, including letters, charters and a number of saints’ Lives. Almost all of these come from Mainz or Fulda, Boniface’s own monastery. Unlike St Boniface, however, Lull left no spiritual heir in Hesse who felt driven to collect together these sources or commemorate his predecessor. In 786 the vacant see of Mainz was quickly filled by Riculf, a chaplain from Charlemagne’s court, who made no effort to associate himself with his predecessor. Although Riculf showed some interest in Lull’s monastery of Hersfeld, he chose to build the monastery of St Alban’s in Mainz, and royal patronage for that new site quickly diminished Hersfeld’s significance as a Hessian monastic centre. 10 The new archbishop’s friendship with the great Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin had perhaps brought the plans of the Anglo-Saxon missions to his attention, but Alcuin himself was more distant commentator than active member of frontier society and thus his importance in this context can be overstated.11 The connection between Lull and Riculf was sufficiently weak 8

9

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11

In addition to the literature in n. 2 on Boniface, see also: T. Schieffer, Winfrid-Bonifatius und die Christliche Grundlegung Europas (Freiburg, 1954; 2nd edn Darmstadt, 1972); Sankt Bonifatius. Gedenkgabe zum zwölfhundertsten Todestag (Fulda, 1954); T. Reuter (ed.), The Greatest Englishman: Essays on St Boniface and the Church at Crediton (Exeter, 1980); L.E. von Padberg, St Bonifatius: Missionar und Reformer (Munich, 2003). For a similar case, see that of St Anskar and his successor Rimbert: J.T. Palmer, ‘Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii and Scandinavian Mission in the Ninth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55:2 (2004), pp. 235–56. See F. Staab, ‘Die Königin Fastrada’, in R. Berndt (ed.), Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794: Kristallisationspunkt karolingische Kultur, Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 80 (Mainz, 1997), pp. 183–217. Cf: Schieffer, ‘Angelsachsen und Franken’, p. 1526.



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for the latter’s appointment to be a firm break from the recent past and the Anglo-Saxon missions. To the populations of Hesse and Thuringia, the connection with Boniface and his circle after 786 was more spiritual than personal. There are over fifty letters to or from Lull and his circle in Mainz and Würzburg.12 The majority of these were apparently collected together for the first time in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Lat. 751, a mid-ninth-century compilation of the Bonifatian correspondence from Mainz. 13 Within the manuscript, the ordering of Boniface’s letters was derived from the earlier Fulda manuscript, Karlsrühe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Rastatt 22, but with a number of further letters – principally Lull’s – inserted at apparently random points throughout.14 There is a stylistic break in the middle of Vienna 751 following the inclusion of some Aldhelmian poetry and some simple decorations which possibly marked the end of an original phase of production.15 Most of Lull’s early letters which can be dated before 754 are included before this centrepiece, while most of the letters associated with his episcopacy are included thereafter and indeed dominate the remaining folios. That the manuscript then ends with a selection of early ninth-century letters associated with Mainz in further hands seems to suggest that this was a compilation added to in several phases. There are features in Vienna 751 which imply it was used in part as a collection of epistolary exemplars.16 These are, however, mainly restricted to the first part of the compilation and the latinity of Lull’s letters is often so poor that it is perhaps preferable to see in their use an active interest in Lull himself in the mid-ninth century. The second half of the compilation may reflect an interest in the wider historical community of Boniface, which might in turn suggest the involvement at some level of Hrabanus Maurus. 17 Amongst the 12

13

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15 16

17

Boniface et al., Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. M. Tangl, MGH Epistolae selectae in usum scholarum 1 (Berlin, 1916). Tangl, ‘Studien . . . 1’, p. 68. For a useful facsimile of the manuscript see Sancti Bonifatii epistolae, ed. F. Unterkircher, Codices selecti phototypice impressi 24 (Graz, 1971). On the relationship between the earliest manuscripts of the Bonifatian correspondence, see Tangl, ‘Studien . . . 1’, pp. 68 – 97. Sancti Bonifatii epistolae, ed. Unterkircher, fols 39v–42r. A. Orchard, ‘Old Sources, New Resources: Finding the Right Formula for Boniface’, ASE 30 (2001), pp. 15–38, at pp. 18–19. McKitterick, ‘Anglo-Saxon Missionaries’, p. 10. On Hrabanus see: R. Kottje, ‘Hrabanus Maurus – “Praeceptor Germaniae”?’, Deutsches Archiv 31 (1975), pp. 534–45; R. Kottje and H. Zimmermann, Hrabanus Maurus: Lehrer, Abt und Bischof (Wiesbaden, 1982); B.-S. Albert, ‘Raban Maur, l’unité de l’empire et ses relations avec les Carolingiens’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 86 (1991), pp. 5–44; M. de Jong, ‘The Empire as ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and Biblical historia for Rulers’, in Hen and Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past pp. 191–226; J.T. Palmer, ‘The Frankish Cult of Martyrs and the Case of the Two Saints Boniface’, Revue Bénédictine 114:3–4 (2004), pp. 326 –48, at pp. 338 –43.



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ninth-century letters in Vienna 751, the latest only just pre-dates the archiepiscopacy of Hrabanus in Mainz (847–56). The archbishop was a native of Mainz and had also been abbot of Fulda and a pupil of Alcuin. More than many people who succeeded to Boniface’s work, Hrabanus was a true heir to the pastoral and intellectual legacies of the Anglo-Saxons. It was, for example, under Hrabanus at Fulda in the 830s and 840s that for the first time a number of writers had positive things to say about Lull as Boniface’s heir.18 It is important to remember that the letters are not just individual sources for Lull, but also that their preservation is one result of the impact that the Anglo-Saxon had had on his diocese. After 786 there was little evident interest in Lull until the 1060s. Developments began when around 1063 Otloh of Freising described Lull as sanctus for the first time in a new Vita Bonifatii, written for the monks in Fulda as a response to an argument with the archbishop of Mainz over tithes.19 Within a decade the celebrated annalist Lampert of Hersfeld, who was also involved in the tithe dispute, built upon the renewed interest in Boniface and wrote a Vita Lulli.20 A twelfthcentury manuscript – Erlangen-Nürnburg, Universitätbibliothek, 321 – included both of these new works together, alongside the ninthcentury vitae on Boniface’s friends Burchard of Würzburg, Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim, Sturm of Fulda, Wigbert of Fritzlar and Gregory of Utrecht.21 Again it was an interest in the relationships between Bonifatian communities within Hesse and Thuringia that seems to have been the catalyst for interest in Lull. In his native Britain, meanwhile, no one commemorated Lull until William of Malmesbury recalled a short poem praising the saint’s virtue in the Gesta regum Anglorum (c.1125).22 William was greatly interested 18

19

20

21

22

Brun Candidus, Vita Aegil, ch. 2, ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores 15.1, pp. 222–37, at p. 225; Rudolf, Vita Leobae, ch. 19, ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores 15.1, pp. 118–31, at p. 130; Ex Megenharti Fuldensis sermone de sancto Ferrucio, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores 15.1, pp. 148–50. Otloh, Vita Bonifatii I.25, ed. W. Levison, MGH SRG 57, pp. 111–217, at p. 138. On Otloh’s vita see K.F. Morrison, ‘The Structure of Holiness in Otloh’s Vita Bonifatii and Ebo’s Vita Ottonis’, in K. Pennington and R. Somerville (eds), Law, Church, and Society: Essays in Honour of Stephan Kuttner (Pennsylvania, 1977), pp. 131–56. Lampert, Vita Lulli, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG 38 (Hanover and Liepzig, 1894), pp. 307–40. On Lampert see T. Struve, ‘Lampert von Hersfeld: Persönlichkeit und Weltbild eines Geschichtsschreibers am Beginn des Investiturstreits’, Hessisches Jahrbuch fürLandesgeschichte 19 (1969), pp. 1–123, continued in Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 20 (1970), pp. 32–142. On the relationship between Mainz, Fulda and Hersfeld in the eleventh century, see T. Vogtherr, ‘Die Reichklöster Corvey, Fulda und Hersfeld’, in Weinfurter and Siefarth, Die Salier und das Reich 2, pp. 429 – 64, esp. pp. 445– 7. It is worth noting here that Lampert himself listed the vitae about Boniface, Leoba and Sturm amongst his sources, and had also clearly read the Vita Wigberti: Lampert, Vita Lulli, ch. 27, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 340; Struve, ‘Lampert von Hersfeld (B)’, p. 125. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, I.85, eds R.A.B. Mynors, R. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998), pp. 120 –1.



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in Boniface’s role in England’s past as someone who had chastised immoral kings and encouraged high standards in the English church from afar.23 In this work Lull was little more than a footnote as Boniface’s successor, made significant because Lull had himself been educated in Malmesbury for a short time. 24 William had read about Lull in Wandalbert of Prüm’s mid-ninth-century Miracula s. Goaris, so his opinion of the Anglo-Saxon had a Carolingian pedigree. 25 Lull’s significance was amplified by developments in Anglo-German relations at the time William was writing. In 1110 King Henry I sent his daughter Mathilda to Mainz via Boniface’s former mission station at Utrecht (where she would later obtain much land) in order to marry Emperor Henry V.26 At the same time Mathilda’s mother asked William to write the Gesta regum Anglorum to celebrate the relationship between Malmesbury and her family, which now extended east of the Rhine. 27 William’s Gesta pontificum Anglorum, written at the same time, provides further evidence of this renewed interest in the Bonifatian Rhineland, again praising Lull as Boniface’s successor and this time adding the story of Fredericus of Utrecht, who continued Boniface’s work in the 820s.28 The first references to Lull in English histories therefore coincide neatly with a period when the interaction between dynastic politics and historical writing invigorated the connections between Malmesbury, Mainz and Utrecht. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, then, historians saw Lull as historically significant because he represented connections between certain places from the Bonifatian past that had become meaningful once more. A quick survey of the sources for Lull confirms just how dependent on Boniface the commemoration of Lull was. In the ninth century his letters were only preserved to build on the Bonifatian past revealed in earlier manuscripts, and even then Lull’s significance was likely shaped 23

24 25

26

27 28

William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, I.79-84, eds Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, pp. 114–21. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 71, ed. Tangl, p. 144; Die Briefe, no. 135, ed. Tangl, p. 274. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, I.85, eds Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, pp. 120 –1; Wandalbert, Miracula sanctis Goaris, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores 15.1, pp. 361–73. On William’s identifiable ninth-century sources, see R. Thomson, ‘William of Malmesbury’s Carolingian Sources’, Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981), pp. 321–38. K. Leyser, ‘England and the Empire in the Early Twelfth Century’, in K. Leyser (ed.), Medieval Germany and Her Neighbours 900 –1250 (London, 1982), pp. 191–214, at pp. 192–208; idem, ‘The Anglo-Norman Succession 1120 –25’, in T. Reuter (ed.), Communication and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond (London, 1994), pp. 97–114. William of Malmesbury, Epistola, no. 2, ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, pp. 6 – 9. William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum, I.6, ed. N.E.S.A. Hamilton, RS (1870), pp. 11–15. Note, however, that Fredericus was a Frisian and not an Anglo-Saxon. William’s source was Odbert, Passio Frederici, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores 15.1, pp. 344–56. Fredericus may have composed the original Vita altera Bonifatii, ed. W. Levison, MGH SRG 57, pp. 62– 8; see J. Romein, ‘Wie is de “Presbyter Ultrajectensis”?’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 44 (1929), pp. 373 – 81.



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within the context of Hrabanus’s own interest in Boniface’s heirs. Lull was only interesting to people in a very narrow geographical and social milieu. When people finally paid Lull literary homage again in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, little had changed with the small exception that it seemed that Malmesbury had quietly remembered their former pupil all along because of his role as Boniface’s heir. We should be wary, however, of seeing these sources as confirming that Lull was ‘just’ Boniface’s successor; he had, after all, become entwined with the commemoration of a great martyr. If the years after 754 had really been of no real importance to the Bonifatian past, then it is difficult to see why even Hrabanus would have cared to consider Lull further. As it is, it is necessary to consider in more depth what it means to say that Lull was Boniface’s heir.

The cult of Boniface and Lull’s literary world Following Boniface’s martyrdom in 754, Lull was quick to promote the martyr’s cult to the wider world. Letters soon arrived in Mainz from Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury, Bishop Milret of Worcester and Bishop Cyneheard of Winchester celebrating the sanctity of their friend.29 Cuthbert reported that the English had already agreed to initiate a cult of Boniface. To capitalize on this interest, Lull commissioned Willibald, an Anglo-Saxon priest living in Mainz, to write a Vita Bonifatii: ‘you have urged me so’, Willibald recalled, ‘at the request of religious and catholic men who have heard – in the region of Tuscany, or in the marches of Gaul, or at the portals of Germany, or even in the farthest reaches of Britain – of the brilliant reputation and the many miracles of St Boniface the martyr’.30 Although Lull did not write the Vita himself, his correspondence reveals a man keen to obtain a range of books for study in the schools under his care. It is therefore important to see the production of the Vita in the wider context of the developing literary world of the Bonifatian centres. One common assumption, already cautiously repeated above, is that under Lull someone compiled the first collection of Bonifatian letters to help with the writing of the Vita. True, Willibald wrote that he had made efforts to research Boniface’s life because he had not known him 29

30

Boniface, Die Briefe, nos 11, 12 and 14, ed. Tangl, pp. 238 –43, 243–5, 246 – 7. On the evidence for the early cult of Boniface in England, where he was celebrated as a missionary martyr, see Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, pp. 51–5. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, pref., ed. Levison, p. 2: ‘Co[m]pulistis enim me . . . petentibus relegiosis ac catholicis viris, quibus vel in Tusciae partibus vel in Germaniae aditibus aut etiam in Brittaniae limitibus sancti Bonifatii martyris fama miraculorumque choruscatio perstrepuit . . .’



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personally.31 But the correlation between Willibald’s text and the letters is at best slight. The arch-villains from Boniface’s letters – notably Virgil of Salzburg and Gewilib of Mainz – are passed over by Willibald in favour of secular leaders like Hedan of Thuringia, about whom Boniface himself left no surviving comment. Famous stories Willibald told of Boniface, such as the felling of the Oak of Jupiter, find no echoes in the letters. Even on the matter of church synods, which both sources cover, Willibald emphasized the higher principles of correction and said little about the decisions actually embodied in the church records. This does not mean Lull’s circle did not use the letters, merely that the Vita Bonifatii was built upon principles other than the problematic notion of ‘historical record’. Saints’ Lives were, of course, the past shaped for a range of devotional, religious and political purposes. 32 Saints’ Lives like the Vita Bonifatii often functioned within an exegetical framework. The saints were not significant as people per se, but rather because their stories illustrated to audiences universal truths about God’s work in the same allegorical manner Scripture did. Each chapter of the Vita Bonifatii ended, for example, with a quotation from one of St Paul’s epistles to illustrate the spiritual meaning of Boniface’s career. For his biblical exegesis, Lull turned to Northumbrian traditions and was keen to obtain Bede’s works De templo and In cantica canticorum from Bede’s old home at Wearmouth–Jarrow. 33 He also approached Coena, archbishop of York and its famous library, for Bede’s works on Samuel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the gospel of St Mark. 34 These particular requests seems to have been inspired by Bede’s list of his own works at the end of the Historia ecclesiastica, a text which had itself brought Anglo-Saxon history, and particularly its saints, within biblical and allegorical frameworks.35 In pursuing Bede’s exegesis, Lull followed a path set down by Boniface, who had made vague appeals to Wearmouth–Jarrow and York for the Northumbrian’s work. 36 On both sides of the channel, Augustine’s argument that recent history was to be 31

32

33

34 35

36

Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, pref., ed. Levison, pp. 2–3: ‘sicut discipulis eius secum diu commorantibus vel vobis ipsis referentibus conperirem, prochemium mediumque aut finem vitae eius, quanta valeam indagatione, litteris inseram’. F. Lifshitz, ‘Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographical” Texts as Historical Narrative’, Viator 25 (1994), pp. 95–113; I.N. Wood, ‘The Use and Abuse of Latin Hagiography in the Early Medieval West’, in E. Chrysos and I.N. Wood (eds), East and West: Modes of Communication (Leiden, 1999), pp. 93–109. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 126, ed. Tangl, p. 264. Levison, England and the Continent, p. 140 cited this as proof Lull now had Bede’s list of compositions from the Historia ecclesiastica, although if so it is unclear why he asked for three books of De templi when Bede says he wrote only two. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 125, ed. Tangl, pp. 262–3, at p. 263. R.D. Ray, ‘Bede, the Exegete, as Historian’, in G. Bonner (ed.), Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede (London, 1976), pp. 125–40. Boniface, Die Briefe, nos 75, 76 and 91, ed. Tangl, pp. 158– 9, 156 – 8, 206 – 8.



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treated as an extension of biblical history was highly influential. 37 Thus the Vita Bonifatii was written to interpret rather than to record the past. Lull’s exegetical-historical interests were also reflected in his other requests. In 764 he sent gifts to Wearmouth–Jarrow in the hope of obtaining Bede’s Vita Cuthberti in its prose and metrical forms, which shows a wider interest in the literary vehicles for promoting saints’ cults.38 Again Boniface had already established a history of seeking such texts from Britain and had notably requested some martyrs’ passions from his friend Bugga.39 Lull developed his own unique interests too, asking Coena for some unidentified libri cosmografiorum, perhaps those once obtained from Rome by Benedict Biscop. 40 Amongst Lull’s friends this might have influenced the description of a pilgrimage to Greece and the Holy Land by Willibald of Eichstätt, which his sister Hygeburg later incorporated into her own hagiographical composition, the Vita Willibaldi et Wynnebaldi, and circulated with the Vita Bonifatii.41 Augustine’s influence is again perceptible: he had argued for geographical description as an exegetical tool and in Britain this had inspired Adamnán of Iona and Bede to write descriptions of the Holy Land, which again Bede incorporated into his Historia ecclesiatica.42 Hagiography had become part of the same project as exegesis. This is not to say, of course, that Lull had had a direct hand in Hygeburg’s work. None the less, Lull’s role in obtaining works of exegesis and hagiography had contributed greatly to the literary cultures that shaped its intellectual horizons and formed the sources on which the grand reputation of the Anglo-Saxon missions is based. The literary interests of Lull and Boniface not only dictated the content of the Vita Bonifatii and related texts, but also their style. Willibald’s prose employed the overly long sentences and heavy alliteration characteristic of the prose of Aldhelm of Malmesbury. In 745 or 746 Lull, remembering his education in Britain, had asked his friend Dealwin at Malmesbury to send him ‘some works by Bishop Aldhelm on prose, metre or rhythm’.43 He was sent a couple of letters by the 37

38 39 40 41

42

43

Augustine, De doctrina christiana, II.42–4, ed. J. Martin, CCSL 32 (Turnhout, 1982), pp. 1– 167, at pp. 62–3; Ray, ‘Bede, the Exegete, as Historian’, p. 132. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 116, ed. Tangl, pp. 250 –1. Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 15, ed. Tangl, pp. 26 –7. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 124, ed. Tangl, p. 261; Levison, England and the Continent, p. 42. On Willibald and Hygeburg see: W. Berschin, in his Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter 3. Karolingische Biographie 750 – 920 n. Chr., Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters 10 (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 18 – 22; Palmer, ‘Constructions of Sanctity’, pp. 172–213. T. O’Loughlan, ‘The Exegetical Purpose of Adamnán’s De locis sanctis’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 24 (1992), pp. 37–53. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 71, ed. Tangl, p. 144: ‘Aldhelmi episcopi aliqua opuscula seu prosarum seu metrorum aut rithmicorum.’



