The Invention of Saintliness

The Invention of Saintliness The study of saints and saintliness has enjoyed an increase in scholarly interest over th...

Author: Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

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The Invention of Saintliness

The study of saints and saintliness has enjoyed an increase in scholarly interest over the past decades. Historians have gained new insight into the rise and function of holy men and women, holy sites and holy objects, thanks to new approaches borrowed from other disciplines. Officially recognized saints are found in heaven, but are made on earth. This volume discusses, from a historical and literary angle, the ways in which sanctification and the inscription of saintliness take place. Going beyond the traditional categories of canonization, cult, liturgical veneration, and hagiographical lives, the work raises fundamental issues concerning definitions of saints and saintliness in a period before the concept was crystallized in canon law. As well as discussing sources and methodology, contributions cover contextual issues, including relics and sacred places, life and the afterlife, and examinations of specific sources and texts. Subjects raised include the idea of hagiography as intimate biography, perceptions of holiness in writings by and about female mystics, and bodily aspects of the Franciscan search for evangelical perfection. Essential reading for those interested in medieval religion, this will also prove more generally valuable for scholars of the history of religion, medieval historians, and those studying medieval literature. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Medieval Studies at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Her wide-ranging publications on historiography, hagiography, and gender studies include Sanctity and Motherhood (Garland, 1995), De Kluizenaar in de Eik (The Hermit in the Oak) (1995), and Gouden Legenden (Golden Legends) (1998). She is preparing a book on Anchoresses in the Low Countries.

Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture Edited by George Ferzoco University of Leicester

and Carolyn Muessig University of Bristol

This series aims to present developments and debates within the field of medieval religion and culture. It will provide a broad range of case studies and theoretical perspectives, covering a variety of topics, theories and issues. 1 Gender and Holiness Men, women and saints in late medieval Europe Edited by Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih 2 The Invention of Saintliness Edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

The Invention of Saintliness

Edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

Selection and editorial material # 2002 Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker; individual chapters # 2002 the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-16600-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26062-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-26759-5 (Print Edition)

Contents

Notes on contributors Foreword by Han J. W. Drijversy

vii ix

PART I

Introduction 1

The invention of saintliness: texts and contexts

1 3

A N N E K E B. M U L D E R - B A KK E R

PART II

Contexts: the cult of saints and the invention of saintliness 2

Relics and their veneration in the Middle Ages

25 27

A R N OL D A N GE N E N D T

3

Saints without a past: sacred places and intercessory power in saints’ Lives from the Low Countries

38

A N N E K E B. M U L D E R - B A KK E R

4

Life and afterlife: Arnulf of Oudenburg, bishop of Soissons, and Godelieve of Gistel. Their function as intercessors in medieval Flanders

58

R E NE´ E N IP

PART III

Texts: the Lives of saints and the invention of saintliness

77

vi 5

Contents ‘‘Whither runnest thou?’’: the conception of saintliness in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius

79

MAAIKE ZIMMERMAN

6

The West European Alexius legend: with an Appendix presenting the medieval Latin text corpus in its context (Alexiana Latina Medii Aevi, I)

93

LOUK J. ENG ELS

7

Bernward of Hildesheim: a case of self-planned sainthood?

145

BERNHARD GALLISTL

8

Dealing with Brother Ass: bodily aspects of the Franciscan sanctification of the self

163

BERT ROEST

9

Saints and despair: twelfth-century hagiography as ‘intimate biography’

185

INE KE V AN ‘T S PIJ KE R

10

Literary genre and degrees of saintliness: the perception of holiness in writings by and about female mystics

206

WERNER WILLIAMS-KRAPP

Index

219

Contributors

Arnold Angenendt is Emeritus Professor of Church History at the Westpha¨lische Wilhelms Universita¨t (University of Mu¨nster, Westphalia) in the Institute for Medieval and Modern Church History. He has published extensively in the fields of historical theology, church history, and the history of religion. Among his most prominent books are Heilige und Reliquien: die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom fru¨hen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart (1994) and Geschichte der Religiosita¨t im Mittelalter (1997, 2nd ed. 2000). Louk J. Engels is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Latin (University of Groningen, 1966–94). Besides studies on the Latin Alexius legend he is preparing a critical edition of Peter Abelard’s sermones. Bernhard Gallistl, manuscript librarian of the Dombibliothek (Episcopal Library) Hildesheim, studied Classical Philology and History of Religion (Ph.D. with Walter Burkert, Zu¨rich). His work focuses on the iconography, hagiography, and religious culture of Hildesheim in the Ottonian period. He has published on Greek religion, Bernward of Hildesheim, and Epiphanius of Pavia. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Medieval Studies at the University of Groningen. Her wide-ranging publications on historiography and hagiography include Sanctity and Motherhood (Garland, 1995), and she is presently preparing a book on Anchoresses in the Low Countries. Reneé Nip is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Groningen. She has published on the historiography and hagiography of the Low Countries and Flanders, co-edited Media Latinitas (Festschrift L. J. Engels, Brepols, 1996), and is now directing a project involving the digitalization of Dutch medieval sources (Repertorium Carasso-Kok). Bert Roest studied History and Medieval Studies at the Universities of Groningen and Toronto. He has written two books and several articles on Franciscan historiography and the development of a Franciscan school network between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century. At present he is

viii

Contributors

preparing a volume on late medieval literature of religious instruction and a study on early modern educational discourses. Ineke van ‘t Spijker has published on medieval hagiography and monasticism and is preparing a book on Exegesis and the Formation of the Self in monastic literature from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Werner Williams-Krapp is Professor of German Language and Literature of the Middle Ages at the University of Augsburg (Germany). He has published extensively in the area of late medieval religious literature with books and articles on hagiography, mystics, drama, sermons, and theology in the vernacular. He has also edited numerous German prose works. His most prominent book publications are Die deutschen und niederla¨ndischen Legendare des Mittelalters (1986), U¨berlieferung und Gattung: Zur Gattung ‘Spiel’ im Mittelalter (1980), and Die Offenbarungen der Katharina Tucher (1998). Currently he is working on a history of German literature in the fifteenth century. Maaike Zimmerman is Lecturer in Latin at the Department of Greek and Latin Languages and Cultures of the University of Groningen. She also presides over the research group ‘Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius’. Her writings include a Commentary on Book X of Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Groningen, 2000).

Foreword

The study of saints and saintliness has enjoyed new scholarly interest over the past decades. Historians, scholars working in the field of religion, and others have gained new insights into the rise and function of holy men and women, holy sites, and holy objects, thanks to new approaches borrowed from other disciplines. Illuminating and stimulating publications by trend-setting scholars like Peter Brown and others have changed and deepened our perceptions and understanding of the role and importance of saints and their cults, holy sites and relics in late antique, Byzantine, and medieval societies. They have furthermore given new impetus to hagiographical research and the development of new methodological approaches. Even though we have gained a better comprehension of saints and saintliness, there is still a lot of work to be done, as the Introduction to this volume makes clear. This book is the result of a seminar dedicated to the cultural role of saints in ancient and medieval societies. The seminar was organized and hosted by the Center of Classical, Oriental, Medieval and Renaissance Studies (COMERS) of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Papers presented and discussed at this seminar dealt with a variety of subjects, such as the conception of saints and sanctity, the rise of the holy man in connection with the needs of society, the cult of saints, holy sites and relics, hagiography and the literary form of saints’ lives, and the iconography of saints in the arts. The articles collected in this book in one way or another deal with topics discussed at the seminar. Not all the seminar papers are included in this volume, but several of them are (papers by Engels, Mulder-Bakker, Nip, Roest, Van ‘t Spijker, and Zimmerman); three of the chapters (those by Angenendt, Gallistl, and Williams-Krapp) were specially written for this book. It would be impossible in a book like this to cover all aspects of a subject of such wide range. It is nevertheless hoped that the approach chosen here may open up new ways of studying and understanding sanctity and the holy. Thanks are owed to all participants in the seminar, particularly those who presented papers. Thanks are also due to all those who contributed to the making of this volume: the authors of the various articles, Myra Scholz and Gerrit Bunt, who translated several of the articles and/or corrected the

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Foreword

English, and in particular its editor Anneke Mulder-Bakker, without whose perseverance this book would not have seen the light of day. Han J. W. Drijversy October 2001

Part I

Introduction

1

The invention of saintliness Texts and contexts Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

Canon 2104: In causis confessorum discuti debet dubium: an constet de virtutibus theologalibus Fide, Spe, Caritate tum in Deum tum in proximum, necnon de cardinalibus [virtutibus] Prudentia, Iustitia, Temperantia, Fortitudine, earumque adnexis in gradu heroico in casu et ad effectum de quo agitur; in causis vero martyrum: an constet de martyrio eiusque causa et de signis seu miraculis in casu et ad effectum de quo agitur. Canon 2116: Praeter virtutum heroicitatem aut martyrium, ad beatificationem Servi Dei requiruntur miracula eius intercessione patrata.1 Canon 2104: In [canonization] procedures of confessors the question to be discussed is whether the Servant of God possessed, to a heroic degree, the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love of God and neighbor, as well as the cardinal virtues, Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, and related virtues, and whether this is certain enough to permit proceedings towards beatification. However, in the case of the canonization of a martyr, the question is whether his martyrdom is absolutely certain and whether it is known for sure that signs or miracles occurred, and whether all this is certain enough to permit proceedings towards beatification. Canon 2116: In addition to a heroic degree of virtue or martyrdom, another requirement for the beatification of a Servant of God is that miracles have been performed through his intercession. This, then, is the official definition: a saint is a deceased person who once excelled in virtue. A saint is one who possessed faith, hope, and love, demonstrated wisdom and justice, exercised moderation and perseverance. A person who occasionally manifested these virtues can make no claim to sainthood, but only he who persevered through his entire life, to a heroic degree, in gradu heroico, under difficult circumstances, and with a cheerful heart. Only he who took true delight in the practice of virtue can be considered for canonization, provided that a few miracles after death revealed the man’s saintly ability to

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Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

intercede with God – the man’s ability, yes, for only seldom are women admitted to this select group. After exemplary exercise of virtue and a holy life, the existence of a cult, public veneration after the person’s death, is the ultimate indication of sainthood. Sanctity, in other words, is a quality ascribed posthumously. Saints live in the hereafter, in the company surrounding the throne of God. Here on earth believers have to be satisfied with the material remains of their earthly existence, their relics or their graves; and, of course, with the stories of their exemplary lives or the legends about their miraculous deeds. This, in summary, is the ‘list of requirements’ found scattered throughout the present-day Corpus Iuris Canonici and used in canonization procedures in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a program that goes back to Cardinal Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV, who in 1734–8 set down the conceptions prevalent at the time in his De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione.2 He codified the ideas that had gradually crystallized out of the papal canonization procedures since the late Middle Ages. Sanctity as defined by canon law is therefore – certainly from a medieval perspective – a relatively modern concept. Scholars of today who study saints are caught in a kind of double bind. Consciously or unconsciously they tend to take over the Church’s teaching summarized above as the point of departure for their research. The concept of sanctity in canon law generally determines the selection of the material and provides a framework for their findings. The same historians are bound by the scholarly traditions of their discipline, which also point to a certain selection of sources and prescribe an accompanying method of research. This makes their work doubly difficult. In order to heighten awareness of the pitfalls surrounding hagiographic research, this introduction will focus on three of the questions researchers will encounter. First, what should we understand by saints and saintliness in the medieval context – in the period, that is, before the concept was crystallized in canon law? Second, who decided in that period, and on the grounds of which criteria, who could be considered a saint. In other words, who constituted the social agency? The third question is one of the sources and methods to be used in research. The following paragraphs are intended as an introduction to this last issue.

Clearing the scene Notwithstanding the many recent ‘‘studies brilliantly critical of the ‘fathers’ of medieval studies’’ published in the United States,3 as well as the debates on ‘La Nouvelle Histoire’ or ‘New Perspectives’ in medieval studies in Europe,4 medievalists of today have still not wrestled themselves free from their predecessors’ scholarship. Academic disciplines such as historical writing and literary studies were developed in the nineteenth century, at a time, that is, when the growth of the nation state, of constitutions and a

The invention of saintliness

5

civil service – in short, the public domain – was an all-pervasive concern. These nineteenth-century preoccupations led to the setting of standards for the relevant disciplines. Scholars working in these disciplines today, medieval historians in particular, resemble dwarfs standing on the shoulders of the one-eyed giants of the nineteenth century.5 Positing a dichotomy between public and private, these forefathers had eyes only for the public sphere – offices and institutions, rules and procedures, and the written documentation produced by institutions.6 Although no such dichotomy existed in the Middle Ages, historians still have a tendency to accept only public laws and institutions as the structuring element and solid base of medieval society. To justify this, consciously or not, they fall back on another dualism, one that did exist in the Middle Ages, namely that of literate versus illiterate, clergy versus laity, the world of learning as opposed to the world of popular culture.7 As a result, they still view documentary sources, charters and archival evidence in particular, along with the canon of literary texts, as the most trustworthy sources for the study of the medieval past.8 Hagiographic sources, despised as they were in the nineteenth century, are still the victims of that ill repute. This is due not only to their ambiguous character – shared, it should be noted, by literary sources that now figure so prominently in the work of ‘New Medievalism’ adepts – but also because they are seen as lacking literary form and thus as altogether unworthy of scholarly interest.9 It is indeed remarkable that none of the collections representing the recent vogue in ‘New Medievalism,’ ‘New Historicism,’ or ‘The Past and Future of Medieval Studies’ includes work on the ‘New Hagiography.’ The message seems to be that ‘true’ medievalists do not concern themselves with hagiographic sources, or if they do, it is only because they wish to study the earliest texts in the vernacular or are interested in folk beliefs and popular mentality. Little or no thought is given to the place of hagiography within medieval studies.10 The problem goes even deeper. Not only do medievalists base their work on documentary sources and literary works, a small segment of the sources available, they seem to lack the theories and methods to analyze that segment adequately.11 Certainly in the last decades there has been a great deal of discussion on the interpretation of written sources, especially by literary critics reflecting on medieval texts. The contemporary ‘postmodern’ debate is in fact completely focused on the interpretation of language and texts, including documentary texts. What the debates leave unexplored, however, are questions – most intriguing for historians and philologists – of the context in which these medieval texts came about, and of how this can be adequately researched.12 They concentrate exclusively on what we can (now) do with those texts, on the meaning we can give them.13 As Gabrielle Spiegel has cogently pointed out, there is a ‘‘common reliance upon a language-model epistemology, one that views language not as a window on the world it transparently reflects, but as constructing that world. ’’14 The genesis of this

6


language and textual references to the social agency behind the texts are consequently left out of consideration. She notes regretfully: What gets lost in the concentration on meaning in place of experience is the sense of social agency, of men and women struggling with the contingencies and complexities of their lives in terms of the fates that history deals out to them and transforming the worlds they inherit and pass to future generations.15 This is precisely what historians and philologists consider their sphere of activity.16 For them the sources reveal, or at least point to, a world behind the coded narrative. This explains why the modern debate generally has little appeal for philologists and why historians continue to rely on familiar tools such as language skills or diplomatics and auxiliary sciences.17 German studies in particular, as well as Dutch research modeled on them, have this as their focus. Even when these historians reflect on Historismus in den Kulturwissenschaften,18 the questions raised by the ‘New Historicism’ and the ‘New Rhetoric’ often remain outside their field of vision. In this way they ignore the fact that they, too, need an adequate methodology in order to understand ‘‘documentary writing as a scripture, as an inscription of order,’’ rather than as ‘‘transparent texts which can assert objective truth independent of the subjective act that intended the document and of the operations of language within it.’’19 We might stop to ask whether it is worth the effort to go in search of a suitable methodology. Would it not be better to simply leave the few hagiographical sources which are studied to (church) historians and philologists with their old-fashioned, ‘positivistic’ approach? Why bother? Those who are interested can join the literary debate in progress and limit themselves to the sources, especially those of a literary and historiographic nature, for which good research methods have been developed. Would that not be sufficient? The answer here is simply, no. In a discipline where the religious and devotional texts, including hagiographic texts, constitute the bulk of the scarce remnants of source material, we cannot afford to leave a large part of them out of consideration.20 Those who wish to take medieval studies seriously have to open up those sources in a responsible way and study them with reliable methods. My third question in this introduction can therefore be phrased as follows: which texts should we use for ‘modern’ hagiographic research? And how should we organize our study of those sources if we commit ourselves to the idea that it must be grounded in an intimate knowledge of the medieval past and reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation? These three sets of questions – concerning conceptions of sanctity, the matter of social agencies involved in their making, and the problem of sources


7

and methodologies – are of pivotal importance. I shall begin with the conceptions.

The contexts The concept in canon law Scholarly studies of saints show that the concept of sanctity found in canon law often constitutes the frame of reference not only for canonization procedures in the Roman Catholic Church but also for research conducted by (church) historians. In some cases this comes about consciously, in others unconsciously. The Dutch church historian R. R. Post, for instance, in his authoritative Church History of the Netherlands in the Middle Ages, candidly held that ‘‘he is a saint who best imitates Christ in this life, by an exemplary practice of Christian virtues and by participating in his suffering,’’ thus adhering to the modern definition of a saint in canon law.21 Post admitted that ‘‘ideals of sainthood had not always been the same for the common faithful,’’ but this did not prevent him from applying modern ideals to the medieval past. Differing ‘beliefs’ he labeled as ‘deviant,’ ‘superstitious,’ or even as ‘heretical,’ and at best as clerical ‘concessions’ to the illiterate populace. From an ecclesiastical point of view Post may be right, but from an historical perspective I would argue that he is not. Historians ought to make use of historically adequate criteria. When studies of saints and sainthood gained momentum in the fields of history and the social sciences in the 1960s,22 Delooz – one of the first and most perceptive sociological scholars – opted, after careful consideration, for research within the ecclesiastical framework.23 He wished to find out how many recognized and venerated saints there had been in previous periods and cultures, where they came from, what the ratio was of men to women. To answer these questions he wanted to study all saints who had been granted recognition by the Church. Because the Church had no statistics or official lists available, he restricted himself for practical reasons to the Acta Sanctorum, the collection, that is, of saints’ Lives begun by the Bollandists in the seventeenth century, and to the modern reference works based on this collection. He therefore deliberately made use of the Roman Catholic canon compiled in the period following the Council of Trent (1545–63).24 In a similarly well-considered way, Andre´ Vauchez went about his study of canonization procedures in the late medieval Church.25 Although he recounts a good many colorful details about saints who were never canonized and gives an inventory of popular saints and local cults in southern Europe in order to clarify the context, the ecclesiastical procedures and the development of criteria of saintliness expressly constitute the core of his research. Thanks to him and to others who have examined canonization procedures,26 it has become clear that the definition of sanctity found in current canon law goes back to the work of Lambertini in the eighteenth

8


century.27 Sanctity in the form that we know it is therefore an eighteenthcentury concept. There is continuity with older traditions in the sense that exemplary – later heroic – exercise of virtue became increasingly important in the papal procedures starting in the late Middle Ages.28 With the canonization of Theresa of Avila in 1602, this practice of virtue for the first time became the cardinal consideration.29 Around the same time the vita became an official document in which sainthood was programmatically recorded and the heroic exercise of virtue was presented as an example to the common faithful.30 Vauchez shows how papal investigating committees from the thirteenth century onward determined to an ever greater extent the entire ‘invention of saintliness’ – at least in those cases where an official canonization was sought. Even at that time, it should be noted, these were only a small minority, as believers for the most part simply began a veneration with no attempt being made for official recognition. In some such cases there was a Life – which served as the basis for liturgical veneration – but often this, too, was lacking. The papal investigators demanded a well-documented biography and a written report on the miracles. As a matter of fact, the emphasis came to rest more and more on the historical life of the prospective saint, his exemplary ethical deeds, and God’s gracious acknowledgment of them by means of miracles. All of this would be recorded in a programmatic vita, which contained an appeal to ordinary believers to follow his example. After Trent, therefore, when the Bollandists made an inventory of the existing dossiers of recognized and venerated saints, they concentrated on vitae of such historical persons.31 They searched for the oldest and (historically) most reliable vitae, eliminated the legendary accretions and ‘‘increase[d] the effectiveness of saints’ lives as spurs to virtuous action.’’ Thanks to them, ‘‘hagiography took on new importance as an instrument of doctrinal definition and popular instruction.’’32 As already mentioned, this culminated in Lambertini’s work in the eighteenth century. It is no mere coincidence, in my opinion, that this was the time when the Bildungsroman, and the modern novel in general, with its emphasis on the development of the protagonist, was taking form.

Medieval concepts Saints were not always moralists. Peter Brown opens his seminal book on The Cult of the Saints with the following claim: ‘‘this book is about the joining of Heaven and Earth, and the role, in this joining, of dead human beings.’’33 In his view, the place where heaven and earth come together, the locus of sanctity, and the role of relics are as important a part of the picture as the saint who is buried there. In fact, a survey of recent hagiographic research done from anthropological and comparative religious perspectives shows that there are several conceptions of sanctity – some overlapping but some conflicting as well – within Latin Christendom, and that all these conceptions contributed to a greater or lesser degree to the


9

later canonical concept. (I am restricting myself here to views within the mainstream of medieval Christianity; ideas condemned by the Church are outside the scope of this discussion.) In the Middle Ages the factual sanctity ascribed to a person, or a thing, is often a mix of various components. What were these medieval types? Central to Christian doctrine and to all conceptions of sanctity is the conviction that saints and the holy forge a link between God and humanity. This often takes place through the medium of persons, but in many cases also through objects. The holy – ‘das Heilighafte,’ as Mikoletzky called it – accrued as much to things as to persons.34 Certainly in the early Middle Ages material things enjoyed priority: the sacred space of the church edifice, the grave, the well, the oak, the relic or holy object. These exemplify the first type of holiness that I should like to identify for the medieval period: at the sacred place heaven and earth flowed together, allowing people to benefit from the power streaming from above. Believers came to the holy place to perform their devotions and beg God for a small portion of happiness in their otherwise cheerless existence. At times they were granted a glimpse of heaven. We could call this the type of the ‘power stations,’ places where the divine could be tapped.35 In the later Middle Ages, when ‘das Heilighafte’ of persons was strongly propagated by the Pope and the Church, stories cropped up everywhere about saintly persons as eponyms of these power stations, as my study ‘‘Saints without a Past’’ in this volume shows (see Chapter 3). Seldom, however, did they become people of flesh and blood in whom we can see a reflection of our own humanity. Clearly, vitae are not the most suitable sources for studies of those holy places and the miracles that took place there. As a result of the emphasis on persons in the later Middle Ages, the second concept, that of the saint as intercessor, became dominant. Dwelling in the company around the throne of God, the saint imparts God’s redemptive power to his devotees at his grave. Intercession is therefore the second characteristic in the canonical definition of sanctity. It does not always combine readily with the requirement of an exemplary life. Saints, it seems, tend to fit either one pattern or the other, that of intercession above or exemplary conduct here below. It was especially devoted servants of the Church, with their credentials for transmitting the gifts of divine grace in mass and the sacraments, who achieved the status of intercessor. Here we see the successful lobby of the earthly hierarchy. In addition there was the occasional virgin martyr. All societies had their strong and venerable virgins, as Canon Geoffrey of Sint-Oedenrode pointed out: the Romans had their Amadrides, Parcae, and Hesperides; the heathen their Musae or Vestal Virgins; and the Christians Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. The virginal state (and martyrdom) was incontestable proof of sanctity and miraculous power.36 At times the Church found it desirable to make the appropriate adjustments in the saint’s earthly life. Nip, in her contribution to this volume (see Chapter 4), shows, for example, how the married woman Godelieve gradually evolved into a pious virgin.37

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The third concept has already been mentioned, namely the quality of exemplariness: the saint as imitator of Christ and model for all believers. This is the central element in the canonical concept of sanctity. More generally, we could term this the idol concept of the saint.38 It is what saints have in common with pop stars and other idols. This type of sanctity gives scholars the chance to search for the man behind the saint, and for this reason it is the subject of several recent studies. The saints’ Lives, as compiled and touched up by the Bollandists, provide rich source material. What cannot be overlooked, however, is that many exemplary pious persons never achieved the ‘cult status.’ Many of the holy mothers of Lie`ge who are now, without a second thought, made the subject of hagiographic studies and offered to our students in Gender Studies, were never venerated, either in local cults or in the Church liturgy. In terms of ecclesiastical criteria, they were therefore not saints, not even ‘local saints.’ The same was true of Hildegard of Bingen, Dorothea of Montau, some of the ‘Unquiet Souls’ of Kieckhefer, and the ‘Prophets in their own Country’ of Kleinberg.39 While they were immensely popular in their lifetime, providing a good example and manifesting the gift of prophecy, they were not credited with the intercessor status after death. In some cases admirers among the clergy did their best to bring this about. Brenda Bolton shows in a perceptive article that James of Vitry, the famous crusade preacher and cardinal who as a young man had served as confessor to Mary of Oignies, did everything in his power to make his idol a saint after her death. He wrote a suitable Vita for Mary, wore a bone of her finger as a religious treasure around his neck, and sent golden casks to store her relics; but all this did not result in a cult.40 In terms of canon law, then, Mary did not satisfy the requirements for beatification or canonization. She was not a saint, local or otherwise, in the ecclesiastical sense. The question, however, is whether she was considered a saint by the medieval public. Gabriella Zarri has introduced the term ‘sante vive’ for holy women of this kind in sixteenth-century Italy and claims for them a living sainthood: ‘‘venerated by the people as wonder-working saints and upheld by their own followers as models for imitation, the ‘living saints’ were publicized through preaching and through the drafting of their legends – many of which, however, never made it into print.’’41 During her lifetime Mary of Oignies was indeed a living saint of this sort, as was Lutgart of Tongres and other pious beguines. Thomas of Cantimpre´, an equally famous prelate who campaigned for the canonization of Lutgart, tells the following story about her: A visitor, when asked, ‘‘Did you see that holy woman?,’’ replied, ‘‘I saw and in the way she looked at me, I was so struck through and through with such a horror of sins that it was as if it had been the Divine Majesty looking at me [my italics].’’42 Contemporaries of Lutgart apparently ascribed to her a form of sainthood. After her death Thomas, presumably in the hope of promoting a cult and a possible canonization, wrote a fine Latin Vita which forms the basis of no fewer than three vernacular versions of her Life. There are also several versions of her Latin Vita. Nevertheless, no cult


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developed around Lutgart and she did not achieve sainthood before the era of the Counter-Reformation.43 In Italy, it should be noted, the ‘sante vive’ did in many cases become the focal point of local veneration and wonder working. The two groups of women are therefore not truly comparable.44 The question remains whether we should ascribe a peculiar type of saintliness to the holy women of the Low Countries during their lifetime, a different sort from that associated with ecclesiastical sanctity after death.45 As Williams-Krapp shows (see Chapter 10), late medieval biographers in Germany and the Netherlands intentionally made no claims to ‘traditional’ sainthood for their holy women. It was therefore not a case of ‘defective’ saintliness, but a conscious choice. Were they striving for sanctity of a different sort, or could we better speak of a struggle for cultural and spiritual hegemony by aspirant laywomen, as Ashley appears to do for Margery Kempe in the English situation?46 My fourth concept is that of the saint as icon. A brief comparison will clarify what I have in mind here. A pea soup manufacturer in the Netherlands recently gained the rights to the traditional Elfstedentocht (Eleven City Ice Skating Race) for advertising purposes. This firm distributes orange skating caps, has skaters in its logo, and has made the race winner an icon: he is the person who never gives up, who sacrificed his entire life for his sport and goes through hell and high water to win. All Dutch people who wish to be part of this scene now wear that type of cap and eat pea soup. They do not have to win the Elfstedentocht to belong to this group. Nor do they have to know the life story of the winner in order to applaud him. They do not even have to know how to skate. But they do have to know the yell and stand at the sidelines when the winner comes past. Or better yet, they have to take him on their shoulders and carry him around. Popular saints function as icons in a similar way. The patron saints of cities or villages are the icon of the community. They embody the local identity. They call up pleasurable feelings of security and radiate a salutary warmth. They add a ‘festive element’47 to life. Villagers need not live as virgin martyrs themselves in order to acknowledge Dymphna as their patron; they need not even have any desire to live a chaste life. They do not have to know the life story of Arnulf in order to believe in his miraculous power. But they do have to drink his beer and carry him on their shoulders on his festive day. Many of the surviving (vernacular) texts about saints serve this icon function. Historians, in my opinion, spend far too much time examining the life story for an explanation of a saint’s popularity. As Nip shows so convincingly (Chapter 4), even the monks in Arnulf’s own monastery – the best propagandists he had and certainly the educated people of the time – did not know the life story of their patron in any detail. And in subsequent centuries, when Arnulf became the patron saint of beer brewers, they saw no need to adapt the story of his life. This anecdote also indicates that we should not be tempted by the dichotomy, so often invoked by scholars, of clergy versus

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laity, educated versus common people. Clerics and the common faithful stand hand in hand here.

The texts Hagiographic sources And now for the texts. Once again I should like to begin with a short excursion into the history of hagiographic studies. As pointed out earlier in this introduction, many scholars base their work on the ecclesiastical dossiers: the modern church lexica48 or the sources of these works, the Acta Sanctorum. The Acta Sanctorum comprise a heroic collection of saints’ Lives from the universal Church, indeed, compiled by the Bollandists from the seventeenth century onward. Up to now sixty-six volumes have appeared, with the saints appearing in calendar order. The project has now reached November 11. Impressive as it is, the dossier is far from complete.49 Because the Bollandists focus on historical persons and their ‘biographies,’ only genuine Vitae are included, and of those only the ones written in the Latin (or Greek) of the learned. Vernacular Lives and other types of source material are normally not taken into account.50 As it happens, there are relatively few complete accounts of saints’ Lives in Latin. The large majority of miracle workers, historical and legendary alike, enjoyed spontaneous veneration, without having this lead to the writing of their life story. There were very likely stories about them that circulated orally, but there was no need to put them in writing. Julia Smith’s perceptive article on local saints in Brittany shows that for most of them only material remembrances survive. These are the holy places mentioned above.51 A bell, a cross, or a stone stands there now (or did so in times past) to mark the spot where the miraculous power of the saint was localized. Saints’ Lives and legends were written down, she maintains, if it was considered necessary – if, for example, a church or a family wished to make use of a veneration for its own purposes. Detailed life stories are simply missing for many miracle workers. This has been the fate of relatively many women saints. The resulting imbalance can be demonstrated from a sample, a comparison of entries under the letter B in the Oxford Dictionary of Saints52 and in the Acta Sanctorum. For the period before 1500 there are sixty-seven names in the Oxford Dictionary, of which forty refer to English saints. Among these forty are well-known historical figures such as Bede and Queen Bathild, and legendary saints like Brandan and Bridget of Kildare. Vitae have been handed down for them, just as for some of the local saints. For only seven of them, however, were Lives included in the Acta Sanctorum, that is, one in six.53 Next to nothing is known about most of the remaining thirty-three: the name Breage is known because this nun accompanied missionaries to Cornwall, the name Blida because she was the mother of a saint, and Buryan because her name was bequeathed to a church. Brychan was the father of twelve or sixty-three saints – he is portrayed with


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them in a stained-glass window in Cornwall. None of these saints is included in Delooz’s or Weinstein and Bell’s studies because they are not found in the Acta Sanctorum. In total, there are eleven holy mothers among the local saints of England with a name beginning with B. None of them appears in the Acta Sanctorum, although five were queens or abbesses and are more or less extensively documented in other sources like Bede. In conclusion, then, the Latin corpus of the Acta Sanctorum includes only complete Vitae in Latin (or Greek) and thus comprises only a small portion of venerated saints, much smaller than is generally recognized. Saints without a vita and saints without a cult, the ‘living saints’ for example, are, with a few exceptions, simply excluded. If we wish to study sanctity from a well-founded historical perspective, we must therefore give scrupulous attention to the question of which sources should be used. We can further conclude that hagiography as the object of our studies is not a genre, that of the vita, but a discourse.54 Every text, in whatever genre, that deals with saints is a hagiographic text, and is deserving of study; or, to state it even more emphatically, every source that says something about a saint, also an image or a material object, is a hagiographic source.55 As Engels shows in his contribution to this volume (see Chapter 6), hagiographic sources are of widely varying types. They can be strictly ecclesiastical texts such as the Latin vitae, the liturgical hymns and prayers, and martyrologies. These forms of hagiography differ from dogmatic and theological texts, however, in that they enjoy a certain freedom: ‘‘Unlike texts which must be believed or practiced, [hagiography] often represents an unstable equilibrium between the credible and the incredible; it sets forth that which one is free to think or to do. Under these two aspects it creates, outside of time and rules, a ‘free’ space of new possibilities.’’56 This is even more true of non-ecclesiastical hagiographic texts such as the saint’s sermon and the devotional tract, to say nothing of the vernacular legend and religious drama. In view of these differences we must examine each text in detail to determine the intention of the author and the circle in which the text functioned. Did the author want to honor the saint as an icon of the community? Then we will have to look at the list of virtues in a very different way than if he was trying to teach his people a lesson. If the writer was the lord of a region who wished to use a saint to his own advantage, we will have to interpret his claims about the saint’s daily attendance in the lord’s chapel accordingly.57 Owing to its relative freedom, the vita displays a striking similarity to the ancient novel or, later, the short story. Zimmerman has made this comparison the object of study in her contribution to this volume (see Chapter 5).

In search of the meaning This brings us quite naturally to the problem indicated at the beginning, that of methods and techniques for adequately interpreting these sources. Using the (various) written texts as our point of departure, can we come to know

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anything about the authors and their intentions in writing, or more broadly, about the social agency affecting the invention of saintliness and the writing of the legend? Literary critics, including those who consider themselves representatives of the ‘New Historicism,’ doubt that this is possible. Once again I wish to cite Gabriella Spiegel’s thought-provoking ‘‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text.’’ Historians and philologists, she writes, should not let themselves be driven into a corner. Well trained to search for specifics – and not general symbolic meanings only – they forget that they have something special to offer, also on a theoretical level, and they should exploit their specialized skills. As Spiegel observes: Texts, as material embodiments of situated language use, reflect in their very materiality the inseparability of material and discursive practices and the need to preserve a sense of their mutual involvement and interdependence in the production of meaning. The most fruitful means of investigating this material and discursive mutuality, I would suggest, is to focus analysis on the moment of inscription, that is, on the ways in which the historical world is internalized in the text and its meaning fixed. This process of ‘inscription’ (or the fixation of meaning) is not to be confused with written in the traditional sense of ‘recorded.’ Rather, it represents the moment of choice, decision, and action that creates the social reality of the text, a reality existing both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the particular performance incorporated in the work, through the latter’s inclusions, exclusions, distortions, and stresses. In force in shaping a literary text is a host of unstated desires, beliefs, misunderstandings, and interests which impress themselves upon the work, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, but which arise from pressures that are social and not merely intertextual. Historians must insist, I think, on the importance of history itself as an active constituent of the elements that themselves constitute the text.58 It is precisely this ‘‘moment of inscription,’’ this ‘‘moment of choice, decision, and action,’’ which forms the focal point of this volume. For this reason Engels, for example, has set up his studies on Alexius in two phases. First, in his contribution to this volume, he examines the texts in terms of the evidence they offer about their historical context and about the process of inscribing sainthood in people and traditions. Only then can he analyze the meaning of these texts and text types. It is not that he, and the other authors in this volume, want to reconstruct ‘historical truth’ and place it in opposition to a subjectively known text, as an appeal to objective history that can reveal the original meaning of the text.59 There is no such historical truth or set of significant facts separate from the texts. There is, however, the constitution of significant facts,60 the process of inscribing sainthood, and the social agencies at work, which he can search for in the texts. Only then can he start to interpret the texts from a different

The invention of saintliness 61

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perspective, the ‘literary’ one, and give them meaning. For this second stage he can elaborate on the work of literary historians such as Thomas Hefferman, Edith Feistner, and Susanne Wittern.62 The main problem historians and philologists have with literary studies, as well as with anthropological research conducted along similar lines, is their focus pure and simple on interpretive generalizations, their suppression of the individual in favor of the general, their contempt for historical distinctions. Initially, historians may go along with an ostensibly sound argument. After reading Mircea Eliade, for instance, one might be convinced that every religion must have had its holy places, Christianity included. But a more historical approach, such as Markus’s review of recent work on the rise of holy places in the Holy Land (in the fourth century), shows that this is not the case.63 As has been shown above, the history of holy places in the old Germanic world is yet another story. For this reason texts from that area, too, must be individually analyzed to determine ‘‘the ways in which the historical world was internalized in the text and its meaning fixed.’’64 Angenendt, who made questions of this type the point of departure for his innovative book Heilige und Reliquien, further explores the topic of relic veneration in his contribution to this volume (see Chapter 2).65 Reneé Nip and I do the same with respect to holy places. And next to vitae we all use other kinds of sources, written texts as well as material objects, for hagiography as an object of study is, as stated already, not a genre but a discourse. Moreover, hagiographic texts often reveal surprising details about the social context which are of great importance for the problem of the invention of saintliness. To cite just one example: in a breathtaking study Laura Smoller uses the statements collected by the papal commissioners in Brittany in their search for witnesses of miracles performed by Vincent Ferrer. She analyzes all sorts of contradictions which were not relevant to the central concern of the investigation and were left standing in the reports. She demonstrates that witnesses ‘adjusted’ the miracle stories in their memory to fit familiar patterns. One witness remembered that a rescued child walked on the water, probably because the Biblical pericope of Jesus walking on the water was read in church on the following day: ‘‘her recollections mingled spiritual meditations and lived experience.’’ Other women ‘‘constructed their memories so as to highlight their own claims to social or religious authority.’’ In doing so they appeared to bypass the clergy’s traditional intercessory role.66 Observations like these about the social agency contribute greatly to a scrupulous investigation of the invention of saintliness. Until now scholars in search of social agency – probably in the wake of the Bollandists and their search for the historical person behind the saint – have mostly fixed their attention on other matters. They have investigated historical persons, at least persons localized in time, in whose lives they could track down clues for their later status of sainthood. What they are actually engaged in is historical, not hagiographic, research. Studies like those of Weinstein and Bell or Goodich examine the careers and ways of life of persons who were

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declared saints (long) after their death.67 They ferret out when these (often legendary) persons may have lived and what they may have done, not what finally made them saints; and only in passing do they mention whether a cult developed around them and when their saints’ Lives were written. Research into sainthood is actually still a young discipline, with many questions waiting to be addressed: Who was in fact venerated in what time? Who, in other words, was stored in the collective memory of a given society?68 What was the ratio of men to women among the saints who were actually venerated in a certain region or time? For which saints was there a holiday?69 About which saints were texts available, which were portrayed in the parish church, which appeared in mystery plays? How much attention was in fact paid to each one?70 In view of the great popularity of Mary and Mary Magdalene, and virgin saints such as Agnes, Catherine, and Barbara, the ‘imbalance’ between men and women, for example, could have been experienced quite differently in the Middle Ages from what we would imagine today.71

The social agency Now that the study of hagiography has freed itself from confessional and church historical frameworks, saints no longer form a constant. They are not a corpus of elect who bear the mark of God on their forehead and go their way, untouchable, through history. They have become ordinary persons whom people around them at a given time recognized as saints, as elect. Saintliness has become a matter of bystanders and onlookers, a question of perceived holiness. The onlookers are not only clerics and Church authorities – these are in fact almost never the ones involved in the initial stages. The potential saint himself, and the common faithful around him, come first. Nor do these bystanders show some automatic concern for a canonically pure saintliness. They are interested in completely different issues. Gallistl, for example, shows in his ‘‘Bernward of Hildesheim: A Case of Self-Planned Sainthood?’’ (see Chapter 7) how around the year 1000 Bishop Bernward made use of traditional and new components of sanctity in order to work toward his own future election. The sacred nature of the office of bishop, his political contribution to the Renovatio (sacri) Imperii, the construction of his own burial church (which amounted to creating for himself memoria which for centuries had been closely associated with the veneration of saints) were elements consciously manipulated to that end. Francis of Assisi worked in a totally different way on his own sanctification. For him, as Roest shows (see Chapter 8), the central instrument to saintliness was the sanctification of the body. Later his biographer, the theologian Bonaventura, would set forth the theological and devotional ramifications of this sanctification of the body. The study of Van ‘t Spijker (see Chapter 9) shows how in the hagiographical writings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, elements of the inner struggle of putative saints – their doubt, their inner conflicts and despair – began to be


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integrated into hagiography. The intellectual struggle here forms part of the mirror of their sanctity. These are only a few examples of the process of inscribing saintliness, both by the saint himself and by the learned hagiographers, as they can be distilled from the hagiographic sources (again, not only the vitae, not even only the written sources, but also church buildings, other artifacts and, in Francis’s case, the body). Certainly in the late Middle Ages, the common faithful were selfconfident members of the Christian community who felt they could claim for themselves as much access to the sacred as the clergy. They had their own devotional circles meeting in their homes, their own Books of Hours, and their own confraternities. Most importantly, they had their own parish. John van Engen has rightly pointed out that parishes, the heart of local religious life, often owed their existence to local initiatives: ‘‘most grew slowly out of the needs or interests (spiritual as well as financial) of local communities and almost never from any hierarchical masterplan.’’72 My impression is that it was also on this level that the struggle about saintliness was waged. Not the Vatican in Rome but the village parish, the ordinary believers and the village priest, rooted in ecclesiastical tradition and popular culture, were the locus of religious contention.73 Only in a later stage did theologians and Doctors of the Church have the chance to decide whether or not to slot the veneration which had arisen around a saint into the Church tradition. The local patron saint as soul and icon of the community – that was the heart of the matter. Perhaps the research strategy of Brian Stock can be helpful in addressing the question of social agency at the parish level in particular. The term ‘textual communities’ suggests itself here: microsocieties organized around the common understanding of a (written or otherwise transmitted) tradition.74 We would then have to seek out answers, as the authors in this volume try to do, to the questions of how potential saints themselves, their surroundings, and their confessors – and perhaps later admirers and Church authorities as well – responded to the call of God, to subsequent events and the memories of them, to the tradition and the types of sanctity that offered themselves as patterns for modeling the memories. In this context we would also have to investigate how the faithful created from all this a saint who fitted the religious wishes of the community and who could be fitted into the tradition of the Church – the inscribing of saintliness. A follow-up study should then explore how the same or different groups were instrumental in expanding the initial recognition into a regional, or in some cases even universal, cult, and how, in later centuries, new stories were composed and old ones were given new meanings. By way of conclusion, we can look again at the questions raised at the beginning of this introduction. In historical and literary research on the Middle Ages, the canonical definition of sanctity cannot serve as the (exclusive) framework for studies devoted to saints. An exemplary life followed by a canonization, a cult, and a liturgical veneration are not decisive criteria. And

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it will certainly not do to merely ask whether a person heroically exercised virtue throughout his life. Using specified hagiographic sources, we will have to determine for each textual community individually how the inscribing of saintliness took place, who were the social agencies involved, and which components were decisive. Nor can we limit our research to hagiography defined as the genre of saints’ Lives and legends (and collected in the Acta Sanctorum). Hagiography is not a genre but a discourse. All genres that have saints as their subject are hagiographic sources. This means that hagiographic and historiographic sources, images, and artifacts are all potential sources for research. We will have to study them with all the technical skills that we possess, keeping in mind the advice of Spiegel but not shunning the methodology of literary criticism. The task is not an easy one, but well worth undertaking. Translation by Myra Scholz

Notes I would like to thank Reneé Nip, Ineke van ‘t Spijker, Bert Roest, and Bernhard Scholz for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I am also grateful to the Humanities Faculty of Groningen University for enabling me to spend three months in Rome, where I profited from inspiring discussions with colleagues such as Sofia Boesch Gajano and Francesco Scorza Barcellona. 1 Codex Iuris Canonici Pii X Pontifici Maximi iussu digestus Benedicti Papae XIV auctoritate promulgatus, . . . IV, ii, 24, 2101–24: ed. P. C. Gasparri, Rome, Vatican, 1918 and Freiburg, Herder, 572–6. The category of the martyrs, a distinct group of saints, is left aside in the following. 2 P. Lambertini, Opus de Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione, Rome, Vatican, 1734–8 and revised edition Padua, Manfre, 1743. 3 L. Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987; M. Brownlee et al. (eds), The New Medievalism, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1991; J. van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1994; H. Bloch et al. (eds), Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1996. Quotation from K. Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, 1. 4 J. LeGoff et al. (eds), La Nouvelle Histoire, Paris, CEPL, 1978; P. Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; J. Hamesse (ed.), Bilan et Perspectives des E´tudes Me´die´vales en Europe, Louvain-la-Neuve, Fe´deration internationale des Instituts d’E´tudes me´die´vales, 1995, and the volumes quoted in the remainder of this introduction. 5 In a sense the study of saints finds itself in a position similar to that of the study of women. See B. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998. That is perhaps why fine and inspiring studies of saints have been done from a Gender Studies perspective. See C. M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 6 G. G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Hanover, NH, Wesleyan University Press, 1997, 23–30. 7 See A. J. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. J. Bak et al., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, 39–77. But see also B. Roest, ‘‘Church and Laity in the Later Middle Ages: A Short Essay on Models and Perspectives in Medieval Religious History,’’ Theoretische Geschiedenis, 25 (1998), 78–87, and K. Schreiner, ‘‘Laienfro¨mmigkeit – Fro¨mmigkeit von Eliten oder Fro¨mmigkeit des Volkes? Zur sozialen Verfasstheit laikaler Fro¨mmigkeitspraxis im spa¨ten Mittelalter,’’ in K. Schreiner and E.


8

9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

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Mu¨ller-Luckner (eds), Laienfro¨mmigkeit im spa¨ten Mittelalter: Formen, Funktionen, politisch-soziale Zusammenha¨nge (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs 20), Munich, Oldenbourg, 1992, 1–78. See the studies of G. Althoff, who was himself trained in the German tradition of medieval scholarship with its disdain for chronicles and saints’ Lives but who has now left this behind; for example in his Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue: Zum politischen Stellenwert der Gruppenbindungen im fru¨heren Mittelalter, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990. Th. Mertens, ‘‘De geestelijke literatuur tussen theologie en filologie,’’ in F. P. van Oostrom and W. van Anrooij (eds), Misselike tonghe: De Middelnederlandse letterkunde in interdisciplinair verband, Amsterdam, Prometheus, 1991, 130–41, here 132, observes a disdain for the Middle Dutch devotional texts with its lack of ‘‘schone vorm, esthetiek en zijn inferieure boodschap.’’ Dutch medievalists of past generations did not demean themselves by dealing with the ‘‘onsmakelijke walgelijkheden’’ of saints’ Lives and legends. Members of Hagiographic Societies in Europe and the US, convening in Groningen, The Netherlands, in summer 2000, have decided therefore to organize a special conference devoted to this topic (scheduled for 2003 in New York). J. Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, 6: ‘‘Modern scholars normally turn to Delehaye [author of The Legends of the Saints] and the Bollandists when they want reliable information about saints and their cults or a modern edition of a hagiographic work, but for the facet of hagiographical research that Delehaye would consider his and the Bollandists’ farthest reaching contribution – that is, developing a methodology by which all the sources can be soundly investigated – scholars look elsewhere, if they look at all.’’ But see D. LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1983. An example: R. Boyer, ‘‘An Attempt to Define the Typology of Medieval Hagiography,’’ in H. Bekker-Nielson et al. (eds), Hagiography and Medieval Literature, Odense, Odense University Press, 1981, 27–39. G. M. Spiegel, ‘‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text,’’ in idem (ed.), The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1997, 4. And see hereafter in the paragraph ‘‘In Search of the Meaning.’’ Ibid., 21. For D. von der Nahmer, Die lateinische Heiligenvita: Eine Einfu¨hrung in die lateinische Hagiographie, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994, 130, hagiography is the study of the historical person about whom the hagiographer has written a life story. If the hagiographer comes with fantasies, he is not worth our attention. About vitae of fictional saints he says, for example: ‘‘Der Historiker ko¨nnte diese Texte als Curiosa jener Zeit den Literaturhistorikern u¨berlassen,’’ except for any information they contain about factual saints’ days, relics, etc. In this context, Bert Roest called my attention to Hayden V. White, The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representations, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1987, 66: ‘‘the subordination of historical narrative to the deliberate mode of the middle style entails exclusions, and had implications for the kind of events that can be represented in narrative. Excluded are the kinds of events traditionally conceived to be the stuff of religious belief and ritual (miracles, magical events, godly events) on the one side, and the kinds of ‘grotesque’ events that are the stuff of farce, satire, and calumny, on the other.’’ Cf. J. Dubois and J.-L. Lemaıˆ tre, Sources et me´thodes de l’hagiographie me´dievale, Paris, Cerf, 1993. O. G. Oexle and J. Ru¨rgen (eds), Historismus in den Kulturwissenschaften: Geschichtskonzepte, historische Einscha¨tzungen, Grundlagenprobleme (Beitra¨ge zur Geschichtskultur 12), Cologne and Vienna, Bo¨hlau, 1996; Th. Hertfelder, ‘‘Neue Ansichten vom Historismus,’’ Historisches Jahrbuch, 118 (1998), 361–73, who notes that ‘‘to the amazement of German historians,’’ New Historicism has existed in the United States for no less than 20 years, and G. Scholtz (ed.), Historizismus am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine internationale Diskussion, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1997, where a first cautious attempt is made to inventory this movement. B. Bedos-Rezak, ‘‘Diplomatic Sources and Medieval Documentary Practices: An Essay in Interpretive Methodology,’’ in Van Engen, 1994, 313–43, here 324 and 333. But see the excellent work done in some of the ‘‘Sonderforschungsbereiche’’ as cited hereafter. Th. Mertens and W. F. Scheepsma (eds), Boeken voor de eeuwigheid: Middelnederlands geestelijk proza, Amsterdam, Prometheus, 1993, 8, has calculated that 70–80 per cent of all Middle Dutch manuscripts handed down to us contain religious and devotional texts. For France the percentage is much lower, but even there it is 30–40 per cent.