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bishop, along with a dramatic poem by the otherwise unknown Æthilwald on the dangers and joys of peregrinatio, thus providing the Anglo-Saxon community abroad with a poetic expression of their life. 44 Boniface and Lull both composed their own Aldhelmian verse, Boniface producing a corpus of popular Ænigmatae and Lull an octosyllabic poem.45 Aldhelm’s poetic and theological interests were combined in De virginitate, which the community established by Boniface at Würzburg obtained in the eighth century.46 In the context of these texts, Lull’s compilation of Boniface’s letters, infused with the convoluted style of Aldhelmian Latin, complemented the more general creation of the Latin schools in Hesse and Thuringia which gave birth to the Vita Bonifatii and the legend of Boniface.

Lull and Carolingian ‘Kirchenpolitik’ The intellectual traditions Boniface and Lull established developed firmly within wider trends in early Carolingian correctio.47 Boniface had called the Concilium Germanicum in 742, with Carlomann’s authority, to urge changes in the standards in religious living. 48 To the west, Pippin held his own councils at Les Estinnes and Soissons in 743 and 744 ‘to restore church laws of customs, doctrine and ministry’. 49 After Boniface’s martyrdom, Lull continued to be involved in similar synods convened by Chrodegang of Metz at Ver in 755, and Attigny in 762. 50 44

45

46

47

48

49

50

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Lat. 751 includes the following Aldhelmian works: Aldhelm, nos 1, 4, 6, 7 and 8, ed. P. Ehwald, MGH AA 15 (Berlin, 1919), pp. 475–8, 480– 6, 494, 495– 7 and 497; Æthilwald, De transmarini itineris peregrinatione, ed. P. Ehwald, MGH AA 15, pp. 528 –33. Boniface, Ænigmata, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Poetae 1 (Berlin, 1895), pp. 3–23; Lull, Carmen de conversione Saxonum, ed. Dümmler, MGH Poetae 1, pp. 380 –1. Boniface and Lull were also interested in the picture poetry of Optatianus Porfyrius, as exemplified by Boniface’s introductory poem to his Ars grammatica (ed. Dümmler, MGH Poetae 1, pp. 16 –17), and Lull’s requests to Canterbury for some of Optatianus’s own works (Milret, Die Briefe, no. 112, ed. Tangl, p. 245). See Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 144–5. E.A. Lowe, ‘An Eighth-Century List of Books in a Bodleian Manuscript from Würzburg and its Probable Relation to the Laudian Acts’, Speculum 3 (1928), pp. 3–15, at pp. 8 – 9. On developments in the Carolingian church, see R. McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms 789 – 895 (London, 1977); M. de Jong, ‘Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History II c.700–900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 622–53, at pp. 623–7. For summaries of the Bonifatian synods, see W. Hartmann, Die Synoden der Karolingerzeit im Frankenreich und in Italien (Paderborn, 1989), pp. 47– 63. Concilium Liftinense, ch. 1, ed. A. Werminghof, MGH Concilia 2.1 (Hanover, 1906), pp. 5–7, at p. 7: ‘. . . aecclesiastica iura moribus et doctrinis et ministerio recuperare’. Concilium Suessionense, ch. 2, ed. A. Werminghof, MGH Concilia 2.1, pp. 33– 6, at p. 34 makes the same claims. Concilium Vernense, ed. A. Boretius, MGH Capitularia 1 (Hanover, 1883), pp. 32 – 7; Concilium Attiniacense, ed. A Werminghof, Concilia 2.1, pp. 72–3. On Chrodegang’s synods, see: Schieffer, ‘Angelsachsen und Franken’, pp. 1456 – 63; E. Ewig, ‘Beobachtungen zur Entwicklung der fränkischen Reichskirche unter Chrodegang von Metz’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 2 (1968), pp. 67–77; idem, ‘Saint Chrodegang et la réforme de l’église franque’, in Saint Chrodegang (Metz, 1967), pp. 25–53; Hartmann, Die Synoden, pp. 65– 82.



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To think of these as promulgating a ‘programme of reform’ – or even separate Bonifatian and Chrodegangian movements – is anachronistic. 51 They do, however, provide a further framework in which Lull orientated the more political aspects of his work and the promotion of the cult of Boniface. Particularly as one of the foremost bishops in the early years of Charlemagne’s reign, Lull’s career and plans unfolded in the context of Carolingian attempts to regulate and control the church. Control of Mainz and its diocese to the west Lull inherited from Boniface an episcopal see and diocese only held by the Anglo-Saxons from late in the 740s. The rise of Lull had, however, been swift.52 Letters suggest that he had only met Boniface for the first time in 738 when Lull, on pilgrimage to Rome with his family, was laid low with malaria and thus prevented from returning home. 53 He soon recovered and accompanied Boniface to Germany, where he quickly rose through the ranks of Boniface’s collegium to become his mentor’s successor in Mainz. As his death approached, or so Willibald claimed, Boniface drew up plans for the construction of new churches and summoned Lull, saying: ‘you, my dear son, must bring to completion the building of the churches that I began in Thuringia. Earnestly recall the people from the paths of error, finish the construction of the basilica in Fulda and bring thither this body of mine now wasted in years.’ 54 Lull carried with him, it seemed, a strong sense of continuing his mentor’s work. The Vita Bonifatii not only set out Boniface’s work, but also the ways in which Lull perceived the continuation of such tasks. The succession relied much on Boniface’s own machinations. Shortly before his retirement in 753, Boniface wrote to Abbot Fulrad of St Denis to ask him to appoint Lull to his ministry: ‘I hope’, he wrote, ‘if God is willing, that in him the priests will have a master, the monks a teacher in the Rule [of Benedict], and the Christian people a faithful preacher and pastor.’55 To Lull, this included continuing to play a role in the wider Frankish church: the Vita Bonifatii claims Lull succeeded 51

52 53 54

55

T. Reuter, ‘“Kirchenreform” und “Kirchenpolitik” im Zeitalter Karl Martells: Begriffe und Wirchlichkeit’, in J. Jarnut, U. Nonn and M. Richter (eds), Karl Martell in seiner Zeit, Beihefte der Francia 37 (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 35–59. Schieffer, ‘Angelsachsen und Franken’, pp. 1479 – 82. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 98, ed. Tangl, pp. 218 –22; Tangl, ‘Studien . . . 2’, p. 189. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 8, ed. Levison, p. 46: ‘Sed tu, fili karissime, structuram in Thyringea a me ceptam ecclesiarum ad perfectionis terminum deduc; tu populum ab erroris invio instantissime revoca tuque aedificationem basilicae iam inchoatae ad Fuldan conple ibidemque meum multis annorum curriculis corpus inveteratum perduc.’ Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 93, ed. Tangl, pp. 212–14, at p. 213: ‘Et spero, si Deus voluerit, quod in illo habeant presbiteri magistrum et monachi regularem doctorem et populi christiani fidelem predicatorem et pastorem.’



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to many of Boniface’s duties before 754 because the aged archbishop could no longer attend synods regularly. 56 But the same letter to Fulrad reveals that Boniface feared his followers would not be allowed to continue his work after he had gone. Much depended on the plans the recently crowned King Pippin III had for Germany. 57 Thus Boniface, Lull and a number of their closest friends met with Pippin in Düren in May and Attigny in June when, amongst other things, they negotiated the royal confirmation of the privileges of the monastery of Fulda and control over the mission station of Utrecht. 58 While Boniface set off for his mission in Frisia, Lull returned to Mainz as its new bishop and, as news arrived of Boniface’s fate, began promoting the martyr’s cult. The fight for strong religious discipline necessarily involved striving for a foothold in the city of Mainz. It was here that much significant public action occurred, creating a political, economic and social hub for the region.59 It was also from amongst the Macanenses (‘men of Mainz’), however, that Boniface found two of his famous examples of impious episcopal standards: Gerold, and his son Gewilib. 60 Whether or not the Anglo-Saxons received a frosty reception in the city as a result of this spat, after 754 the proximity of a genuine martyr soon moved many powerful families to make donations to Fulda, often with much ceremony.61 Lull, however, is scarcely to be seen in these rituals of Mainz city life, either as a listed witness or as a beneficiary (although this may say something about the lack of extant non-royal charters for Hersfeld). Evidence suggests he allied himself with the families of Laidrat and 56 57

58

59

60

61

Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 8, ed. Levison, p. 45. It is debatable whether Boniface had a hand in the coronation of Pippin; see: K.-U. Jäschke, ‘Bonifatius und die Königssalbung Pippins der Jüngeren’, Archiv für Diplomatik 23 (1977), pp. 25–54; R. McKitterick, ‘The Illusion of Royal Power in the Carolingian Annals’, EHR 115.460 (2000), pp. 1–20. For counter-arguments, although not convincing ones, see: J. Jarnut, ‘Wer hat Pippin 751 zum König gesalbt?’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 16 (1982), pp. 45– 57; J. Semmler, ‘Bonifatius, die Karolinger und “die Franken” ’, in D.R. Bauer, R. Hiestand and B. Kasten (eds), Mönchtum – Kirche – Herrschaft, 750 –1000 (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 3–49, at pp. 44– 6; idem, Der Dynastiewechsel von 751 und die fränkische Königssalbung, Studia Humaniora, Series Minor 6 (Düsseldorf, 2003), p. 41. MGH Diplomatum Karolinorum 1, nos 4, 5, ed. Mühlbacher, pp. 6 – 7, 7 – 8; Urkundenbuch der Kloster Fulda 1, no. 20, ed. E.E. Stengel, Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission für Hessen und Waldeck 10, 2 vols (Marburg, 1913–58), pp. 39 – 43, at pp. 42–3. Witnesses to the Fulda charter include Boniface, Lull, Burchard of Würzburg, Willibald of Eichstätt, Eoba (Boniface’s assistant in Utrecht) and Megingoz (the future bishop of Würzburg). M. Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley 400 –1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 47 (Cambridge, 2000); idem, ‘People, Places and Power in Carolingian Society’, in M. de Jong and F. Theuws (eds), Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, The Transformation of the Roman World 6 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 397–437, at pp. 407–11. Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 60, ed. Tangl, p. 124; Schieffer, Winfrid-Bonifatius, pp. 130 –1, 230 –3; F. Staab, ‘ “Rudi populo rudis adhuc presul.” Zu den wehrhaften Bischöfen der Zeit Karl Martells’, in Jarnut, Nonn and Richter (eds), Karl Martell in seiner Zeit, pp. 249 –73, esp. pp. 252–3. Innes, State and Society, pp. 21–2.



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Otakar, whose lands lay between Mainz and Bingen. 62 On 28 August 763, he bought from Laidrat una area publicum in Mainz for three pounds of gold and silver from Boniface’s treasure (de pretio sancti Bonifatii martyris).63 The location was significant: the land he bought was situated within Roman Mainz, within the city walls and between the River Rhine and the via communis.64 Lull was no longer quite the outsider he had been, and instead now personally owned property that gave him access to the economic and political activity outside the confines of the cathedral. Proximity to the river, meanwhile, opened up Lull’s work to the busy trade and communication routes facilitated by the Rhine.65 On the same day in 763, he gave Laidrat thirty-seven pounds of gold and silver for land in and around Bingen complete with twenty-two mancipia.66 Bingen was a Roman fort and an important centre in the early local networks upon which the Merovingian diocese of Mainz had developed.67 Lull had literally bought into the political and economic structures which had underpinned the authority of the see of Mainz for generations, giving him the material position with which to engage the Macanenses. Religious standards and society While developing a firmer hold over the diocese of Mainz, Lull was also concerned to promote religious discipline. In ninth-century Fulda, the priest Megenhart wrote that ‘after the most saintly martyr and priest Boniface, [Lull] ruled the people vigorously from the see of Mainz’. 68 Times were not always easy and sometime after 782 Charlemagne wrote to Lull encouraging him to be firm: the ignorant of heart ‘will give, either to the corrections of your paternal admonishments, or to the coercions of the pastor’s staff ’.69 The Admonitio generalis in which 62 63 64

65

66 67 68

69

Urkundenbuch der Kloster Fulda 1, nos 40 –1, ed. Stengel, pp. 68–72. Urkundenbuch der Kloster Fulda 1, no. 41, ed. Stengel, pp. 71–2. On the medieval development of Mainz, see K. Weidemann, ‘Die Topographie von Mainz in der Römerzeit und dem frühen Mittelalter’, Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 15 (1968), pp. 146 – 99, esp. pp. 193 – 9 on the medieval churches. On the evidence for economic activity on the banks of the Rhine in Mainz, see E. Wamers, Die frühmittelalterlichen Lesefunde aus der Löhrstrasse (Baustelle Hilton II) in Mainz, Mainzer archäologische Schriften 1 (Mainz, 1994), esp. pp. 194–5 on the via communis. For a contemporary Rhineland traveller meeting Lull in Mainz, see Alcuin, Carmina 4, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Poetae 1, pp. 220 –3, at p. 222; D.A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 16 (Leiden, 2004), pp. 316 – 18. Urkundenbuch der Kloster Fulda 1, no. 40, ed. Stengel, p. 70. Heinemeyer, Das Erzbistum Mainz, pp. 53–7. Ex Megenharti Fuldensis sermone de sancto Ferrucio, ed. O. Holder-Egger, p. 150: ‘. . . post sanctissimum martyrem atque pontificem Bonifacium sedis Mogonciacensis strenue rexit populum’. Charlemagne, Epistolae variorum 22, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Epistolae 4 (Berlin, 1895), p. 532: ‘. . . debent vel paterna ammonitione corrigi vel pastorali baculo coherceri’. See Tangl, ‘Studien . . . 2’, p. 182.



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Charlemagne attempted to enforce stronger discipline within his church and community was only a few years away. 70 Lull’s correspondence, particularly when cross-referenced with the synods of Boniface and Chrodegang, provide some vivid expressions of how religious ‘vigour’ was promoted and enforced on the ground. Moreover, it provides an important context in which to read the many passages on these renewed Christian standards in the Vita Bonifatii. Megingoz of Würzburg, the co-addressee of the Vita Bonifatii, was keen to support Lull’s drive to improve the standards of Christian living.71 One of only three letters by Megingoz to Lull showed a particular concern over the question of divorce. 72 He had read a number of authorities, including Augustine and Jerome, but found disagreement over whether divorce was always impermissible or if adultery or forced marriage gave justification to separation. Lull’s response is unknown but it is unlikely he considered divorce a just course of action in most cases. Boniface had praised the pagan Wends for perceiving marriage as inviolable to the extent that a woman would commit suicide on her husband’s death.73 Willibald brought attention to the suppression under Boniface of lay concubinage, although not the decision at Les Estinnes that ‘adulterous and incestuous marriages, which are not legitimate, are to be prohibited and corrected by episcopal authority’. 74 Boniface was more concerned, Willibald suggested, with condemning and dissolving clerical marriages.75 Quite what this emphasis on married clerics and concubines says about post-Bonifatian attitudes to sexual behaviour is unclear, but at Ver in 755 incest was again condemned and it was decreed that all lay marriages should be conducted in public. 76 The letter of Megingoz’s perhaps therefore speaks of persistent difficulties in regulating Christian social behaviour. Lull’s letters do reveal deep concerns with the temptations of the flesh that people from religious houses might face in the outside world. In one case, Lull wrote a letter chastising the abbess Switha for allowing two nuns to leave her care temporarily. 77 Addressing Switha, he wrote that: 70 71

72 73 74

75 76 77

Admonito generalis, ed. A. Boretius, MGH Capitularia 2.1 (Hanover, 1883), pp. 52– 63. On Megingoz’s monastic background at the Bonifatian foundation of Fritzlar, see: Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 40, ed. Tangl, pp. 64–5; Lupus, Vita Wigberti, ch. 5, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores 15.1, pp. 36–43, at pp. 39 – 40. Megingoz, Die Briefe, no. 134, ed. Tangl, pp. 272 – 3. Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 73, ed. Tangl, p. 150. Concilium Liftinense, ch. 3, ed. Werminghof, p. 7: ‘adulteria et incesta matrimonia, que non sint legitima, prohibeantur et emendentur episcoporum iudicio’. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 7, ed. Levison, p. 40. Concilium Vernense, chs 9 and 15, ed. Boretius, pp. 35–6. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 128, ed. Tangl, pp. 265 – 6.



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With the devil’s traps of arrogance and the sexual satisfactions of the laity to hand, you permitted them to go freely to the ruin of their souls in distant lands, not recalling that ‘if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch [Matthew XV.14]’ and that ‘the soul that sins shall die [Ezekiel XVIII.4]’.78 He then proceeded to excommunicate the sisters (for failing to seek his permission to leave the monastery) and Switha (for not stopping them), and also ordered the two nuns to abstain from bread and water and their abbess from meat and all drink. They were to serve as an example: ‘rebuke sinners in the presence of all’, Lull wrote, ‘that others may have fear [I Timothy V.20]’.79 Twice he refers to the violation of ‘the discipline of saintly rules’, once linking them to the religious life set down by Boniface. Indeed the unregulated wanderings of the female religious was something that had deeply concerned his predecessor. Of women travelling on pilgrimage to Rome, Boniface had commented that ‘the greater part perish and few keep their virtue’. 80 The solution he proposed to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury was simply to forbid such travels, although he remained happy for women he knew and trusted to go as a reward for their faith.81 There was concern for wandering monks too: Megingoz wrote to Lull to seek support in discouraging one of his own relatives from entering the monastic life because he felt that the vow of stabilitas would be too hard for this relative to maintain. 82 In the Frankish synods, the importance of stabilitas loci was explicitly juxtaposed with the dangers of fornication and other trappings of lay life.83 To defend the moral fibre of society, the church itself had to be corrected and disciplined. There are further references to Boniface’s ‘discipline of saintly rules’ as a measure of the religious life in a letter from Lull to his archbishop, Chrodegang of Metz. Lull wrote that: Without the consent of my predecessor St Boniface or me, his successor, a certain priest [named Enraed], ordained for another parish, 78

79

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82 83

Lull, Die Briefe, no. 128, ed. Tangl, p. 266: ‘. . . in laqueum diaboli propter arrogantiam ac voluptatem laicorum explendam ad perditionem animarum suarum liberas ire permiseras in longinquam regionem non recolens illud evangelicum: “Si cecus ceco ducatum praebet, ambo in foveam cadunt”, et illud: “Anima, quae peccaverit, ipsa morietur” ’. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 128, ed. Tangl, p. 266: ‘ “Peccantes coram omnibus argue, ut ceteri timorem habeant.”’ Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 78, ed. Tangl, p. 169: ‘. . . magna ex parte pereunt paucis remanentibus integris’. D.B. Schneider, ‘Anglo-Saxon Women in the Religious Life: A Study of the Status and Position of Women in an Early Medieval Society’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge (1985), pp. 225 – 6. Megingoz, Die Briefe, no. 136, ed. Tangl, pp. 136 –7. Concilium Suessionense, ch. 3, ed. Werminghof, p. 34.