20


21 R. R. Post, Kerkgeschiedenis van Nederland in de Middeleeuwen, 2 vols, 2, Utrecht and Antwerp, Spectrum, 1957, 237. My translation. 22 See the seminal work of F. Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merovinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merovingerzeit, Prague, Nat. Cesk. Akademie Ved, 1965. His ‘‘Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Hagiographie der Merovinger- und Karolingerzeit: Die Viten der Heiligen des su¨dalemannischen Raumes und die sogenannten Adelsheiligen,’’ Vortra¨ge und Forschungen, 20 (1974), 131–76, is still programmatic. 23 P. Delooz, Sociologie et canonisations, The Hague, Mouton, 1969. Cf. his ‘‘Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church,’’ in S. Wilson (ed.), Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 189–216. 24 D. Weinstein and R. M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom 1000– 1700, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, who attempt much broader generalizations, blindly follow Delooz in this matter. They simply took every other saint of Delooz’s dossier, with the result that their selection is not very convincing. Cf. M. Goodich, Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 25), Stuttgart, Hiersemann, 1982. The series of G. Philippart, Hagiographies: Histoire internationale de la litte´rature hagiographique latine et vernaculaire en Occident des origines a` 1550, Turnhout, Brepols, 1994–; and the relevant volumes in the Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age occidental, dir. L. Geńicot, Turnhout, Brepols, 1972–, remain similarly bound to the framework of canon law. 25 A. Vauchez, La saintete´ en Occident aux derniers sie`cles du Moyen Age: d’apre`s les proce`s de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, Rome, Ećole française, 1981, 2nd ed., 1988; now also available in English translation: Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell, introd. R. Kieckhefer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. 26 A. H. Bredero, ‘‘God en zijn heiligen,’’ in idem (ed.), Christenheid en Christendom in de Middeleeuwen: over de verhouding van godsdienst, kerk en samenleving, Kok, Kampen, 1986, 284–98. 27 See note 2. 28 Cf. M. Heinzelmann, ‘‘Sanktitas und ‘Tugendadel’: Zu Konzeptionen von ‘Heiligkeit’ im 5. und 10. Jahrhundert,’’ Francia, 5 (1977), 741–52. 29 See R. De Maio, ‘‘L’ideale eroico nei processi di canonizzazione della Controriforma,’’ Ricerche di Storia Sociale e Religiosa, 2 (1972), 139–60. See also the fine study by G. T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1996. 30 In addition to Vauchez’s large work, see also: ‘‘Saints admirables et saints imitables: les fonctions de l’hagiographie ont-elles change´ aux derniers sie`cles du Moyen Age?,’’ in Les Fonctions des Saints dans le Monde Occidental (iiie–xiiie sie`cles) (Collection de l’Ećole française de Rome 149), Rome, Ećole française, 1991, 161–72. 31 The twentieth-century Bollandist Hipolyte Delehaye – perhaps the greatest scholar among the erudite Bollandists – noted in his study The Work of the Bollandists through Three Centuries, 1615–1915, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1922, 91–4, 209, that the originators of the Acta Sanctorum, particularly Bollandus himself and Papebroch, still had an eye for the literary value of some historically less reliable vitae; however: ‘‘After Papebroch, the editors failed only too often to preserve the breadth of mind he showed in this matter as in so many others. Nevertheless, it was no longer an anxiety for edification which prompted this increased severity, but a too exclusive desire to give first place to historical matter.’’ Cf. his own The Legends of the Saints, trans. D. Attwater, New York, Fordham University Press, 1962. 32 S. Ditchfield, ‘‘Sanctity in Early Modern Italy,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 47 (1996), 98– 112, and his Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Campi and the Preservation of the Particular, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Cf. G. Barone et al. (eds), Modelli di santita` e modelli di comportamento (Sacro/Santo 10), Turin, Rosenberg and Sellier, 1994. 33 P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981. Although this book provoked a great deal of criticism, its central idea has not been undermined. See also M. van Uytfanghe, ‘‘L’origine, l’essor et les fonctions du culte des saints. Quelques repe`res pour un de´bat rouvert,’’ Cassiodorus, 2 (1996), 143–96 and J. Howard-Johnston and P. A. Hayward (eds), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown, Oxford, Oxford Universiry Press, 1999. 34 H. Mikoletzky, ‘‘Sinn und Art der Heiligung im fru¨hen Mittelalter,’’ Mitteilungen des Instituts fu¨r O¨sterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 57 (1949), 83–122, here 83; and P. Geary, ‘‘The Ninth-


35 36

37 38 39

40 41

42

43

44 45

46

47 48 49

50

21

Century Relic Trade: A Response to Popular Piety?’’ in J. Obelkevich (ed.), Religion and the People (800–1700), Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1979, 8–19. Cf. E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altar: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992, 175. J. van der Straeten, ‘‘Sainte Ode, patronne de Sint-Oedenrode,’’ Analecta Bollandiana, 76 (1958), 68–118 with an Epistola apologetica, 110–17, here 114. See also my own contribution to this volume (Chapter 3). One may argue that the martyrium, the category of blood martyrs and victims who died a violent death, has to be reintroduced here as a distinct subcategory of sanctity, also for the medieval period. See note 2. See the contribution of Reneé Nip to this volume. J.-C. Schmitt (ed.), Les Saints et les stars: Le texte hagiographique dans la culture populaire, Paris, Beauchesne, 1983; W. Frijhoff, Heiligen, Idolen, Iconen, Nijmegen, Sun, 1998. See the contributions of Gallistl, Van ‘t Spijker, and Roest to this volume. R. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984; A. M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992; C. Ruhrberg, Der Literarische Ko¨rper der Heiligen: Leben und Viten der Christina von Stommeln, 1242–1312 (Bibliotheca Germanica 35), Tu¨bingen, Francke, 1995. B. Bolton, ‘‘Spiegels van vroomheid: Relieken van Maria van Oignies,’’ in M. Monteiro et al. (eds), De dynamiek van religie en cultuur: Geschiedenis van het Nederlands katholicisme (Festschrift M. Spierts), Kampen, Kok, 1993, 124–37. G. Zarri, ‘‘Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,’’ in D. Bornstein et al. (eds), Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, 219–304, here 225, based on her Le sante vive: Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ’400 e ’500, Turin, Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990. Thomas Cantipratanus, Vita Lutgardi, 2, 27: ed. Acta Sanctorum [AASS], 16 Junii, 3rd ed., Paris and Rome, 1846, vol. 24, 187–210, here 201: ‘‘Vidisti, ait, illam sanctam mulierem?,’’ trans. M. H. King, The Life of Lutgart of Aywie`res by Thomas de Cantimpre´, Saskatoon, Peregrina, 1987, 56. Cf. E. Mantingh, ‘‘De derde man: Op zoek naar Willem van Affligem, auteur van het Leven van Lutgart,’’ in J. D. Janssens (ed.), Op Avontuur: Middeleeuwse epiek in de Lage Landen, Amsterdam, Prometheus, 1998, 159–78 and his Een monnik met een rol: Willem van Affligem, het Kopenhaagse ‘‘Leven van Lutgart’’ en de fictie van een meerdaagse voorlezing, Hilversum, Verloren, 2000. See Vauchez, 1981, in particular 254–6. In the Early Church and in the Orthodox East the transition from living saint to venerated dead was much less complicated than in Western Europe. See M. S. Burrows, ‘‘On the Visibility of God in the Holy Man: A Reconsideration of the Role of the Apa in the Pachomian Vitae,’’ Vigiliae Christianae, 41 (1987), 11–33, and J. M. Peterson, ‘‘Dead or Alive? The Holy Man as Healer in East and West in the Late Sixth Century,’’ Journal of Medieval History, 9 (1983), 91–8, here 91. K. Ashley, ‘‘Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,’’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28 (1998), 371–88. See the contribution by W. WilliamsKrapp to this volume. Cf. J.-P. Albert, Le sang et le Ciel: Les saintes mystiques dans le monde chre´tien, Paris, Aubier, 1997 and A. Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. I will come back to this in my forthcoming book on Dutch recluses. M. de Certeau, ‘‘Hagiographie,’’ in Encyclopaedia Universalis, VIII, Paris, Encyclopaedia Universalis France, 1975, 207–9, here 208. See for instance Butler’s Lives of the Saints, various editions; Les Vies des Saints, better known as the ‘Petits Bollandists,’ 15 vols, Paris, Bloud, 1874; Biblioteca Sanctorum, 13 vols, Rome, Pontificia Universita` Lateranense, 1961–70. Compare for this the many saints’ Lives edited in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, which are not edited in the Acta Sanctorum. Levison and the other Monumenta editors are, by the way, even more strictly focusing on historical data than the Bollandists. But see note 31. Since 1887 the Bollandists have applied the original criteria much less strictly; nevertheless, many saints are still excluded. Notwithstanding this, the Bollandists participate fully in the scholarly debate by means of their journal Analecta Bollandiana, which has

22

51 52 53

54 55 56

57

58 59 60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker appeared since 1882. Yet the Italian group of hagiographic scholars considered it necessary to found their own academic periodical Hagiographica (1995–). J. M. H. Smith, ‘‘Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles and Relics in Brittany, c. 850–1250,’’ Speculum, 65 (1990), 309–43. D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 1978, 3rd ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, 36–75. C. A. Lees, ‘‘Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England,’’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), 17–45, here note 45. Lees investigated many Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives, none of which has been considered in general studies. Her conclusion: ‘‘A consideration of this period of sanctity would modify considerably the parameters of the discussion of sanctity, femininity, and sexuality now concentrated on the later medieval period.’’ M. J. M. van Uytfanghe, ‘‘L’Hagiographie: Un ‘genre’ chre´tien ou antique tardif?,’’ Analecta Bollandiana, 111 (1993), 135–88; De Certeau, 1975. See also the contribution of Zimmerman to this volume. See the contribution of Angenendt to this volume. De Certeau, 1975, 208: ‘‘a` la diffe´rence des textes qu’il faut croire ou pratiquer, elle repre´sente souvent un e´quilibre instable entre le croyable et l’incroyable; elle propose ce qu’il est loisible de penser ou de faire. Sous ces deux aspects, elle creé, hors du temps et de la re`gle, un espace de ‘vacance’ et de possibilite´s neuves.’’ Cf. S. Coue´, Hagiographie im Kontext: Schreibanlass und Funktion von Bischofsviten aus dem 11. und vom Anfang des 12. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1997; Th. Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orleáns, 800–1200, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; F. Prinz, ‘‘Hagiographie als Kultpropaganda: Die Rolle der Auftraggeber und Autoren hagiographischer Texte des Fru¨hmittelalters,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Kirchengeschichte, 103 (1992), 174–94. Spiegel, 1997, 25–6. As L. Patterson phrased it in ‘‘Historical Criticism and the Claims of Humanism,’’ in idem, 1987, 44. See e.g. the ‘negotiation’ of the Canons of Saint Oda’s Chapter and other believers on the ‘factual’ question of whether Oda had been a virgin – the only acceptable state for the Canons – or a mother or widow as others suggested. See Van der Straeten, 1958. The fine analysis of the Vita Romani by Felice Lifshitz demonstrates what this means in practice. She carefully disentangles what the author, Fulbert of Jumie`ges, himself must have brought in, what is a reflection of oral traditions, and – by taking into account the scarce archival and material sources (the floodings) – what can be attributed to the historical context in which (Viking) Normans and Christian monks shaped their wonder-working patron saint. See F. Lifshitz, The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics (684–1090) (Studies and Texts 122), Toronto, Pontifical Institute, 1995, 137– 79. Th. J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988; E. Feistner, Historische Typologie der deutschen Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters von der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts bis zur Reformation, Wiesbaden, Reichert Verlag, 1995; S. Wittern, Frauen, Heiligkeit und Macht: Lateinische Frauenviten aus dem 4. bis 7. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1994. R. A. Markus, ‘‘How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2 (1994), 257–71. Spiegel, 1997, 25–6 as quoted above. A. Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien: Die Geschichte ihre Kultes vom fru¨hen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart, Munich, Beck, 1994. L. A. Smoller, ‘‘Miracle, Memory, and Meaning in the Canonization of Vincent Ferrer, 1453–1454,’’ Speculum, 73 (1998), 429–54, here 442 and 452–3. See note 24. P. Geary, ‘‘Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal,’’ in S. Sticca (ed.), Saints: Studies in Hagiography, Binghamton, NY, Binghamton, 1996, 1–22, here 14. H. L. M. Defoer et al., Rijksmuseum het Catharijneconvent: Tekst en Uitleg, 2nd ed., Utrecht, Catharijneconvent, 1982, 13–19 give a calendar of the bishopric of Utrecht from the year 1475 and calculate that a ‘construction worker’ was given 46 free days for saints’ celebrations, not including the major church holidays and All Souls; this comes to approximately the same number of free days a construction worker had in 1975.


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70 See for research of this kind the thought-provoking book of Duffy, 1992. Cf. the attempts to investigate the importance attached to saints by ordinary believers in G. Lobrichon, ‘‘L’engendrement des saints: le de´bat des savants et la re´vendication d’une saintete´ exemplaire en France du Nord au xie et au de´but du xiie sie`cle,’’ in Les Fonctions des saints, 1991, 143–60. 71 Cf. K. A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1997; S. Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. 72 J. van Engen, ‘‘The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,’’ American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 519–52, here 542. 73 We may recall what still happens in Italy today, for instance in the case of Padre Pio. 74 B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983; and his Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1990, 23. Perhaps the study of D. Robertson, The Medieval Saints’ Lives: Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature, Lexington, KY, French Forum, 1995, which was not available to me, would also provide good leads.

Part II

Contexts The cult of saints and the invention of saintliness

2

Relics and their veneration in the Middle Ages Arnold Angenendt

If one wishes to understand, and not simply condemn, the medieval cult of relics, it is advisable to go a long way back in religious history, since there we find an abundance of parallel material. Klaus E. Mu¨ller, for instance, writes in his Ethnological Primer on the inheritance of the ‘ancients’: Special garments worn by them, insignia such as maces or ceremonial weapons carried by them, the bowl that they used to drink from, and above all, of course, parts of the incorruptible elements of their own bodies, such as nails and hairs, teeth, certain bones, even the entire skull, may therefore be preserved after their death and treasured as relics. They may be worn as a kind of amulets, deposited in special places. . . . They then come to function, so to speak, as little ‘accumulators,’ from which at all times, and especially in crisis situations, power can be drawn.1 Behind it lies the worship of ancestors, in which, as Mu¨ller says, the earliest forefather was ‘‘the first man ever.’’2 His race was the first to set foot in the country and thus became the ‘‘founding family.’’3 The grave of the founding ancestor remained at the center, since that was where he continued to be present, and therefore it formed the place of worship and assembly, and also guaranteed regeneration as well as the administration of justice. Consequently this is where ‘‘the hearth and the sacred communal fire were localized, the altars were built, the cult requisites, sacred musical instruments, . . . ancestral skulls and other relics, idols, magical stones, ‘medicines,’ etc., had their place.’’4 The presence and vitality of such buried ancestors also appears in that ‘‘on the basis of their skeleton, which in that case had to be largely intact, they could be called back to life.’’5 These beliefs found perhaps their most significant expression in Chinese culture. As regards death, it was held that: A continued individual existence in another mode of being is part of the general belief and especially the basis of the cult of ancestors. . . . Rich burial gifts are an expression of the notion that in their new existence the

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Arnold Angenendt dead have fundamentally the same wants, physical as well as emotional and spiritual, as in their earthly life. Grave libraries, for example, are intended to provide the accustomed reading matter in this world for the hereafter as well. . . . The dead are believed to have a power which might even exceed their earthly capacities. They can intervene directly in earthly existence, beneficially or by way of revenge. . . . Finally the ‘idea’ of their physical appearance must even have been conceived of as something that is preserved, for they can appear to the living in their accustomed shape. Corporeality seems to have been something that could to a certain extent be ‘reactivated.’6

The cult of ancestors appears in all stages of Chinese religion: The excavations of the royal necropolis in the vicinity of the capital Anyang testify to the magnificent splendor and the bloody rituals accompanying the burials of the kings of the Shang period. The center of the tomb consisted of a deep rectangular pit. In the middle of this pit a sacrificial cavity was dug, in which a dog and an adult man were sacrificed, who were presumably intended to assist the dead king in his hunting in the spirit world. Over the sacrificial cavity the coffin was placed, which was made of heavy wood. . . . [Here] the sacrificial gifts were deposited, which could consist of goods for the dead and magnificent bronze vessels inscribed with dedications, of axes, heads of spears and arrows, bronze helmets, figures carved from jade and ivory, or shells as well as of sacrificed animals and human beings.7 A remarkable manifestation of these ideas is also to be found in Egypt: [The body] is embalmed, and this enables the deceased to reach the hereafter uncorrupted. Should the body nevertheless have sustained damage, it will be fully healed on the other side by specially qualified gods. Even crippled and blind persons or people who have incurred other disabilities during life are healed after death in the hereafter. . . . The whole or healed person then experiences, with the help of the sun god, his resurrection. . . . As soon as the deceased rises from the dead, he assumes his earthly shape, is united with his Ba (and his shadow), and becomes a living ‘flesh,’ a sarx.8 In connection with the medieval veneration of relics we should also mention the fact that ‘‘the human body was not seen as an organism, but as a composite of its members,’’ and that ‘‘the individual members functioned as independent actors.’’9 All these phenomena, from the founder’s grave to the uncorrupted body and to the acting capacity of the individual members of the body, we will meet again in the medieval cult of relics.


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In early Christianity, however, the general religious and theological conditions necessary for a cult of relics were absent. To Paul the body is a ‘‘body of this death’’ (Romans 7,24; AV), ‘‘corruptible’’ and ‘‘earthy.’’ Yet Christianity did not favor a disembodied soul, but rather hoped for a resurrected body, which, however, would be ‘‘incorruptible’’ and ‘‘heavenly’’ (at 1 Cor. 15,44 the Vulgate contrasts a corpus animale and a corpus spirituale).10 Luke describes the death of Jesus as a giving-up of the ghost and a commending of the spirit to the Father (Luke 23,46); his buried body did not see corruption (Acts 2,31; cf. Ps. 16[15], 10). Consequently the resurrection was the reunion of the soul with the uncorrupted body.11 In the anti-gnostic polemic orthodoxy emphasized that the earthly body was to be taken up into the glorified body and thus pushed into the background the Pauline ‘‘putting on of immortality,’’ by which ‘‘this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality’’ (1 Cor. 15,53). In this way Christians hoped for the resurrection of the earthly body. As it was said in Job 19,26 (but only according to the Vulgate): ‘‘I shall be wrapped in my skin again and in my flesh I shall behold God.’’12 Of the earliest memorable figures such as Stephen, Peter, Paul, or Mary, no relics have been preserved.13 The martyrdom of Polycarpus (d. AD 156) was the first at which the martyr’s bones were collected, since they were considered more valuable than precious stones or gold.14 This was the start of a cult of martyrs which involved the grave as well as the body, bones, and blood. The primary basis for this veneration lay in the idea that the soul in heaven was linked with its body on earth, which was to be renewed in the resurrection, but even now was irradiated and infused with a heavenly dynamis/virtus (often understood as a mana-like force). Consequently, contact with the earthly body mediated the heavenly power contained in it.15 Augustine, who thought of the earthly body, even with its cut-off nails and hairs, as merging into the body of the resurrection, already began to record the miracles taking place at graves and relics.16 A starting date was fixed by Ambrose, when on 17 June 386 he was the first in the West to open a martyr’s grave and translate the bones to the altar of a church.17 He consciously established a correspondence between heaven and earth: as the souls of the martyrs had their abode under the heavenly altar (Rev. 6,9), so their bodies resided under the earthly altar. The link between the relics’ grave and the altar became essential. Rome, however, maintained the principle dating from pre-Christian times that a grave was to remain sacrosanct, and that consequently opening it and transferring its contents were not permitted.18 In order to link heaven and earth in spite of this law, Gregory the Great had the choir of St Peter’s Church rebuilt: since the sarcophagus had to remain undisturbed, the floor of the choir was raised so as to make it possible for the upper part of the Constantine monument over Saint Peter’s grave to serve as the altar. The circular crypt which was built under the raised floor made the grave accessible without interfering with it.19

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Arnold Angenendt

In Gaul translations followed the pattern set by Ambrose, although with an addition which was soon accepted in the whole of Western Christendom and then also in Rome: the coffin was placed on a raised platform behind the altar and at right angles to it; the saint’s head came to lie in the West, so that he could face Christ as he came again from the East.20 The reasons for this ‘elevation to the honor of the altars,’ since it destroyed the correspondence between heaven and earth, must have been compelling, but are scarcely indicated. It remained fundamental that the soul in heaven was in contact with the body on earth, and communicated the heavenly power (virtus) of the soul to the body.21 Scholars have rightly spoken of a ‘‘real presence of the saints in their relics and graves,’’22 and this could even enter into competition with the eucharistic real presence.23 The presence of the saints’ virtus in relics affirmed itself in a special manner in the ‘whole’ and ‘uncorrupted’ body. This reactivated the idea, fundamental for those religions which bury, rather than burn, corpses, that the bones are the seat of life and that their undamaged preservation is a condition for their resurrection. In Christian circles two psalm verses were cited, Ps. 34[33],21: ‘‘He [the Lord] keepeth all his [i.e. the righteous man’s] bones: not one of them is broken,’’ and Ps. 16[15],10: ‘‘neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption.’’ The idea that God is able to preserve all bones whole and uncorrupted led to the ‘legend of the indestructible life,’ according to which the bodies of those martyred were miraculously restored and the bodies of certain saints remained uncorrupted.24 It was said already of the martyr Nazarius, whom Ambrose elevated, that his blood had flowed out so fresh as if it had just been shed, and the severed head had been so ‘‘whole’’ (integrum) and ‘‘uncorrupted’’ (incorruptum), with the hairs and beard still on it, as if it had only just been washed and laid in its grave.25 The phenomenon of the ‘whole’ and ‘uncorrupted’ body, which rests on sporadic cases of bodies remaining uncorrupted, and which was considered in ancient Egypt with its mummified corpses as a condition for a continuation of life in the hereafter, was interpreted in the Middle Ages, with reference to the ‘‘incorruptio’’ (1 Cor. 15,42) which the faithful hoped to attain at the resurrection, as an anticipatory sign of grace. Paul the Deacon (d. 787), at the translation of Saint Benedict from Monte Cassino to Fleury, argued that only the Lord’s body had not seen corruption; all other corpses were subject to corruption, with the exception, however, of those that had been preserved without a stain through a divine miracle.26 Such corpses were ‘‘whole,’’ ‘‘as if untouched,’’ even ‘‘as if still alive,’’ ‘‘only asleep,’’ with ‘‘fresh blood’’ and a ‘‘rose or lily-colored countenance.’’27 Examples are the martyr-bishop Lambert (d. 705/706), who showed a ‘‘worthy and blissful body, firm and unstained.’’ The body of the AngloSaxon hermit Sola (d. 794) at Solnhofen proved to be, even after many years, ‘‘whole’’ and ‘‘uncorrupted,’’ as if of an ‘‘extraordinary freshness.’’ The corpse of Saint Otmar (d. 759), abbot of St Gall, was ‘‘untouched by any kind of corruption.’’ The best-known instances are the reports on the


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opening of Charlemagne’s grave at Aachen by Otto III: Charlemagne was found sitting on his throne, and Otto ordered his finger nails, which had grown through the glove, to be cut off. Of Charlemagne’s body nothing was corrupted; only a small part of the tip of his nose was missing, and Otto had it restored. Finally the young emperor extracted a tooth from Charlemagne’s mouth.28 Of special importance for incorruption was absence of sexual stain: the ideas on cultic cleanness which were revived in the early Middle Ages were narrowed to sexual defilement (pollutio),29 and caused above all the sexually abstinent, who had remained undefiled, to have an uncorrupted corpse. According to Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1166), among the virtues chastity was pre-eminent because it did not only signify a quality of the soul, but ‘‘raises the corruptible flesh to a certain incorruptibility, and allows a foretaste of the sweetness of the future resurrection.’’30 Aelred is referring to bodies of saints which had been found uncorrupted, as he himself had found King Edward the Confessor to be when his grave was opened.31 In Anglo-Saxon Christendom itself there was an example which continued to be cited from early times throughout the Middle Ages: the abbess Æthelthryth,32 an East Anglian king’s daughter and founder of the convent of Ely. Her body was found ‘‘uncorrupt,’’33 and ‘‘the divine miracle whereby her flesh would not corrupt after she was buried was token and proof that she had remained uncorrupted by contact with any man.’’34 More pointed is the wording of Eddi Stephanus, the biographer of Wilfred of York (d. 709/710): Regina Aethildrythe, cuius corpus vivens ante impollutum, post mortem incorruptum manens;35 our hagiographer is able to boast of his own saint that his body had remained integer from his mother’s womb.36 In general, corpore et mente integer is among the virtues which are constantly cited but not really investigated.37 The holy corpse caused the saints’ graves to radiate sacrality. Theofrid of Echternach (d. 1110), who composed a treatise on relics, speaks of a supermundane source of strength: The power (virtus) of the holy soul, already reigning with God, spreads miraculously over all that belongs to it, whether inward or outward, whether still locked in the prison of the flesh or already raised into the heavenly city of Jerusalem. And whatever it does miraculously on the grounds of its preventive and interceding merits in flesh and bone [during earthly life], the same it does even more miraculously when delivered from the dust and radiates on to everything, both inward and outward, on to all fabric and preciousness of the ornament and cover [of the grave]. As the soul itself cannot be seen in the body, and is yet miraculously active within it, so also the treasure of the precious dust, even when it is not seen and cannot be touched. It transfers the abundance of its sanctity . . . on to all within which it is inwardly hidden and outwardly enclosed. If anyone in firm faith touches with his hand the outward cover [of the grave], for instance a plate of gold or silver, a stone, whether

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Arnold Angenendt precious or not, or a piece of fabric, ornamental metal, marble or wood – he touches what is inside.38

In this way the graves of the great saints came to be sacral places, above all the graves of the leading apostles Peter and Paul in Rome, of the apostle James in Compostela, of the Three Kings in Cologne, as well as those of countless other saints. From the grave the saints of heaven acted as protectors of those for whom their intercession was sought.39 For example, in a sermon appended by Alcuin to the Vita of Saint Willibrord (d. 739) we read: over the great cities of Western Christendom holy patrons watch and give their blessing: in Rome Peter and Paul, in Milan Ambrose, in Agaunum (St Maurice, Valais) the Theban martyrs, in Poitiers Hilarius, in Tours Martin, in Paris Germain, and in Reims Remigius.40 The pilgrimage to saintly graves intensified with the increasing mobility in the Middle Ages.41 A visit to the grave of a saint was believed to bring healing and help to all people and in all cases of need, and also yielded remission of penance and finally indulgences.42 Besides Rome, favored destinations were Cologne (the Three Kings), Compostela (the apostle James), Canterbury (Thomas Becket), Aachen (the cloak of the Virgin), as well as a host of national and regional centers. In the late Middle Ages a pilgrimage fever set in; on the spur of the moment people, old as well as young, left their homes and went on pilgrimage, sometimes even naked. Theologians urged sobriety, did not object to indulgences, but gave preference to repentance.43 Divisions of relics are a relatively late phenomenon. Margarete Weidemann has emphasized that ‘‘in Gregory of Tours no divisions of relics [are] recorded, not even in connection with the numerous translations which took place in the sixth century.’’44 Anyone who tried to remove part of a saint’s body or divide his bones would incur the latter’s severe punishment. For Gregory the Great (d. 604) the same obtains; John McCulloh observes: ‘‘Neither Gregory’s Dialogues nor his Registrum contains any reference to identifiable pieces separated from a saintly corpse.’’45 In the case of martyrs, however, a cut-off part of the body might be treasured, and if a martyr had suffered death by beheading, the head might be specially venerated, as for instance the heads of Peter and Paul in the Lateran.46 Specially made head reliquaries became widespread and were numerous in the high and late Middle Ages, for instance for the companions of Saint Ursula of Cologne.47 Separation of the head could now take place also in the case of non-martyrs, for example Saint Elisabeth in Marburg.48 Other parts of the body – hands, arms, and feet – were treated similarly; in the background archaic ideas on the capacity of individual parts of the body for independent action may still have played a part. From the beginning it had been permissible to remove superfluous or posthumously growing parts, such as hair, blood, (milk) teeth, and nails; at first these were the only relics that could be removed from a body. Augustine had already asked himself with respect to the resurrected body:


33

‘‘Now what answer shall I make about the hair and the nails? . . . Accordingly, if the hair shorn time after time, and the nails which are trimmed off, produce ugliness by returning to their old place at the resurrection, they will not return.’’49 Hairs and nails were to a certain extent ‘superfluous.’ Let us take as an example the report of the second elevation of Saint Amandus in the year 809: the abbot of the monastery is said to have appropriated, strictly speaking with a foolhardy hand, part of the uncorrupted limbs (inviolatorum portionem membrorum); he cut off the nails (ungues et ungulas), since after the saint’s death these had, contra naturam, continued to grow so strongly that they had even penetrated through the sleeves of the shroud. The abbot also shaved off the saint’s beard, which had likewise continued to grow after his death. Finally he removed two teeth with a strong pair of tongs; when they were broken out, blood is said to have miraculously flowed. Other reports of elevations contain similar elements. Eligius (d. 660) removed teeth from the body of Saint Quintinus, which again led to the flowing of blood, and then (iron) nails, which after the martyrdom were still attached to the body, as well as hair. In this context we should also interpret the special position taken by the relics of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Of Jesus, who had bodily ascended to heaven, as well as of Mary, who had likewise been bodily assumed, there were only teeth and hair, in the case of Jesus also blood and the foreskin removed at his circumcision, in the case of Mary above all milk.50 It was not until the ninth and tenth centuries that the reluctance to dismember a saint’s body disappeared; Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, and Hrabanus Maurus, the reputed praeceptor Germaniae, appear to have led the way.51 But the bulk of relics were still contact relics, such as personal belongings or grave objects. The ever-present threat of fraud was met critically in accordance with the spirit of the times, primarily with ‘authentica,’ narrow strips of parchment with the relevant saint’s name, and also with the fire test, since relics were believed to be non-flammable.52 These developments had important consequences for the arts. Since the late ninth century artists had begun to make reliquary statues, in which the parts preserved as relics were incorporated into a complete artificial body: ‘‘The plastic image often restores to a body relic a human appearance, which it had lost by decomposition and dismemberment.’’53 The oldest extant example of such a reliquary effigy is the statue of Saint Fides of Conches from the tenth century: as a relic there was the head, and this was completed by means of an artificial body; ‘‘the statue represents this body in a threedimensional form.’’54 In the high and late Middle Ages statues of saints usually contained relics within them, and thus made actual the persons depicted. Late medieval piety regarded the relics, now present everywhere in large numbers, not only as carriers of virtus, but moreover associated them with indulgences, which were valued even more highly. The relics collected by

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Frederick the Wise in the Schloßkirche at Wittenberg and by Albrecht of Brandenburg in his convent at Halle carried indulgences of millions of years.55 Luther, who praised the exemplariness of martyrs but rejected the intercession of saints, did accept images, but not relics; these were to him ‘‘alles tot Ding’’ (merely dead things).56 The Calvinists argued triumphantly that the saints had resisted neither the destruction of their images nor the burning of their relics. On the Catholic side the Council of Trent confirmed the possibility of the cult of both saints and relics, but was eager to exclude certain abuses.57 Not only Christian archeology, but even more so the translation of relics, received an important stimulus from the rediscovery of the Roman catacombs; the catacomb saints were translated as ‘whole’ bodies as far as the area covered by present-day Switzerland, Southern Germany, and Austria, and, dressed in the heavenly ornament of white garments and pearls, were placed on the altars or exhibited.58 The most momentous break came with the Enlightenment, especially with scientific medicine. The eighteenth-century discussion as to whether the dead did not after all have a certain vital energy (vis vegetativa) ended with the irrevocable conclusion that the corpse was dead and, on account of its toxicity, even dangerous, so that kissing the bones gave way to warnings against them, sweet odors to evil smells. The church reform under the Emperor Joseph II removed images and relics for which testimonies of authenticity were lacking. The violence attending the French Revolution caused a great deal of destruction, and during the Bavarian confiscation under Montgelas relics were removed from their artistic containers.59 The ultramontane piety of the nineteenth century brought a revival, and even thought that the research on the catacombs, which was pursued with great zeal, gave evidence of an early Christian veneration of saints and relics and thus afforded new material for the discussion between the denominations.60 It is striking that even the recent ‘surrogate religions’ created their own relics: the Bluthelden on the Ko¨nigsplatz at Munich and the embalmed Lenin in the wall of the Kremlin.61 The cult of relics offers a remarkable example of the relation between Christianity and archaic religiosity, since awe of the dead body as well as the idea of holy places are among the oldest distinctive marks of humanity. However, of Jesus only his words and his deeds as our Savior were remembered, but no relics existed. This has always remained part of Christian consciousness, as is testified, among others, by Saint Francis: ‘‘For in this world we have and see nothing corporally . . . except His [sacramental] Body and Blood, and the words through which we . . . have been redeemed from death to life.’’62 Translation by Dr Gerrit H. V. Bunt


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Notes 1 K. E. Mu¨ller, Das magische Universum der Identita¨t. Elementarformen sozialen Verhaltens: Ein ethnologischer Grundriß, Frankfurt a.M. and New York, Campus, 1987, 177: ‘‘Spezielle Trachtstu¨cke, die sie getragen, Insignien wie Sta¨be oder Zeremonialwaffen, die sie gefu¨hrt haben, die Schale, aus der sie zu trinken pflegten, und erst recht natu¨rlich auch Teile der unverga¨nglichen Elemente ihres Ko¨rpers selbst, wie Na¨gel und Haare, Za¨hne, bestimmte Knochen, ja der gesammte Scha¨del, ko¨nnen daher nach ihrem Tode aufbewahrt und regelrecht nach Reliquienart thesauriert werden. Man tra¨gt sie etwa als Amulette bei sich, deponiert sie an besonderen Stellen. . . . Sie bilden dann gewissermaßen kleine ‘Akkumulatoren,’ aus denen sich sta¨ndig, und namentlich in Krisensituationen, Kraft scho¨pfen la¨ßt.’’ 2 Ibid., 95: [wobei der] ‘‘Urahn der erste Mensch schlechthin war.’’ 3 Ibid., 73: ‘‘Gru¨ndersippe.’’ 4 Ibid., 124: [Folglich sind hier auch] ‘‘das Herd- und die sakralen Gemeinschaftsfeuer lokalisiert, befinden sich die Alta¨re, haben die Kultrequisiten, heilige Musikinstrumente, . . . Ahnenscha¨del und andere Reliquien, die Idole, zauberkra¨ftige Steine, ‘Medizinen’ usw. ihren Platz.’’ 5 Ibid., 174: [daß sie] ‘‘anhand ihres Skeletts, das in dem Falle allerdings weitgehend unversehrt erhalten sein mußte, wiederzubeleben waren.’’ 6 U. Unger, ‘‘Tod,’’ in Sachwo¨rterbuch des chinesischen Altertums (forthcoming): ‘‘Die individuelle Weiterexistenz in einer anderen Daseinsform ist Bestandteil des allgemeinen Glaubens und speziell die Basis des Ahnenkultes. . . . Reiche Grabausstattungen sind Ausdruck der Vorstellung, daß die Toten in ihrer neuen Existenz grundsa¨tzlich die gleichen Bedu¨rfnisse haben wie in ihrer irdischen, von den physischen bis hin zu solchen des Gemu¨tes und des Geistes. Grabbibliotheken zum Beispiel sollen wohl die im Diesseits gewohnte Lektu¨re auch fu¨r das Jenseits bereitstellen. . . . [Es] wird den Toten eine Ma¨chtigkeit zuerkannt, die wohlmo¨glich u¨ber die irdische hinausgeht. Sie ko¨nnen unmittelbar in das irdische Leben eingreifen, segnend und ra¨chend. . . . Schließlich muß sogar die ‘Idee’ ihrer ko¨rperlichen Erscheinung als etwas Bewahrtes vorgestellt worden sein, denn sie ko¨nnen den Lebenden in der gewohnten Gestalt erscheinen. Die Ko¨rperlichkeit wa¨re also etwas bedingt ‘Reaktivierbares.’ ’’ 7 G. Malmquist, ‘‘Chinesische Religionen,’’ in Theologische Realenzyklopedie, VII, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1981, 760–82, here 763: ‘‘Die Ausgrabungen der ko¨niglichen Nekropole in der Na¨he der Hauptstadt An-yang bezeugen die großartige Pracht und die blutigen Riten, die die Begra¨bnisse der Ko¨nige der Shang-Zeit begleiteten. Das Zentrum des Grabes bestand aus einer tiefen rechteckigen Grube. In der Mitte der Grube wurde eine Opfervertiefung ausgehoben, in welcher man einen Hund und einen erwachsenen Mann opferte, die vermutlich dem toten Ko¨nig auf seiner Jagd in der Geisterwelt beistehen sollten. U¨ber der Opfervertiefung wurde der Sarg placiert, der aus schwerem Holz gezimmert war.. . . [Dort] wurden die Opfergaben niedergelegt, die aus Totenware und prachtvollen Bronzegera¨ten bestehen konnten, die mit Widmungen versehen waren, aus A¨xten, Speer- und Pfeilspitzen, Bronzehelmen, geschnitzten Figuren aus Jade und Elfenbein, Muscheln sowie aus den geopferten Tieren und Menschen.’’ 8 E. Brunner-Traut, Gelebte Mythen: Beitra¨ge zum alta¨gyptischen Mythos, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988, 66: ‘‘[Der Leib] wird balsamiert, und damit hat der Tote Aussicht, ko¨rperlich unversehrt das Jenseits zu erreichen. Sollte der Leib dennoch Schaden gelitten haben, so wird er durch eigens dafu¨r zusta¨ndige Go¨tter dru¨ben voll wiederhergestellt. Auch Lahme und Blinde oder sonstwie im Leben gescha¨digte Menschen werden nach dem Tode im Jenseits heilgemacht. . . . Der heile bzw. geheilte Mensch erfa¨hrt dann mit Hilfe des Sonnengottes seine Auferstehung. . . . Sobald der Tote aufsteht, nimmt er seine irdische Gestalt an, vereinigt sich mit seinem Ba (und seinem Schatten) und wird nun zum lebendigen ‘Fleisch,’ zur sarx.’’ 9 E. Brunner-Traut, Fru¨hformen des Erkennens: Am Beispiel Alta¨gyptens, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990, 71: [So wurde] ‘‘der menschliche Ko¨rper nicht als Organismus, sondern als ein Kompositum seiner Glieder verstanden . . . [wobei] die einzelnen Glieder als selbsta¨ndige Handlungstra¨ger auftraten.’’ 10 P. Hoffmann, ‘‘Die Toten in Christus: Eine religionsgeschichtliche und exegetische Untersuchung zur paulinischen Eschatologie,’’ Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen, NF 2, Mu¨nster, 1966, 247.

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11 P. Hoffmann, ‘‘Auferstehung I, 3 (Neues Testament),’’ in Theologische Realenzyklopaedie, IV, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1979, 478–513, here 505. 12 A. Kehl, ‘‘Gewand (der Seele),’’ in Reallexikon fu¨r Antike und Christentum, X, Stuttgart, Hiersemann, 1978, 945–1025, here 987–97. 13 B. Ko¨tting, ‘‘Grab,’’ in ibid., XII, 1983, 366–97, here 383–91. 14 Martyrium Polycarpi, 18,3: ed. T. Baumeister, Genese und Entfaltung der altkirchlichen Theologie des Martyriums, Berne, Lang, 1991, 83. 15 A. Angenendt, Heiligen und Reliquien: Die Geschichte ihres Kultes von den Anfa¨ngen bis zur Gegenwart, Munich, Beck, 1994A, 102–22. 16 C. Gnilka, ‘‘Der neue Sinn der Worte,’’ Fru¨hmittelalterliche Studien, 26 (1992), 32–64. 17 E. Dassmann, ‘‘Ambrosius und die Ma¨rtyrer,’’ Jahrbuch fu¨r Antike und Christentum, 18 (1975), 49–68. 18 J. M. McCulloh, ‘‘From Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change in Papal Relic Policy from the 6th to the 8th Century,’’ in E. Dassmann and K. Suso Frank (eds), Pietas, Festschrift fu¨r Bernhard Ko¨tting (Jahrbuch fu¨r Antike und Christentum Erg. 8), Mu¨nster, Aschendorff, 1980, 313–24. 19 E. Kirschbaum, Die Gra¨ber der Apostelfu¨rsten, Frankfurt a.M., Scheffler, 1957, 156–65. 20 A. Angenendt, ‘‘Zur Ehre der Alta¨re erhoben: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Reliquienverehrung,’’ Ro¨mische Quartalschrift fu¨r christliche Altertumskunde, 89 (1994B), 221–44. 21 P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, 86–105. 22 P. Dinzelbacher, ‘‘Die ‘Realpresenz’ der Heiligen in ihren Reliquiaren und Gra¨bern nach mittelalterlichen Quellen,’’ in idem and D. R. Bauer (eds), Heiligenverehrung in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Ostfildern, Schwabenverlag, 1990, 115–74. 23 G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (Studies in the History of Christian Thought 63), Leyden, Brill, 1995. 24 A. Angenendt, ‘‘Corpus incorruptum: Eine Leitidee der mittelalterlichen Reliquienverehrung,’’ Saeculum, 42 (1991), 320–46. 25 Vita Ambrosii, 32, 1: ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vita di Cipriano; Vita di Ambrogio; Vita di Agostino, (Vite dei Santi 3), [Milan], 1981, 2, 51–125, here 94,8. 26 Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum, VI, 2: ed. L. Bethman and G. Waitz (Monumenta Germaniae Historica [MGH]: Scriptores Rerum Langobardicarum), Hanover, 1878, 12–187, here 161,26 and 165,10. 27 A. Angenendt, ‘‘Der ‘ganze’ und ‘unverweste’ Leib – eine Leitidee der Reliquienverehrung bei Gregor von Tours und Beda Venerabilis,’’ in H. Mordek (ed.), Aus Archiven und Bibliotheken: Festschrift fu¨r Raymund Kottje, Frankfurt a.M., Lang, etc., 1992, 33–50. 28 Angenendt, 1991. 29 H. Lutterbach, Selbstthematisierung und Bekenntnis: Die zivilisationsgeschichtliche Bedeutung der christlichen Buße (500–1500) (forthcoming). 30 Aelred of Rievaulx, Sermo, 14, 21: ed. G. Raciti, Aelredi Rievallensis, Sermones, I–XLVI (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 2A), Turnhout, Brepols, 119, 181; cf. ibid., Sermo, 45, 11, 355, 119. 31 Vita Edwardi: ed. Patrologia Latina [PL] 195, 738–90, here 782B-D. 32 D. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989, 34. 33 Beda Venerabilis, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, IV, 19: ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969, 394–5. 34 Ibid., IV, 19: 392–3. 35 Vita Wilfridi, 19: ed. W. Levison (MGH. Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum [SRM] 6), Hanover and Leipzig, 1913, 214,6. 36 Ibid., 21: 216,8. 37 L. Hertling, ‘‘Der mittelalterliche Heiligentypus nach den Tugendkatalogen,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Askese und Mystik, 8 (1933), 260–8, here 264. 38 Theofrid of Echternach, Flores epitaphii sanctorum, II, 3: ed. PL 157, 317–404, here 345A. 39 Angenendt, 1994A, 125–8. 40 Alcuinus, Vita Willibrordi, 32: ed. W. Levison (MGH: SRM 7), Hanover and Leipzig, 1920, 81–141, here 139,7. 41 L. Schmugge, ‘‘Die Anfa¨nge des Pilgerverkehrs im Mittelalter,’’ Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 64 (1984), 1–83. 42 L. Carlen, Wallfahrt und Recht im Abendland (Freiburger Vero¨ffentlichungen 23), Fribourg, Switzerland, Universita¨tsverlag, 1987; see also Angenendt, 1994A, 132–7.


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43 K. Schreiner, ‘‘ ‘Peregrinatio laudabilis’ und ‘peregrinatio vituperabilis’: Zur religio¨sen Ambivalenz des Wallens und Laufens in der Fro¨mmigkeitstheologie des spa¨ten Mittelalters,’’ in Wallfahrt und Alltag in Mittelalter und fru¨her Neuzeit (Vero¨ffentlichungen des Instituts fu¨r Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der fru¨hen Neuzeit 14), Vienna, Verlag der O¨sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992, 133–63, here 133. 44 M. Weidemann, ‘‘Reliquie und Eulogie: Zur Begriffsbestimmung geweihter Gegensta¨nde in der fra¨nkischen Kirchenlehre des 6. Jahrhunderts,’’ in J. Werner (ed.), Die Ausgrabungen in St Ulrich und Afra in Augsburg, 1961–1968 (Mu¨nchener Beitra¨ge zur Vor- und Fru¨hgeschichte 23), Textband, Munich, Beck, 1977, 353–73, here 371: ‘‘[daß] bei Gregor von Tours keine Reliquienteilungen u¨berliefert [sind], auch nicht in Zusammenhang mit den zahlreichen Translationen, die im 6. Jahrhundert stattfanden.’’ Cf. also M. Vieillard-Troiekouroff, Les monuments religieux de la Gaule d’apre`s les œuvres de Gre´goire de Tours, Paris, Champion, [1976], 377: ‘‘On ne semble pas encore en Gaule avoir mutile´ les corps des saints pour en distribuer des reliques.’’ 45 J. M. McCulloh, ‘‘The Cult of Relics in the Letters and ‘Dialogues’ of Pope Gregory the Great: A Lexicographical Study,’’ Traditio, 32 (1976), 153; idem, ‘‘From Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change in Papal Relic Policy from the 6th to the 8th Century,’’ in Dassman and Frank, 1980, 313–24, here 313. 46 Kirschbaum, 1957, 208–11. 47 F. G. Zehnder, Sankt Ursula: Legende – Verehrung – Bilderwelt, Cologne, Wienand, 1985. 48 J. Petersohn, ‘‘Kaisertum und Kultakt in der Stauferzeit,’’ in idem (ed.), Politik und Heiligenverehrung im Hochmittelalter (Vortra¨ge und Forschungen 42), Sigmaringen, Thorbecke, 1994, 101–46, here 117–23. 49 Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XXII, 19: ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb (Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina 48), Turnhout, Brepols, 837,44; English translation in: Saint Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. W. M. Green, 7 vols (Loeb Classical Library 7), London and Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1957–72, 289. 50 Angenendt, 1994A, 214–29. 51 Angenendt, 1994B, 237–44. 52 K. Schreiner, ‘‘‘Discrimen veri ac falsi’: Ansa¨tze und Formen der Kritik in der Heiligen- und Reliquienverehrung des Mittelalters,’’ Archiv fu¨r Kulturgeschichte, 48 (1966), 1–53. 53 H. Belting, Bild und Kunst: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, Munich, Beck, 1990, 331: ‘‘Das plastische Bildwerk gibt einer Ko¨rperreliquie oft das menschliche Aussehen zuru¨ck, das sie in der Verwesung und Zerstu¨ckelung verlor.’’ 54 Ibid., 333: ‘‘Die Statue stellt diesen Ko¨rper in der dreidimensionalen Erscheinung dar.’’ 55 Angenendt, 1994a, 161–2. 56 Luther, Deutsch Catechismus 1529: ed. O. Brenner, Martin Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe 30), Weimar, 1910, 123–238, here 145,19. 57 H. Jedin, ‘‘Die Entstehung und Tragweite des Trienter Dekrets u¨ber die Bilderverehrung,’’ in idem (ed.), Kirche des Glaubens – Kirche der Geschichte, Ausgewa¨hlte Aufsa¨tze und Vortra¨ge, Freiburg im Br., Herder, 1966, 460–98. 58 H. Achermann, Die Katakombenheiligen und ihre Translationen in der schweizerischen Quart des Bistums Konstanz (Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte Nidwaldens 38), Stans, Verlag historischer Verein Nidwalden, 1979. 59 Angenendt, 1994A, 261–73. 60 V. Saxer, ‘‘Zwei christliche Archaölogen in Rom: das Werk von Giovanni Battista de Rossi und Joseph Wilpert,’’ Ro¨mische Quartalschrift fu¨r christliche Altertumskunde, 89 (1994), 163–72. 61 Angenendt, 1994A, 316–30. 62 Francis, A Letter to the Clergy: ed. L. Hardick and E. Grau, Die Schriften des heiligen Franziskus von Assisi (Franziskanische Quellenschriften 1), 8th ed., Werl, 1984, 68–72, here 70; English translation in The Complete Works, Francis and Clare, trans. and introd. R. J. Armstrong O.F.M. Cap. and I. C. Brady O.F.M. Preface by John Vaughn O.F.M. (The Classics of Western Spirituality), London, SPCK, 1982, 50.

3

Saints without a past Sacred places and intercessory power in saints’ Lives from the Low Countries Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

Even as a young girl Landrada had been different.1 She did not like to play with other girls but preferred to sit on her own, gazing at the stars. When she reached womanhood, she refused to marry, scorned her parents, who wanted to marry her off, and fled into the woods. There she built herself a small hut, grew vegetables, and bred cattle for the poor and the pilgrims who came by hoping for shelter for the night. A shepherd’s boy looked after the livestock. One night, far out in the fields, this boy saw miraculous lights shining above the bushes and heard angels singing. He hurried back to tell Landrada, who informed the parish priest; the three of them graced the place with a visit. After that Landrada would go there on her own to meditate and mumble her prayers. It thus could happen – I quote from the fifteenthcentury Middle Dutch version of the Life of Landrada – that ‘‘a cross came falling down from above onto a stone near her, which stone kept the imprint of the cross until this very day.’’ A voice from heaven declared that Christ Himself, who had suffered death on the Cross for humanity’s sake, had seen fit to send this sign to His bride, Landrada, as a token of His heavenly Love. From then onwards the stone marked a holy place, where evil spirits could cause no harm and hunger and death found no access.2 Landrada understood that she was to clear the thorny bushes and build a Lady’s Chapel and a women’s convent on the spot, now well known as Munsterbilzen. She herself resided there as the first abbess. Thanks to Christ’s blessing, the abbey grew into a paradisaical place. All this is thought to have occurred in the seventh century. In later years, its felicity was confirmed when King Charles came to visit the abbey and spent the night. As he was having dinner, he was alarmed when a bear threatened to enter the abbey. The virgins had already fled, only Landrada stood her ground and waited for the king to help. She handed him a bar and the blessing of the Cross, and with them the king overcame the bear. This event had occurred just in time because Charles himself had been on the point of becoming an intruder and raping one of the nuns. He now overcame his own lusts as well. This was to earn him the epithet ‘The Great,’ used ever since. A wonderful legend, if rather implausible in our eyes. It is a good example of invented saintliness as set down in numerous Saints’ Lives from the Low

Saints without a past

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Countries in the high and later Middle Ages. Such vitae focus on a sacred place: a grave, a sarcophagus or, as in Landrada’s case, a sacred (Celtic) stone. The saints who lent their names to the cults seem to be of minor importance or even fully fictional; they are later inventions to legitimize the spot. This is why the cults can be characterized as cases of ‘topolatry.’3 It is texts dealing with such topolatry that I aim to study here. My intention is to investigate what they reveal to us about the invention of saintliness, about the various agencies at work, and about the interplay of Church tradition, folklore, and lay people’s religious appetite. Before we occupy ourselves with these narratives, however, a few preliminary remarks should help us adequately demarcate the text corpus and narrow down the research questions. Recent scholarship has pointed out that confessional church historians, and hagiographers among them, usually take (modern) church doctrine as their yardstick when studying the roles and functions of saints in the past.4 They start from current concepts of sanctity and seek their source material in the Counter-Reformation Acta Sanctorum. As I have argued in the Introduction, these scholars accept without much questioning current doctrinal constructs of sainthood and employ these as if they were neutral descriptions of historic reality. They use the modern canon law concept of sainthood5 – with its exclusive focus on the historical life of the putative saint and the written ‘biography’ (vita) – as a yardstick to measure (and brand) differing concepts of the medieval past. They neglect the source material referring to differing types of saints or, worse, analyze these narratives using modern criteria. In the case of my fictional saints, for example, they either neglect the legends or cling to the ideé fixe of an historical person as the ‘founder’ of the cult. The cults in question, however, cannot usually be traced back to historically documented persons who are held in remembrance. The cults are not personal, rather they are local. There may be one or two vague references to a holy person in the distant past, but they are not very helpful for dating and characterizing the cults.6 The saints are almost always dated back to the good old days of mission and conversion, ‘le sie`cle des saints’ of the seventh century, and studied in modern scholarship in that context. But the narratives crop up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period in which the devotions were ‘sanctioned’ and appropriated by the ecclesiastical tradition. My aim, therefore, is to study them in that context. The thirteenth century appears to be a crucial epoch. It is then that most of the texts make their appearance, as well as new modes of veneration, which help explain these new writings. Of Mary of Oignies, a devout and saintly woman in Brabant at the turn of the century, it is said that prayers to the saints greatly delighted her.7 They ‘‘comforted her in her spirit in a wondrous manner’’ – I quote from Margot King’s translation of her Vita by James of Vitry. This biographer tells us: ‘‘When any saint’s day approached, the saint announced his feast to her and visited her.’’ Unknown saints introduced themselves with a clue to their identity –

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apparently Mary was not yet acquainted with them. ‘‘A certain saint appeared to her, glorious with a great many merits. Although the woman asked the saint who he was, he did not give his name but wrote four letters before the eyes of her mind.’’ A cleric told her they were to be read as Saint Aiol. Once in the church of Saint Gertrudis in Lenlos she ‘‘felt the solemnity [of the feast-day] approaching and when the priest was not ready and the bells did not ring, . . . she rose from her place and began to ring the bells as hard as she could.’’ As the priest ran to the church and asked her what she was doing, she was ‘‘embarrassed and timid and said: ‘Forgive me, my Lord, but tonight is a great feast.’ The priest then opened the calendar and discovered that the next day was the feast of Saint Gertrudis.’’ On another occasion, when she was on her way to the church of Saint Nicholas in Oignies in early December, ‘‘she felt that the great solemnity of Saint Nicholas was present in her heart. She marveled because she did not know that the Feast of Saint Nicholas was usually celebrated there before the Nativity of the Lord and not in May’’ (apparently the Saint Nicholas cult was still in the making in the thirteenth century). These stories are amazing: many universally recognized saints appear not to be known yet, even the feast-days of the parish’s own patron saints were unknown to the common faithful! The veneration of saints, at least in the modes we are used to, was not yet common practice; this was only to come in the course of the thirteenth century and after. Of course, an ecclesiastical cult of saints had existed for centuries – altars and churches had their patrocinia, the saints of the early Church were commemorated in mass, relics attracted crowds of pilgrims – but this scarcely influenced the daily life of the faithful. Intense lay involvement was a new phenomenon. The thirteenth century was a time of ‘inner conversion’ in northwest Europe or a ‘conversion en profondeur’ as Ludo Milis has phrased it.8 It was a time when the Christian religion entered the sphere of daily life, when lay people started to shape their beliefs along Christian lines and let saints play their part in it. The faithful began learning the saints’ names and their feast days, they loved to hear about their legends and devotions. They sought new Christian forms to gratify old religious needs.9 As Angenendt explained in his Heilige und Reliquien: ‘‘The agrarian society, bound as it was to nature, longed for a direct influence on all those powers that were felt to dominate its life: weather and storms, fertility and harvests, illness and plagues, life and death. The official Church sought to meet this need with a variety of blessings and exorcisms. Even more important were the saints . . . [who] with their blessing as well as with their curse filled the gap for which Christianity at first had nothing to offer.’’10 ‘My’ fictional saints were particularly suited to filling this gap. A boom in the production of Saints’ Lives resulted, among them the fictional Lives, the Inventions and Translation stories, Miracle collections and Visions. Still more stories were produced after the arrival of the Friars in the Low Countries, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, who employed the saint


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lore to enliven their sermons. Appealing short stories and exempla were excerpted and used to propagate the exemplariness of the saints. As the Legenda Aurea, the standard corpus of universal Saints’ Lives, became known here in the 1280s, the legends permeated all of society.11 For this reason I have chosen the thirteenth century, the period from the rise of a popular veneration of saints to the coming of the Legenda Aurea, as the focus of my research. An inventory of all vitae written in the Low Countries in the thirteenth century – newly composed texts and revised vitae, in Latin and the vernacular (both Walloon French and Middle Dutch) – yields about eighty texts.12 They form my frame of reference. Including the legends about fictional saints, which account for about a quarter of the total, four categories of saints and two types of hagiographic discourse can be distinguished in these texts.13 As to the four categories of saintly persons, the first group comprises the life stories of universal saints. These are the ones best known in modern scholarship: martyrs and confessors, the saints of the Roman calendar and the Roman liturgy. Many of the vitae of these saints, often written in late Antiquity, were revised in the thirteenth century, either into full-fledged Lives (about a dozen) or as part of the Legenda Aurea. Later on many of them were incorporated into vernacular versions of the Legenda Aurea, the so-called Passionalia, and, from the seventeenth century onwards, into the Acta Sanctorum. Although quite a few of these universal saints were as fictitious as my ‘saints without a past,’ a study of their thirteenth-century Lives and the rhetoric in the texts will show that they form a distinct category. My second group consists of vitae of local saints, the missionaries and founding fathers, the patron saints of churches and convents, the wonder-workers who protected church property and the welfare of devotees in the region. These saints were often not venerated in the Church at large, but they were all the more powerful as regional intercessors. Their Lives were recorded in local collections and vernacular Passionalia. Because the compilers of the Acta Sanctorum lived in the Low Countries, quite a few of the Latin vitae of this group of saints were actually incorporated into this prestigious series. As a third category, we have the stories about the ‘living saints,’ the lived examples of a perfect life, the hermits and recluses, the mulieres sanctae. They were no wonder-workers but earned the awe of bystanders thanks to their spiritual and mystical experiences. Being highly valued advisors, they were considered holy men and women by their contemporaries and were often mentioned in chronicles and collections of exempla. Although sometimes granted vitae, they were rarely admitted into the select circle of saints in heaven; as a consequence, they usually did not make it into CounterReformation Acta Sanctorum. The fourth category, the group I started with, is to my mind the most interesting one: saints without a past around whom legends were woven, with only a material hold in the present – the ‘sarcophagus saints,’ newcomers in the hagiographic world. They were normally not incorporated into the Acta Sanctorum.