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has been led astray by a certain priest named Willefrith who, moreover, despises your institutional decrees and despises our power in our lawful parish . . . But when he did not . . . wish to repent, correcting the past, he was excommunicated by me in accordance with your newest canonica institutia.84 The language, as Lull himself hinted, contained strong echoes of the Council of Ver, which supported the bishop’s condemnation and excommunication of ‘false priests’ through its decrees against priests who worked without episcopal permission. 85 But matters of jurisdiction were just the beginning: Lull names eleven servants Willefrith stole from him ‘amongst countless others’ at night, and lists a variety of stolen farmyard animals and gold and silver treasures with which Willefrith had also absconded.86 The priest threatened the very material basis of Lull’s episcopal authority. Boniface himself had needed defence ‘from such deceivers’ (contra tales falsarios), having condemned the heretics Aldebert and Clemens at synods and having had Ansfrid denounced at Pippin III’s court.87 To prevent further heresies, in 744 Pippin III and his bishops had proscribed regular synods and a strict church hierarchy with priests subject to bishops, and bishoprics subject to metropolitan sees.88 While Enraed and Willefrith may not have been heretics themselves, their independence posed a direct challenge to Lull’s ability to control his diocese and lead his flock according to the standards he believed to be correct. Networks of monasteries and royal protection to the east The decrees of the Carolingian synods created new institutional models in which monasticism functioned. For all Boniface’s vigorous standards,

84

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Lull, Die Briefe, no. 110, ed. Tangl, pp. 236 – 8, at p. 237: ‘. . . quod in paccochiam nostram contra ius canoncium a Uuillefritho presbitero quidam adductus est presbiter in alia ordinatus parrochia, non consentiente antecessore meo sancto Bonifatio archiepiscopo neque me successore eius. Qui et institutionis vestrae decreta contemnens et in parrochia nostra constitutus nostrum sprevit magisterium . . . Sed cum nec ita emendatus penitere de praeteritis voluit, novissime secundum canonicam institutionem vestram excommunicatus est a me.’ Concilium Vernense, ch. 8, ed. Boretius, pp. 34–5. A similar decree was made at Concilium Suessionense, ch. 5, ed. Werminghof, p. 35. Amongst the list of stolen servants is one Theodo, who might be identical with the Theodo Lull bought to work his land around Bingen, thus perhaps giving some indication of where Willefrith and Enraed were. Concilium Suessionense, chs 2 and 7, ed. Werminghoff, pp. 34–5; Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 7, ed. Levison, p. 40; N. Zeddies, ‘Bonifatius und zwei nützliche Rebellen: die Häretiker Aldebert und Clemens’, in M.T. Fögen (ed.), Ordnung und Aufruhr im Mittelalter. Historische und juristische Studien zur Rebellion (Frankfurt, 1995), pp. 217– 63. Concilium Suessionense, chs 2–3, ed. Werminghof, p. 34; Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 8, p. 43.



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the monastic foundations he established were essentially personal institutions that followed ‘mixed rules’ based upon the Regula s. Benedicti.89 Independent sacred spaces had been a significant feature of Merovingian monasticism and had supported a range of localized political struggles, making their existence something of a threat to the spread of Carolingian authority.90 Frankish bishops agreed at the Council of Ver that all monasteries should be subject to either the king or a bishop. 91 Through tuitio, monastic life could be protected and controlled. 92 The Bonifatian synods had already placed bishops in a position where they were to protect the property of monasteria.93 It is perhaps notable that one of the councils to which Willibald compared Boniface’s work was the Council of Chalcedon in 451, at which monks were placed under the authority of bishops. Working between Bonifatian ideals and Carolingian politics, Lull carried with him a strong sense of uniting the local episcopal and monastic infrastructure under the cult of Boniface. A potential problem for Lull was the continuing independence of Boniface’s foundation at Fulda. Lull’s efforts to bring the monastery under his control are only recorded in the Vita Sturmi, written by the Abbot Eigil in the 810s at a time when, once again, the brethren had to assert their right to self-determination in the wake of the unpopular abbacy of Ratgar.94 Eigil, who had been made a priest by Lull, portrayed his former bishop as something of villain. Eigil claimed (in contradiction to the Vita Bonifatii ), that Lull had refused to allow the body of the martyr to be taken from Mainz and buried at Fulda in accordance with Boniface’s own instructions.95 Only reluctantly, after he had interrogated a deacon who had had a vision of Boniface, did Lull release the 89

90

91 92

93 94

95

C. Holdsworth, ‘Saint Boniface the Monk’, in Reuter, The Greatest Englishman, pp. 47–68; J. Semmler, ‘Instituta sancti Bonifatii. Fulda im Wiederstreit der Observanzen’, in G. Schrimpf (ed.), Kloster Fulda in der Welt der Karolinger und Ottonen, Fuldaer Studien 7 (Frankfurt, 1996), pp. 79–104. P. Fouracre, ‘The Origins of the Carolingian Attempt to Regulate the Cult of Saints’, in J. Howard-Johnston and P.A. Hayward (eds), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 1999), pp. 143–66; J. Semmler, ‘Episcopi potestas und karolingische Klosterpolitik’, in A. Borst (ed.), Mönchtum, Episkopat und Adel zur Gründungszeit des Klosters Reichenau (Sigmaringen, 1974), pp. 305– 95. Concilium Vernense, ch. 20, ed. Boretius, p. 36. On these developments, see B.H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power Restraint and Privilege in Early Medieval Europe (Manchester, 1999), pp. 99–114; de Jong, ‘Carolingian Monasticism’, pp. 623–7. Concilium Liftinense, ch. 2, ed. Werminghof, p. 7. P. Kehl, ‘Die Entstehungszeit der Vita Sturmi des Eigil. Versuch einer Neudatierung’, Archiv für mittelrheinsiche Kirchengeschichte 46 (1994), pp. 11–20. On Fuldan reform see: J. Semmler, ‘Studien zum Supplex Libellus und zur anianischen Reform in Fulda’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 69 (1958), pp. 268–98; G. Becht-Jördens, ‘Die Vita Aegils des Brun Candidus als Quelle zu Fragen aus der Geschichte Fuldas im Zeitalter der anianischen Reform’, Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 42 (1992), pp. 19–48. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, ch. 16, ed. Engelbert, pp. 149–50.



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body to Sturm, the abbot. As time progressed, Eigil continued, Lull grew envious of Sturm’s reputation and convinced Pippin III that the abbot was de inimicitia regis.96 Accused of these otherwise unspecified political crimes, Sturm was sent to Jumièges for two years (763–5). Mayke de Jong has recently reinterpreted such punishments, not as imprisonment, but as a temporary exile – a ‘time-out’ within the protection of sacred space to diffuse political tensions. 97 Indeed, Sturm was not even marched away under guard. Lull imposed his own abbot, Marcus, on Fulda in order to increase his hold on the place, only for the brethren to petition Pippin at court to have Sturm back; faced with a revolt from an important locus sancti, Pippin brought Sturm back and informed the abbot he had ‘forgotten’ what Sturm’s crimes had even been.98 Thereafter Fulda was a royal abbey completely free from Lull’s dominion. Without Fulda, the cornerstone of Lull’s monastic network became Hersfeld. The bishop re-founded the monastery on the site of an early Bonifatian hermitage and set himself up as abbot. 99 On 5 January 775 at Quierzy, Charlemagne took Hersfeld into his protection and granted the monks the right to choose their abbots without the interference of any bishops, echoing the privileges he had granted Fulda the previous September whilst at Düren.100 Thereafter Charlemagne made eight land grants to Hersfeld and Lull before 786. 101 Such figures compare favourably with Fulda, which received only five royal charters in the same period, and indeed marks Hersfeld out as particularly favoured within the Carolingian kingdom.102 Lull appears to have been the decisive figure here: when he died in 786 the royal donations to Hersfeld dried up and Fulda began to eclipse its monastic neighbour. Through the Hersfeld charters, Lull appears as a bishop consolidating his hold on lands east of the Rhine. Here, the boundaries of episcopal

96 97

98 99

100

101

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Eigil, Vita Sturmi, chs 17–18, ed. Engelbert, pp. 151–3. M. de Jong, ‘Monastic Prisoners or Opting Out? Political Coercion and Honour in the Frankish Kingdoms’, in de Jong and Theuws, Topographies of Power, pp. 291–328, esp. pp. 297–303 and p. 328. Eigil, Vita Sturmi, chs 18–19, ed. Engelbert, pp. 152–5. On the Bonifatian foundation see: Eigil, Vita Sturmi, chs 4–5, ed. Engelbert, pp. 133–5; H. Beumann, Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 2 (1952), pp. 1–15; W. Kratz, ‘Die Anfänge des Klosters Hersfeld’, Fuldaer Geschichtsblätter 41 (1965), pp. 74–87. The Hersfeld privileges are MGH Diplomatum Karolinorum, nos 89, 90, ed. Mühlbacher, pp. 128–9, 130. On the privileges, and whether Hersfeld was a Reichsgut, see: Schieffer, ‘Angelsachsen und Franken’, pp. 1517–18; K.-U. Jäschke, ‘Zu den schriftlichen Zeugnissen für die Anfänge der Reichsabtei Hersfeld’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 107 (1971), pp. 94–135. The Fulda privileges are Urkundenbuch der Kloster Fulda 1, no. 68, ed. Stengel, pp. 121–5. MGH Diplomatum Karolinorum, nos 103, 104, 105, 121, 126, 129, 142, 144, ed. Mühlbacher, pp. 128 – 9, 130, 147– 8, 148 –9, 149 –50, 169 – 70, 175 – 6, 179– 80, 193 –4, 195– 6. Urkundenbuch der Kloster Fulda 1, nos 73, 74, 77–9, ed. Stengel, pp. 130 –7, 137, 140 –7.



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authority were very much open to renegotiation. 103 Boniface had planned new bishoprics at Würzburg, Eichstätt, Büraburg and Erfurt early in the 740s, but his plans were hastily redesigned; by the time Willibald wrote the Vita Bonifatii, only Würzburg and Eichstätt still functioned.104 Pope Zacharias refused to accept Erfurt as an episcopal see because he had been told it was an urbs paganorum rusticorum.105 Initially this left the Bonifatian foundation of Ohrdruf, where Lull had been educated for a time, as the principal Christian centre in the area. 106 A number of Charlemagne’s gifts began to develop the basis of landholdings for Hersfeld – and thus Lull – in the area, and the fragmented Christian topography of Thuringia acquired some cohesion. To the west of Hersfeld, Lull also extended a hold over the Bonifatian foundations of Büraburg and Fritzlar. Bishop Witta of Büraburg translated the relics of St Wigbert from Fritzlar to Lull’s Hersfeld. 107 In 782, Charlemagne supported a land grant from Lull to the church of Fritzlar that helped to affirm Lull’s appropriation of the relics. 108 The translation strengthened the spiritual and financial power of Lull’s monastery, but also freed Fritzlar for potential development as a Bonifatian cult site. It was there, fifty years earlier, that Boniface had felled the great Oak of Jupiter, an important pagan shrine, and he had used the timber to construct an oratory.109 The translation of Wigbert’s relics followed a Saxon attack on Fritzlar in 774 when the church, according to the Annales regni Francorum from Charlemagne’s court, was saved by the intervention of Boniface’s spirit.110 Through his landholdings and the cult of Boniface, Lull had begun to bring the networks of independent Bonifatian foundations firmly under his control. When Lull’s importance came to be reconsidered in the eleventh century, the tensions evident in the work of Eigil had given way to a renewed appreciation for Lull’s institution building. The Mainz Vita 103

104 105 106 107

108 109 110

See M. Tangl, ‘Das Bistum Erfurt’, in Eggert, Das Mittelalter, pp. 47–59, at pp. 57– 9. Tangl did not, however, note the significance of Hersfeld’s other landholdings. It is unclear whether Boniface or Lull abolished Büraburg and Erfurt. In favour of Boniface see: A. Bigelmair, ‘Die Gründung des mitteldeutschen Bistümer’, in Sankt Bonifatius, pp. 247–87, at pp. 282–7. In favour of Lull see: W.H. Fritze, ‘Bonifatius und die Einbeziehung von Hessen und Thüringen in die Mainzer Diözese’, Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 4 (1954), pp. 37–63. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 8, ed. Levison, p. 44. Zacharias, Die Briefe, no. 50, ed. Tangl, p. 81. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 103, ed. Tangl, pp. 225–7. Lupus, Vita Wigberti, chs 24–5, ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 42–3. Lampert, in the Vita Lulli, ch. 17, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 330, was quiet on the role of Witta in order to associate the translation more fully with Lull. MGH Diplomatum Karolinorum, no. 142, ed. Mühlbacher, pp. 193–4. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 6, ed. Levison, p. 31. Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 774, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG 6 (Hanover, 1895), p. 15. Lupus later revised the story, telling Abbot Bun of Hersfeld that it was St Wigbert that saved the church: Lupus, Vita Wigberti, ch. 19, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 42.



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Bonifatii IV defended Lull’s initial reluctance to release Boniface’s body to Fulda because ‘many . . . wished the body of the saint to remain there [in the city]’.111 Lull’s hesitancy thus appears here to have been a result of considering the needs of a flock he wished to serve. When the deacon recounted his vision, however, Lull quickly moved the body without further questions. Lampert of Hersfeld, Lull’s hagiographer, provides a similar account.112 Strikingly, Lampert also condemned Sturm as ‘a man of great excellence . . . but excessively violent and ferocious of nature’,113 as perhaps one might have expected from his name. Sturm, he claimed, had used flattery and deception to maintain control over his brethren and had alienated (alienere) the Fulda monks against Lull.114 Thus Lull and Pippin were, to Lampert, entirely justified in removing Sturm from office, and it was no good thing that he was allowed to return. It was important to Lampert that Pippin sided with Lull, because one of his prime concerns was how Hersfeld should fit into Emperor Henry IV ’s Reichspolitik.115 Relations between Fulda and Hersfeld had improved since the ninth century, particularly with the abbacy of Ruthard of Fulda, a former monk of Hersfeld, in the 1070s. 116 The two monasteries were also at that time still in the dispute with the archdiocese of Mainz which had prompted Otloh’s Vita Bonifatii a decade earlier. Consequently Lampert was at pains to present Lull as a virtuous archbishop of Mainz and abbot of Hersfeld who was fair in his dealings with Fulda.117 The eleventh-century significance of the AngloSaxon lay in the ways he could embody the complex religious relationships in central Germany which he himself had founded; as these connections changed, so too did the historical relevancy of Lull. Whichever way he was to be interpreted, however, it is clear that in striving to fulfil the work of Boniface, Lull gained a reputation for having a strong and distinctive approach to the control of his diocese.

Lull, mission and kings Mission was central to much of the Anglo-Saxons’ continental work in the eighth century. In the Vita Bonifatii, Willibald claimed that Boniface, just before his retirement, ‘delegated to Burchard [d. 753] the dignified office in the place called Würzburg, putting to his office the 111 112 113

114 115 116 117

Vita Bonifatii IV, ch. 10, p. 102: ‘multi . . . cupiebant sanctorum corpus ibidem remanere’. Lambert, Vita Lulli, chs 11–12, ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 321–2. Lambert, Vita Lulli, ch. 13, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 323: ‘vir excellentis ingenii . . . sed vehementis nimium et ferocis naturae’. Lambert, Vita Lulli, ch. 13, ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 323 – 4. Struve, ‘Lampert von Hersfeld (B)’, p. 70. Struve, ‘Lampert von Hersfeld (B)’, p. 126; Vogtherr, ‘Die Reichklöster’, p. 455. Struve, ‘Lampert von Hersfeld (B)’, pp. 126, 129.



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churches within the borders of the Franks and Saxons and Slavs’. 118 As the Franks had no real footholds in Saxony or the Slavic lands, this statement probably reflects the early ambitions of Lull and Megingoz to coordinate future missionary work. 119 None the less, as Ian Wood has recently argued, mission was not evidently a high priority in the hagiographical traditions which emerged from Mainz, even under Lull. 120 It is conspicuously easy for modern historians to tell the story of Charlemagne’s attempts to convert the Saxons with little mention of Boniface’s heirs.121 The extent to which attitudes to mission had changed under Lull needs to be explored. The undertaking of missionary work in Frisia and Saxony had been dependent on the military campaigns of successive Carolingian mayors during Boniface’s career. Missionaries needed protection, material support and political backing to work safely and make themselves heard. 122 In his letters, Boniface specifically cited the Saxons as a target for missionary work; he wrote to all Christians ‘of the race and lineage of the English’ (de stirpe et prosapia Anglorum) and beseeched them to pray for the souls of the Saxons because of their common ancestry. 123 In doing so he echoed, consciously or not, Bede’s account of the origins of the Anglo-Saxon missions, in which the exile Ecgberht had sent Wictberht and Willibrord to Frisia and Saxony to convert the pagans in their ancestral lands. 124 Like Willibrord, Boniface used Frankish power 118

119

120 121

122

123 124

Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 8, ed. Levison, p. 44: ‘[Bonifatius] Burchardo vero in loco qui apellatur Wirzaburch dignitatis officium delegavit et aecclesias in confinibus Franchorum et Saxonum atque Sclavorum suo officio deputavit . . .’ See C.J. Carroll, ‘The Archbishops and Church Provinces of Mainz and Cologne during the Carolingian Period, 751–911’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge (1999), pp. 28–9, in particular criticizing the anachronistic arguments of Schieffer, ‘Angelsachsen und Franken’, pp. 1519–21 and E. Ewig, Frühes Mittelalter, Rheinische Geschichte 1.2 (Düsseldorf, 1980), p. 113. Wood, The Missionary Life, pp. 57–78. On Charlemagne’s conversion of Saxony, with little reference to Lull, see H. Beumann, ‘Die Hagiographie “bewältigt”: Unterwerfung und Christianisierung der Sachsen durch Karl den Großen’, Settimane 23 (Spoleto, 1982), pp. 129–63; A. Angenendt, Kaiserherrschaft und Königstaufe. Kaiser, Könige und Papste als geistliche Patrone in der abendländischen Missionsgeschichte, Arbeiten zur Frühmittelalterforschung 15 (Berlin and New York, 1984); H. MayrHarting, ‘Charlemagne, the Saxons and the Imperial Coronation of 800’, EHR 111.444 (1996), pp. 1113–33; U. Nonn, ‘Zwangsmission mit Feuer und Schwert? Zur Sachsenmission Karls des Großen’, in F.J. Feltzen (ed.), Bonifatius – Apostel der Deutschen. Mission und Christianisierung vom 8. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, Mainzer Vorträge 9 (Stuttgart, 2004), pp. 55–74. On the importance of kings to missionary work see: C. Stancliffe, ‘Kings and Conversion: Some Comparisons between the Roman Mission to England and Patrick’s to Ireland’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 14 (1980), pp. 59–94; Angenendt, Kaiserherrschaft und Königstaufe; M. Richter, ‘Practical Aspects of the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons’, in P. Ní Chatáin and M. Richter (eds), Irland und die Christenheit: Bibelstudien und Mission (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 363–76. Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 46, ed. Tangl, pp. 74–5. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, V.9, eds B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1969), pp. 476–7; K. Schäferdiek, ‘Fragen der frühen angelsächsischen Festlandmission’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 28 (1994), pp. 172–95.



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structures to establish a basis for his mission, but regardless of Frankish involvement the missions were to be more properly a concern for the people of transmarina Saxonia in Britain.125 Bishop Torthelm of Leicester replied to Boniface’s exhortations enthusiastically and agreed to pray, and Willibald claimed that many people from Britain were attracted to the work; many were Mercians like Lull. 126 Boniface was long dead, however, by the time the Saxon missions were a viable proposition from the 770s onwards and thus it was Lull, working with Charlemagne, who helped bring Boniface’s plan to fruition. Willibald wrote the Vita Bonifatii, not during the reign of Charlemagne, but under Pippin III. Saxony was no priority to the king. He made one incursion into Saxon territory, when he successfully captured a number of strongholds around Sythen in 758. 127 Such a victory might have influenced Willibald’s optimistic description of Burchard’s authority beyond the Frankish frontiers. But Willibald also accused Pippin of attempting to keep Boniface’s relics in Frisia against the saint’s (and Lull’s) wishes, perhaps for use as a focal point for Christian sentiment in an unsettled region.128 The king and the new bishop of Mainz did not entirely see eye to eye on the new cult. They did correspond about the collection of tithes and the difficulties caused by the harsh winter of 763, and Pippin also relayed a story to Lull about a miracle in Dokkum on the site where Boniface had been killed. 129 The sources are, unfortunately, few and far between, but there is nothing to suggest that Pippin and Lull wanted to, or even could, begin to fulfil Boniface’s plans for the conversion of the Saxons. Pippin’s death in 768 and the rise of Charlemagne dramatically improved Lull’s position. Charlemagne was interested in both mission and Boniface’s cult, and his ‘Godescalc calendar’ included both the martyr’s name and that of St Kilian, whose cult Boniface had founded in Würzburg, in the court’s devotional cycle. 130 There is, however, no suggestion that Lull himself worked as a missionary. In Lampert’s Vita Lulli, for example, little is said about Saxony, just that Hersfeld was too close to the Saxon border for Boniface’s liking and, quoting Einhard, that Charlemagne had struggled to subjugate the Saxons. 131 Lull may 125 126

127 128 129 130

131

Lull, Denehard and Burchard, Die Briefe, no. 50, ed. Tangl, p. 84. Torthelm, Die Briefe, no. 47, ed. Tangl, pp. 75–6; Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 6, ed. Levison, p. 34; McKitterick, ‘Anglo-Saxon Missionaries’, pp. 23–4, 27. Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 758, ed. Kurze, pp. 6 –7. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 8, ed. Levison, p. 53. Pippin, Die Briefe, no. 118, ed. Tangl, p. 254. Willibald, ch. 9, Vita Bonifatii, ed. Levison, p. 56. Karls des Grossen Kalendarium und Ostertafel , ed. F. Piper (Berlin, 1858), pp. 25–6; Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, pp. 77–9. The inclusion of Kilian as the only martyr from the Merovingian period perhaps makes a significant statement about perceptions of sanctity at the Carolingian court. Lampert, Vita Lulli, chs 14–15, ed. Holder-Egger, pp. 326–8. Boniface’s opinion of Hersfeld is first mentioned in Eigil’s Vita Sturmi, ch. 6, ed. Engelbert, p. 138.



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have advised Charlemagne and offered organizational support. 132 But it is doubtful that Lull was responsible for Charlemagne’s policy of forcibly converting the Saxons: Charlemagne’s main concern was defence of the region, rather than mission per se, because the Saxons continued to raid his territories.133 Hersfeld is thought to have been a base for missions to the Saxons because of its proximity to the mission field and because of Charlemagne’s own interest in the foundation; 134 but no evidence confirms the direct involvement of Hersfeld and, as Charlemagne moved into Saxony, new centres like Urbs Karoli (Paderborn) were established instead. In the context of Saxony, two letters to Lull from the otherwise unknown priest Wigbert are of great interest. Wigbert worked ‘in the region of our people, i.e. the Saxons’ where many desired the help of the Lord and had listened to his ‘long sermons’. 135 About to travel home to Britain and unsure of coming back, he encouraged Lull to continue his work. Once in Britain, Wigbert wrote to Lull again and revealed that he was doing his best to promote Lull’s work, although he noted happily that it was already well known. 136 As a result of Wigbert’s activities, Lull’s friends and family back home decided to pray for the living and dead named in a list sent by Lull which they copied into a document in their church. King Alchred of Northumbria referred to the receipt of a similar list in a letter to Lull dated 771x774, and Lull also attached a list, now lost, to one of his book requests to Coaena of York.137 From Boniface’s native Wessex, meanwhile, King Cynewulf sought to establish similar ties with Lull, as did King Æardwulf of Kent and Bishop Æardulf of Rochester.138 Networks of confraternal commemoration ensured that the efforts of missionaries would not be forgotten. Indeed, the martyrdom of St Boniface and the defeat of the Old Saxons were amongst the few continental events recorded in early Anglo-Saxon annals.139 Whether prayer communities resulted in any more tangible support for Lull is, however, unclear: Alchred sent the 132

133 134

135 136 137 138

139

R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371–1386AD (London, 1997), pp. 215–17. On Charlemagne’s conversion of Saxony see H. Beumann, ‘Die Hagiographie “bewältigt”: Unterwerfung und Christianisierung der Sachsen durch Karl den Großen’, Settimane 23 (Spoleto, 1982), pp. 129–63; H. Mayr-Harting, ‘Charlemagne, the Saxons and the Imperial Coronation of 800’, EHR 111 (1996), pp. 1113–33. Beumann, ‘Die Hagiographie “bewältigt”’, pp. 150 – 62. Schieffer, ‘Angelsachsen und Franken’, pp. 1519–21; Angenendt, Kaiserherrschaft und Königstaufe, p. 214. Wigbert, Die Briefe, no. 137, ed. Tangl, p. 276: ‘in regione gentis nostrae, id est Saxanorum’. Wigbert, Die Briefe, no. 138, ed. Tangl, pp. 277–8. Alchred, Die Briefe, no. 121, ed. Tangl, p. 257; Lull, Die Briefe, no. 125, ed. Tangl, p. 263. Æardwulf and Æardwulf, Die Briefe, no. 122, ed. Tangl, pp. 258–9; Cynewulf, Die Briefe, no. 139, ed. Tangl, pp. 278 –9. J. Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c.750 – 870, Studies in Early Medieval Britain (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 96–7.



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bishop twelve cloaks and a gold ring, Wigbert wrote vaguely of sending ‘useful’ things, but otherwise only St Willehad is known to have joined missionary efforts in Saxony at this time. Alchred’s involvement in the missions at this point extends the royal contexts within which Lull and the missions worked. The king’s letter to Lull seems closely related to two letters from Eanwulf, a Northumbrian abbot, one congratulating Charlemagne directly for his successes in Saxony, and the other thanking Lull for some writings and establishing another confraternal relationship.140 These letters seem to reveal some moral support developing between the Northumbrians and Franks over the Saxon campaigns, perhaps fostered by Lull and Wigbert. It remained unclear from where precisely episcopal authority in Saxony was to come from, and in 767 Aluberht, the first bishop of the Old Saxons, was consecrated by Ælberht of York rather than a Frankish bishop. The return of Aluberht to the continent might even provide a context in which the letters of Alchred and Eanwulf were carried to Lull.141 St Willehad is a significant figure here. He was related to St Willibrord and Alcuin of York, which suggests a strong family interest in mission.142 According to the ninth-century Bremen Vita Willehadi, Willehad obtained dispensation to preach to the Frisians and Saxons from King Alchred and then worked for Charlemagne, eventually becoming the first bishop of Bremen. 143 When Adam of Bremen came to write his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum in the 1070s he omitted to mention Alchred’s role, but he did include a forged charter which claimed that Charlemagne had later had Lull consecrate Willehad as bishop.144 This was mentioned neither in the ninth-century vita nor by Lampert – probably because Lull died in 786 and Willehad was appointed in 787 – and it probably relates to attempts to justify claims to land once owned by Mainz.145 Both Adam and Willehad’s anonymous ninth-century hagiographer were keen, however, to establish the passion of St Boniface as the foremost inspiration behind Willehad’s missionary zeal.146 If Willehad’s mission was the product of interaction 140 141 142

143

144

145 146

Eanwulf, Die Briefe, nos 119 –20, ed. Tangl, pp. 254 –7; Tangl, ‘Studien . . . 2’, p. 181. Story, Carolingian Connections, p. 53. Thiofrid, Vita Willibrordi, ch. 29, ed. A. Poncelet, Acta Sanctorum, Nov. 3 (Brussels, 1910), pp. 459– 83, at p. 477. Vita Willehadi, ch. 1, ed. A. Poncelet, Acta Sanctorum, Nov. 3, pp. 842–3. There is much debate on whether the vita was composed in Echternach or Bremen – in favour of Bremen see Palmer, ‘Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii’, pp. 240 –1; in favour of Echternach see G. Niemeyer, ‘Die Herkunft der Vita Willehadi’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 12 (1956), pp. 17–35 and Wood, The Missionary Life, pp. 90 –1. Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, I.xi (12), ed. B. Schmeidler, MGH SRG 2 (Hanover, 1917), pp. 17–20. Compare the account of the consecration in the Vita Willehadi, ch. 8, ed. Poncelet, p. 845. Vita Willehadi, ch. 2, ed. Poncelet, p. 843; Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis, I.x–xi (11–12), ed. Schmeidler, pp. 10 –12.



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between Lull, Alchred and Charlemagne, then it is significant that the cult of Boniface was considered to be such a meaningful part of it given Lull’s broader ambitions as the heir of Boniface. Despite close connections between the Saxon and Frisian mission fields, the place of Frisia within Lull’s Bonifatian work remained unclear and it was instead developed by others. 147 With Alchred’s permission, Willehad began his work from the church in Dokkum which was built on the spot where Boniface had died. 148 Adam of Bremen later claimed, with no apparent historical authority, that Willehad spent time with Liudger, the Frisian founder of Dokkum’s church. 149 Liudger was certainly well connected: a pupil of Gregory of Utrecht’s (another graduate of Boniface’s school), he travelled to Alchred’s Northumbria with Aluberht to seek tutelage under Alcuin, and later founded churches at Werden and Münster with Charlemagne’s patronage. 150 When studying the influence of Lull on the cult of Boniface it is striking that Liudger seemed completely uninterested in him. In his Vita Gregorii (written c.800), Liudger wrote of Lull only that: ‘[He] lived in the metropolitan city of Mainz with the greater parts east of the Franks, which constituted the parish [ parochia ] of that city.’151 It is an innocuous statement in its own right, but it is the first part of a list of the people who continued Boniface’s work, all of whom receive glowing epithets like venerabilis pater (Megingoz) and electus Dei antistes ( Willibald of Eichstätt).152 Despite the overlapping circles in which Lull, Liudger and Willehad had worked, for some reason no one in Frisia or Saxony cared to remember Lull with any fondness. In part, a dispute over the relationship between Utrecht and Mainz might account for Frisian attitudes to Lull. Boniface had sought to wrestle control of Utrecht from the diocese of Cologne in order to further his own missionary plans for Frisia, which he claimed Agilolf of 147

148 149

150

151

152

On the difficulties of distinguishing Frisia from western Saxony see: S. Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs Frisons du haut moyen âge 1 (Lille, 1983), pp. 101–5; I.N. Wood, ‘Before or After Mission: Social Relations Across the Middle and Lower Rhine in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries’, in I.L. Hansen and C. Wickham (eds), The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, The Transformation of the Roman World 11 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 149 –66; W.S. van Egmond, ‘Converting Monks: Missionary Activity in Early Medieval Frisia and Saxony’, in G. Armstrong and I.N. Wood (eds), Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, International Medieval Research 7 (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 37–45. Vita Willehadi, ch. 2, ed. Poncelet, p. 843. Adam, Gesta Hammaburgensis, I.xi (12), ed. Schmeidler, p. 13. On the shared interests of Willehad and Liudger in the cult of Boniface, see Kehl, Kult und Nachleben, pp. 58–60. Altfrid, Vita Liudgeri, I.9, I.11, I.21, I.23, ed. W. Diekamp, Die Vitae Sancti Liudgeri, Die Geschichtsquellen des Bistums Münster (Münster, 1881), pp. 1–53, at pp. 13–14, 16 –17, 24–5, 28. Liudger, Vita Gregorii, ch. 5, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores 15.1, pp. 63–79, at pp. 71–2: ‘Lullus Magontiam metropolitanam civitatem cum maxima parte orientalium Francorum, qui in parrochia urbis illius constituti sunt, incoluit.’ Liudger, Vita Gregorii, ch. 8, ed. Holder-Egger, p. 72.



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Cologne (d. 753) was hindering.153 Lull joined in Boniface’s indignation and, in a letter to Gregory of Utrecht, he ranted about homines intolerabile and the novus fantasma episcopus in Cologne.154 Gregory and Lull had likely been friends since 739, when they had both been in Rome with Boniface. But in 777 Gregory’s friend Alberic, another AngloSaxon, approached Riculf of Cologne rather than Lull to seek consecration as bishop of Utrecht.155 There is no sign of dissent from Mainz. Lull had, of course, been keen to remove the body of the martyred Boniface away from Utrecht for use in the Middle Rhine Valley and Saxony; if control of Utrecht was in dispute, there was every chance that Lull could lose influence over the cult if Boniface’s body remained there. The relationship between the cult of Boniface and Lull’s church control was tempered by pragmatism. Frisia remained meaningful as the region in which Boniface died, as Willibald was keen to portray, but it is also made clear in the Vita Bonifatii that the martyr’s duty was towards Germania in accordance with the instructions of Popes Gregory II and Gregory III.156 The important frontier to Lull was in Germania, as is perhaps reflected by the sparing references to Frisia in the Bonifatian letter collections. Quite where Slavic mission fitted into Lull’s plans is unclear. No source other than the Vita Bonifatii suggests Boniface was interested in converting the Slavs. With the retirement of Megingoz in 768 and the successes in Saxony, the Slavic mission fields soon became the focus for the evangelical work of Virgil of Salzburg and Arno, Virgil’s successor and a close friend of Alcuin’s.157 The Irishman had had several disputes with Boniface but his relationship with the Anglo-Saxons in Germany after 754 was positive.158 The presence of Lull and Willibald of Eichstätt in Virgil’s Liber vitae, on the same page as Charles Martell, Carlomann and Pippin III, further suggests Virgil’s respect for his Anglo-Saxon neighbours. Arbeo of Freising, Virgil’s friend, produced vitae that in part renegotiated with Lull’s circle precisely what the significance of Boniface was to Bavaria, but it is also from eighth-century Freising that the earliest extant manuscript of Willibald’s Vita Bonifatii and Hygeburg’s Vita Willibaldi et Wynnebaldi – Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 153

154 155 156 157

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Boniface, Die Briefe, no. 109, ed. Tangl, pp. 234–6; M. Mostert, ‘Bonifatius als geschiedvervalser’, Madoc: Tijdschrift over de Middeleeuwsen 9.3 (1995), pp. 213–21. Lull, Die Briefe, no. 92, ed. Tangl, pp. 209–12; Tangl, ‘Studien . . . 2’, p. 191. Altfrid, Vita Liudgeri, I.17, ed. Diekamp, p. 21. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 5, ed. Levison, p. 25. Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum, chs 2–8, ed. H. Wolfram, Die Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum. Das Weissbuch der Salzburger Kirche über die Erfolgreiche Mission in Karantanien und Pannonien (Vienna, 1979), pp. 34–59, at pp. 40 –9; Alcuin, Epistolae, nos 107, 112, 113, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Epistolae 4 (Berlin, 1895), pp. 153–4, 162–3, 163–6. P.P. Ó’Néill, ‘Bonifaz und Virgil: Konflict zweier Kulturen’, in H. Dopsch and R. Juffinger (eds), Virgil von Salzburg, Missionar und Gelehrter (Salzburg, 1985), pp. 76–83.



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Clm 1086 – comes.159 Würzburg’s hagiographical traditions soon dovetailed with those from Mainz and Freising. 160 Nowhere, unsurprisingly, did Boniface’s dislike of Virgil pass explicitly into the writing of history in the Carolingian period. The Vita Bonifatii may only hint at the fleeting missionary ambitions of Boniface’s heirs in Germany, but in doing so it underlines once more how the story of St Boniface owes so much of its form to the changing world of Lull.

Conclusion Lull’s achievements, although scarcely matching those of St Boniface, have quietly had a powerful effect on medieval history. His cult of St Boniface, especially through the Vita Bonifatii, became one of the most influential east of the Rhine and established the Anglo-Saxon missions as a decisive movement at the dawn of the Carolingian age. As a Carolingian bishop, Lull’s work marked him out as a figure of religious vigour, following the canons set down by Boniface and Chrodegang with diligence and running his diocese carefully in accordance with Bonifatian ideals and Carolingian Kirchenpolitik. Lull could not continue to work as an outsider, as Boniface had often done, and so he bought into local power structures along the Rhineland. He brought the independent foundations of Herfeld, Fritzlar and Erfurt under his personal authority and developed a degree of influence along the border with Saxony. Only Fulda remained beyond his reach despite convincing Pippin III, already wary of unregulated monasteries, to depose the Bavarian abbot Sturm. The nature of Lull’s career prompted debate, albeit sporadically, of which only echoes can now be found from the work of Eigil and Hrabanus through to that of Lampert of Hersfeld three hundred years later. It is perhaps because of this debate that no real cult developed around the commemoration of Lull. But, as Lampert suggests, Lull was significant for taking the legacy of St Boniface and creating a more integrated religious infrastructure in Hesse and Thuringia within which Boniface’s standards and ideas could be effectively promoted. The vigorous rule of Lull perhaps explains why the Boniface of the Vita Bonifatii was not quite the same Boniface evident in the letters. In the first place, the Vita was not the product of historical investigation, but rather of the intellectual environment Lull created in Mainz through the acquisition of exegetical and semi-historical works and literary curiosities. A hagiographical Boniface also had to speak to audiences 159 160

Wood, The Missionary Life, pp. 157–8. Wood, The Missionary Life, pp. 160 –1; Palmer, ‘Constructions of Sanctity’, pp. 244–5.



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present and future about the ways the Bonifatian past related to their own times. Immediately, Lull’s relationship with Mainz and Salzburg meant figures like Virgil and Gewilib were less pertinent threats to the Carolingians than Aldebert or Duke Hedan, and the Vita Bonifatii reflects this. Lull’s keenness to assert that Mainz and Fulda were the principal Bonifatian cult sites, rather than Utrecht and Dokkum, perhaps obscures the nature of Boniface’s interests in Frisia before 754. With Pippin’s successes in Saxony in 758, Megingoz’s Würzburg was well placed to be cast by Willibald as the centre from which future mission could come by the alleged order of Boniface. By 786, Lull’s commemorative activities had established the Bonifatian past as a present concern for the new Carolingian regime, interested in mission and ecclesiastical order. As times continued to change, Boniface’s achievements, and therefore also Lull’s, had to be re-evaluated by new writers in new circumstances. In the end, Boniface and Lull as saints were properly the constructions of Carolingian interests, their lives and ideas recorded and edited as expressions of the way the world they wanted to change developed in the centuries that followed. Department of History, University of Sheffield



Gender, memory and Jewish identity: reading a family history from medieval southern Italy PATRICIA SKINNER

This article combines recent work on memory in the early and central Middle Ages to read the Scroll of Ahimaaz, a well-known eleventh-century Jewish text from southern Italy. It suggests that previous readings of the text have been shaped by the dominant tradition of intellectual history within Jewish studies, and that Ahimaaz’s work has been overlooked for the information it contains about gender and family history. It concludes that whilst the primarily Jewish identity of Ahimaaz and his family is reinforced by the text, they were at the same time as much a product of the southern Italian environment in which they lived. The Hebrew term for ‘memory’ (zekher) is etymologically related to the Hebrew for the masculine gender ( zakhar), ‘as we might expect from a patriarchal society in which “nation”, “community” or “assembly” is always exclusive of women’.1 Does that mean that the only valid memories within the medieval Jewish community were those preserved and transmitted by male witnesses? And was medieval Jewish memory therefore gendered male? If so, what effect did this have on the preservation of family stories, traditionally a female enterprise? Surprisingly, given the popularity of memory as a field of research in medieval studies *

1

I should like to thank the organizers of the ‘Memory, Gender and Identity’ conference at Liverpool in April 2002 for the original invitation to speak on this topic, and colleagues at the British School at Rome for a subsequent opportunity to revise and refine the subject. My research for this paper has been supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, held at the University of Southampton. I would like to thank colleagues there, especially Sarah Pearce and Dan Levene, for their help on specific points; any errors remain my own. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Oxford, 1993), p. 6. This theme is further elaborated by Elliott R. Wolfson, ‘Re/membering the Convenant: Memory, Forgetfulness and the Construction of History in the zohar’, in Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron and David N. Myers (eds), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Hanover and London, 1998), pp. 214 – 46, at pp. 224 – 6.

Early Medieval Europe   () – © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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generally, remarkably little attention has been paid to it by medieval historians studying the Jews. It might be argued that the lack of chronicletype sources from medieval Jewish authors, examined below, forms a major obstacle to anyone wishing to subject medieval Jewish memory to the sophisticated analysis process so effectively deployed by Elisabeth van Houts.2 It is also true to say that memories and commemorations of more recent times in Jewish history have come to play a significant role in modern Jewish identity, and it is difficult to separate the topic of memory from the more emotive theme of memorialization in oral history.3 I have discussed elsewhere the impact of modern Holocaust studies on Jewish perceptions of Jewish medieval history. 4 Here I shall outline why the subject of medieval Jewish memory has not been given the attention it might merit, and suggest how work on medieval memory in other contexts could help to reconstruct the processes by which Jewish identity was reinforced in the Middle Ages.