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In the texts belonging to all four categories of saints, two main types of narrative, two different hagiographic discourses can be distinguished. Gumbrecht, investigating the function and the intercessory quality of saints as worded in the texts, found that two divergent roles were attributed to the saints in question: ‘‘two roles of the saint, and thus two basic functions of hagiographic texts’’ [‘‘zwei Rollen des Heiligen und damit zwei Grundfunktionen hagiographischer Texte’’].14 All legends, he maintains, hold out the prospect of salvation and bliss to the devout, but the one type of narrative promises happiness in the life hereafter, whereas the other type promises immediate comfort to the faithful here below. The first type confronts the reader with the example of an admirable person, full of virtues and good deeds. It exhorts the faithful to imitate the saint and to persevere, although believers can only expect due rewards in heaven. As we will observe later, saints of this type were the favorites of Pope and clergy and the narratives can be qualified as the product of a top-down approach of the Church hierarchy towards the common faithful.15 Narratives of the second type show the saint’s instant intercession in this life; they present the saintly wonder-workers as ensuring some happiness to their devotees in this vale of tears. As we may gather, it was the favorite type of the common faithful and was promoted in a religious movement from below. This distinction between the two hagiographic discourses can help us further typify the four categories of saints. As we may expect, the authors of the first category of texts (about the universal saints) have a distinct preference for the former discourse; the hagiographers of the ‘saints without a past,’ on the other hand, have more mercy upon the common faithful and prefer the latter. They incline overall to a more bottom-up approach. I shall begin with the first category and the top-down approach.

Saints of the calendar In the thirteenth century, a thorough readjustment was undertaken of most vitae of the old and venerable, the universal saints, the martyrs and confessors, who from time immemorial were commemorated in the Church. Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1228–98) deliberately revised these Saints’ Lives with an eye to instructing the faithful and explaining Church doctrine.16 He aimed at providing the mendicant preachers with an instrument to ethicize the faith and discipline the flock. His Legenda Aurea can be considered an instrument in the ‘‘social discipline and confessionalization’’ [‘‘Sozialdisziplinierung und Konfessionalisierung’’] of the laity.17 Most of the saints were presented as other-worldly ascetics and monks. They were thought to have lived lives of exemplary self-sacrifice and devotion, admirable in their heroic perseverance and imitable in their practice of the Christian virtues. Jacobus de Voragine lived in a time when the characteristics of a perfect Christian life were worked out in papal canonization procedures and molded


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into the core of late medieval and modern sanctity as propagated by the Church hierarchy.18 Only men (almost never women), it was believed, who strove for perfection in their earthly life similar to the way Christ Himself had done, could be considered saints. Such men were supposed to have worked the same kind of miracles as Christ: to have turned water into wine, healed the deaf and the blind, raised the dead. Moreover, they were expected to have lived in utter asceticism – in chastity at any rate – preferably in a cloister or hermitage. They were assumed to have practiced the Christian virtues in a heroic manner and to have exhorted their fellow citizens to do the same. According to Vauchez, they were ‘‘les saints admirables et imitables.’’19 The papal concept of sanctity, therefore, has the characteristics of Gumbrecht’s first discourse and is part of the top-down movement of the Church hierarchy towards the lay community. The parish priests and confessors used the examples of these perfecti for the instruction of the faithful; the stories provided them with an instrument to discipline the flock. A second characteristic of this first group of texts is the emphasis placed on the historicity of the saints – however fantastically their life stories may have been stylized in later legend. As historically documented witnesses of God’s continual intervention in history, in the life of mortal men on earth, they were prime candidates for canonization after death and for admission into the circle of saints in heaven. Except for Jacobus’ Legenda Aurea – written in Italy and brought to the Low Countries only in the 1280s – almost no full-fledged Latin vitae of universal saints were (re)written here in the thirteenth century.20 My inventory yields only two texts, a rhymed Vita Martini (set down in Gembloux, where he is venerated as a patron saint) and a Vita Genovevae, a biography of the virgin saint of Paris.21 A likely explanation is that there was little enthusiasm for this type of saint. In contrast to the lack of Latin adaptations, however, more than a dozen rhymed Lives of these universal saints were composed in the vernacular – most of them, conspicuously, dealing with the historically least trustworthy, even fantastic characters among them, such as Alexis, the saint underneath the staircase, the converted whores Thaı¨ s and Mary Magdalene, or the robber saint Moı¨ se.22 Unlike the papal canonization texts, these vernacular tales tell of exemplary devout persons who lived in secular society – and not outside of it, in cloister or anchorage – and had experienced God’s forgiveness. They demonstrate the characteristics of the second hagiographic discourse. They are designed to support confident lay believers, for instance the well-to-do burghers in the commercial towns of Lie`ge and Brabant. Although the texts, like the Legenda Aurea, elaborate on traditional source material, they show a complete reappraisal of the hagiographic mission.23 Here saints are set against monastic self-indulgence and the self-consciousness of the Church hierarchy as it emerges from the Latin vitae.24 Salvation, these narratives imply, is not restricted to cell or cloister. The author of the Poe`me Moral, who included Thaı¨ s’ and Moı¨ se’s Lives, even encouraged the citizens who had the

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strength to withstand temptation to simply continue their role in society. By doing so, they could be of great support to others. The faint-hearted, the irresolute, were the ones who needed the seclusion of convent or cell.25 Authors such as these admired the sense of responsibility of the common faithful and had a positive view of marriage and family life. They showed interest in the daily struggle of the faithful and attached great importance to supporting them.26 They propagated a more secular ideal of sanctity. This, I would argue, is due to the impact of the lay believers. It is part of the religious movement from below.

The Defensores The second category consists of the founding fathers. The vitae in this group narrate the stories of the men and women who christianized the Low Countries, erected the new bishoprics, and built the abbeys in the seventh and eighth centuries. In Flanders and Brabant these founders were often of the female sex, the spouses and daughters of the ruling class (so founding mothers would be a better term). Their life stories were recorded in monastic or ecclesiastical circles and were designed to morally support the monastic communities they had founded. The narratives demonstrate the patron saint’s power and propagate him/her as the defensor of the community. Normally, no emphasis is given to an assumed (heroic) practicing of virtues. Rather, a catalogue of Christian virtues is included, somewhere towards the end or the beginning, as a kind of ‘foreign body’ in the text.27 In Landrada’s case – she is such a founding mother – even a list of this sort is lacking. 28 Some of the old monastic narratives were revised in the thirteenth century, though only six in total.29 The Life of Eleutherius, the first bishop of Tournai, is a good case in point.30 Eleutherius had lived in Clovis’s time, but he left hardly any traces in history. After a translation of his bones in 1247, Gilbert of Tournai, the famous Franciscan scholar and preacher, rewrote the Vita. He still had almost nothing to say about the saintly bishop, but he took the opportunity to digress to miracles long after the bishop’s death: a blind old woman, for example, was said to have ‘seen’ his grave. The relics had secretly been brought to Tournai and had worked some wonders. Though Eleutherius was almost forgotten for the second time after this, Gilbert urged his brethren to revive the cult and propagate the site. Nothing special, therefore, though we happen upon some interesting details. In particular the invention of the grave and the pilgrims visiting the shrine trigger our attention. Gilbert seems to have felt compelled to open up Eleutherius’ cult beyond the circle of brethren and parishioners for whom Eleutherius had functioned as a defensor.31 He extended the radius of Eleutherius’ actions by addressing pilgrims from far and wide. They were invited to come to the shrine and pray for the saint’s intercession. It is the


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same kind of activity that we will meet with at the graves of invented saints. Gilbert can, in fact, be said to have more or less transformed his bishop into such a ‘sarcophagus saint.’ The simple founder and patron saint who defended his church and the men in charge appears to have no longer sufficiently satisfied existing religious needs. Now that lay believers were presenting themselves as active venerators of saints, they also wanted a share in this saint’s caring, they wanted some comfort in their lives.32 The men in charge, by the way, may have promoted this development, because they saw a chance to increase their income by collecting the gifts of pious pilgrims.

Living sainthood The third category consists of the ‘living saints,’ the holy men and women in the Flemish and Brabant towns, the mulieres sanctae. They form by far the largest group, half of my dossier.33 Today’s scholarship has an explicit preference for this category: Kieckhefer in his Unquiet Souls, Bynum in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast, and the studies on the Holy Women of Lie`ge.34 If we go by these authors, the most distinctive characteristic of the living saints seems to have been their female sex. My text corpus does not confirm this; it comprises more male than female living saints. As mentioned previously, the exemplary devout of the (twelfth and) thirteenth century were no wonder-workers and no fanatics striving for perfection in seclusion. Highly valued advisors and pastors, they were approached by the common faithful as mediators between God and the community and considered to be holy men and holy women.35 They were often mentioned in chronicles and exempla collections (for instance, Caesarius’ Dialogus Miraculorum36); at times they were even granted full-fledged vitae. Roisin, who was the first and perhaps the most thoughtful in studying these texts, shows that most of the vitae were written in Cistercian (or Premonstratensian) monasteries and were sauced with a distinct monastic flavor.37 The authors felt bound to the first type of hagiographic discourse and designed their texts principally to exhort the religious in the convents (‘‘lecture de table’’). They propagated a high-church concept of sanctity. Recent scholarship further argues that the authors, often Church politicians themselves, molded these Saints’ Lives along ideological lines: first, as confessors, by directing the exemplary devout during their lifetime; and second, as hagiographers, by modeling their life stories after the prospective saint’s death. They preferably molded the holy man or woman into a virtuous, secluded ascetic.38 But between the lines the texts testify to the original ideals of both the saints themselves and the community of the faithful around them. Differing concepts of sanctity and divergent ideals of the saint’s agency can be detected. To demonstrate this, I choose a favorite of mine: the hermit Gerlach of Houthem (d. 1165). A knight of the Maastricht region who converted to the eremitical lifestyle, he was given a well-thought-out Vita et Miracula in 1227.39

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Gerlach’s peculiarity was that he chose an old and venerable oak in which to live, not a monk’s cell, but a solitary tree standing on his own estates near a well and along a commercial highway. According to the Miracula, the (oak and) well must have retained some of its archaic function because old folks still approached it with due respect.40 Nearby monks, and also the bishop of Lie`ge, mistrusted Gerlach’s living in the oak and had the tree cut down. The hermit was ordered to join the nearby convent, thus becoming a traditional monk, but he successfully refused by appealing to a papal privilege. He showed a distinct preference for the ascetic lifestyle – not the luxurious life of monks – and kept in close contact with the lay believers of the region, who greatly benefited from his pastoral care. After the bishop had seen his error, he ordered a wooden chapel and cell to be built for him, made from the oak’s timber, and appointed a priest to read daily mass for the hermit and his guests. Gerlach was definitely no wonder-worker; he earned the awe of bystanders thanks to his ascetic lifestyle and his sincere devotion. His life appears to have closely resembled the life of penitent knight hermits in the Arthurian epics and other tales of the period.41 He made daily pilgrimages to the church of Saint Servatius in Maastricht and weekly trips to Our Lady’s in Aix-laChapelle. After his death, songs were sung in the region about Saint Servatius administering the last sacraments to this devout follower. A careful analysis of the Saint’s Life, however – written two generations after Gerlach’s death by a Premonstratensian canon of the Saint Gerlach convent founded over the grave site – shows that he had become the exemplar of two, even three, distinct ideals of sainthood. To begin with, the author modeled his hermit into the prototype of a Premonstratensian canon; his Vita thus conforms to Roisin’s typology. Gerlach appears to wear, for instance, the Premonstratensian habit – a totally unhistorical detail. With an eye to the nobility in the region, he is, second, portrayed as the prototype of the knight become saint. His example helped shape a religious identity for the self-confident nobility in the German Empire. Like William of Orange, Mengold of Huy, or Parzival, Gerlach is shown to have lived the penitential life of a converted knight after a long career in imperial service. Third, for the common faithful he served as a kind of contemporary embodiment of the vague universal saints of the early Church, the Moı¨ ses and Magdalenes, as they were pictured in vernacular literature.42 Gerlach is a penitent lay believer – indeed, a shining example to all lay sinners who, after repenting of their sinful life, could hope for God’s forgiveness. The first ten chapters of the Vita read as the ideological program, the ideal sketch of this type of lay Saint’s life story. For all three groups of venerators Gerlach is portrayed as the morally and spiritually inspiring example: as a saint to imitate, he embodied the first hagiographic discourse. That Gerlach acquired a popular cult, that he became a saint who survived the ages, was not due to this exemplariness, however, but to the site where he had chosen to live and the grace that this sacred place conferred upon him.


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We read about this in the Miracula, not the Vita. The sacredness of the place reflected on its inhabitant, so to speak, and made him a holy hermit, while the ascetic’s saintly lifestyle, in turn, christianized the spot and ‘sanctioned’ the rituals performed by the devotees. The peasants, who may have been visiting the spot for centuries, continued to go there, ‘tapped the divine’, and transferred its beneficial effects to the saint’s power.43 They (still) attributed healing power to the water from the well and the timber of the oak; they (still) collected earth from the spot, now Gerlach’s grave. They stirred it with water and used it as a medicine; they scattered it in their stalls and rubbed it between the horns of the cattle. ‘Topolatry’ becomes saint-bound here, but, in contrast to the first hagiographic discourse, comfort and bliss are (still) expected here on earth. Not Gerlach’s exemplary life but the ‘power station’ of his tomb is responsible for this. We gather that in the changing context of the thirteenth century – with the Christian religion entering the sphere of daily life and lay people starting to shape their religious beliefs along Christian lines – people needed a holy person, a saint in conformity with the Christian tradition who could function as a powerful patron of cattle and horses, and as a strong intercessor with God in heaven. Gerlach’s earthly life and the miracles on his grave made him an ideal candidate. Pilgrimages were undertaken to his tomb and they have continued to this day. Sand – aseptic sand in place of the filthy mud – is still collected from underneath the tomb and used to fertilize the soil or keep the faithful healthy. If Gerlach had merely been a ‘living saint,’ he would have been forgotten like most holy men and women of the period; the mulieres sanctae, for instance, almost never gained sainthood after death. By evolving into a ‘sarcophagus saint’ or a ‘dead body,’ however, he achieved everlasting fame.44 We may conclude that the general needs of a rural population and a religious movement from below shaped Gerlach’s sanctity in the long term, while ecclesiastical authorities made a short-term intervention to define his admirable and imitable sainthood according to papal criteria – a step required for the official approval of a cult. In the hands of the clergy, Gerlach could serve as an instrument to ‘christianize’ and discipline the flock. For the lay believers, however, he principally ‘legitimized’ ritual practice and rewarded lay Christian belief, proving himself an effective intercessor. Both sides shine through in the texts of his Life and Miracles. The texts on the fictional saints of my fourth category show similar characteristics.

Saints without a past At least twenty legends have been preserved about purely fictional saints, invented saints, saints without a past.45 Eleutherius’ newly found grave, Gerlach’s tomb, Landrada’s stone cross have prepared us for this category, showing that certain saints rely on material holds for their impact on the flock. Jeroen of Noordwijk in Holland is further proof of this phenomenon.46 Sometime in the high Middle Ages, perhaps in the eleventh or twelfth cen-

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tury, the peasant Nothbodo had a dream of a saint appearing to him and ordering him to dig his bones from a megalithic grave – Nothbodo had probably just started to clear the land and may have come across a stone grave of this kind. He translated the bones to the abbey of Egmond. They appeared to belong to ‘Hiero,’ which refers to Greek ‘hieros’ ¼ holy, and may have yielded the Dutch name J(Hi)eroen. Later on the faithful in Noordwijk were lucky enough to also find Jeroen’s skull, as they were building the parish church. They once more translated the bones, this time from Egmond to Noordwijk, added the skull, and started to honor Jeroen as their patron saint.47 According to the vitae, which are preserved in fourteenth-century versions but may have been produced earlier, Jeroen was a martyred missionary of Willibrord’s retinue. It is worth noting here that the faithful recognized the bones as male. More to the south, the church of Odrada in Alem left people wondering which saint was venerated there.48 No written records were kept, the only sources were oral tales and a wall painting. A Vita was written in 1304. Odrada was said to have been a maiden princess in De Kempen who was ill-treated by her stepmother. Like Cinderella, she was not permitted to join the family for a festivity in church. ‘‘Go and get one of the wild horses inside the fence,’’ her father sneered. And so she did. The horse turned meek as a lamb and put his head in her lap, a trick he may have learnt from the unicorn. Odrada died soon afterwards. Oxen pulled the cart with her corpse to far-away Alem, where she became the eponym of the parish church and – she, too – patron saint of cattle and horses. In nearby Gheel, peasants clearing the heath found a sarcophagus which contained a red tile with five letters: NA above and DIP below.49 They understood that Dymphna had been buried there, an Irish princess who had cleared the land in the distant past and was killed by the hand of her own father. The king had incestuously fallen in love with his daughter – like the father of Donkeyskin. Once her relics had been transferred to the newly built parish church in Gheel, Dymphna became the icon of the settler community. In the thirteenth century, when the community rights were laid down in charters, her life was recorded in an official Latin Vita, and the cult was incorporated into the sacred remembrance of the Church. From then on her Vita could be used for liturgical readings on her feast-day.50 Dymphna was ‘legitimated’ as a Christian saint and hailed as the holy patron of Gheel. From that time onwards she embodied the corporate self-image, the religious identity of the community. Dymphna resembled Oda of SintOedenrode, another Irish princess turned icon of a settler community.51 We may wonder how people in Sint-Oedenrode and Gheel, unlike the people in Holland who dug out the male Jeroen, identified the bones of their saints as female. In all these cases, people may have long been aware of the locus of the holy in the region. They interpreted a megalithic grave, a sarcophagus, or a mold as a saintly grave and proceeded to search for a name and a suitable life story.


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In doing so, they accommodated both pristine ritual and what was often a very old and ‘rural’ kind of patronage for the protection of cattle and horses, the fertility of women and the soil.

The invention of saintliness Four categories of saints and two divergent discourses concerning the functions attributed to these saints in the narratives have been surveyed so far. The first category defined the high-church concept of sanctity, well known in today’s scholarship thanks to Andre´ Vauchez’s magnum opus, La saintete´ en Occident.52 This concept was developed in papal canonization procedures of the later Middle Ages and defined in canon law. It became the yardstick against which all Christian devout were measured in official Church writing. It is the ideal of the exemplary ascetic, admirable for his heroic virtues, imitable for his surrender to God. A saint of this type was chosen on the basis of his devout life. He was expected to inspire the Christian faithful to similar conduct with an eye to their own eternal salvation. As an encore, a successful saint of this category was expected to be a thaumaturge after death. He was then recognized as God’s chosen by the faithful and venerated in cults and devotions; he was canonized by the Church authorities and admitted to the circle of advocates before God’s throne in heaven.53 In His benignity God granted such saints the role not only of preparing the devout for their life in eternity, but also of comforting them in their misery on earth. God’s Mother Mary and Nicholas, but also medieval saints like Elisabeth of Thuringia or Anthony of Padua, are successful examples of this type. As a matter of course, it appears, they were predominantly male. This type of sainthood is a theological construct, a ‘saintete´ imagineé.’ As such it is as construed as the fictional saints of my fourth category. Conceived by Pope and clergy and handed down to the Christian community, it met with only moderate appreciation. In contrast to this concept we discern a ‘saintete´ većue,’ a lived sanctity of the fictional type. It is as construed as the papal concept but also as real, even materially present, in the medieval world. The tomb or the shrine, the stone or the oak, to which a holy person lent his name, was a power station of the divine where the people could tap instant salvation for man and beast, pray for fertility of land and women. Unlike the ethical abstraction of the papal concept, it ties in with the lived reality of the religious experience.54 This latter type of sanctity is a heritage of the German past (at least in Northern Europe). As we know from ethnologists and archeologists, in preChristian society central points in the landscape functioned as focal points in religious life.55 Urnfields and grave mounds, crossroads, oaks, and wells – all located outside the village and clearly visible in the landscape – were sacred places, markers in the mythical, cosmologically embedded ordering of the territory. They were laden with mythical power. Mysterious lights shone here at night, nymphs and fairies roamed the area. Heaven and earth met

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here; chosen ones were allowed a view into heaven.56 Intercessors mediated between men and the divine, and the devout brought ritual gifts to obtain fertility for crops and cattle, health and welfare for the people. I suspect that the peasants of Houthem were still bringing nightly gifts to the tree that was to become Gerlach’s oak. But the sacred places were focal points in the mental landscape as well. Tales about the gods and folklore found a stronghold here. Princesses harassed by their incestuous fathers found shelter on such spots, dwarfs and fairies continued to live there. In the high Middle Ages, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the clearing of new land was begun, and peasants venturing into the woods could not avoid these sacred spots.57 This was precisely the period in which the Christian faith entered daily life and numerous parish churches were founded in the countryside. The parish church was to embody the community in the new settlements, centered around the parish priest and bound together by Christian devotions.58 According to Duffy, ‘‘religion [was] the single significant focus of social life’’ and the parish church ‘‘the focus of the laity’s sense of corporate religion.’’59 This religion took shape in the cult of saints. As a matter of course, sacred places in the neighborhood were recognized as the graves of saints and peasants set to work to redefine the ritual. Together with the bones they brought the mythical power and the folklore to their new parish churches, into the heart of the community. Chips of the oak, earth of the grave were seen as contact relics or visual signs of the saint’s miraculous power. And the old tales and legends were adapted accordingly.60 This process culminated in the writing of the Saints’ Lives in the thirteenth century. Fairy tales, a favorite age-old means to phrase religious experience, were transformed into legends of the saints by adding a martyrdom (Jeroen, Dymphna) or a heroic virginity (Oda, Odrada, and others ).61 The ‘biographies’ of the new saints were recorded in official vitae, written in Latin and accommodated to the traditional hagiographic corpus. They became the founding myths of the new religious communities.62 De vulgari eloquio in Latinum redigerem idioma . . .: I translated the idiom from lay language, that is the vernacular, into Latin, namely the language of the Church, maintained Peter of Cambray, who was ordered to write Dymphna of Gheel’s Vita. In this way he incorporated old material into the sacred remembrance of the Church, sacrae litterarum memorie commendata,63 and assigned the old heroine a place among the community of saints in heaven. She now enjoyed an extent of authority she could never have dreamt of in Donkeyskin disguise.64 In the ecclesiastical context, the Latin vita can be compared to a diploma or warranty in secular life. In that sense it resembles a town privilege (for instance that of Gheel!) or a founding charter. The Church confirmed the cult and legitimated the ritual in a Christian context. And just as people in this time of beginning literacy were hardly interested in the factual information of charters – they saw these mainly as visual signs; Gurevich even knows of cartae sine litteris – in a similar way the faithful will hardly have been interested in the


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details of Gerlach’s or Dymphna’s vita; only the warrant of the Church and the effectiveness of the ritual mattered.65 For the hierarchy of the Church, on the other hand, the content was of the utmost importance. Bishop Guyard of Cambrai personally saw to it that anything possibly ‘rude and ridiculous’ was deleted from Dymphna’s vita.66 And the canons of Sint-Oedenrode demanded that Oda was shaped as a virgin and not a widow, as others held. She had to be a suitable saint for the Chapter, after all. We sense that on the level of the small village community, more than in the universal Church, the controversy was fought out between Latin tradition and lived practice.67 In an Epistola Apologetica the author of Oda’s vita, Godfrey of Sint-Oedenrode, explains that he had had great difficulty in assembling his material for the narrative. In fact, hardly anything had been known about Oda.68 But he was sure that she had been a virgin: all societies had their strong and venerable virgins, did they not? The Romans had their Amadrides, Parcae, and Hesperides, the heathen their Musae or Vestal virgins, and the Christians Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. Virginal state (and martyrdom) was incontestable proof of sanctity and miraculous power. In the case of matrons and widows the faithful had to wait and see whether God would accept the woman as a wonder-worker; in the case of martyrs and virgins they could be sure,69 for ‘‘happy are the barren, the wombs that never bore a child, the breasts that never fed one.’’70 We sense a discussion between the high-church ideal of the virgin saint – loaded with rather magical features71 – and the religious practice of the medieval devout. Were not the mulieres sanctae, the holy widows of the thirteenth century, admired as living saints by their fellow citizens? In Oda’s case the canon ‘won’ as far as Oda’s virginity was concerned. But he modeled her into a settler – clearing the land and living in a cabin identical to those of the pioneering peasants – and made her into the icon of the settler community. He thus shaped a Christian founding myth for the villagers. In celebrating Oda’s or Dymphna’s or Jeroen’s feast-day, in pilgrimages and processions through the fields, in ‘‘celebrations of communal identity,’’ they shaped and confirmed their corporate identity.72 As an encore, we may wonder why all communities did not invent a strong virgin saint or virgin martyr if magic virginity was as important a prerequisite as Godfrey of Sint-Oedenrode maintains. It strikes me that fictional saints in the present-day Netherlands, the area above the Rhine, were often male: Jeroen, Walfridus and Radfridus, Wiro, Odger, and Plechelmus, whereas they took on female shape in present-day Belgium: Oda, Dymphna, Alena, Berlindis, etc.73 Did memories of male missionaries still linger on in the North and Celtic fertility goddesses or Matronae in the South? Did the rise of male German gods in the migration period influence the Christian remembrance in the North?74 I cannot refrain from referring here to the modern borderline between the Calvinistic North and Roman Catholic South (with its exuberant devotion to Mary), which more or less

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corresponds to the old one between male and female saints! An observation to think about. Until now confessional church historians, including hagiographers, focused mainly on the one concept of saintliness, the papal; they described only part of the story, the history from above. Differing concepts of sanctity and input from other agencies were left aside, the history from below was not written. These scholars thought the papal ‘invention of saintliness’ a neutral description of historical reality and used it, in consequence, as a yardstick against which differing concepts were measured. These were condemned as ‘deviant,’ ‘unchristian ¼ unethical,’ ‘superstitious’ at best. They ignored the fact that, from a historical point of view, the development of Church doctrine and devotion – I speak of developments within the Christian community here and not of heresies and worse! – is a matter of continuous amplification (to quote Angenendt’s felicitous term), a process of appropriation, in which various groups were involved, not only the theologians, but also the local parish priest, the lay believers, and, in cases of saintliness, the putative saint himself. An ‘invention of saintliness’ is the result of these various groups and differing kinds of input. This study is meant to review some of the new developments in the time of inner conversion and growth of Christian devotions in Northern Europe. It shows how various groups of lay believers, starting from their own Sitz-imLeben, their own self-understanding and world view, ‘negotiated’ with Church authorities about the concept of the holy, the roles and functions of saints. It shows how the venerable tradition of Latin writing, the oral traditions of folklore, the ethical constructs of the theologians, and lived religious practice – how all these different elements were brought in to help shape the concepts of sanctity and the cults of saints as we know them from the later Middle Ages to the present.75 I have focused on the fictional saints of Northern Europe, the saints without a past but with a strong hold in the medieval present, because they played no minor part in this ‘invention of saintliness.’