Jewish medieval narrative sources: the problems Any attempt to confront these problems is forced to acknowledge that medieval Jewish writers were far less interested in writing down contemporary history than their Gentile counterparts, and so the texts which survive vary enormously in their genre and purpose. Indeed, it has often been claimed that there was no Jewish historiography between the work of Josephus in the first century CE and that of Azariah de’ Rossi in the sixteenth. Unlike the Christian world, therefore, we have very few narrative sources from which to reconstruct the patterns of community and social memory. This apparent lack of interest in history writing is usually attributed to the influence of Judaism as a religion. 5 Many Jewish rites remembered (and still do remember) events in Jewish biblical history as a 2 3

4

5

Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900 – 1200 (Basingstoke, 1999). It has also, apparently, provoked a need to commemorate (or make amends for?) much earlier persecutions and massacres: see Barrie Dobson, ‘The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered’, Jewish Culture and History 3 (2000), pp. 7–20, at p. 8, where he discusses the events of the past two decades commemorating the massacre of the York Jewry in 1190. It is notable that despite its stated aim to focus on and provide a theoretical framework within which to study the formation of historical consciousness, the journal History and Memory concentrates almost exclusively on the modern era. Patricia Skinner, ‘Confronting the “Medieval” in Medieval History: The Jewish Example’, Past and Present 181 (2003), pp. 219 – 47. Dawidowicz sums up the four, unchanging themes running through Jewish life: the Convenant with God, a cycle of destruction and deliverance, the martyrdom of Jews for God’s name, and the promise of redemption: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ‘What is the Use of Jewish History?’, in her What is the Use of Jewish History, ed. Neal Kozodoy (New York, 1992), pp. 3 –19, at pp. 8 and 16.



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means of constructing and reinforcing the identity of the community. 6 The Passover Haggadah, for example, uses its images of the Passover rituals to reinforce contemporary practices. Added to that, Jewish law and faith in God’s provision for the Jews as a people provided a framework which negated the need to reflect on, or find explanations for, the Jews’ current condition. Thus historical reflection was superfluous to Jewish intellectual or religious life, and few historical texts were written.7 Robert Chazan, however, has challenged this view, arguing that the upheavals in Jewish life caused by persecution and migration in the medieval and early modern periods might well have led to a substantial loss of previously extant narrative texts. 8 His argument would carry greater weight if we did not have clear evidence that Jewish communities in times of crisis made strenuous efforts to preserve their books and writings, and had such material not survived in some quantity. Nevertheless, the Jews did not completely ignore contemporary history: far from it. But when they did address current events, they often recorded them in relation to age-old schemata rather than ‘as it really was’. Thus ‘texts that look like history’, to use Ivan Marcus’s term, which have been treated as factual by historical positivists, should really be read against much older, often biblical, narratives in order to tease out more fully how they were constructed. 9 A case in point is that of Jewish accounts of atrocities committed during the crusades, where the biblical motif of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac appears repeatedly to rationalize the deaths of young children at their parents’ hands during the catastrophe.10 It has recently been argued that such texts were also heavily influenced by contemporary Christian crusading texts insofar as both presented an attractive picture of the rewards accompanying martyrdom.11 In neither case did these medieval texts set out to record history as it actually happened: all were literary artefacts whose writers were working within accepted models and shaping their texts to suit a particular agenda. 6

7

8

9

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11

Heinrich Graetz, ‘The Structure of Jewish History’, in Ismar Schorsch (ed.), Heinrich Graetz: The Structure of Jewish History and other Essays (New York, 1975), pp. 63 –124, at p. 70, argued in 1846 that Judaism in the strict sense of the word was not so much a religion as a social movement. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ‘Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography of the Sixteenth Century’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 46 –7 (1979– 80), pp. 607–38, at p. 616, nevertheless rejects the view of Jews as ‘outside history’. Robert Chazan, ‘The Timebound and the Timeless: Medieval Jewish Narration of Events’, History and Memory 6 (1995), pp. 5 –34, at pp. 13 –14. Ivan G. Marcus, ‘History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture’, Prooftexts 10 (1990), pp. 365 – 88. S. Goldin, ‘The Socialisation for Kiddush ha-Shem Among Medieval Jews’, Journal of Medieval History 23 (1997), pp. 117–38. Shmuel Shepkaru, ‘To Die for God: Martyrs’ Heaven in Hebrew and Latin Crusade Narratives’, Speculum 77 (2002), pp. 311–41; Susan Einbinder, ‘Jewish Women Martyrs: Changing Modes of Representation’, Exemplaria 12 (2000), pp. 105 –27.



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But Fentress and Wickham have challenged the distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘literary’ texts:12 their argument is useful in a Jewish context, because it allows us to examine texts by Jewish writers which might at first be identified as literary rather than historical, but nevertheless offer elements which could be classified as having common features with contemporary Christian chronicles. Most functioned as commemorative documents, and their use can illustrate how memory operated, and was constructed, in this community.

Gender and memory Recent work by historians of north-western Europe has demonstrated how fruitfully medieval texts can be sifted for the presence of oral testimony and the passing on of memories of significant people or events. Such work has focused on, but not been limited to, the study of libri memoriales.13 A substantial body of work is now beginning to emerge also factoring gender into the equation, finding for the most part that women’s memory was accorded less value than men’s, unless the passing on of such memory happened in a predominantly female context such as a convent. Van Houts has established an effective framework against which texts can be read to expose the sometimes hidden testimonials which lay behind them, reflecting cooperation between men and women in reconstructing the past. 14 Her definition of a number of direct and indirect indicators of women’s contribution to texts written by men has been very influential in my own more recent work on medieval Italian history. In particular, close reading of the ways in which a text portrays a female protagonist can sometimes reveal her influence on the author: I have argued elsewhere that there might be a closer relationship than has previously been thought between Amatus of Montecassino’s History of the Normans and the influence, or even active intervention, of Princess Sikelgaita of Salerno.15

12 13

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James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), p. 145. Influential in this field are Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990); testimony to the current interest in the subject is the anthology of translated texts produced by eadem and J.M. Ziolkowsk (eds), The Medieval Craft of Memory (Philadelphia, 2002); see also Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried and Patrick Geary (eds), Medieval Concepts of the Past (Cambridge, 2002) as well as Geary’s earlier and still influential work, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994). Van Houts, Memory and Gender; eadem (ed.), Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past 700–1300 (London, 2001). In particular, Patricia Skinner, ‘Gender and Memory in Medieval Italy’, in van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories, pp. 36 –52; and eadem, ‘ “Halt! Be men!” Sikelgaita of Salerno, Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy’, Gender and History 12 (2000), pp. 622– 41.




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Linked to the issue of memory was women’s access to education and their own production of written texts: although female writers are known from the Middle Ages, their literacy is almost always treated as in some ways exceptional, except when in a monastic context. Such stereotyping has led to the assumption that women, by definition, were less likely to produce written accounts. In what is already a classic article, this assumption is challenged by Janet Nelson: she has demonstrated convincingly that the conjunction of specific themes in anonymous early medieval works, such as a recognition of the tensions within family politics and attention paid to female as well as male members, may point to female authorship.16

Gendering Jewish medieval history Now it is certainly not the case that historians of the medieval Jewry have ignored women, far from it.17 But it is true to say that women’s and gender studies have not yet gained a firm foothold in the field of Jewish medieval history. This situation is now beginning to change rapidly,18 but little work has yet been done on the issue of women’s contribution to recorded memories. This may in part be due to the undeniable obstacles that lie in wait for the historian trying to replicate with Jewish texts the types of analysis that have been done on nonJewish ones. First, Jewish culture was and still is male dominated, and Jewish medieval historiography up to the 1990s could be described as extremely conservative in its approach. Studies of the law and its effects, of fiscal records, or of religious disputation literature, dominated the field. Social and cultural history, let alone the history of gender relations, was a very poor relation. Second, religious practice was (and still is in Orthodox communities) central to Jewish life: the law underpinning 16

17

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J. Nelson, ‘Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages’, in J.-P. Genet (ed.), L’historiographie médiévale en Europe (Paris, 1991), pp. 149– 63. Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1896; repr. Philadelphia, 1911), p. 115 onwards, made the crucial point that Jewish women’s legal status may have been low, but their moral status was exalted, an observation that was years ahead of its time. Paula E. Hyman, ‘The Ideological Transformation of Modern Jewish Historiography’, in Shaye D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (eds), The State of Jewish Studies (Detroit, 1990), pp. 143 – 57, at p. 150, describes the entry of women into the field of Jewish history as one of its most striking recent developments. On the issue of men’s time and women’s time in Jewish history, Simha Goldin, ‘Female Time and Male Time in the Middle Ages’, unpublished paper delivered at session 318 of the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 10 –13 July 2000: I am grateful to Dr Goldin for allowing me to read this paper in advance of publication. See, e.g., M. Poorthuis and C. Safrai, ‘Fresh Water for a Tired Soul: Pregnancy and Messianic Desire in a Medieval Jewish Document from Sicily’, in A. Korte (ed.), Women and Miracle Stories (Leiden, 2001), pp. 123 – 44; Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia, 2003); and Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004).



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life was until very recently passed exclusively through male channels. Women’s role was clearly defined and was confined to the domestic sphere.19 Biale suggests that the use of the word ‘Judaism’ itself expresses a hegemonic culture in which the voices of women are a counterhistory; he prefers the term ‘Jewish culture’ to embrace a much wider picture of Jewish social life.20 Jewish law was a law of words, articulated in male prayer and ritual: ‘Women, as a gender-bound constituency, were not even marginal to this word-constructed grouping. They stood outside of its community, yet were appended to and dominated by it.’21 The exclusion of Jewish women from the world of words was rooted in biblical and Talmudic rulings. Hebrew has no neuter word for ‘children’, and thus the Bible exhorted the Jews to ‘teach your sons’; this was in turn interpreted literally to exclude women from advanced learning. The Talmud forbade communities from calling women up to read the Torah in synagogue, based on the principle of the honour of the community: the invitation to a woman might imply that the male congregants were lacking in education or commitment. 22 And the synagogue space itself reinforced women’s seclusion. 23 Set against such a background, it is perhaps not surprising that we hear so few Jewish women’s voices from the Middle Ages. Colette Sirat’s survey of Jewish women and writing in the period produced an extremely small sample, and all were essentially copyists of religious texts rather than authors in their own right.24 Fentress and Wickham’s analysis of what they termed ‘social memory’ found that accessing women’s memories depended largely on male tolerance of women’s views, on the economic roles of each sex, and on the level of sexual seclusion. When women’s memories were accessible, they consisted largely of home and family stories, rather than outside events.25 This has led to their contribution to medieval history writing being largely overlooked, the public–private dichotomy leading to a value judgement which sees ‘private’ as inferior, and thus disempowering women conceptually by devaluing precisely what they do. 26 19

20

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24 25 26

Laura S. Levitt, ‘Reconfiguring Home: Jewish Feminist Identity/ies’, in T.M. Rudavsky (ed.), Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition (New York, 1995), pp. 39– 49, at p. 40, locates this restriction of women to the home in the wording of the ketubbah or marriage contract. David Biale, ‘Confessions of an Historian of Jewish Culture’, Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 1 (1994), pp. 40 –51, at p. 41. Zilla Jane Goodman, ‘Traced in Ink: Women’s Lives in Qotzo shel Yud by Yalag and Mispachah by D. Baron’, in Rudavsky (ed.), Gender and Judaism, pp. 191–207, at p. 191. Sondra Henry and Emily Taitz, Written Out of History: Our Jewish Foremothers (New York, 1990), pp. 7 and 6 respectively. E. Cohen-Harris, ‘Where did Medieval Jewish Women Stand? Visual Sources, Halakhic Writings and Architecture’, Conservative Judaism 52 (2000), pp. 3 –13. C. Sirat, ‘Les femmes juives et l’écriture au moyen age’, Les Nouveaux Cahiers 101 (1990), pp. 14–23. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 137– 8. Maurice Sacks, ‘An Anthropological and Postmodern Critique of Jewish Feminist Theory’, in Rudavsky (ed.), Gender and Judaism, pp. 295 –305, at p. 300.




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Jewish women were doubly hidden, often anonymous presences in extant letters, for example, and ostensibly excluded from scholarly and literary culture. Now, it might be objected that the medieval Jewish businesswomen clearly visible across the whole of medieval Europe and the Middle East – documented, for example, in English exchequer documents, 27 French chronicles,28 crusade narratives and the extensive Cairo Genizah 29 – were hardly ‘private’ or secluded. Indeed, their economic prominence gave them a voice, as anticipated in Fentress and Wickham’s scheme. Despite the fact that the Talmud forbade Jewish women from acting as witnesses, we nevertheless find them acting in this capacity, especially in commercial suits.30 Their activities were in fact legally classified as private proceedings between individuals. 31 This explains why we have a number of instances of Jewish women arguing their cases: for example, a certain Wuhsha appears as witness in a Jewish court of 1098, recorded in the Cairo Genizah documents.32 Moving away from their business transactions, however, how audible are the voices of medieval Jewish women in accounts of events affecting the whole community? The impact of more nuanced treatments of gender has been to revise some age-old assumptions about medieval Jewish women.33 One area in which this is most obvious is in the study 27

28

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31 32 33

Cheryl Tallan, ‘Medieval Jewish Widows: Their Control of Resources’, Jewish History 5 (1991), pp. 63 –74; Suzanne Bartlet, ‘Three Jewish Businesswomen in Thirteenth-Century Winchester’, Jewish Culture and History 3 (2000), pp. 31–54; R.B. Dobson, ‘The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England’, in D. Wood (ed.), Christianity and Judaism, Studies in Church History 29 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 145 – 68. Susan L. Einbinder, ‘Pucellina of Blois: Romantic Myths and Narrative Conventions’, Jewish History 12 (1998), pp. 29 – 46, at p. 39. S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Mediterranean World as Portrayed in the Cairo Genizah, 6 vols (Berkeley, 1967–1993). Sondra Henry and Emily Taitz (eds), Written out of History: Our Jewish Foremothers (New York, 1990), p. 10; Judith Romney Wegner, ‘The Image and Status of Women in Classical Rabbinic Judaism’, in Judith Baskin (ed.), Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit, 1991), pp. 68 – 93, at p. 83. Baskin (ed.), Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, p. 19. Taitz and Henry, Written out of History, p. 77. Michael Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich (Munich, 1998), p. 84, states that there has been a tendency to mythologize the role of Jewish women, and Jewish history has characteristically lagged behind the emergence of women’s history of the 1960s and 1970s. Fortunately, this situation is now being remedied by systematic research: to cite just a few examples, Avraham Grossman, ‘The Status of Jewish Women in Germany, Tenth to Twelfth Centuries’, in J. Carlebach (ed.), Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Frau in Deutschland (Berlin, 1993), pp. 17–35; Ivan Marcus, ‘Mothers, Martyrs and Moneymakers: Some Jewish Women in Medieval Europe’, Conservative Judaism 38 (1986), pp. 34–45; Renée Melammed, ‘He Said, She Said: A Woman Teacher in Twelfth-Century Cairo’, AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies 22 (1997); eadem, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (New York, 1999); J.B. Segal, ‘The Jewish Attitude Towards Women’, Journal of Jewish Studies 30 (1979); S. Seror, ‘Les noms des femmes juives en Angleterre au Moyen Age’, Revue des Études Juives 154 (1995), pp. 295 –325.



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of the texts recording the many acts of terror against medieval Jewish communities during the crusading era. 34 Women are commemorated in these in the eleventh35 and twelfth centuries.36 But there is very little opportunity to judge whether they also contributed at all as eyewitnesses.

Family history: Ahimaaz ben Paltiel’s Scroll of Genealogies Whether Jewish or Christian, the consensus of opinion seems to be that women’s voices are most likely to be found in family histories. And southern Italy provides an almost unique document of family history ripe for analysis. The Scroll of Genealogies of Ahimaaz ben Paltiel, completed in 1054 at Oria in Apulia, came to light in the library of Toledo and was edited in the nineteenth century. In his translation of the text in 1924, Marcus Salzman pointed out its undoubted value not only for the history of the Jewish community in Italy, but also for the light it shed on Byzantine and Arab history of the ninth to eleventh centuries. 37 It also helped to rehabilitate the scholarly reputation of southern Italian Jewry, who had been unfavourably compared with their more learned Spanish and French counterparts. More recently, it has been cited by Roberto Bonfil as clear evidence of the competition which existed between the Palestinian and Babylonian traditions of Judaism in the ninth century.38 Such previous discussions of the text, however, fall into the trap of privileging its religious, ‘real’ or ‘public’ history content over the ‘personal’ history of Ahimaaz’s own family; the latter, if referred to at all, focuses almost entirely on the public roles played by the author’s ancestors. For me, however, it is the way in which the author constructs the history of his family which is the most interesting aspect of the text, 34

35

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37

38

A useful overview of how historians have confronted these texts is Benjamin Z. Kedar, ‘Crusade Historians and the Massacres of 1096’, Jewish History 12 (1998), pp. 11–31. Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1987); excerpts concerning women from the commemorative texts are reprinted in Emilie Amt, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe (London, 1993), pp. 279 – 89. Judith Baskin, ‘Jewish Women in the Middle Ages’, in Baskin (ed.), Jewish Women, pp. 94– 114, at p. 106, highlights the case of Dolce, killed by crusaders in 1196 and commemorated at great length by her husband, Rabbi Eliezer ben Judah of Worms: her skills included cooking, making clothes, sewing Torah scrolls and charitable works. Einbinder, ‘Jewish Women Martyrs’, found, however, that later texts downplayed women’s roles. The Chronicle of Ahimaaz, trans. M. Salzmann (New York, 1924). I have reluctantly used this English translation in preference to the scholarly edition of the scroll produced by Benjamin Klar, Megilat Ahima’ats ( Jerusalem, 1944 /5; 2nd edn 1973). The publication of Ahimaaz’s scroll may well explain the flourishing of historiography on the southern Italian Jewry in the early twentieth century: Nino Tamassia, Stranieri ed ebrei nell’Italia meridionale dall’età romana alla svevo (Venice, 1904) was swiftly followed (and extensively quoted) by Nicolà Ferorelli, Gli ebrei nell’Italia meridionale dall’età romana al secolo XVIII (Torino, 1915; repr. Bologna, 1966). See, e.g., Roberto Bonfil, ‘Mito, retorica, storia: saggio sul “Rotolo di Ahimaaz” ’, in his Tra Due Mondi: Cultura Ebraica e Cultura Christiana nel Medioevo (Naples, 1996), pp. 93 –133.