Notes 1 The Vita Landradae is preserved in a fifteenth-century codex from Korsendonck, published in the Acta Sanctorum [AASS], 8 Julii, 3rd ed., Paris and Rome, 1867, vol. 29, 619–29, and in a sixteenth-century printed account by Surius, De probatis sanctorum Historiae, IV, Cologne, 1573, 135–41. Both go back to the Vita Landradae by Thierrry of Sint-Truiden, who wrote this vita of the putative hermit and abbess of the seventh century some time around 1100 in the abbey of Saint Bavo in Ghent. Standing in the Ghent tradition, Thierry reports the miraculous translation of Landrada’s bones to Wintershoven, following Heriger of Lobbes’s Translation story, and from there to Ghent. Surius prints a slightly different version and reports Landrada’s translation to Haetere or Altere, supposedly in 1278. His text may date from this period, the thirteenth century. Vernacular versions appear in the fifteenth century by Olivier de Langhe, see C. Hap, Legenden van de Heiligen Bavo, Livinus, Landoaldus, Landrada, Pharaildis en Macarius in het Middelnederlands bewerkt door Olivier de Langhe, Licenciate thesis, Louvain, 1969, 347–64; another vernacular version, Van Sinte Landraden, is preserved in Brussels, Royal Library, MS IV, 138 (c. 1500). For Landrada see also Bibliotheca Sanctorum, VII, Rome, 1966, 1099 and Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek, III, Brussels, 1968, 272–6. A more comprehensive study of


2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13

14 15

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the Landrada texts and cult is much needed. See for the present state of research the unpublished doctoraal scriptie by E. Betten, Groningen, 1999. Van Sinte Landraden, f. 130rb: ‘‘Ende die boesen gheesten en sullen voertaan in dese stat ghenen scade moeghen doen. Ende daer en sal hongher noch sterfte comen over die getrouwe dienaren gods.’’ This term ‘topolatry’ was coined by P. Post and the group of scholars working on pilgrimage sites in The Netherlands. See P. J. Margry and C. M. A. Caspers, Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland, 3 vols, Hilversum, Verloren, 1997–2000. M. Otter, Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing, Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 1966, 2, observes for the English situation that ‘‘the spatial setting seems to be an unusually prominent concern in English history and historical hagiography.’’ In her view, the invention of a saint, that is, digging his bones out of the ground, amounts to digging into the past and at the same time projecting a past by writing a foundation story [and inscribing saintliness, I would add]. The same holds true for the Translation stories from the Low Countries. See the critique by J. van Engen, ‘‘The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,’’ American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 519–52. Codex Iuris Canonici Pii X, Pontificis Maximi, IV, ii, 24, can. 2101–24: ed. P. Casparri, Rome, Vatican, 1918, 572–6. See, e.g., L. van der Essen, E´tude critique et litte´raire sur les Vitae des saints me´rovingiens de l’ancienne Belgique, Louvain and Paris, 1907, although this seminal work is still invaluable for its factual information and its flawless methodology. James of Vitry, Vita Mariae Oigniacensis: ed. AASS, 23 Junii, 3rd ed., Paris and Rome, 1867, vol. 25, 547–82; English translation by M. H. King, The Life of Marie d’Oignies by Jacques de Vitry, Saskatoon, Peregrina, 1986, 86 and 91; also for the following. L. Milis, ‘‘La conversion en profondeur: un proce`s sans fin,’’ Revue du Nord, 68 (1986), 487–98, on the ‘inner conversion’; see also L. Milis (ed.), Heidense Middeleeuwen, Brussels and Rome, Institut Belge, 1991. J. J. van Moolenbroek, ‘‘Omgang met de duivel, demonen en doden in dertiende-eeuws Nederland volgens exempels van Caesarius van Heisterbach: Over geleerde cultuur en volksgeloof,’’ in J. Tennekes and H. M. Vroom (eds), Contextualiteit en Christelijk geloof, Kampen, Kok, 1989, 130–50. See also his Mirakels Historisch: De Exempels van Caesarius van Heisterbach over Nederland en de Nederlanders, Hilversum,Verloren, 1999. A. Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien: Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom fru¨hen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart, Munich, Beck, 1994, 12–13; see also his contribution to this volume. M. Carasso-Kok, ‘‘Een goed geordend verhaal: Jacobus de Voragine en de Legenda Aurea,’’ in A. B. Mulder-Bakker and M. Carasso-Kok (eds), Gouden Legenden: Heiligenlevens en Heiligenverering in de Nederlanden, Hilversum, Verloren, 1997, 27–48. My inventory is based on: M. Carasso-Kok, Repertorium van verhalende historische bronnen uit de middeleeuwen: Heiligenlevens, annalen, kronieken en andere in Nederland geschreven verhalende bronnen, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981; the preliminary list of De verhalende bronnen uit de Zuidelijke Nederlanden 600–1500, preprint Leuven, 1995; the saints surveyed by S. Roisin, L’Hagiographie Cistercie¨nne dans le dioce`se de Lie`ge au xiiie sie`cle, Brussels, 1947; J. Leclercq (ed.), Les Saints de Belgique, Tournai, rev. ed., 1953, and incidental findings. I will give names, feast-days, and, if available, the BHL number from Bibliotheca Hagiografica Latina, Brussels, 1898, and supplements. As one may observe, I do not use the Roman Catholic distinction of apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, etc. E. Feistner, Historische Typologie der deutschen Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters von der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts bis zur Reformation (Schriften des Sonderforschungsbereichs 226, Band 20), Wiesbaden, Reichert Verlag, 1995, does still adhere to these traditional, ecclesiastical categories. H. U. Gumbrecht, ‘‘Faszinationstyp Hagiographie: Ein historisches Experiment zur Gattungstheorie,’’ in C. Cormeau (ed.), Deutsche Literatur im Mittelalter: Kontakte und Perspektive, Stuttgart, 1979, 37–84. See also Feistner, 1995. Considerable discussion has been devoted to this issue in German and Dutch historiography. See H. Schilling, ‘‘Disziplinierung oder ‘Selbstregulierung der Untertaner?’ Ein Pla¨doyer fu¨r die Doppeltperspektive von Makro- und Mikrohistorie bei der Erforschung der fru¨hmodernen Kirchenzucht,’’ Historische Zeitschrift, 264 (1997), 675–91, and H. R. Schmidt, ‘‘Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Pla¨doyer fu¨r das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung,’’ Historische Zeitschrift, 265 (1997), 639–82, and the studies

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16

17

18

19

20

21 22

23

24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker they refer to. See also H. Pleij, De Sneeuwpoppen van 1511: Stadscultuur in de late middeleeuwen, Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1988. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, now available in an English translation: Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. Granger Ryan, 2 vols, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993. See A. Bourreau, La Legende doreé. Le syste`me narrative de Jacques de Voragine (mort 1298), Paris, Seuil, 1984; S. L. Reames, The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History, Madison, WI, 1985. See the studies referred to in note 15 and M. Prinz, ‘‘Sozialdisziplinierung und Konfessionalisierung: Neuere Fragestellungen in der Sozialgeschichte der fru¨heren Neuzeit,’’ Westfa¨lische Forschungen, 42 (1992), 1–25; cf. A. Bourreau, ‘‘Narration cle´ricale et narration populaire: La le´gende de Placide-Eustache,’’ in J.-C. Schmidt (ed.), Les Saints et les Stars, Paris, Beauchesne, 1983, 47–8, where he explains that this type of narrative stresses ‘‘plus un tableau anime´ des vertues chre´tiennes qu’une succession d’actions.’’ See the magnum opus of A. Vauchez, La saintete´ en Occident aux derniers sie`cles du Moyen Age: d’apre`s les proce`s de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, Rome, Ećole Française, 1st ed., 1981, 2nd ed., 1988; now also in English translation: Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrel, introd. R. Kieckhefer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. A. Vauchez, ‘‘Saints admirables et saints imitables: les fonctions de l’hagiographie ont-elles change´ aux derniers sie`cles du Moyen Age?’’ in Les Fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (iiie–xiiie sie`cle) (Collection de l’Ećole Française de Rome 149), Rome, Ećole Française, 1991, 161–72. It is worth noting, though, that statues of these universal saints became sites of miracles in this period and started to attract pilgrims. 70 per cent of all known pilgrimage sites in The Netherlands devoted to universal saints, such as Anthony Abbot, Rochus, Quirinus, Gertrudis, Anne, and John the Baptist, date from the late Middle Ages. See Margry, 1997–2000, vol. 1, 26. Martinus of Tours, 11/11, BHL 5635–7 and Genoveva, 3/1, BHL 3349. At least four versions of the Life of Alexis were written in French and Middle Dutch, further Lives of Euphrosyne, Juliana, Martha, Mary of Egypt, Moses of Ethiopy, Thaı¨ s, and Nicholas; Lives of regional bishops such as Eleutherius of Tournai and Servatius of Maastricht; Vies des Pe`res (Desert Fathers), Vies des Saints, and a few Lives of contemporary saints, namely Francis of Assisi, Claire of Assisi, Lutgart of Tongres, and Christine the Astonishing. A. Goddard Elliott, The Vie de Saint Alexis in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: An Edition and Commentary, Chapel Hill, Department of Romance Languages, 1983; K. D. Uitti, Story, Myth and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050–1200, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973, 3–64. Cf. R. Ku¨nzel, Beelden en zelfbeelden van middeleeuwse mensen: Historisch-antropologische studies over groepsculturen in de Nederlanden, Nijmegen, SUN, 1997, 67, who shows that the clergy appears to have ‘‘een sterke gerichtheid op religiositeit en introspectie met als gevolg een verminderde aandacht voor de wereld en daardoor ook voor de wereld van de arbeid.’’ A. Bayot (ed.), Le Poe`me Moral: Traite´ de vie chre´tienne ećrit dans la re´gion wallonne vers l’an 1200, Brussels, 1929, 239, vs. 3393–3400. R. I. Moore, ‘‘Literacy and the Making of Heresy, c. 1000–1150,’’ in P. Biller and A. Hudson (eds), Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 37. L. Hertling, ‘‘Der mittelalterliche Heiligentypus nach den Tugendkatalogen,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Askese und Mystik, 8 (1933), 260–8; M. Heinzelmann, ‘‘Sanktitas und ‘Tugendadel’: Zu Konzeptionen von ‘Heiligkeit’ im 5. und 10. Jahrhundert,’’ Francia, 5 (1977), 741–52. See notes 1 and 2. Arnulf, b. of Soissons, 15/8, whose Miracula were recorded by Jan van Biervliet, BHL 705b; Eleutherius, b. of Tournai, 3/2, BHL 2467, whose Life was also translated into French; Thorpinus, b. of Hamar, venerated in Ter Doest, 8/1, BHL 8275; Vedastus, b. of Arras, 6/2, as well as the French version, Vie de Saint Vast; Walfridus and Radfridus of Bedum, near Groningen, 22/6, BHL 8791. Vita S. Eleutherii, written by Gilbert of Tournai and published in the AASS, 20 Februarii, 3rd ed., Paris and Rome, 1865, vol. 6, 183–210; see on the author Gilbert: Dictionnaire de Spiritualite´, Paris, 1937–95, vol. 6, 1139–46. Th. Head and R. Landes (eds), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response around the Year 1000, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992; cf. P. Geary, ‘‘The Ninth-Century Relic


32 33

34

35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

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Trade: A Response to Popular Culture?’’, in J. Obelkevich (ed.), Religion and the People, 800– 1700, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1979, 8–19. See B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000–1215, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. For this category I cannot confine myself to the ‘official’ vitae, published in the AASS and elsewhere, because only persons beatified or canonized after their death are incorporated there. I list all exemplary devout persons who were seen as holy during their lifetime and of whom contemporary authors wrote down short curricula vitae or more or less elaborated biographies: Abundus, monk in Villers, BHL 18c; Aleidis of Schaerbeek, 12(15)/6, BHL 264; Arnulfus, lay brother in Villers, 30/6, BHL 713; Beatrice of Dendermonde; Beatrice of Nazareth, 29/7, BHL 1062; Boniface of Lausanne, 19/2, BHL 1398–9; Carolus, Abbot of Villers, 29/1, BHL 1619; Catharine of Parc-les-Dames near Louvain; Christine the Astonishing of Sint-Truiden, Latin vita by Thomas of Cantimpre´ plus a Middle Dutch version, 23/6 and 24/7, BHL 1746–7; Dodo of Haske, 30/3, BHL 2206; Elisabeth of Spalbeek, 19/10, BHL 2484; Ermentrudis of Lie`ge; Eve of Lie`ge, 5/3; Franco of Villers; Frederik, Abbot of Hallum, 3/3, BHL 3149; Gerlach of Houthem, 5/1, BHL 3449; Gobertus of Aspremont, abbot of Villers, 20/8, BHL 3570–1; Godefridfus Pachomius; Godefridus Sacrista of Villers, 2/10, BHL 3579; Ida of Gorlsleeuw/Rameya, 29/10, BHL 4144; Ida of Louvain, 13/4, BHL 4145; Ida of Nivelles, 11/12, BHL 4146; Ivetta of Huy, 13/1, BHL 4620; Joannes, Abbot of Cantimpre´; Juliana of Cornillon, 5/4, BHL 4521; Lutgard of Tongres, Latin vita by Thomas of Cantimpre´, with Middle Dutch versions, 16/6, BHL 4950; Margaretha of Ypres, 20/7, BHL 5319; Mary of Oignies by James of Vitry with supplement by Thomas of Cantimpre´, 23/6, BHL 5516–17; Mary of Woluwe; Nicholas, lay brother of Villers; Richard of Aduard, 30/12, BHL 7203; Siardus, Abbot of Mariengaarde, 13/11, BHL 7697–8; Simon of Alna, 6/12, BHL 7755; Werricus, prior of Alna, 5/12, BHL 8865. R. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984; C. Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987; A. M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992; cf. also C. Ruhrberg, Der literarische Ko¨rper der Heiligen: Leben und Viten der Christina von Stommeln, 1242– 1312 (Bibliotheca Germanica 35), Tu¨bingen, Francke, 1995. A. B. Mulder-Bakker, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to idem (ed.), Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, New York and London, Garland, 1995, 3–30; idem, ‘‘Views of the Laity: Women and Religious Teaching in the Low Countries,’’ in S. Gensini (ed.), Vita Religiosa e Identita` Politiche: Universalita` e Particolarismi nell’ Europa del Tardo Medioevo, Pisa, Pacini, 1998, 301–24. Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum Libri Octo: ed. J. Strange, 2 vols, Cologne, 1851. Roisin, 1947. The way the ‘subservient’ Mary of Oignies (whose Life, as mentioned earlier, was written by the Church politician James of Vitry) left all honour to the clergy is a good example of this. See M. Lauwers , ‘‘Expe´rience be´guinale et rećit hagiographique: A propos de la Vita Mariae Oigniacensis de Jacques de Vitry (vers 1215),’’ Journal des Savants, 1989, 61–103; idem, ‘‘Entre Be´guinisme et Mysticisme: La Vie de Marie d’Oignies (d. 1213) de Jacques de Vitry ou la de´finition d’une saintete´ fe´minine,’’ Ons Geestelijk Erf, 66 (1992), 46–69. Cf. K. Glente, ‘‘Mystikerinnenviten aus ma¨nnlicher und weiblicher Sicht: Ein Vergleich zwischen Thomas von Cantimpre´ und Katharina von Unterlinden,’’ in P. Dinzelbacher and D. Bauer (eds), Religio¨se Frauenbewegungen und mystische Fro¨mmichkeit im Mittelalter, Cologne and Vienna, Bo¨hlau, 1988, 251–64. A. B. Mulder-Bakker, De kluizenaar in de eik: Gerlach van Houthem en zijn verering, Hilversum, Verloren, 1995, with an edition of the Latin Vita by C. H. Kneepkens and the Middle Dutch Life by H. van Dijk, 137–245. Miracula XXIX, 2: 208. H. Grundmann, ‘‘Zur Vita S. Gerlaci Eremitae,’’ Deutsches Archiv fu¨r Erforschung des Mittelalters, 18 (1962), 539–54. See above in the paragraph ‘Saints of the Calendar’ (pp. 42–4). A. J. Gurjewitsch, Mittelalterliche Volkskultur, trans. M. Springer, Munich, Beck, 1987, 172; also in English translation by J. Bak et al., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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44 Cf. J. M. Petersen, ‘‘Dead or Alive? The Holy Man as Healer in East and West in the Late Sixth Century,’’ Journal of Medieval Studies, 9 (1983), 91–8, here 91. 45 I have not yet tracked down all the ’sarcophagus’ and ’grave saints,’ but the following seem to belong to this category: Alena of Dilbeek or Vorst, 24/6, BHL 265; Berlindis; Christina or Christiana of Dendermonde, 25(26)/7, BHL 1745; Cunera of Rhenen, 3/6, BHL 2010–12; Dymphna of Gheel, 15/5, BHL 2352–5; Everelmus of Eeckhout; Evermarus of Rutten near Tongres, 15/6, BHL 2794–7; Gudula of Brussels (?); Jeroen (Hiero) of Noordwijk; Landrada of Munsterbilsen, 8/7; Livinus of Ghent; Fiere Margriet of Louvain (?); Maxellendis; Mengold of Huy; Oda of Amay, 23/10, BHL 6259–61; Oda of Sint-Oedenrode, 27/11, BHL 6263–7; Odrada of Alem, 2/11, BHL 6317; Pharaldis (Veerle or Vaer Hilde) of Ghent, 4/1, BHL 987; Ragenufle of Incourt, 14/7, BHL 7056; Rolendis of Gespinnes, 3/5, BHL 7293; possibly also Wivina of Brussels. 46 Vita et Translatio S. Jeronis: ed. O. Oppermann, in idem (ed.), Fontes Egmundenses, Utrecht, 1933, 39–58, containing two vitae in versions from the fifteenth century. See also O. Oppermann, ‘‘Over de wording der legende van S. Jeroen,’’ in his Opmerkingen over Hollandse stadsrechten der 13e eeuw, Utrecht, 1923, 31–8; R. Rentenaar, ‘‘De Nederlandse duinen in de middeleeuwse bronnen tot omstreeks 1300,’’ Geografisch Tijdschrift, 11 (1977), 370–3 and J. Vis, ‘‘Noordwijk-Binnen,’’ in Margry, 1997–2000, 1, 572–8. 47 Jeroen’s Inventio wonderfully conforms to the pattern of Inventio narratives as defined by Otter, 1966, 30–3: a threefold dream, the finding of the grave, the translation, and the foundation of a church or cloister. 48 Vita Odradae: ed. AASS, 3 Nov., 3rd ed., Brussels, 1894, vol. 64, 57–69; M. Coens, ‘‘Le miracle du cheval dompte´ par une vierge dans les le´gendes de Ste Aldegonde de Tronchiennes et de Ste Odrada de Balen,’’ Analecta Bollandiana, 89 (1971), 103–12; W. Steurs, ‘‘Alem et SaintTrond. Hagiographie et histoire rurale: la ‘Vita Odradae,’ ’’ Le Moyen Age, 99 (1993), 449–70; and A.-J. Bijsterveld, ‘‘Alem,’’ in Margry, 1997–2000, 1, 103–9. 49 Vita Dymphnae auctore Petro Canonico S. Autberti: ed. AASS, 15 Maii, 3rd ed., Paris and Rome, 1866, vol. 16, 475–95; A. B. Mulder-Bakker, ‘‘Woudvrouwen: Ierse prinsessen als kluizenaressen in de Nederlanden,’’ Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 20 (1994), 1–23. 50 Cf. on the liturgical function of vitae: A. H. Bredero, ‘‘God en zijn Heiligen,’’ in idem, Christenheid en Christendom in de Middeleeuwen, Kampen, Kok, 1986, 284–98, here 288. 51 Vita Odae: ed. J. van der Straeten, ‘‘Sainte Ode, patronne de Oedenrode,’’ Analecta Bollandiana, 76 (1958), 65–118; Oda’s relics and cult are being investigated at the moment. See A.-J., Bijsterveld, ‘‘De kam van Sint Oda,’’ Brabants Heem, 48 (1996), 81–9. 52 See note 18. 53 But cf. G. Barone, ‘‘Une hagiographie sans miracles: Observations en marge de quelques vies au xe sie`cle,’’ in Fonctions, 1991, 436–46. 54 E. Duffy, ‘‘Holy Maidens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth and SixteenthCentury England,’’ in D. Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Festschrift R. M. T. Hill; Studies in Church History, Subsidia 1), Oxford, Blackwell, 1978, 175–96, here 189: ‘‘. . . virginity as a symbol of sacred power is not so much a model to imitate, something most of them never dreamt of doing, but rather a source of power to be tapped.’’ And his authoritative book on lived religion in England: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992. See also the seminal volumes of J. Delumeau (dir.), Histoire većue du peuple chre´tien, 2 vols, Toulouse, Privat, 1979. 55 N. Roymans, ‘‘The Cultural Biography of Urnfields and the Long-Term History of a Mythical Landscape,’’ Archeological Dialogues, 2 (1995), 2–24. Berthold of Regensburg observes in one of his sermons: ‘‘Und etelıˆ che geloubent an heilige brunnen, soˆ an heilige boume, soˆ an heilige greber, uˆf dem velde’’; in F. Pfeiffer et al. (eds), Die deutschen Predigten des Bertholds von Regensburg, 1880, vol. 2, Nachdruck K. Ruh, Berthold (von Regensburg): Vollsta¨ndige Ausgabe seiner deutschen Predigten, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1965, 13. Burchard, bishop of Worms in the eleventh century, interrogates his flock on similar topics, see C. Lebbe, ‘‘In het schemergebied tussen het leven en de dood,’’ in Milis, 1991, 69–89, here 77. 56 Cf. M. Eliade, Das Heilige und das Profane, Hamburg, 1957, 7. 57 D. Bullough, ‘‘Burial, Community and Belief in the Early Medieval West,’’ in P. Wormald et al. (eds), Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society. . . , Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, 182. 58 R. Fossier, L’Enfance de l’Europe, Paris, Armand Colin, 1982, 345–58, 499–500; J.-C. Schmidt, ‘‘Les superstitions,’’ in Histoire de la France religieuse: Des origines au xive sie`cle, 4 vols, Paris, Seuil, 1988, 1, 417–551. 59 Duffy, 1992, 132.