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and it is rich in possibilities for a gendered reading. Although it has been described rather dismissively as a ‘pseudo-chronicle’, 39 Ahimaaz’s work reveals a great deal about how a Jewish author might construct his own identity and that of his family in this period. Moreover, since private and personal memories within narrative sources are relatively scarce in medieval Italy (even though legal documents and especially court cases can often provide glimpses of such memories), Ahimaaz’s text takes on an added importance for medieval Italian family history. Before exploring some of the detail of the text, however, the work itself needs to be located. In a sense it is unique, but however much information a single source might contain, it is hard to understand that information unless the source itself can be contextualized. 40 What textual community did Ahimaaz belong to? We can start by understanding what this text is not. It has little in common with the Latin family histories of the French or Iberian aristocracy (for example, the history of the counts of Anjou or the deeds of the counts of Barcelona), many of which were concerned to legitimize a family’s hold on power, land or both; nor does it share many characteristics with monastic chronicles which often appended family histories of their benefactors, such as those German examples studied by Timothy Reuter. 41 If there is a parallel to be drawn in Christian, Latin texts, the Scroll of Genealogies has more in common with those texts by royal servants that incorporate their own family histories as part of the text, such as Thietmar of Merseberg’s Chronicon or, perhaps even more closely, the Dialogue of the Exchequer of the Englishman Richard fitzNigel, who provides a genealogy of his kin to reflect their and his own importance. 42 Salzmann cites Ahimaaz’s inclusion of supernatural events to draw a parallel between his text and the Byzantine authors Photius and Psellos, and suggests in fact that Ahimaaz may even have had access to Byzantine written sources in compiling the historical sections of the work. But the Scroll of Genealogies does not really fit very well into the Greek literary tradition either (although the lengthy tale of the ninth-century visit to southern Italy by the sage Abu Aaron has a distinctly hagiographical overtone and might well have been modelled on contemporary Greek 39 40 41

42

Einbinder, ‘Jewish Women Martyrs’, p. 114, n. 25. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 77. See J. Dunbabin, ‘Discovering a Past for the French Aristocracy’; R. McCluskey, ‘Malleable Accounts of the Past in Twelfth-Century Iberia’; T. Reuter, ‘Past, Present and No Future in the regnum Teutonicum’, all in Paul Magdalino (ed.), The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe (London, 1992), pp. 1–14, 211–25 and 15–36 respectively. David Warner (ed.), Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseberg (Manchester, 2001); J. Hudson, ‘Administration, Family and Perceptions of the Past in Twelfth-Century England: Richard fitzNigel and the Dialogue of the Exchequer’, in Magdalino (ed.), The Perception of the Past, pp. 75 – 93.



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saints’ lives).43 Neither, more surprisingly, does it have any parallel in medieval Jewish writing: the so-called Chains of Tradition, texts which recorded the way in which the law had been passed from rabbi to rabbi over the centuries, might well have a genealogical character to them, but are not in any sense family histories. Within Jewish scholarship, Ahimaaz’s text has more recently been characterized as midrash, or biblical commentary, with the story of his family woven along biblical lines. For example, one of his relatives became astrologer at the Fatimid court, and is presented on the same lines as the biblical Joseph at the court of the Pharaoh.44 Similarly, its composition in rhymed prose, owing much to Arabic tradition, has led to it being described as a piyyut, or liturgical poem. But it does not fit happily into either of the main categories of such poetry, being neither a penitential nor a lamentation, and the determination to associate it in this way privileges the form of the work over its content, and denies the possibility that the chronicle might simply be read as a piece of family history without the need to justify its existence further.45 Although Joshua Prawer accepts the work as ‘a history of a family’, he does so only to distinguish it from the slightly later autobiographical work of Obadyah, a Norman convert to Judaism at the end of the eleventh century; and Stephen Benin’s dismissive comment that the Scroll ‘purports to be a genealogical survey’ would seem to epitomize the general view of the work. 46

Ahimaaz and southern Italy Instead of searching for literary parallels, we need to ask what might have caused Ahimaaz to write his Scroll. Remembering that the motivation for many eleventh-century genealogical works in the Latin, Christian world was the increasing need to avoid consanguineous marriages, 47 and to reinforce property rights through inheritance, 48 neither of these reasons is adequate to explain the Jewish work – marital customs were dramatically different, and Jews were not, as a rule, entitled to own 43 44 45

46

47 48

Chronicle of Ahimaaz, pp. 63 – 6. Bonfil, ‘Mito’, p. 129. ‘As a cultural artifact, it is important to note that this account was written in rhymed Hebrew prose with various poetic components that reflected further developments of the piyyut genre’: . However, the poem does not appear to fit with either of Susan Einbinder’s categories of piyyutim – as lament or penitential work: Einbinder, ‘Jewish Women Martyrs’, p. 106, n. 4. Joshua Prawer, ‘The Autobiography of Obadyah the Norman, a Convert to Judaism at the Time of the First Crusade’, in Isadore Twersky (ed.), Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature (Cambridge, MA and London, 1979), pp. 110 –34; Stephen D. Benin, ‘Jews, Muslims and Christians in Byzantine Italy’, in B. Hary et al. (eds), Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Communication and Interaction (Leiden, 2000), pp. 27–35, at p. 27. Van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 88. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 166.




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landed property (the evidence from southern Italy, however, points to Jews both renting and buying land). 49 In fact, the answer would seem to lie in the extremely localized political and social developments in southern Italy at this time. Ahimaaz had been born in Capua, and his grandfather, Samuel, had acted as a finance minister for the princes of that city in the late tenth century. Since relatively few documents survive from this period of Capuan history, we should not be unduly deterred by the fact that he is not otherwise recorded. By the mid-eleventh century, however, Capua was at the heart of many changes, not least the rise of Norman power (Normans settled in nearby Aversa in 1031 and conquered Capua itself in 1058); furthermore, the Jews of Capua, who are recorded as owing a number of taxes and services to Prince Guaimarius IV of Salerno in 1041, were also in that year made subject to being given by the prince to one of his palace officials. 50 Ahimaaz was, as we know, based in Oria, a certain distance away from these developments, but if we remember that ‘active memory’ lasted about a century, or the lifespan of three or four generations, 51 then the memory of his grandfather’s distinguished position might well have been in danger of being lost in the general atmosphere of insecurity which must have pervaded the Capuan Jewish community at this time, and along with it memories of his ancestors further up the family tree. At the same time, Ahimaaz’s residence in a territory outside Guaimarius’s control might have made communications with his kin less easy. This, I would argue, was the primary motivation for him to record in writing the deeds of his ancestors, and at the same time to preserve other information which might have come to him about the history of Jewish life in southern Italy. In doing so, rather like Thietmar and Richard, he associated himself with a distinguished line of ancestors, and in this case demonstrated his affinity with his learned male kin (of whom more presently). He may even have been preserving the history of the family for his two recorded sons, then aged ten and sixteen. 49

50

51

See, for example, Codex Dipomaticus Cavensis, ed. M. Morcaldi et al. (Milan, Naples and Pisa, 1873–93), IV, document 651 (1012). Houses described as ‘Jewish’ are included in a document from the same archive dating from 991: ibid., II, document 442. Both relate to Lombarddominated Salerno. This limited property holding was not universal throughout southern Italy, however. In Byzantine-ruled Taranto in the mid-eleventh century we have evidence of land sales to one Theophylact the Jew ‘called Chimaria’: F. Trinchera, Syllabus Graecarum Membranarum (Naples, 1865), p. 29, document 26 (1033) and p. 36, document 31 (1039). G.A. Loud, Church and Society in the Norman Principality of Capua, 1058–1197 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 26–37, discusses the pre-Norman history of the city, but makes no mention of its Jewish inhabitants; Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, La principauté lombarde de Salerne (IXe-XIe siècle) (Rome, 1991), p. 448. In 1086, Guaimarius’s daughter, Princess Sikelgaita, imitated her father by donating the Jewish community of Bari to its archbishop: Skinner, ‘ “Halt! Be men!”’, p. 631. Van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 6.



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Fig. 1 The family of Ahimaaz ben Paltiel according to his Book of Genealogies

What then were Ahimaaz’s sources? He does not tell us explicitly, although his opening sentences refer to his wish to present ‘the traditions of my forefathers, to unfold them in proper order, to explain them with notes, to trace without confusion the genealogy whose parts must be collected without stubble’.52 The translator of the work suggests that some poorly preserved documents may have reached the author. However, his genealogy (Fig. 1) shows that only seven generations separated Ahimaaz from the first of his named ancestors, and there is internal evidence to suggest that written sources need not have formed a major part of his work. Instead, we can profitably look for evidence of oral testimony and traditions.53 52 53

Chronicle of Ahimaaz, p. 60. Salzmann suggests that Ahimaaz’s grandfather was a major oral source: Chronicle of Ahimaaz, p. 29.




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Ahimaaz starts by establishing that his ancestors had come to southern Italy among the exiles from Jerusalem expelled by the Roman general Titus in the latter half of the first century. 54 Now this is inherently likely: Jewish epigraphic evidence reveals an early and sustained Jewish presence in Rome and southern Italy, and Amnon Linder’s study of Roman and early medieval legislation relating to the Jews might also be taken as evidence of their presence.55 But a continuous link with antiquity as claimed by Ahimaaz does not need to be proven as true: he simply establishes his kin as a long-established fixture in the southern Italian Jewish community. As Jean Dunbabin comments, ‘Scepticism was out of place in family history.’ It is a measure of how differently we now use medieval texts that in 1924 Salzmann could comment rather sourly that ‘the author makes no discrimination between legend and history’.56 What is clear is that the male members of the clan were memorable chiefly for their achievements in learning and liturgy. Rabbi Amittai I (‘a liturgical poet and scholar, master of the knowledge of God’s law and distinguished for wisdom among his people’), who might be described as the founder of his family’s fortunes in Ahimaaz’s scheme, and his sons (‘amiable and worthy sons, intelligent and learned men, scholars and poets zealously teaching, worthy disciples, men of merit and renown, masters of secret lore, grasping and applying the deeper truth of scriptures’) are eulogized for their learning. Amittai’s son Shephatiah was ‘zealous in the pursuit of wisdom’, and his younger brother Hananeel was ‘engaged in the study of the law of God’. 57 It is plausible to suggest, therefore, that some of the writings of these ninthcentury ancestors might have survived the upheavals of persecution that the Jews of southern Italy suffered under Emperor Basil I in the late 860s.58 Indeed Shephatiah, who was clearly a distinguished and wellremembered ancestor, is credited in a lengthy story with having persuaded the emperor to spare Oria from the terror by performing an act 54 55

56 57 58

Chronicle of Ahimaaz, p. 61. David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1993); Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit, 1987) and idem, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit, 1997); see also Bernard Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis, 1977). The evidence of legislation as a means of assessing the early medieval distribution of Jewish communities has recently, and to my mind convincingly, been challenged by Michael Toch, ‘ “Dunkle Jahrhunderte”: Gab es ein jüdisches Frühmittelalter?’, Kleine Schriften des Arye Maimon-Instituts 4 (Trier, 2001), a stance that has provoked debate: see Friedrich Lotter, ‘Totale Finsternis über “Dunklen Jahrhunderten”: zum Methodenverständnis von Michael Toch und seinen Folgen’, and Toch’s reply in Aschkenas 11 (2001), pp. 215 –31 and 465 – 87 respectively. Dunbabin, ‘Discovering a Past’, p. 12; Chronicle of Ahimaaz, p. 8. All three Chronicle of Ahimaaz, p. 62. Chronicle of Ahimaaz, pp. 69 and 101. On the persecution see Andrew Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the Fourth Crusade (London, 1971), pp. 86 – 92.



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of healing at the imperial court.59 As part of his reward, the Byzantine empress sent him back home with rich gifts of gold jewellery for his two daughters. We meet one daughter, Cassia, later in the text. She is described as ‘of rare beauty and of genial and charming disposition’, and the story of her marriage to her cousin Hananeel is treated in some detail.60 The wedding was celebrated by her brother Amittai writing a poem called ‘The Lord that from the beginning telleth the end’, in her honour.

Gender and memory in Ahimaaz The story of Cassia is useful for dividing the topic of memory down into two strands: how memories were shaped by gendered expectations of who was qualified to remember, and how gender shaped the ways in which males and females within the family were remembered. Illustrating both processes, Taitz and Henry cite the example of a woman named in the Cairo Genizah documents who was given the honour of naming a granddaughter: she named the girl after her own mother. 61 Her own role in the naming process would be remembered by the girl, and the memory of her mother would persist in the naming. If we turn to look at Ahimaaz’s family, we find a parallel case in that Cassia had an eponymous granddaughter. But why did the elder Cassia remain in the family’s memory whilst her sister appears only anonymously in Ahimaaz’s account? Both, after all, were daughters of a famous father, and both are reported as recipients of fabulous jewellery which must have become a treasured heirloom (of which more presently). Perhaps Cassia’s memory remained stronger because she married her cousin and therefore remained within the family: her sister’s fate is unknown. Perhaps the poem written in her honour survived in family papers. Whatever the reason, Cassia was further honoured by having a descendant named after her.62 There is, however, a further possibility. Rather than focusing on why Cassia was the object of memory, we might instead ask whether she was one of the main rememberers. If the upheavals of Emperor Basil I’s reign cut off Ahimaaz’s family tree with the first Amittai, then the elder 59 60

61 62

Chronicle of Ahimaaz, pp. 70 –3. Shephatiah wishes to marry her off, against the wishes of his wife who compares prospective suitors unfavourably with her own husband, another literary device to emphasize the rabbi’s greatness. Shephatiah finally succeeds in his aim when he sees his daughter in her sleeping gown and notices that ‘she had arrived at the time of maturity for marriage’: p. 83. Taitz and Henry, Written Out of History, p. 80. Skinner, ‘Gender and Memory’, p. 47: names were as effective pegs for memory as were material objects. S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, III: The Family (Berkeley and London, 1978), p. 32, comments on Cassia’s endogamous marriage, and on the still-extant poem in Klar’s edition of the scroll.




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Cassia, his granddaughter, may have been the first in her family to have begun the process of collecting family memories, a task commonly ascribed to medieval women.63 As the genealogy shows, she and her husband were the progenitors of the family line which eventually produced Ahimaaz himself. And Ahimaaz presents the history of the other line, descended from Amittai II, in a very different light. Amittai II had a son named Abdiel. Abdiel’s son Baruch had in his house a book called Merkabah (Chariot) which had been used by the great Shephatiah himself. Unfortunately, Baruch seems not to have appreciated the value of the text: Ahimaaz states that he was ‘not so learned’ as his ancestors.64 When an unclean woman (possibly Baruch’s wife – uncleanness could accompany and follow menstrual periods or the days after childbirth until the woman visited the ritual bath or mikveh), ‘may she be blotted from the book of life’, lit a candle before the book, she brought God’s wrath and plague upon her family and many died. ‘The memory of Baruch perished, his lamp was extinguished . . . he had no sons, only one daughter.’ 65 One might be tempted simply to dismiss this tale as another example of the gendered nature of access to learned texts in Jewish society, already discussed. Did disaster befall the family because of the uncleanness, or simply because a woman had approached the text? Since ritual purification was a key element of mystical practice, there may not be a gender bias here. However, the Merkabah was not just any old book: it was a work of midrash, or biblical commentary, on the ‘bizarre vision’ at the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, of the chariot of God. Moreover, Jewish law was emphatic that the biblical text should not be expounded upon by anyone, ‘unless he is a scholar and has understood on his own’. Contemplation of the text by one who was inexperienced could lead to disaster (the Babylonian Talmud cited the case of a child who had been burnt up).66 Thus in casting the tale of Amittai’s unfortunate family against access to a forbidden text, Ahimaaz was emphasizing his own and his ancestor Shephatiah’s scholarly credentials rather than commenting on the place of women in his family. Given that this tale is gender neutral, therefore, the possibility that he relied on memories of the family transferred down the female line remains open. 63

64 65 66

Van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 66; Matthew Innes, ‘Keeping It in the Family: Women and Aristocratic Memory, 700 – 1200’, in van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories, pp. 17–35, at p. 17. Chronicle of Ahimaaz, p. 87. Chronicle of Ahimaaz, p. 88. David J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübingen, 1988), pp. 1–4. See also A. Kuyt, The ‘Descent’ to the Chariot: Towards a Description of the Terminology, Place, Function and Nature of the Yeridah in Hekhalot Literature (Tübingen, 1995).



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Memory strategies in Ahimaaz How did Ahimaaz’s family remember? One factor to consider was longevity: it has been demonstrated from the analysis of Jewish burials in England that women of the Jewry tended to live longer than their Christian counterparts,67 a phenomenon attributed to smaller family size (which in turn may have been due to the strictness of Jewish purity laws which acted as a regulator to sexual activity). Although Ahimaaz does not tell us, it is possible that Cassia was named and remembered because she lived a relatively long time. Who, then, preserved family memories after her? If we count on three further generations, we reach Samuel, Ahimaaz’s grandfather, who might well have been the source of information for the glittering career of his own grandfather Paltiel, vizier and astrologer to Al-Muizz, caliph of Egypt. Another way to preserve memory, it has been suggested, was through geographical features and burial sites, which could act as a locus for family commemoration.68 Given the geographical dispersal of Ahimaaz’s ancestors, there does not appear to have been one chief place with which they all associated, although Oria had been their home and Ahimaaz had resettled there. Jewish epitaphs have been discovered at Venosa and Bari, 69 and it is not unlikely that Oria, too, had a Jewish cemetery, although this might not have survived the upheavals of the Byzantine persecution and Arab raids. A further means of retaining the memory of an ancestor was the reuse of his or her personal effects: clothing might be passed down, and jewellery certainly would be.70 We have already noted that the Jewish community of southern Italy, at least the documented communities within the Lombard-ruled region, does not appear to have had the right to own landed property, and this may well have led to moveable objects being ascribed a much greater importance in Jewish family memories than in those of Gentiles. Moreover, Ahimaaz’s family appears to have been very mobile during its history, and despite the fact that Byzantine law apparently permitted the ownership of property, he does not mention any family estates in Oria. Thus the books of the family’s 67

68 69

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Jane McComish, ‘The Medieval Jewish Cemetery at Jewbury, York’, Jewish Culture and History, 3 (2000), pp. 21–30, at p. 29. Van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 69, cites the importance of longevity in the case of medieval nuns, who were spared the perils of childbirth. This career choice was not, of course, open to Jewish women. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, p. 93; van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 94. U. Cassuto, ‘Nuove iscrizioni ebraiche di Venosa’, Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucania 4 (1934), pp. 1– 9; idem, ‘Ancora nuove iscrizioni ebraiche di Venosa’, Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucania 5 (1935), pp. 179 – 84; idem, ‘Iscrizioni ebraiche a Bari’, Rivista degli Studi Orientali 15 (1935), pp. 320 –1. Van Houts, Memory and Gender, pp. 104 and 106; Patricia Skinner, ‘Women, Wills and Wealth in Medieval Southern Italy’, EME 2 (1993), pp. 133 –52, discusses some of the personal effects handed on in Christian families.




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distinguished ancestor, Shephatiah, would have been a particularly valuable possession, and one has already featured as the centrepiece of a story explaining the demise of one branch of the family. 71 Rather than be donated to the church, as precious books often were by Christian donors, the liturgical life of the Jewish family centred around the home, with the father as head, and so books took on an added importance. But the story of how such possessions functioned as pegs for memory in Ahimaaz’s family is not that straightforward. The Arab raids on southern Italy in the early tenth century seem to have displaced the Jewish community, including Ahimaaz’s family, from Oria to Bari. Ahimaaz recounts how Hananeel, son of Paltiel the vizier, sought permission to return to Italy from Egypt. Finding that his relatives were now in Bari, he went to Constantinople to seek permission to travel to and through Apulia. At Bari, he found an old copy of the scriptures which had been his, and various clothes, including women’s clothes and ornaments. Disputing their possession with the ‘teachers and sages’ of Bari, he eventually reached a compromise whereby he received the book and the clothes. 72 It is tempting to speculate that the ‘women’s ornaments’ mentioned included the jewellery given to Shephatiah’s daughters by the Byzantine empress: if so, it would represent a case of a family remembering its ancestors through the loss of their heirlooms. Nevertheless, it is striking how much trouble Hananeel went to to recover at least some of this moveable patrimony, and Ahimaaz’s careful recording of their fate serves only to highlight their importance.

Gender, memory and identity in a Jewish text Discussing the letter to her son written by the Frankish aristocrat, Dhuoda, Matthew Innes states that she placed her son into three concentric groups – as a Christian, as a member of his social and political class, and as a member of his kin group. 73 This formula is useful for understanding the world-view presented by Ahimaaz, and brings out an interesting point. For in commemorating his family, was Ahimaaz also re-emphasizing his and their Jewish identity? His epilogue is in no doubt: I, Ahimaaz, son of rabbi Paltiel, son of Samuel son of Hananeel son of Amittai,74 asked God to enlighten me to find the genealogy of my fathers . . . I have begun at the very beginning from the Captivity of 71 72

73 74

Jewish purchases: see above, n. 49; liturgical books: van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 114. Chronicle of Ahimaaz, pp. 91–2. The sages might quite legally have salvaged them from the wreckage of Oria: Sharf, Byzantine Jewry, p. 116. Innes, ‘Keeping It in the Family’, p. 18. Note here that Ahimaaz either is mistaken or telescopes his genealogy: Hananeel’s father was definitely Paltiel, but the founding father of the family in this book is Amittai.