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60 See also A. Murray, ‘‘Missionaries and Magic in Dark-Age Europe,’’ Past and Present, 136 (1992), 186–205, here 200, who remarks: ‘‘the vital assets of pagan religion as such had been taken over and reshaped.’’ 61 See the groundbreaking study of M. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, London, Vintage, 1995, e.g. 335–41 on Dymphna-Donkeyskin; or Ku¨nzel, 1997, 76 on Little Red Riding Hood. 62 We may wonder whether the observations for Brittany by J. M. H. Smith, ‘‘Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles, and Relics in Brittany, c. 850–1250,’’ Speculum, 65 (1990), 309– 43, here 335, also hold true for the Low Countries. In Brittany the veneration of saints focused on visual signs in the landscape. Cult sites, healing springs, and other local landmarks or physical objects were the focal points in the devotion. The oral stories that were told on the spot were only recorded in writing, she maintains, for non-religious reasons. ‘‘Almost always property, money, or ecclesiastical privilege was at issue’’ then. 63 Vita Dymphnae: AASS, 15 Maii, vol. 16, 478. 64 F. Baüml, ‘‘Scribe et impera: Geletterdheid in middeleeuws Duitsland,’’ in M. Mostert (ed.), Communicatie in de middeleeuwen, Hilversum, Verloren, 1995, 82. 65 A. J. Gurevich, ‘‘Heresy and Literacy: Evidence of the Thirteenth-Century ‘Exempla,’ ’’ in Biller and Hudson, 1994, 105–6, and M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, Oxford, Blackwell, 1st ed., 1979; 2nd ed., 1993. Note that no traces of Gerlach’s vita whatsoever are found in texts from outside the confines of his own convent before the late fifteenth century. 66 Vita Dympnae: AASS, 15 Maii, vol. 16, 478: ‘‘opus istud venerabilis Patris nostri Guidonis Cameracensium Pontificis aspectui praesentetis: ut in eo quodcumque perspexerit incompositum sive rude, quod forsitan auditori possit facere ridiculum, aut legenti, diligenter eliminet.’’ 67 Cf. R. Ku¨nzel, ‘‘Paganisme, syncre´tisme et culture religieuse populaire,’’ Annales ESC, 47 (1992), 1055–69, here 1065. 68 Epistola apologetica super vita praefatae beate Ode virginis in partibus Brabantie quiescentis conscripta, published by Van der Straeten, 1958, 110–17. The passage refers to Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, 2: ed. F. Eyssenhardt, Leipzig, 1866, 45, where: ‘‘Ipsam quoque terram qua hominibus invia est, referciunt longaevorum chori, qui habitant silvas nemora lucos, lacus ac fluvios, appellanturque Panes, Fauni, Fontes Satyri, Silvani Nymphae, Fatui Faunaeque vel Fautuae vel etiam Fanae a quibus Fana dicta sunt quod solent divinare.’’ See L. Harf-Lancner, Les Feés au Moyen Age, Morgane et Me´lusine: La naissance des feés, Geneva, Slatkine, 1984, 23. 69 Epistola apologetica: Van der Straeten, 1958, 114: ‘‘Illis namque diebus martyrium et virginitas quasi coniugalis dignitas prefulsit in Ecclesia. Unde nullam viduarum quamlibet sanctarum proprio honoratam monasterio fratrum [the Chapter] accepimus, nisi primo agnita resurrectione dominica promeruit. Ideoque beata Oda, si vidua esset dicenda, non esset, ut estimo, tam venerabili honestata monasterio.’’ 70 Luke 23,29. 71 It is quite remarkable, indeed, that the clergy and not the common faithful give firm credit to magical virginity here: it is another proof of the non-existence of a big divide between a rational clergy and a superstitious populace. 72 Duffy, 1992, 137. 73 This kind of evidence questions theories as proposed by E. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992, 182. 74 Cf. K. Samplonius, ‘‘From Veleda to the Vo¨lva: Aspects of Female Divination in Germanic Europe,’’ in Mulder-Bakker, 1995, 69–100, here 89–92. 75 See J. J. van Moolenbroek, 1989, 145, who, working on popular beliefs in the thirteenth century, comes to the conclusion: ‘‘Het trage kersteningsproces, waarbij door missionarissen en volksopvoeders gebruik werd gemaakt van inheemse voorstellingen, kon ertoe bijdragen dat ook in de plattelandscultuur van onze streken een wijze van wereldbegrijpen gevormd en gangbaar werd waarin pre-christelijke en min of meer christelijke voorstellingen en gebruiken een eigenaardige symbiose aangingen.’’

4

Life and afterlife Arnulf of Oudenburg, bishop of Soissons, and Godelieve of Gistel: their function as intercessors in medieval Flanders Reneé Nip

During the Middle Ages, Arnulf of Oudenburg, bishop of Soissons (d. 1087), and Godelieve of Gistel (d. 1070) became the most popular saints in Flanders, and they have remained so until today. It is remarkable, however, that the holy qualities for which they are venerated are quite different from those that led to their canonization. This is the more striking because the Lives of the two saints were written down not long after their deaths, and this was done by authors who had lived in their surroundings. Nevertheless, Arnulf was often confused with Arnulf, bishop of Metz, and turned from a peacemaker into the patron saint of the Flemish brewers. Godelieve changed from a martyred pious housewife into a virgin and martyr. In the case of Arnulf of Oudenburg, the written tradition does not reflect this development. In the case of Godelieve, a new Life was written that presented the new image and became the basis of her cult. Such developments seem to be incompatible with the task of a hagiographer. As many authors of Saints’ Lives explain in their prologue, a hagiographer had to find and present the true story to validate the sainthood of his protagonist. These Lives served as the foundation of the ecclesiastical celebration as well as the popular veneration. Where did these changes come from and how could they be incorporated in the cult supported by the clergy? In this chapter I shall focus on the relation between the written Lives of Arnulf of Oudenburg and Godelieve of Gistel and their actual cult. Although we know about these Flemish saints only from hagiographic texts, they are believed to be actual historical people. The oldest version of Arnulf’s Life was composed by Lisiard, bishop of Soissons (1108–26), who claimed that he had known his predecessor in person.1 He mentioned that he had lived with Arnulf during the saint’s episcopacy and was ordained subdeacon by him. Lisiard began his Life not long after Arnulf’s death and completed it shortly after 1108. Arnulf’s sister Adzela and his nephew and namesake, Arnulf, had been a great help to him, so he said. The Life is full of details that could have been easily verified at the time. Therefore we may assume that Arnulf of Oudenburg had once been a man of flesh and blood.

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As I pointed out elsewhere, the canonization of Godelieve of Gistel in 1084, only fourteen years after her death, was part of a settlement between Robert the Frisian, count of Flanders, and his rebellious vassal, Count Eustace II of Boulogne.2 According to the Life written by Drogo, monk of SintWinocsbergen, on the occasion of the canonization, Godelieve was born near Boulogne as the daughter of a knight of the count of Boulogne.3 She was married to a Flemish knight, Bertulf of Gistel, who maltreated her and in the end had her murdered by his servants. Miracles happened at the place of the crime and at her grave. Therefore, soon after her death she was venerated as a saint. In my article I argued that the canonization was to function as a peace-offering between the two parties and at the same time served to emphasize the overlordship of the count of Flanders over the count of Boulogne. If that is so, Godelieve is not likely to have been a fictitious character.

The two Arnulfs Let us start with the confusion of Arnulf of Oudenburg, bishop of Soissons, and Arnulf, bishop of Metz. As we shall see, a fifteenth-century manuscript written in the abbey of Oudenburg contains one of the earliest portraits that we have of Arnulf of Oudenburg. In the subtitle, however, he is named Arnulf of Oudenburg and Metz. So it seems that not even the monks of the abbey that Arnulf of Oudenburg supposedly founded were very well informed about the true identity of their patron saint. There are certainly some similarities between the two holy bishops, and the dates of their feast-days might easily lead to confusion.4 According to his Life, Arnulf of Oudenburg was born about 1048 in Tiegem, near Oudenaarde in Flanders.5 After he had served as a miles in the retinue of his uncle Arnulf, lord of Oudenaarde, he entered the abbey of Saint-Me´dard at Soissons, where he first lived as a monk and then as a hermit. About 1077, the monks of Saint-Me´dard chose him to be their abbot to replace Abbot Pons, whose mismanagement was ruining the abbey. However, Queen Bertha of France, who favored the deposed Pons, soon forced Arnulf to resign and, almost relieved, he resumed his life as a hermit. Although he was consecrated bishop of Soissons by the papal legate Hugo of Die in 1081, because of opposition from another candidate, who was backed by King Philip of France, Arnulf was prevented from occupying his see. In about 1084, Pope Gregory VII sent Arnulf to Flanders to negotiate a peace settlement between Count Robert the Frisian and a number of rebellious Flemish noblemen. Out of gratitude for the successful mediation, Arnulf was endowed with the church of Oudenburg, near Ostende, for the foundation of a monastery. Then he returned to his life as a hermit and finally died at Oudenburg in 1087 on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. At his own request he was buried on the next day, 16 August, the feast of Saint Arnulf of Metz (d. 640). The canonization of Arnulf of Oudenburg took place on 1 May 1121.

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We can conclude from this story, as it can be found already in the oldest version of Arnulf of Oudenburg’s Life, that the Merovingian saint, Arnulf of Metz, was actually venerated in Flanders and northern France in the late eleventh century.6 This other Arnulf, head of a powerful family, had occupied a prominent position at the Merovingian court before in 614 he was called to the episcopal see of Metz. In 629 Arnulf retired from the episcopal see and lived as a hermit near Remiremont until he died in about 640. The marriage of his son Ansegisel to Begga, a daughter of Pepin I, mayor of the palace, was considered to link the Carolingian kings to their predecessors, the Merovingians. For this reason Arnulf of Metz played an important role in the legitimation of the Carolingian kingship. His cult can be traced back to the late eighth century.7 Besides their names, we can find more similarities between the two saints. Both Arnulfs had noble and secular careers before they decided to dedicate their lives entirely to God: both men were elected to be bishops, but both preferred a hermit’s life. Arnulf of Oudenburg died on the eve of the day of Arnulf of Metz’s death. And so the two Arnulfs were linked by their similar careers and the dates of their deaths, and could therefore easily be confused. Still, this cannot explain the erroneous identification of Arnulf of Oudenburg in the portrait that I mentioned above. The picture shows a holy bishop, Arnulf of Oudenburg’s coat of arms, and a female saint. Underneath the picture is written: De burgo ueteri Arnulphe deque metensi, Et Godelef prece nos omni soluite fece.8 (Arnulf of Oudenburg and Metz and Godelieve redeem us by your intercession from all impurity.) The picture is found in a manuscript that contains several texts concerning the abbey of Oudenburg which give enough information about the identity of the founder, though his biography is not one of them. Arnulf’s Life, however, was well known in Oudenburg. Already in 1114 a remake of the original Life was completed by Hariulf, third abbot of Oudenburg (1105–43), in close cooperation with Lisiard, the author of the oldest version. In order to obtain formal recognition of Arnulf’s sainthood, a book of miracles was appended to it in 1120, and later a report of the canonization in 1121 and some more miracles were added.9 We know this version, for example, from the transcript by Jan of Biervliet, monk and abbot of Oudenburg (1278–1307).10 Another transcript was made in 1615 by Jacques of Hannoie, monk of Oudenburg (1562–1624).11 The texts of the offices performed on 1 May, the day of Arnulf’s elevation, and on 16 August to commemorate the saint’s death, also contain parts of this Life.12 According to the information Sanderus received in 1639 for his catalogue of the libraries in what is now Belgium, the abbey of Oudenburg possessed at that time Arnulf of Oudenburg’s Life in three different versions. A Life of Arnulf of Metz is not mentioned.13

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Thus it is clear that the precise identity of Arnulf of Oudenburg could have been well known within the abbey. Therefore, even if the monks of Oudenburg did not know the true life story of their patron saint and confused him so easily with his namesake, Arnulf of Metz, we must conclude that the course of his life did not determine the devotion of the monks and other worshipers. Arnulf of Oudenburg’s patronage of the brewers is only a corroboration of this.

Patron saint of the brewers The role of Arnulf of Oudenburg as patron saint of the Flemish brewers is another characteristic that he shared with his namesake of Metz. Arnulf of Metz is venerated as the patron saint of the brewers and the millers in Alsace, just as Arnulf of Oudenburg is in Tiegem, his birthplace.14 The brewers’ guild of Bruges already venerated Arnulf of Oudenburg as their patron saint before 1395.15 About a century later, the brewers of Ghent and Malines did the same.16 Soon Arnulf became the patron saint of all brewers in what is now called Belgium. Since the first half of the fifteenth century we find Arnulf of Oudenburg often portrayed with brewers’ implements as his attributes.17 Nothing in the life stories of Lisiard and Hariulf gives the slightest reason for this patronage and many scholars have tried hard to explain the connection between this saint and beer. Was this because Arnulf was related to the Lords of Eine, who were closely involved in the abbey of Oudenburg as founders and benefactors? Some of them held the office of butler, pincerna or buticularius, at the court of the count of Flanders. Other scholars suggest that Arnulf’s father had been a brewer. Still another suggestion connects the patronage with the Aernoutsbroeders, Arnold’s brothers, a movement of wandering scholars and tipplers, the origin of which is rather obscure.18 The explanation is probably much simpler. The choice of a patron saint by guilds was not determined by the qualities or deeds of a specific saint, but mostly by accidental circumstances. The guilds often took over the patron saint of the chapel or church where they used to perform their religious duties, and the chosen patronage is only an expression of the existence of a saint’s cult in a certain place.19 Perhaps the brewers of Oudenburg held their meetings in the abbey, where undoubtedly the monks brewed their own beer. Under the patronage of the dukes of Burgundy, the abbey experienced a period of prosperity, and the association of their product with the holy founder of the abbey might have been attractive to the brewers.20 Be this as it may, this patronage of the brewers caused new legends about Arnulf saving the brew from a fire, distributing beer to the thirsty, and curing the sick by stirring the beer they drank with his crosier.21 Once the patron saint of the brewers, Arnulf was supposed to have the power not only to protect the brewers, but also the process of brewing and all that had to do with beer. This was given credibility by stories of this kind. Thus I was told that a brewer did not dare to lend his statue of Saint Arnulf to the exhibition

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in celebration of the nine hundredth anniversary of Arnulf’s death in 1984 in Oudenburg out of fear that this would spoil his brew. These legends prove how difficult it is to establish the actual relation between events and stories about them. The stories were not added to the Lives or incorporated in other Latin hagiographic texts, although they were of great importance to the diffusion of the cult. So we must conclude that there was no relation between the official hagiographic tradition and the patronage of the brewers, which became the highlight of the cult. Nor is there any evidence that during the Middle Ages Arnulf’s Lives were ever translated into the vernacular. Therefore it seems that these Lives were not of great importance to the cult. This proves that it would be very unwise to look for the explanation of a saint’s cult exclusively in the Lives.

Miracle-worker The Lives also contain stories, mostly ones attesting to thaumaturgical powers ascribed to Arnulf, which are also part of his cult. In these cases the special qualities attributed to Arnulf of Oudenburg, such as his healing power, his concern for women and children, pregnancy and birth, have their roots in events that are described in the Lives. They relate different types of miracles. The differences concern Arnulf’s role as intercessor, the category of persons involved as well as the scope of the miracles. First of all we must distinguish between the miracles that happened during Arnulf’s lifetime and the posthumous ones. But also the miracles that took place in the saint’s presence have to be categorized according to Arnulf’s actual role in the event. On the one hand there are the miracles in which he unknowingly was little more than the medium through which God performs His works. On the other hand, there were miracles in which Arnulf was more actively involved. An example of the first type, mostly cures, happened during Arnulf’s abbacy, on a tour of the lands of the abbey of Saint-Me´dard. A woman who had been blind for ten years came to the monks who accompanied their abbot and asked them to give her the water in which Arnulf had washed his hands. A dream had revealed to her that this water would cure her. And so it happened. The monks told this only afterwards to Arnulf, who felt very uncomfortable as a result of the happening and left the place as soon as possible (I.XIV).22 Such miracles, happening without the knowledge of the saints, are a common theme in many a saint’s Life. Often they prompted the hagiographers to explain how the saint feared these thaumaturgical powers as a possible threat to his spiritual welfare in his striving for humility and avoidance of the worldly. Or the authors voice their opinion that miracles in general ought to be viewed with caution, also because the saint’s conduct is a much more important criterion for his sainthood.23

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From the moment Arnulf became aware of his healing power, he started to use it. He healed the sick by touching and blessing them or giving them something to eat – bread, wine, or fruit touched and blessed by him. In front of his recluse’s cell near the abbey of Saint-Me´dard he grew some fruit-trees especially for this purpose (I.XXI). Only a few of these miracles are related in more detail. Most of them concern women and their sons. Their status is rarely mentioned, but they seem to have been commoners. During Arnulf’s stay in Flanders, too, all sorts of invalid people came to him to be cured (II.XXII). A poor widow in the parish of Gistel successfully implored his help to restore the health of her five sons (II.XVII). Thanks to the noblewoman Hasplendis, two men were cured by Arnulf. She visited the saint to seek his help for one of her servants who suffered from insanity. Another sick man, who heard of the cure of her servant, asked Hasplendis to do the same for him and so she did (I.XII–XIII). In none of these cases is anybody converted or is anyone made to reform their ways. In these cases, Arnulf’s visitors did not suffer from life-threatening diseases, but from disabilities restricting their movements and thus their ability to provide for their own living. Such miracles on biblical lines can be found in almost all saints’ Lives. The saints concerned seem to have had no specialization and they cannot be distinguished from each other in the use of their miraculous powers, or in their clients.24 All people who had no other resources asked for their help. It is remarkable, though, that Arnulf’s capacity to perform miracles manifested itself only after he had passed as a hermit through a harsh, self-imposed spiritual training and had become an abbot. Traditionally, thaumaturgical powers were ascribed especially to ecclesiastical dignitaries.

Peacemaker More interesting are the miracles that characterize Arnulf’s sainthood and explain specific preferences of his venerators. These miracles were performed shortly before or during his episcopacy. The hagiographers tell them at length, suggesting that Arnulf’s intercessorship in these proved his sainthood. The miracles were more complicated and came with a message. They too were mostly cures, but these concerned powerful people who were supposed to bear social responsibility, noblemen and their families. Their suffering was a sign that they were doing wrong and should change to take their responsibility, while their healing was a reward for doing so. In some cases, someone was already ill before consulting Arnulf and found recovery after they promised to change their way of living. In others, a man fell ill because he appeared to be reluctant to reform his manners in the way suggested by Arnulf, and was cured by the saint only after proving to be repentant. In all these miracles much more was at stake than just the health of a single person. For example, Geric, a rich and powerful knight and one-time companion of Arnulf, had become an oppressor and plunderer, especially of

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widows and orphans. He was married to an excellent wife, Judith, and they had many children. One day, though, he fell ill and all his children died one after another. His relatives were already trying to rob him and his wife of their goods, when Judith persuaded him to go to Arnulf and ask him for advice. Arnulf not only explained to Geric why things had gone wrong and how he could alter this, but he added that out of compassion he had prayed to God for a long time to inflict some sort of suffering on Geric, forcing him to come to his senses. Fortunately God had answered Arnulf’s prayers and Geric was given a chance to mend his ways and indeed recovered. Judith also received a reward for her good care. Surely Arnulf did not mean so much her care for her husband’s sick body as that for his soul by steering him back on to the right path. She was to give birth to yet another son, Lambert, who would succeed his father and take care of his mother in her old age, and Judith would not die before she had seen his children (I.XXXI–XXXII). A similar story is that of Guy, castellan of Chaˆtillon, and his wife Ermegarde. Guy also fell ill and in despair Ermegarde, who was far advanced in pregnancy, sent a messenger to Arnulf asking him to pray for her husband’s health and for herself to have a safe delivery. Thanks to Arnulf all went well, except for the fact that the child was born blind. The little boy was then brought to Arnulf, who cured him with his saliva (I.XXVI–XXVIII). Even more important were Arnulf’s exertions to secure the succession to the throne of France. At the request of King Philip I and Queen Bertha and many dignitaries, Arnulf prayed to God to provide the royal couple with an heir to save the country from chaos. At the same time Arnulf advised the queen to devote herself to charity; after a while he was able to tell her, even before she knew this herself, that she was pregnant and was to give birth to a son, whom she should call Louis (I.XXX, II.III). And so it happened. These examples of Arnulf’s intercessorship caused his veneration by women and young couples. Together with other stories they also contributed to the image of Arnulf as the bringer of peace. A fine example is the rescue of a young man possessed by demons. Together with a friend who felt deeply insulted by some commoners, this man and others had attacked a village. The villagers, however, defended themselves fiercely and the friend was killed. While taking away his dead body into the woods surrounding the village, the man was suddenly caught by demons, and his relatives had to chain him, since he was totally out of his senses, to prevent him from hurting himself. When he was brought to Arnulf, the holy man cured him and made him promise to atone for all the evil he had ever done. So, according to his hagiographer, Arnulf freed this young man from the demons, but also from his thirst for blood. If not, all the villagers would certainly have been killed by way of revenge by the relatives and friends of the possessed man (I.XXIII). Others, like Herrad of Torhout and Folcard of Gistel, refused to listen to Arnulf’s summons to make peace, for which they were struck by the devil. Arnulf freed them at the supplication of friends and relatives, who promised to maintain the peace and take care

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that Herrad and Folcard would abandon any form of violence for the rest of their lives (II.XV, XVIII). In this way Arnulf played an important role in breaking long chains of revenge and counter-revenge which fueled violence in society. These miracles concern men who were punished by God with illness and loss because of their evil-doing. They were saved because others had the sense to bring them to Arnulf, who showed them the way and persuaded them to atone for their sins and to change their conduct. The cure is God’s reward for good behavior and brings welfare not only to the sick themselves but also to their friends and relatives. These events affected the whole of society by bringing peace. At the same time they served to instruct especially the class of the fighters, the noblemen, on how to behave. The hagiographers described this as Arnulf’s most important function as a saint. At present, the main site of veneration is the park laid out around a well in Tiegem, Arnulf’s place of birth. It is said that the saint once drank from this well and that ever since blind and other sick people were cured by using it. Until recently, newly-weds went to the chapel in the park to ask Arnulf to bring peace to their households and bless their marriage with children. Pregnant women used to go there to pray for a safe delivery.25 Prayers to that effect are known since the late Middle Ages. People still go to the park for meditation and prayer. The annual processions to this site have recently ceased and only few people nowadays believe in the curing power of the well, although it is generally assumed that the clear water is healthier than the best we can buy. We do not know when the well in Tiegem became such an important site of veneration. On 1 May 1457, in a magnificent ceremony, the original shrine of the saint was opened and his relics were translated into a richly decorated one, made especially in Bruges. On this occasion Anien Coussere, abbot of Oudenburg, granted part of the relics to the church of Tiegem.26 Did this gift prompt a cult in Arnulf’s place of birth, or did it confirm the existence of such a cult?

Posthumous miracles The hagiographers saw these miracles as expressions of the main task that God had imposed on Arnulf of Oudenburg.27 Nevertheless, the Lives proved to be insufficient to attain official recognition by the Church of Arnulf’s sainthood. In 1119 Radulf, archbishop of Reims, demanded a record of the posthumous miracles as a condition for canonization (III.prol.). In the ongoing theological discussion the opinion dominated that not miracles but only conduct, deeds, and virtues could be criteria for sainthood. In practice, however, even the clerical authorities seemed to consider the evidence of miracles, especially posthumous miracles, as decisive. Is this because the people always had the last word and finally determined the success of a saint’s cult? Did the Church compromise for the sake of financial and other benefits? Or was the Church just lacking in power to impose

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her ideas?28 Perhaps the answer is that in practice the lower clergy shared the same culture as their people and that that explains why the gap between theory, as put forward by the higher clergy, and actual practice remained so wide.29 True, Lisiard mentioned in the last chapter of his original version of the Life that numerous miracles happened at Arnulf’s grave and that many sick people came and took with them the dust of his tomb to bring them cure (XLVI), but apparently this was not enough. So Hariulf, in the second Life, transferred this passage in an expanded form to a special book of miracles.30 He tells us how from the moment of Arnulf’s burial not seven or ten, but thousands of sick people came to the saint’s grave or sent messengers to get some of the dust whirling around his tomb and take it with them as some kind of medicine. This cured all kinds of diseases of the body and the mind, if the patients took it mixed with their food or drink or just licked it. People came from everywhere, even from France, Holland, England, and Scotland, to carry off the dust (III.II). Only one case is described in detail and tells about a man suffering from dropsy, a hydrocipus, who was cured by putting some dust in water and drinking this (III.VII). This book of miracles contains a few miracles that mainly served to prove the sainthood of the deceased, such as a miraculous lighting of the sky and the tomb (III.I, XVII), ever-burning candles on the grave (III.V), relics remaining unharmed by a fire (III.XIII), or the prevention of the theft of Arnulf’s body by some monks of Saint-Me´dard, who were deterred from doing this by a tremendous heavenly tumult (III.III). Two stories are reminiscent of the saint’s action as peacemaker and breaker of blood revenge (III.XIV, XIX). The vast majority of the miracles, however, are simple cures, especially if we take into account the numbers that Hariulf gave. During the years 1115– 16, when the whole region was ravaged by an epidemic causing many victims, sixty and fifty people respectively of both sexes and of all ages were cured. Hariulf mentions these numbers explicitly, but added that there might have been more cases (III.VI). All sort of disorders are named, such as total or partial paralysis and insanity. Two old men suffering from hernia dragged their bodies to Arnulf’s grave, where their intestines were restored to their proper place (III.XI). Nothing is said about the social status of the sick, but they seem to have been commoners. The hagiographers give the impression that during his life Arnulf as a thaumaturgist took special care of women and their sons, but after his death no such preference can be distinguished. His tomb became a place where all could go and seek to be cured. So the conclusion must be that his conduct, his deeds and virtues, made Arnulf into a saint, and, once a saint, he became a refuge for everyone. Now his function as intercessor was all that remained, and that became much more important than the function as example and instructor that he had also fulfilled during his life and which led to his canonization.

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Godelieve of Gistel The replacement of the original Life of Godelieve of Gistel with a new one presenting a different image of the saint also suggests that a saint’s life story played only second fiddle in a saint’s cult. The Latin tradition consists of three versions of the Life of Godelieve, the original Life composed on the occasion of her canonization in 1084 by the monk Drogo of Sint-Winocsbergen,31 a revision of this text,32 and the so-called Legend.33 The first two versions of Godelieve’s life story tell the same story, a sober one, according to which Godelieve, married by her parents to Bertulf, was a perfect housewife, ready to fulfill her conjugal duties, but rejected by her husband. Perfect in her obedience and subjection to her husband and in her faith in God, she endured without any complaints all that Bertulf, who for some reason hated his wife, put her through. Bertulf treated her badly and in the end he made two of his servants kill her. Like Jesus, Godelieve was led to the slaughter like a lamb and so she deserved sainthood as a martyr. But it is the third and supposedly latest version which had the greatest impact on Godelieve’s cult. To distinguish it from the two older Lives, it is known as the Legend of Saint Godelieve, because it is considered less reliable than the other two. The author is unknown and there is, as we shall see, no agreement about the date of its composition. The author of the Legend knew the original Life and thanks to him we know the name of the monk Drogo as the writer of that text (Prol.). He tells, however, a different story.34 The Legend is much more detailed and contains many more miracles, especially posthumous ones. It does not end with the murder of Godelieve, but it also tells how Bertulf lived on after her death, and ends with the foundation of a nunnery in Gistel by Bertulf’s daughter Edith. Besides, by emphasizing her virginity instead of her martyrhood, it pictures Godelieve as a different kind of saint.