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Jerusalem . . . through the captivity of the city of Oria in which I have settled, I have come down to the arrival of my fathers in Capua and have ended with my own time and that of my children . . .75 At several places in the text, Ahimaaz stresses his family’s Jewishness in a number of set episodes: Shephatiah’s brother Hananeel is seen threatened with conversion by an unnamed archbishop after he miscalculated the date of the new moon; Paltiel the vizier, his wife and his uncle were transferred to Jerusalem for burial by their son Samuel; Shabbetai and Papoleon came to grief in a shipwreck when they tried to invoke the power of God’s holy name (ha-Shem) to speed their ship along.76 In addition, Ahimaaz mentions the Jewish communities of several southern Italian cities, which periodically welcomed members of his family on their travels. And yet there is another identity running through Ahimaaz’s Book of Genealogies, which explains the prominence of a female ancestor in his narrative. Avraham Grossmann has reminded us that the Gentile environment could significantly affect the status of Jewish women. 77 If Oria was under Byzantine suzerainty at the time, then the lives of its Jewish women might well have been influenced by the relative freedom of expression and action that their Christian contemporaries enjoyed. Furthermore, it is striking that Cassia and her granddaughter bore Roman names; and the name of the wife of Samuel, the treasurer at Capua, gives pause for thought as well. Nearby Venosa may even have had a tradition of Jewish women holding public offices. 78 And this in turn might have meant that Cassia, Ahimaaz’s great-great-great-grandmother, became the protagonist in the preservation of family memories (and even documents), rather than her brother Amittai. Indeed, that she won this particular battle might be indicated by how negatively Ahimaaz commemorates Amittai’s descendants. Here, though, we are confronted with the difficulty in deciding just how much Ahimaaz edited out of the story to celebrate his own line. If nothing else, Ahimaaz’s concentration on his own paternal kin at the expense of another branch of the family echoes the increasing emphasis on lineage in Christian sources. It could be argued that alongside Ahimaaz’s Jewish identity there was a genuinely south Italian one. After all, his work is unusual for a Jewish 75 76 77

78

Chronicle of Ahimaaz, pp. 100 –1. Chronicle of Ahimaaz, pp. 78, 97 and 93 respectively. Avraham Grossman, ‘Medieval Rabbinic Views of Wife-Beating, 800 –1300’, Jewish History 5 (1991), pp. 53– 62, at p. 53: ‘The Gentile environment . . . led to . . . divergence and influenced more than anything else the status of medieval Jewish women.’ The same volume carries other studies of Jewish women, including Judith Baskin, ‘Some Parallels in the Education of Medieval Jewish and Christian Women’, pp. 41–51. Ross Kraemer, ‘Jewish Women in the Diaspora World of Late Antiquity’, in Baskin (ed.), Jewish Women, pp. 43 – 67, at p. 54.




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text, and fits far better with what we know of the culture of Byzantine and ex-Byzantine southern Italy. Here, especially in the former Byzantine enclaves of Amalfi and Gaeta, families preserved the memory of their ancestors, often as far back as Ahimaaz does, not through narratives, but through their legal documents, listing out long lines linking them to the family’s founding father. And, like Ahimaaz, when the chain became too unwieldy, they telescoped it by cutting out some of the generations between them and that founding father. This, I think, is why Ahimaaz’s final statement of his own identity misses out Paltiel the vizier, Hasadiah and Shephatiah, and jumps straight back to Amittai I. Jewish, yes, but a Jew whose identity was firmly tied to his southern Italian setting. Jewish sources are often mined only for the history of Jewish communities, but this article has argued that they might also be profitably examined as cultural products of a region as well as a specific ethnic group or author. How far was Ahimaaz’s work a product of his eleventhcentury environment? I have already addressed the local context which may have precipitated the work, one which might be described not so much as a time of crisis, but certainly an era of instability. One has only to turn to the pages of one of the earliest accounts of the Norman conquest of the south, Amatus of Montecassino’s History of the Normans produced a generation after Ahimaaz’s scroll, to find randomly inserted a hostile tale about a (temporary) convert to Judaism. 79 Yet it has been noted that elsewhere in eleventh-century Europe, family histories were being (re)constructed as a means to support property claims and establish local status. Could Ahimaaz’s account of his family and their precious objects have functioned in the same way? Perhaps he was at the centre of an ongoing struggle for leadership within his community, as well as needing to preserve the fragile memory of his ancestors? Even if we accept the conservative interpretation of the work as simply one of exegesis, its production might still have contributed to that goal. I have already outlined the immediate context of its production: what is less easy to establish is whether Ahimaaz can be connected with the broader trend in Christian Europe towards commemoration and reconstruction of family histories for the purposes of property claims or narrowing the lines of inheritance. It is possible to read the account as one of a genuine lineage, directly connecting the author through seven (male) relations to his ancestor Amittai I: if this interpretation is correct, it leaves open the question as to what claim, beyond longevity, the family was making. 79

Storia de’ Normanni di Amato di Montecassino, ed. V. de Bartholomeis, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia 76 (Rome, 1935), Book II, chapter 38, pp. 104 – 6; a fuller discussion of this episode and others in southern Italian Jewish/non-Jewish relations will appear shortly in P. Skinner, ‘Conflicting Accounts: Negotiating a Jewish Space in Medieval Southern Italy’, in Michael Frassetto (ed.), Medieval Attitudes towards the Jews (forthcoming).



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Ahimaaz’s story ends with his scroll, but his family and the Jewish community of southern Italy had a longer history. We do not know what happened to Ahimaaz or his sons thereafter, but the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, journeying through the region over a century later, found a R. Hananel, the physician dwelling in Amalfi; and a R. Ahimaaz heading up the Jewish community in Melfi. 80 Although the Jewish community at Capua was numbered at some three hundred in Benjamin’s account, suggesting that even if the count was inaccurate there was a sufficiently large number for the community to be judged as flourishing, the city of Oria, long celebrated as a centre of Jewish culture, is not even mentioned. Benjamin’s translator, M.N. Adler, suggests that one reason for the traveller’s journey was the insecurity he felt regarding Jewish settlements at home in Spain, and a desire to investigate possible sources of refuge should the need arise. In Italy, the uncertainties of the eleventh century, hinted at by Ahimaaz, had given way to a flourishing of Jewish communities and culture in the twelfth. Cecil Roth considers Hananel of Amalfi to have been one of Ahimaaz’s descendants. There is no reason to reject this possibility, but nor should we ignore Ahimaaz’s namesake as leader of the Melfitan community, midway between the two areas of activity associated with his family. If the purpose of the scroll had been to emphasize the family’s longevity and scholarly importance, then perhaps it fulfilled its purpose in supporting the ambitions of Ahimaaz’s descendants. There is still remarkably little interaction between practitioners of Jewish and non-Jewish medieval history, and this is certainly true of the Italian situation. Yet it has been demonstrated, most notably by William Chester Jordan for France, that reading Jewish histories can bring out new angles in so-called mainstream history, and the topic of memory has certainly given rise to some of the most fruitful dialogues. 81 Reading Jewish sources against their wider context can also offer less narrowly defined interpretations of Jewish authors’ intentions, and blur the division between Jewish and non-Jewish identity, revealing the ways in which the diaspora setting subtly affected the output of Jewish writers. Like the Venosan and Barese gravestones, Ahimaaz’s scroll remains as a monument to the medieval southern Italian Jewish community; unlike those Hebrew stones, however, his message is much more ambiguous. Department of History, University of Southampton 80 81

M.N. Adler (ed. and tr.), The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (New York, 1907), p. 9. The conference held at Rice University in 2002 on ‘Memoria: Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Christianity and Judaism’, the proceedings of which have not yet appeared in print, illustrated the potential of the theme.



Book reviews

Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimation in Medieval Societies. Edited by Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy and Julio Escalona. The Medieval Mediterranean 53. Leiden: Brill. 2004. xxiii + 359 pp. EUR 99. ISBN 90 04 13305 4. ‘The subject is enormous and, in many respects, unnervingly elusive’ (p. x). True. But the collaborators in this volume have identified in ‘legitimation’ an important object of investigation, one they have been examining in the context of a series of interlocking cooperative research programmes based in Madrid, St Andrews and Lyon. The book includes eleven essays: six devoted to Iberia, two to Francia and one each to Italy, Poland and England; seven address the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, with only four devoted to earlier periods. Part I of the collection is context-centred, analysing various situations in which legitimation takes place, whether moments such as royal successions and dynastic shifts; spaces such as assemblies; or structures such as administrative networks, relationships of fidelity and hierarchical urban societies. Part II is source-centred, highlighting ‘discourses of political legitimation’ in particular texts or sets of texts, principally narrative histories, but also a group of sermons and treatises. An introduction defends the selection of essays and highlights common themes, notably the utility of a broad conception of political culture, the discursive nature of legitimation and – most usefully – the relationship between legitimation and delegitimation. As a whole, however, the volume fails to cohere, despite the high quality of the individual contributions. The editors offer definitions of legitimacy and legitimation, but an introduction can only accomplish so much. Legitimacy and legitimation are not the central concern of all of the papers: some ignore the ideas entirely, while others mention them only in conclusion. A more focused agenda might have addressed more successfully certain fundamental questions. What precisely is it that is legitimate or subject to processes of legitimation? Broadly speaking, it is political power, but that is a slippery subject in its own right: we find here legitimate rule, Early Medieval Europe   () – © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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lordship and kingship, but also legitimate kings, primacy, possession and claims. What are the distinctions between ‘forms’, ‘processes’, ‘sources’ and ‘resources’ of legitimation? What is it that unites (or divides?) the myriad elements the essays present as related to legitimacy: rhetoric, ritual, victory, morality, designation, prophecy, supernatural affirmation, conflict, royal authority, proof, documents, marriage, election, consensus, custom, law, office, speech, and so on? Perhaps future publications by these already fruitful research programmes (one has been announced in the series Annexes des Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiévale) will provide answers. Readers of EME will be most interested in three of the essays. Paul Fouracre shows how the Carolingian overthrow of the Merovingians was accompanied by the articulation of the ‘first properly post-Roman ideas of legitimation’ (p. 24). Stephen D. White adds another layer to his ongoing critique of the idea of a feudal revolution, rereading classic texts as evidence of a continuous ‘discourse of fidelity’. And Julio Escalona, in the strongest essay in the volume, shows how ninth-century chronicles shaped the historical image of Alfonso I (739 – 57) to bolster three distinct political needs of Alfonso III (866 – 911): dynastic prestige, justification of territorial conquest, and particularly the replacement of a Carolingian with a neo-Visigothic template for the Asturian kingdom. Columbia University

ADAM J. KOSTO

Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter. By Gerd Althoff. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag. 2003. 256 pp. 7 illustrations. EUR 24.90. ISBN 3 89678 473 0. Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe. By Gerd Althoff. Translated by Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. ix + 195 pp. £45.00 (hardback); £16.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 521 77054 8 (hardback); ISBN 0 521 77934 0 (paperback). Thirteen years stand between these two books: Althoff ’s study of interpersonal bonds in early medieval society was first published in German in 1990. In one sense, the time interval is clearly reflected in their respective qualities. Althoff ’s earlier work has the character of a pilot study, we might almost say a manifesto, for those interlinked investigations which he would go on to pursue in more detail elsewhere – into the ‘rules’ conditioning medieval politics, into historiography as a source Early Medieval Europe   ()


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for political culture, and into the constitutive role of ritual. Taken together, these represent an exhilaratingly ambitious attempt to construct what Timothy Reuter called a ‘grammar’ of medieval political life. Has Althoff succeeded? The more recent book offers a particularly mature, forceful and well-supported statement of his credo. But each of them provides indications of what his distinctive approaches can reveal about power in the medieval world, as well as reminders of what is left in shadow. The two books complement each other in approach and repay reading together, each broadening and deepening the insights of the other. While they differ in focus, much also unites them. Both books, first of all, are profoundly sceptical about the role in medieval politics of ‘public’ power, impersonal government, or indeed any meaningful bonds extending beyond the face-to-face. Althoff rejects the reality of the medieval Nationalstaat as vehemently as German medievalists of an earlier time had invoked it. His own characteristic emphases and silences arguably map the susceptibilities of his own age almost as precisely as the nationalist wish-fulfilment of his forebears mapped theirs. The political landscape which Althoff conjures up, with its lobbyists, cronies, sofa government, high-level whitewash and face-saving, its rhetorical bluster, and its glossy, choreographed, dissent-free ‘public sphere’, certainly seems to the jaundiced reader to raise depressingly familiar echoes. Althoff ’s world is one in which the main function of ‘public’ assemblies was to apply, with maximum visible solemnity, an ornate rubber stamp to consensus decisions reached invisibly in advance by small, unaccountable in-crowds. Althoff uncovers plenty of evidence for this interaction of the veiled and the demonstrative – though it is hard to accept that the innumerable and various assemblies so familiar throughout medieval western Europe were in every case as stage-managed and bereft of argument as his view requires. The organizing categories of the earlier book – kin, ‘cooperative’ groups, lords and followers – deliberately negate any notion of a distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ ties, or any attempt to prioritize the latter over the former. In the early Middle Ages – thus Althoff ’s fundamental point – all political bonds lacked durability: the prudent contracted as many as possible. The two books concur in asserting the epochal importance of the Carolingian period, both for the ritualization of politics and for the establishment of new bonds and obligations between the powerful and their followers. Reading them together reveals how Althoff perceives these processes as interconnected. Both studies likewise trace the tensions which existed between the prerogatives of kings and their obligations, and between the duties acknowledged by members of the high nobility and their own powers and privileges. Ritual, he persuasively argues, became increasingly central to articulating and mediating these tensions. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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The two books track, from complementary perspectives, the advancing claims of monarchy, and some of the problems which by the eleventh century these had begun to reveal. And both books are fundamentally concerned with the ways in which relationships among and between rulers and followers were established, maintained and manifested through carefully crafted displays of favour, disfavour, and sociability – not to mention occasional acts of raucous public disharmony. The constant interactions and balancing acts which medieval political life entailed, between concealment and display, between the informal and the ‘staged’, and between vertical and horizontal ties, are recurrent themes. Althoff insists upon the historicity of political rituals, as well as their confected character and relationship with power: their changes, he argues, mapped precisely the shifts over time in power relations within the elite. A major strength of both works, and of his whole approach, lies in his dynamic view of medieval political culture, which he portrays as constantly interacting with, and taking the imprint of, changing modes of power. This is most refreshing, though his analysis would be stronger still had it paid more explicit regard to the impact of changes in society, religion and learning too. In the end, for all the emphasis on change, the prevailing impression in both books is of shifting patterns of equilibrium within fundamentally comparable ruling elites, of stable character and finite extent. The contrasts, variations, and complexities to be anticipated in studies taking as their subject das Mittelalter, or even ‘early medieval Europe’, are not always as sharply articulated as readers might expect. Others have already observed the limits of Althoff ’s horizons. Indeed, he has acknowledged them himself, and led the calls for his methodology to be extended to other places and times. His own field of investigation is mainly defined by the Carolingian empire and by its eastern successorkingdom, down to the thirteenth century – a vast field, it is true, within which his command of the sources is awesome. It must be said, however, that his approach seems to work less happily when applied outside his favoured milieu, of face-to-face interactions within relatively small circles of kings, lords, and vassals – groups possessed of considerable social homogeneity, whose members could have been depended on to know, and internalize, the ‘rules of the game’. But, throughout the Middle Ages, western Europe was the venue for more than one ‘game’, played to more than one set of ‘rules’. Some of the limits of Althoff ’s perspective are signalled in a relatively late example which he cites (in Die Macht der Rituale), of a thirteenth-century settlement reached between the archbishop and town of Cologne. Here it transpires that the humiliating public submission which the burghers performed, far from manifesting with (as Althoff elsewhere puts it) ‘seismographic’ Early Medieval Europe   ()


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precision the actual state of power relations, was in fact a face-saving façade purchased by the archbishop through generous grants of privileges. This may, as Althoff contends, show just what a valuable ‘convertible’ political currency ritual acts were; but it also surely underlines the fact that, beyond the intimate confines of the court, the construction of power through ritual was no longer – had it ever been – the only game in town. Not least among the reasons for hoping that Althoff ’s study of ritual quickly finds an English translation is the allure of setting students to work reconciling his stateless world of personal bonds, honor, and (in the profoundest sense) gesture politics with the sharply contrasting vision, of administration, law, burgeoning pragmatic literacy, and the rest of the ‘machinery’ of the incipient ‘nation state’, still being trumpeted aloud in other quarters. The experience might leave some with salutary doubts about the explanatory power of general ‘rules’, however thoughtfully conceived. But readers can hardly fail also to come away enriched by Althoff ’s profound learning, and inspired by the breadth and boldness of the vision which he unfolds. University of Durham

LEN SCALES

The History of the Normans by Amatus of Montecassino. Translated by Prescott N. Dunbar. Revised with introduction and notes by Graham A. Loud. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. 2004. xxi + 220 pp. £45. ISBN 1 84383 078 7. Graham Loud has done anglophone historians of southern Italy a great service of late; first, by producing the closest thing to a biography of Robert Guiscard that the contemporary sources will allow, and now by bringing to light the first English translation of the earliest narrative source dedicated to the Norman conquests of Italy and Sicily. The History of the Normans by Amatus, a monk of Montecassino, was written within a few years of Richard of Capua’s death (1078) to memorialize the achievements of the Normans in the region. The work, dedicated to Abbot Desiderius who had thrown in his lot with Richard after the conquest of Capua in 1058, was the first account of the Normans in Italy that portrayed their conquests in a positive light. As such it is invaluable not only as a source of raw historical data, but as an exercise in historical narrative. Unfortunately Amatus’s text survives only in a modified fourteenth-century French translation of the Latin original. But given the vagaries of manuscript survival, we are, of course, delighted to have it even in a corrupted form and are pleased to see it now rendered by Prescott Dunbar into modern English. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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Loud’s introduction is a model of the genre. It is admirably concise, immensely well informed, and highly readable. In it he not only presents what can be known about the work’s author and its manuscript tradition, but recreates the intellectual milieu of Montecassino under Desiderius, as well as the political context within which the abbot navigated. The single largest part of the introduction focuses on the ‘scope and purpose’ of the account, illustrating how Amatus applied the theme of divine providence to help provide legitimacy for the Norman conquests. The basic principle behind this divine intervention: God helps those (that is, the Normans) who help themselves. In contrast, the Lombards and the other parties who saw their hold in Italy evaporate, come across as morally as well as politically challenged. In addition to the introduction, Loud has provided detailed maps and genealogical tables that make it easy for the reader to locate the people and places whose names figure in the account. The reader will also find a full bibliography of the pertinent primary and secondary sources. Pomona College

KENNETH BAXTER WOLF

The Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France. By Robert F. Berkhofer III. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. vi + 270 pp. £35. ISBN 0 8122 3796 X. This is a very interesting and wide-ranging study. It analyses changes in monastic attitudes to and exploitation of worldly resources, in particular in the context of the use of writing and the control of those to whom resources had been delegated. The focus is on five French monasteries, between the Carolingian period and c.1200. The author argues that ‘By the twelfth century, writing and rule had become closely linked – scribal culture and accountability became mutually supporting . . . the idea and practice of accountability is fundamental to the transformation from bad lordship to good, since being accountable was what separated the thug from the tax collector, the extortionist from the lawyer, the murderer from the judge’ ( pp. 7– 8). The book is well structured, lucidly written, and based on considerable research in original sources as well as extensive bibliography in English, French and German. Likewise the use of a sample of five major northern French Benedictine monasteries – Saint-Bertin, Saint-Denis, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-Père-de-Chartres, and Saint-Vaast-d’Arras – is effective. I would have liked more maps, and the index would have been made more helpful with a greater number of sub-headings. However, this does not detract from the major virtues of the book. Most Early Medieval Europe   ()


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notable is its willingness to deal with large issues: the nature of memory; its relationship to writing; the relationship between writing and administration; the changing nature of lordship; the development of administrative mentalities. These very qualities stimulate questions. What was the relationship between changes in the nature and quality of canon law and developments in estate administration? Given the importance of canon law concerning the alienability of land, it is surprising that legal issues do not feature more prominently in the book. Likewise, some further consideration of local settlement organization would have been interesting. Berkhofer argues that economic concerns came to have greater influence on the shaping of monastic lands in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. However, if the forming of nucleated settlements was already a feature of landscape and economic development before then, and such formation was at least in part driven by lords, economic concerns may have been of considerable influence even before the eleventh century. Given that nucleation did not necessarily change settlement names or terminology, such changes and concerns may be largely hidden in the types of evidence the author uses. In addition, it may be asked how far the mentality of accountability had developed by Berkhofer’s end point around 1200. Indeed the last chapter hints that the author feels he has only reached the beginnings of the history of accountability: ‘Like contemporary kings and counts, twelfth-century monks did not have a balance sheet, to match income and outgo. Any balance had to be struck in their minds. Budgeting as such was a later phenomenon in northern France. In this sense, monastic administration was still not institutionalized’ (pp. 160 – 1). Such questions reflect the great value of this study. The author will no doubt provide equally illuminating answers in future works. University of St Andrews

JOHN HUDSON

Edward the Elder 899– 924. Edited by N.J. Higham and D.H. Hill. London and New York: Routledge. 2001. xvi + 320 pp. £65.00 hardback; £20.99 paperback. ISBN 0415214963 (hardback); ISBN 0415214971 ( paperback). The twenty-two papers in this admirable volume, dedicated to the late Eric John, come from a conference held in 1999 by Manchester University’s Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies. They bring into much sharper focus a man and king who seemed heavily overshadowed both by his father Alfred, and by his son and effective successor Æthelstan; and they present a reign, previously well known only for burh building © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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and for battles, as a key stage in the development of English kingship and statecraft. The volume works very well on two levels. Individually, the papers characterize and review the evidence for the period of Edward’s lifetime – the relatively meagre written sources, important new archaeological material, and coinage, silver hoards, embroideries, and topographical evidence – thus appraising a seminal quarter-century in the long gestation and birth of a united kingdom of England. This produces salutary insights, such as James Campbell’s and Barbara Yorke’s necessarily brief but incisive evaluations of Æthelwold, Edward’s older cousin and rival for the throne (a man who, Campbell suggests, may at first have done more to unite England after Alfred’s death than Edward himself did); Alan Thacker’s examination of how in tellingly different ways Edward and Æthelstan manipulated royal saints’ cults to boost their power; and Patrick Wormald’s magnificent study of the effective ‘tough-mindedness’ of the West Saxon kings’ property strategy, with Edward the most pragmatic among them. The volume also has a good geographical range. Southern England is predictably well represented, but for once the north and east also figure strongly, with valuable appraisals of both old and new archaeological evidence which seek to put it into its historical context and relate it to the volume’s main themes. Of particular note is Lesley Abrams’s appropriately cautious stocktaking of what ‘the Danelaw’ means in the context of Edward’s reign and of what we reliably know about it (not a lot, it seems). Western Mercia gets rather less attention, but Stewart Lyon’s discussion of the coinage of Edward’s reign and Mechthild Gretsch’s of Old English glosses in psalters offer important insights into Mercian–West Saxon relations. Establishing the nature of that relationship is the major theme of Simon Keynes’s study of Edward as ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’, in which he reiterates his thesis that Alfred was not merely overlord of all the English who were not subject to Danish rule but was their actual king, and argues that Edward inherited this role. The influence of Keynes’s line of argument is seen in a number of papers but does not dominate the book’s main messages. The latter are skilfully drawn out and focused by Nick Higham, whose introduction and endpiece give the book its significant coherence and authority. Edward the Elder used to be, in Higham’s words, ‘diminished by the faintness of the praises accorded to him’, but the keen, careful attention paid by the volume’s contributors to our regrettably sparse sources for Edward reveal an energetic, aggressive and hard-nosed king whose major contribution to early English history has at last been suitably illuminated. Department of Medieval History, University of Birmingham Early Medieval Europe   ()

STEVEN BASSETT © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

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The Tower of London Moat. Archaeological Excavations 1995 – 9. By Graham Keevil. Oxford: Oxford Archaeology with Historic Royal Palaces. 2004. xix + 315 pp. + 183 figures + 18 tables. £14.99. ISBN 0 904220 35 4. This substantial monograph presents the results of a detailed archaeological evaluation of the moat surrounding this great royal fortress and UNESCO World Heritage Site. The programme of trial excavation, geophysical survey and environmental sampling formed the archaeological component of the Tower Environs Scheme: a bold, contentious, but ultimately unsuccessful initiative to re-flood the moat in order to enhance the visual appeal of the site’s present-day setting. Findings relate, unsurprisingly, to the period following the castle’s massive expansion in the mid-thirteenth century, although consideration of the wider spatial context of the royal fortress has implications for our understanding of the late Saxon and early Norman city. The volume is enriched throughout by generous use of colour figures, including a series of stunning reconstructions. University of Exeter

OLIVER CREIGHTON

Gesta Principum Polonorum: The Deeds of the Princes of the Poles. Translated and annotated by Paul W. Knoll and Frank Schaer, with a preface by Thomas N. Bisson. Budapest: Central European University Press. 2003. lxv + 317 pp. £35. ISBN 963924140 7. The Gesta Principum Polonorum, perhaps better known under the name given by an earlier editor to its compiler – Gallus Anonymous – ranks as one of the most underrated and most frequently overlooked works of medieval historical writing. Composed in the early decades of the twelfth century by an unknown cleric who, internal evidence suggests, had originally come from the francophone parts of western Europe, the Gesta traces the history of the dukes from mythical times to the author’s own lifetime, but with a strong focus on the period from the eleventh century in general, and on the deeds of Duke Boleslav III in particular. It thus remains one of the earliest known narratives of medieval Polish history, but its significance extends beyond its immediate regional or national context. By merit of its carefully crafted narrative structure, of the author’s ability to create morally instructive encounters and episodes, and of the detail with which actions and events are elaborated, the Gesta’s author ought to be grouped with the great historians of the twelfth century. The text also provides a rich source for those interested in © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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representations of rulership, and in rituals and other forms of political communication, inviting comparisons with similar works emerging in the first half of the twelfth century, which equally sought to recover or reconstruct the history of a realm or dynasty – such as writings by Cosmas of Prague, for instance, William of Malmesbury, Theodericus Monachus or even Fulcher of Chartres. So far, however, despite the best efforts of such illustrious admirers as Thomas Bisson, it has hardly been noticed by medievalists outside he former Eastern bloc. Part of the problem may have been that the critical edition of the text, prepared by Julian Krzyanowski and published in Warsaw in 1946, was rarely available outside highly specialized research libraries. That excuse can no longer be made: the present book reprints the 1946 edition (although without much of the critical apparatus), and combines it with a modern English translation. The translation must rank as a major achievement, especially when keeping in mind the Gesta’s occasionally obscure or ungrammatical Latin, and is accompanied by a very thoughtful set of notes, and a perceptive and helpful introduction, which summarizes historiographical debates about the Gesta’s author and date of composition with admirable clarity. The Central European University Press is to be congratulated on making the Gesta available to a much wider audience, and the present reviewer can but implore others to take this opportunity and to acquaint themselves and their students with one of the most fascinating and rewarding pieces of historical writing to survive from the twelfth century. University of Wales, Aberystwyth

BJÖRN WEILER

Interpreters of Early Medieval Britain. Edited by Michael Lapidge. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy. 2002. x + 565 pp. £40. ISBN 0 19 726277 5. This valuable collection prints thirty-eight obituaries of scholars whose work has significantly influenced the field of early medieval studies of Britain, chiefly reprinted from the Proceedings of the British Academy. Two were freshly composed by Lapidge for the volume (Skeat and Bradley) and one reprinted from another publication (Napier). Together with the entries in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford, 2004), the British Academy obituaries are the starting point for any historiographical exploration of the field. Study of the early modern origins of early medieval scholarship is a well-established field and scholars of Old English, especially in Early Medieval Europe   ()


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North America, have become notably reflective about the academic traditions in which they work. There is, however, no substantive consideration of early medieval studies in Britain and those in the disciplines of history and art history, for example, have been less intrigued by their scholarly genealogy. Yet debates furiously conducted among modern scholars very often follow intellectual furrows ploughed centuries ago: as Allen Frantzen and others have demonstrated, historiographical understanding illuminates current research and poses important questions about the future of the field. This collection begins to chart some of this unexplored territory: demonstrating, for example, how closely allied English scholars were with Germans in the nineteenth and early twentieth century ( Wright and Napier, for example); or the considerable part played by Hector Munro Chadwick in shaping the field by bringing on young scholars, and particularly his encouragement of women ( Whitelock, Kershaw, Harmer, and Jackson, Dickins and Hunter Blair). Lapidge’s introduction is a generous and percipient survey of the development of the field, particularly warm in its appreciation of Chadwick’s contribution (for example, his anticipation of oral formulaic theories of verse composition which has not been generally noted). The selection of obituaries represents the range of disciplines: Celtic and Germanic languages, palaeography and history. The historians (Plummer, Rhys, Stenton, Harmer, Whitelock and Hunter Blair) are limited in number but this largely reflects the field (particularly since scholars who have died since 1987 are still awaiting the BA obits). As a whole the collection prompts important questions about the academic traditions (for example, the effect of the First and Second World Wars, probable factors in the decline in close links with German universities and the prominence of female scholars). But these obituaries are not only instructive reading: there is much to enjoy here too. Julian Brown’s warm account of Wormald reveals as much about the author as it does about its subject, for example. The story of Joseph Wright is a remarkable one and could provide some scholarly inspiration in these RAE-obsessed times. He was born in 1855 of humble origins and started work at the age of six. He taught himself to read and write and then attended night school and the Mechanics Institute at Bradford; finally he set off aged twenty-one to study in Germany with the forty pounds he had saved. ‘[My mother and I] both knew how necessary it was for me to go; for my future development, I felt that I must go to that country of scholars, and I went.’ He was appointed Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford, and died in 1930, decorated with academic honours and a wealthy man. University of York © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

CATHERINE CUBITT Early Medieval Europe   ()

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An Archaeology of Trade in Middle Saxon England. By John Naylor. British Archaeological Reports British Series 376. Oxford: Archaeopress. 2004. iv + 171 pp. £30. ISBN 1 84171 647 2. Studies of middle Anglo-Saxon economic systems have been stimulated recently by new discoveries, many made by metal-detector users whose reports have led to the identification of sites usually referred to as ‘productive’ or ‘prolific’ because of the numbers of coins and other metal objects found at them. Debate continues over which of these scatters represent intermittent fairs, which markets attached to settlements, which royal, church or aristocratic centres, which toll-stations, and which simply rural sites with residents seemingly better able to acquire small items than people living in later medieval villages and farms. The four major wic sites continue to produce new information, notably the unsuspected but ‘rich’ seventh-century cemetery found at Southampton in 1998– 2000, and London’s Royal Opera House excavations published in 2003. Several postgraduate theses on this topic have now led to publication either as books or articles. Some take an object category, like G. Thomas’s work on strap-ends, others have scrutinized counties or wic hinterlands. In a thesis submitted in 2002, Naylor compared and contrasted south Yorkshire and Kent. Most sites in the former are well known, though the short summary of Thwing, only published in scattered interim reports, is useful. Fishergate, York, was probably one of the wics. Kent had landing-places, but no wic with streets and houses on the scale of Southampton or London has been located – B. Philp’s excavation in one candidate, Dover, published in 2003, found a church but not great quantities of artefacts (despite William of Malmesbury having a tale of St Aldhelm buying a bible from some sailors there!). The first summary of Kent in this period was a paper by S. Brookes that also appeared in 2003, but unfortunately Naylor’s thesis was not revised for publication, so these works and others are not considered. The constantly increasing database of finds, usually now reported on the web sites of the Portable Antiquities Scheme and of the Cambridge Early Medieval Coin Corpus, means that conventional syntheses will anyway get out of date much more rapidly than before the electronic age. Naylor’s main conclusion is that areas dominated by a wic (or emporium) developed fewer inland ‘prolific sites’ or markets than those with long coastlines and many points of entry, an argument which as he says also fits Lincolnshire well. It does not explain the emergence of the wics, notably that at Ipswich, which has no great advantages as a port compared to other entry points into Suffolk and Norfolk – and into Essex, a different kingdom, of course, but perhaps dominated in the south by London. By choosing a start date of c.650, however, Naylor does not Early Medieval Europe   ()


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cover significant developments in the emergence of kingdoms. Most furnished burials also pre-date his chosen period, though the implications of occasional depositions of coins deserved consideration in relation to their known numbers and distributions. University of Southampton

DAVID A. HINTON

Treasure in the Medieval West. Edited by Elizabeth M. Tyler. York: York Medieval Press. 2000. xi + 174 pp. £45.00. ISBN 0 9529734 8 0. In this collection of nine papers presented at the York Medieval Seminar in 1997, treasure takes multiple forms, ranging from buried hoards to literary metaphors, and from precious tableware to royal brides. Despite the stimulating array of disciplinary approaches presented in the volume, the union of its parts suffers from a lack of cohesion. A strong introductory chapter would have drawn more closely together the broad selection of topics covered. More attentive editorial work would have also averted difficulties such as the disconnection between the main part of Leslie Webster’s paper and its conclusion (bottom of p. 57). Moreover, few of the chapters – aside from those of Timothy Reuter and Jenny Stratford – even hint at the relevant secondary literature on the topic of treasure currently being generated by continental academics and curators. Viewed as a whole, however, the collection provides a fairly thorough sampling of research on treasure among English scholars in a variety of disciplines. In addition to presenting very different definitions of and evidence for treasure, the volume’s contributors approach their material in diverse manners. Most successful among them are the pieces that address a single topic intensively rather than providing a comprehensive evaluation of large geographical or chronological developments in such a short space. Hence Martin Carver’s detailed assessment of Sutton Hoo as a form of poetic expression offers the very useful analogy of burial ritual as a form of theatre for those attending funerals (p. 39); Elizabeth Tyler’s piece explains the ways in which an anonymous author manipulated displays of treasure in the Vita Aedwardi Regis to celebrate the AngloSaxon royal family’s dynastic claims and imperial ambitions (p. 97). In her detailed detective work on the Goldenes Rössl, Jenny Stratford reconstructs the context in which Isabeau of Bavaria commissioned this spectacular tableau for her husband Charles VI on New Years Day, 1405. She suggests the symbolism of this gift be viewed in light of the queen’s political and financial independence growing in relation to her husband’s increasing incapacitation by mental illness (p. 128). © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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In the pieces that attempted to create syntheses of wide-ranging selections of evidence, the arguments are less satisfying since in many cases they descend into abstraction. Dominic Jane’s brief survey of burial practice treats interment rites around the Mediterranean as if they were nearly uniform, and downplays the prevalence of grave robbery on the continent and the ‘world of Sutton Hoo’ (p. 7). Pauline Stafford’s piece, while providing insight into the exchange, storage and theft of women that often paralleled the flow of treasure, breaks down when she draws comparisons between evidence from the fifth and sixth centuries and that from the ninth and tenth centuries in Francia. Her account of the neglect of royal insignia in descriptions of queens of the Merovingian dynasty (pp. 74–5), for instance, overlooks the fact that no exclusive symbols of rulership have been identified as being used by Frankish kings at this date (Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History, pp. 47– 8). John Cherry’s piece presents an unfocused survey of late medieval hoards in England and reaches no clear resolution of the issues he raises. By the end of the volume, one arrives at the realization that the fluid definition of treasure presented here provides an engaging kaleidoscope through which human social relations may be viewed. Yet, judging from the ease with which sexual desire may be conflated with avarice in some specific artistic and literary representations of treasure (p. 142), we should not be too eager to draw general conclusions from random assortments of nuanced examples. State University of New York at Binghamton

BONNIE EFFROS

Karolingische Rekognitionszeichen: Die Kanzlerzeile und ihre graphische Ausgestaltung auf den Herrscherurkunden des achten und neunten Jahrhunderts. By Peter Worm. elementa diplomatica 10/ 1–2. General ed. Peter Rück. Marburg an der Lahn. 2004. 2 volumes: I Textband, 176 pp.; II Abbildungsband, 318 b/w plates. EUR 69.00. ISBN 3 8185 0390 7 (paperback). With corrigenda at . A ‘Recognitionszeichen’ is the statement, usually placed in the lowerright quadrant of a royal diploma, that a chancery cleric had subscribed and thereby authenticated the act. The subscription itself is usually written in special, elongated letters in a formula such as ‘N. notarius ad uicem N. archicancellarius scripsit et subscripsit’, the final word being truncated so that either its first or last ‘s’ creates a large design shaped like an upside-down U (a ‘Bogen’ or ‘ruche’) crossed by three or more highly decorative lines, the lines sometimes interspersed with Tironian Early Medieval Europe   ()


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notes giving the name of the ‘ambasciator’ who transmitted the order to expedite to the chancery. Overlapping this ruche or to its immediate right was attached the royal seal. Subscriptions are therefore important evidence in reconstructing the personnel of Carolingian chanceries, while ruches are one of the most intriguing of the ‘Graphische Symbole’ which have recently attracted diplomatists’ interest as indicators of either the majesty or the magic of royal diplomas. Above all, since subscription and ruche were ostensibly the chancery’s validation, the rigour of their application speaks directly to questions about the legal usefulness of diplomas and the administrative character of chanceries. In this monograph from an aleady stellar series edited by Peter Rück, Peter Worm presents a thorough analysis of these signs as they appear in originals from the beginning of Carolingian monarchy under Pippin through the ending of the different Carolingian lines in the most important successor kingdoms. (The second volume provides welcome and well-executed plates documenting many of his examples, though a set of corrigenda should be consulted for a number of important misnomers.) Analysing every hand that subscribed an extant original in order to identify scribes and discern trends, Worm provides firm evidence that under Louis the Pious subscriptions were not only autograph by the scribes they name but also distinctive to each one; subscriptions and ruches were therefore able to serve as authenticators of valid diplomas. Very quickly, however, this principle was lost, making it hard to see how a diploma’s authenticity could ever have been proved in trials. Worm also remarks a tremendous variety of formulary and design, though both taken from ‘pools’ of common exemplars circulating at courts. Each kingdom developed its own range of distinctive forms and formulae, though I am more impressed with the common evolution among them towards more decorative, less administratively functional designs in ways that consistently left the royal monogram and seal as a diploma’s distinguishing aspect. Worm believes that these trends reflect a growing lack of literacy among beneficiaries, who were correspondingly more impressed with visual markers of a diploma’s authority, though why monks and cathedral canons would be illiterate is not clear. The most interesting exception to these trends is (as usual) Italy, where already Louis II’s clerics were introducing elements into diplomas taken from private acts, suggesting a more pragmatic, non-representational use of writing consonant with what is known of Italian society. Without adhering to all Worm’s conclusions and assumptions, I have no doubt that every historian who has any reason to use royal diplomas will find these two volumes not merely useful but essential. University of California, Berkeley © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

GEOFFREY KOZIOL Early Medieval Europe   ()

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