The Legend The textual transmission of the three versions of Godelieve’s Life is rather poor. We know one manuscript (c. 1200) that contains Drogo’s Life,35 while the other two versions are only available in the edition in the Acta Sanctorum.36 Jean-Baptiste du Sollier based his edition of the revision on a sixteenth-century manuscript, now lost, from the abbey of Oudenburg.37 His only source for the edition of the Legend was a transcript sent in 1604 to Rosweyde by the Jesuit Rubeccius, from Bruges.38 Neither the revision nor the Legend informs us about the authors or the dates of completion of these texts. Therefore it is not easy to date them. It is generally assumed that the revision of the Life was composed earlier than the Legend. The anonymous author followed Drogo’s story closely and did not add miraculous events such as can be found in the Legend. Mainly stylistic characteristics have led to the conclusion that the revision cannot

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have been made before the thirteenth century.39 If we assume that this revision preceded the Legend, then this narrative cannot be of a much younger date, because it must have been in existence in 1349. According to a comment in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century manuscript, a clerk of Gistel completed his translation of the Legend into the vernacular in that year. However, the reliability of the mention of the year 1349 is doubted and it is usually assumed that the Legend was written some time later.40 The oldest manuscripts containing Middle Netherlandish41 versions of this text, however, date from the fifteenth century. The five surviving manuscripts, dating from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries, do not present a direct translation of the only Latin text we know of, so perhaps there was once another Latin version.42 The main reason to date the Legend in the fourteenth or even fifteenth century is the miracle stories included in this version of Godelieve’s Life, which are considered to be products of late medieval popular imagination. They have also led to the conclusion that the Legend does not present a trustworthy account of Godelieve’s life story. However, a scrupulous examination of the content does not support these conclusions, as D. A. Stracke pointed out, who argued that the Legend was written in the twelfth century.43 There is no need to repeat all his arguments. It is more important to know how the anonymous author composed the Legend. He tells us in his Prologue that he followed the story of Drogo, the first writer of Godelieve’s Life, and added information omitted by Drogo which the approved true story tells and some stories, though very few, which deserved to be believed. Thus, the Legend is based on the original Life and also contains information that Drogo could have included and which was derived from oral tradition. For example, the Legend names the years, not mentioned by Drogo, of Godelieve’s birth (1052) (Prol.) and death (1070) (81). In the Prologue, the author also mentions her precise birthplace, the castle of Londefort near Wierre in the county of Boulogne, and the names of her parents, Heinfrid and Ogena, and her two sisters, Adela and Ogena. Both Baldwin V (1035–67) and Baldwin VI (1067–70), counts of Flanders, are called by their nicknames (Prol., 20). Most of these additions cannot be verified, but neither can they be falsified. Others are correct or very likely so. Therefore it seems very plausible that the Legend was composed at a time when the memory of Godelieve’s life, death, and canonization was still very vivid. Besides, in the Legend no posthumous miracles are included of a later date than the death of Godelieve’s widower, Bertulf. Thus neither the story itself nor the style and language of the text gives us any reason why the Legend could not have been written in the twelfth century. This conclusion can be strengthened by looking at the motivation that the author might have had for revising Drogo’s Life. Considering the addition of events that led to the foundation of the abbey in Gistel, as well as the transformation of the image of the saint, it seems very likely that the foundation of this nunnery was the occasion for the revision. According to the Legend,

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Bertulf remarried soon after Godelieve’s death and had a daughter, who was born blind (90). This girl, Edith, was cured when prayers were offered to Godelieve and her eyes were sprinkled with water from the well in which Godelieve’s murderers had immersed her dead body after they had strangled her (91). This and other miracles convinced Bertulf of Godelieve’s sanctity and filled him with remorse. He made a pilgrimage by way of penance and went to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens. After his return, he retired to the abbey of Sint-Winocsbergen, where he died and was buried (95). Out of gratitude his daughter founded a nunnery near the well in Gistel to honor Godelieve and to complete Bertulf’s penance (96). We do not know when the nunnery was founded, but it certainly existed in the twelfth century. The oldest written evidence of a nunnery in Gistel is the mention of an abbess Agatha, which cannot be dated before 1171.44 If we assume that the Legend was composed for the nuns of the abbey of Gistel, we can also understand why the emphasis shifted from Godelieve’s martyrdom to her supposed virginity. According to the Legend, Godelieve did not want to marry at all, because she wished to keep her virginity for Jesus, and she knew herself supported by her parents in this. However, the count of Boulogne, whose knight her father Heinfrid was, and Baldwin VI, count of Flanders, whose knight Bertulf of Gistel was, decided otherwise, and at the age of fifteen she was married to Bertulf (20). However, this marriage was never consummated as a result of the puzzling repugnance Bertulf felt for his wife. So Godelieve became one of those saints who despite their marriage succeeded in keeping their virginity thanks to the intervention of God. Since then, Godelieve has been venerated as a virgin and a martyr. Drogo’s Life does not give us any reason to believe that Godelieve’s marriage was not consummated. In fact, Drogo did not devote a word to this question or to the possible preservation of her virginity, so to him this does not seem to have been a point of interest at all.45 The difference between the two texts can be explained from the different goals that the writers pursued. I have said earlier that Drogo’s Life served to effect Godelieve’s canonization as part of a peace settlement between the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. It is understandable that in this case Godelieve’s martyrdom was emphasized. However, the Life was also the basis of the cult. Therefore, it is comprehensible that after the foundation of a nunnery under the patronage of Godelieve it became desirable to stress first of all the saint’s virginity. Although Drogo’s Life was never forgotten, the Legend became more popular, since the abbey was the center of the cult.

The miracles In the Legend, Godelieve was pictured as the perfect example for nuns and for women in general. The miracles that were added to her life story also illustrate the virtues that a pious woman was expected to practice, especially doing good to the poor. For instance, while still a child, Godelieve was caught

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one day when she had taken much more food to distribute to the poor than her father had permitted. Out of fear for her father’s anger she turned to Jesus, who helped her out by turning the food she was carrying into chips of wood (4–6). It is remarkable that during her lifetime only such miracles took place as gave Godelieve an opportunity to fulfill her duty towards God. Unlike Arnulf of Oudenburg, Godelieve was not a miracle-worker and did not have healing power. This difference between the two Flemish saints is not a question of gender. For instance, when Ida of Boulogne cured someone by giving them alms and thus became aware of her healing power, she, like Arnulf, started to use it and cured several people.46 However, it is important to remember that by then Ida was a widow who had fulfilled her spousal and maternal duties and, although she did not actually take the veil, had devoted herself fully to God. Godelieve was during her lifetime a daughter and a wife, and thus also had other obligations. Two miracles that can be found only in the Legend cannot be ignored, because they prove the dominant influence of this text in Godelieve’s cult. The first concerns the site of the miracle of the crows. It is believed that one day Godelieve was working in the fields and chasing away the crows that were pecking at the newly sown grains of corn. As the time came for her to go to church, she wondered how she could keep the birds away from the field during her absence. She decided to order them to go into the shed and lock them up. The crows willingly obeyed and so enabled her to fulfill her duty towards God in undisturbed tranquillity (34–35). The site where this miracle occurred is still an important site of veneration. The second miracle centers on a shirt that Godelieve is supposed to have sewn after her death. Bertulf, Godelieve’s widowed husband, sent a servant to Gistel with a precious piece of cloth for some shirts. Half-way through the journey the servant saw a respectable and majestic lady sitting in the shadow of a large tree, in the place where Godelieve during her lifetime used to take a rest on her way to or from the church. All at once the servant felt himself trembling with fear and he wished to run away, when the lady addressed him. She told him that no one could do the job his master wished to be done better than herself and asked him to hand the cloth over to her. The servant was so impressed by her appearance that he did not dare refuse. Full of anxiety because he had handed the precious cloth to a total stranger, he returned home. The next day he returned to the spot and found the woman, who handed over to him the finest shirts. Although the lady refused to tell the servant her name, as soon as Bertulf saw the shirts he recognized the needlework of his former wife, Godelieve, whose cruel death he had caused (93–94). This miracle brought Bertulf to his senses. The shirt, presently preserved at the abbey of Gistel, turned up only in the nineteenth century and, even if one is prepared to believe in this miracle, cannot possibly be one of the shirts miraculously sewn by Godelieve.47 The story, however, is much older and shows us that Godelieve’s conduct was

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exemplary, because even after her death she took care of her husband by putting him on the right path. In Drogo’s Life of Godelieve one looks in vain for miraculous events that announced her sainthood. Only once is she described as special, because, according to her hagiographer, she knew that one day God would elevate her above all women living in Flanders at that time (8).48 Of course, leading a perfect life and especially being generous to the poor even at the cost of her own well-being, Godelieve was an example to all women. By rebuking those who criticized her husband and bemoaned her pitiful life she acted as an instructor, but nobody approached her to act as an intercessor between God and men. It seems that during her life she was admired, but not considered a saint. Drogo saw the way she met her death as an imitatio Christi (10), which is the object of all saints. Her violent death and her innocence as a victim made her into a martyr. As her body was thrown into the well, she was purified from anything that might have polluted her (11). It was like a second baptism. At once her holiness was proved by miracles: the water in the well acquired healing powers and the earth on the spot where she was murdered changed into precious white stone (13). Besides mentioning that all kinds of sick people were cured by drinking water from this well, Drogo described only four of the many miracles that happened at Godelieve’s grave. In one case Drogo suggested a connection between Godelieve’s way of living and the kind of miracles she performed by stating that this cure showed that Godelieve cared as much about the poor after her death as during her lifetime. For instance, a paralyzed woman who had lain for nine years in front of the gates of the abbey of Saint-Trond hoping in vain for recovery was brought to Godelieve’s grave and after a short stay she was cured (15). The author of the Legend pictured Godelieve as a budding saint during her life and to this end inserted miracles enabling Godelieve to fulfill her pious and beneficent tasks to the extent she wished. The miracle of the crows clearly functioned as such. But only after her death did Godelieve become an intercessor. The Legend emphasized her share in the salvation of her husband Bertulf and, indirectly, the foundation of the nunnery. The posthumous miracles collected from other sources than these Lives in the Acta Sanctorum do not refer to her life story, but are mostly cures performed at two sites: the well and Godelieve’s grave.49 There is no specialization and the sick seem to have been commoners. In this respect Godelieve did not differ from other saints. The nunnery of Gistel is often referred to as ‘t Putje (the little well), and this may serve as a sign of the importance that is attached to the healing power of the saint. It also demonstrates the importance of this site in the cult of Godelieve.

Holy places Especially in Northern Europe, graves and wells often formed the center of a saint’s cult. These sites had become sanctified by the presence of the relics or the touch of a saint. In premodern society people also knew sacred places,

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according to Mircea Eliade, because they needed them as landmarks in an otherwise amorphous space.50 In the first centuries of Christianity, however, the Church took a very hostile attitude towards these kinds of places, which were considered to be remnants of paganism, and many of them were demolished. Christianity was a spiritual religion in which a place could never be an object of devotion, but was only the space were people gathered to honor God. This position had biblical foundations. In the course of the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine (306–37) was converted to Christianity, which under his successors almost became the state religion, this idea changed profoundly. This change came about under the influence of, on the one hand, the memorial buildings erected by the emperor Constantine in Jerusalem, which were soon included in devotional rituals, and, on the other hand, the veneration of the martyrs and their relics. In Jerusalem the biblical past of Christianity was commemorated at sites that became holy places because of the events they represented. The persecuted Church was originally commemorated in the annual celebration of the anniversary of the martyrs at their graves.51 Their tombs and the places where their relics were kept derived sacredness from the presence of (parts of) their holy bodies. These developments suggest that the initial clerical rejection of holy places was not generally accepted. They prove that the connection between places and holiness was not forgotten and could easily be restored, if it was ever severed at all. Again we find a discrepancy between theory and practice. According to Dieter Harmening, the criticism leveled in theological discussion during the Middle Ages at the veneration of trees and wells as divine beings did not reflect reality, but was purely a polemic argument.52 These criticisms simply ignored the fact that pre-Christians too did not venerate places and objects for their own sake, but only for what they considered as the sacred within them. In the Middle Ages people saw the world as part of a greater entity, God’s plan. Their knowledge of God’s plan could only be defective, although it was fully determinant. Therefore, they searched for ways to be in touch with the divine. God manifested Himself in sacred places through channels of communication, formed by saints, between Him and the world. In this way, these places could provide what people needed, and, in view of the overwhelming majority of these kinds of miracles, what people must have needed most was cures. So they took material from these sacred places, dust and water, both sources of life and death, as a medicine. The Church took charge of these places, sometimes by the building of chapels and monasteries on the site, as happened in the cases of Godelieve of Gistel and Arnulf of Oudenburg. This clerical intervention should not be explained as a christianizing of pagan customs, but as an acceptance of this form of sacredness, bringing it within the organization of the Church. In the fourth century, in these parts of Europe, many pagan sanctuaries, sites, and objects of veneration were still in use. Saint Martin, for example, met with a lot of resistance against his efforts to put an end to such practices.

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Instead, we often find a continuity within a different context. For instance, baptisteries were built at the ruins of pagan sanctuaries near wells and other waters which from of old had been centers of a cult and had been visited as holy places by people looking for healing.53 This continuity might explain why the well in Arnulf’s place of birth, Tiegem, became such an important site in Arnulf’s cult. A relic has been placed there in a small sanctuary, where people can pray to the saint. In this way the link between the well and the saint was guaranteed. The water became the means through which Arnulf acted as an intercessor between God and the people. Sometimes such places disappeared after the sacred power was transferred to another place, for instance, through the elevation of the bones of a saint from the grave and their translation to a new tomb inside the church, the most common form of canonization during the Middle Ages. This happened to the grave of Arnulf of Soissons, and Hariulf explicitly stated that after the translation some cure miracles at once took place inside the church (III.XVI). Since then, there is no mention of the healing dust any more. The ecclesiastical recognition of the sainthood of the miracle-worker took away every possible suspicion of magic or superstition. Hariulf’s description of the opening of Arnulf’s grave made it impossible to doubt Arnulf’s sainthood, and therefore the healing power of the dust of his grave. They found the bishop in full pontificals; on his chest lay a leaden tablet inscribed with the name and career of the saint. And when Hariulf raised Arnulf’s skull, a sweetsmelling oil wetted his fingers (III.XV).

Conclusion The patronage of the brewers which found no place in the Latin hagiographic tradition and the absence of translations of Arnulf of Oudenburg’s Lives into the vernacular prove that these Lives played only a minor role in the saint’s cult. The Lives were used in the liturgy and were probably also read in the abbey of Oudenburg. Therefore, one could imagine that a gap existed between the ecclesiastical and popular cults. The confusion of the saint and the other holy bishop, Arnulf of Metz, suggests otherwise. The adaptation of the Life of Godelieve of Gistel and the modification of the image of her sainthood also show how after her death her personality and conduct as pictured in the original Life fell into the background. Once a saint, her life and deeds could easily be adjusted to serve a new purpose. Even her exemplary and instructive function did not need to be based on the original and supposedly true story that led to her canonization. Godelieve’s new image was apparently attractive to nuns as well as to laymen. Not who these saints were or how they reached sainthood, but the fact that they were saints, was of paramount importance. Once a saint, one became an intercessor between God and men, and, if successful, this resulted in cure miracles. This intercessorship became the most important element in the cults of saints. Sacred sites like graves and wells became the centers of the

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cult of the saints after their death and provided a medicine for many common people who had no other means to restore their health. All kinds of illnesses were cured, and the only relation with the saints’ lives seems to have been their concern for the weak. In this respect Arnulf of Soissons did not differ from Godelieve of Gistel, but, unlike Godelieve, Arnulf acted as an intercessor already during his life. The miracles he performed then were closely related to his own life. He protected the weak by his healing power and also by teaching the powerful to keep peace. The difference between the two saints can be explained from their way of living. Arnulf became a holy man after he renounced the world and devoted himself unconditionally to God. He was a monk, and as an abbot and a bishop he held ecclesiastical offices. As a good Christian, Godelieve lived her life as a daughter and wife as best she could, but she became a saint only after her martyrdom which purified her from any pollution. Miracles were not only important to the people, but also to the Church. Saints’ Lives provided evidence of the holiness of a person’s life and deeds, but miracles, especially posthumous ones, had to prove his or her status as a saint. A holy life and miracles as criteria for canonization are not always in balance. In theory, deeds and virtues were to be decisive, but in practice the miracles won.

Notes I wish to thank Liesbeth van Houts for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 Lisiardus, Vita Arnulfi episcopi Suessionensis (BHL 703): ed. R. Nip, Arnulfus van Oudenburg, bisschop van Soissons (d. 1087), mens en model, Groningen, diss. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1995, 255–80. For Lisiard and the dating of this text see ibid., 49, 71–2 and 221. 2 R. Nip, ‘‘The Canonization of Godelieve of Gistel,’’ Hagiographica, 2 (1995), 145–55. 3 Drogo, Vita Godeliph (BHL 3591t): ed. N. N. Huyghebaert, trans. S. Gyselen, Drogo van SintWinoksbergen, Vita Godeliph, Tielt and Bussum, Lannoo, 1982, 34–72. 4 A similar case is the confusion and ultimate merger of Saint Severin, bishop of Cologne, with Saint Severin, bishop of Bordeaux; see M. Zender, ‘‘Die Verehrung des hl. Severinus von Ko¨ln,’’ in idem, Gestalt und Wandel: Aufsa¨tze zur rheinisch-westfa¨lischen Volkskunde und Kulturraumforschung, ed. H. L. Cox and G. Wiegelmann, Bonn, Ro¨hrscheid, 1977, 300–23. 5 See for Arnulf’s life story, especially for the dates, Nip, 1995. 6 Lisiardus, Vita Arnulfi, LIII–LV: ed. Nip, 1995, 278–9. 7 E. Hlawitschka, ‘‘Die Vorfahren Karls des Grossen,’’ in W. Braunfels (ed.), Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, Du¨sseldorf, Schwann, 3rd ed., 1967, 51–82, there 51–7. 8 Bruges, Grootseminarie, MS 127/5, fol. 28r; R. Vander Plaetse, ‘‘De divitiae claustrales van de Sint-Pietersabdij van Oudenburg tot ca. 1600,’’ in Sint-Arnoldus en de Sint-Pietersabdij te Oudenburg 1084–1984, Oudenburg, Gemeentebestuur van Oudenburg, 1984, 273–7, no. 162; for a reproduction of the picture see ibid., 108; M. Smeyers and B. Cardon, ‘‘Vier eeuwen Vlaamse miniatuurkunst in handschriften uit het Grootseminarie te Brugge,’’ in A. Denaux and E. Vanden Berghe (eds), De Duinenabdij en het Grootseminarie te Brugge, Tielt and Weesp, Lannoo, 1984, 137–88, there 164 and 166–73. 9 Hariulfus, Vita Arnulfi epicopi Suessionensis (BHL 704): ed. J. Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum Ordinis Sancti Benedicti [AASSOSB], VI, ii, Paris, 1701, 502–55, reprinted in Patrologia Latina [PL] 174, 1367–1438; see for the relation between the Life of Lisiard (BHL 703) and the Life of Hariulf (BHL 704) Nip, 1995, 46–76. 10 Bruges, Grootseminarie, MS 506/131 bis, fols. 2–45va; Nip, 1995, 51 and 282.

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11 Brussels, Royal Library, MS II, 562, fols. 1–57v; Van den Gheyn, Catalogue, V, 267, no. 3279; Nip, 1995, 52 and 282. 12 Nip, 1995, 43. 13 Sanderus, Bibliotheca Belgica Manuscripta, 2 vols, Lille, 1641–3, 1, 224–6; Nip, 1995, 73. 14 J. Ferrant, Un Saint de la Flandre au XIe`me sie`cle: Vie de Saint Arnold ou Arnulphe, Eve`que de Soissons, 2 vols, Bruges, 1887, 1, 292–8; J. L. Meulemeester, ‘‘Een inleiding tot de Sint-Arnoldusikonografie en -devotie,’’ in Sint-Arnoldus en de Sint-Pietersabdij, 1984, 109–72, there 138–41; H. Jung, Bier, Kunst und Brauchtum, Dortmund, Schropp Verlag, 1974, 120; cf. Zender, 1977, 310–11, who supposes a confusion between Severinus and Severus, bishop of Ravenna, as patron saint of the weavers of Cologne. 15 N. Geirnaert, ‘‘Sint-Arnoldus van Tiegem, patroon van de Brugse brouwers in de middeleeuwen,’’ Biekorf, 86 (1986), 333–8, there 334–5. 16 Meulemeester, 1984, 140–2. 17 Ibid., 123–5 and 140. 18 A. Smits, ‘‘Sint-Aernout, patroon der brouwers,’’ Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 1985, 232–63; idem, ‘‘Arnoldus en de brouwers,’’ Vlaanderen, 216 (1987), 28–31. 19 H. Delehaye, ‘‘Loca sanctorum,’’ Analecta Bollandiana, 48 (1930), 5–64, there 40–3. 20 E. Feys and D. Van de Casteele, Histoire d’Oudenbourg, 2 vols, Bruges, 1873, 1, 96–209. 21 Meulemeester, 1984, 140. 22 The numbers in parentheses refer to books and chapters of Hariulf’s Vita Arnulfi (BHL 704), ed. AASSOSB, VI, ii, 507–55. For a concordance with Lisiard’s Life (BHL 703) see Nip, 1995, app. 3. Hariulf’s Life replaced the older version and was the basis for the cult. 23 E. Demm, ‘‘Zur Rolle des Wunders in der Heiligkeitskonzeption des Mittelalters,’’ Archiv fu¨r Kulturgeschichte, 57 (1975), 300–44, there 306–7. 24 See for example P.-A. Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France me´die´vale (XIe–XIIe), Paris, Cerf, 1985, 227–64. 25 Ferrant, 1887, vol. 2, 311–15; Meulemeester, 1984, 153–5. 26 Feys and Van de Casteele, 1873, vol. 1, 382–4; Ferrant, 1887, vol. 2, 205–17; Meulemeester, 1984, 146. 27 Nip, 1995, 221–34. 28 Demm, 1975, 316–21; see also A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, transl. Jean Birrell, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 535–9. 29 Cf. J. W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994, 237, who calls into question the influence of the Church in sexual matters. 30 Hariulf, Vita Arnulfi, 3: AASSOSB, VI, ii, 549–55. 31 Drogo, Vita Godeliph: ed. Huyghebaert, 1982, 34–72. For the authorship see M. Coens, ‘‘La vie ancienne de sainte Godelive de Ghistelles par Drogon de Bergues,’’ Analecta Bollandiana, 44 (1926), 103–37, there 110–17. 32 Vita Godelevae (BHL 3592): ed. J. Sollier, AASS, 6 Iulii, 3rd ed., Paris and Rome, 1867, vol. 29, 404–10. 33 Vita altera Godelevae (BHL 3593): ed. ibid., 414–36. 34 The numbers in parentheses refer to the ed. AASS, 6 Iulii, vol. 29, 414–36. 35 Saint-Omer, MS BV 716 IV (VII), fols. 120v–123, see ed. Huyghebaert, 1982, 14–18. 36 AASS, 6 Iulii, vol. 29, 404–10 and 414–36. 37 Ibid., 367. 38 Ibid., 370. 39 Vita Godeliph: ed. Huyghebaert, 1982, 17; D. A. Stracke, ‘‘Bijdragen over Sinte Godelieve,’’ Ons Geestelijk Erf, 27 (1935), 5–61 and 128–42, there 130–4. 40 A. Hoste, ‘‘Kritische bemerkingen bij de latijnse legende van Sint Godelieve door de Anonymus Gistellensis,’’ Sacris Erudiri, 20 (1971), 299–330, there 302–5 and 329–30; D. Callewaert, ‘‘Het leven van de H. Godelieve,’’ Volkskunde, 79 (1978), 311–19, there 313; A. Keersmaekers, ‘‘Het leven van de H. Godelieve in handschriften,’’ Vlaanderen, 200 (1984), 12–16, there 15–16; A. Berteloot, ‘‘De Middelnederlandse legende van Sint-Godelieve: Een tekst-kritische studie van een heiligenleven op de taalgrens,’’ De Franse Nederlanden, 1988, 78– 88, there 80–1. 41 For the use of this term see D. E. H. de Boer, ‘‘Advenerunt cum Brantledderis or the Combustion of Latin in Middle Netherlandish Administrative Contexts,’’ in R. I. A. Nip

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42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Reneé Nip et al. (eds), Media Latinitas: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Occasion of the Retirement of L. J. Engels (Instrumenta Patristica 28), Turnhout, Brepols, 1995, 29–50, there 29. Callewaert, 1978, 312–13; Keersmaekers, 1984, 12; Berteloot, 1988, 80–1. See for this Stracke, 1935, 5–61. M. Nuyttens, ‘‘De Tempeliers en de oorsprong van de Godelieveabdij te Gistel,’’ in SintGodelieveabdij Gistel 1891–1991, Gistel, 1991, 39–43. This nunnery was plundered in 1578 and moved to Bruges. The monastery of Gistel, which is at present the center of the cult of Godelieve, was refounded in 1891. R. Nip, ‘‘Godelieve of Gistel and Ida of Boulogne,’’ in A. B. Mulder-Bakker (ed.), Sanctity and Motherhood: Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, New York and London, Garland, 1995, 191–224, there 204–9. Vita BV. Ide Vidue (BHL 4141), 8: ed. PL 155, 437–66, there 442. On this see B. Janssens de Bisthoven, ‘‘Het wondere weefsel van de H. Godelieve,’’ Sacris Erudiri, 20 (1971), 285–98. The numbers in parentheses refer to the Vita Godeliph (BHL 3591t), ed. Huyghebaert, 1982, 34–72. Vita Godelevae: AASS, 6 Iulii, vol. 29, 436–44. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. R. Trask, New York, Harper, 1961, 20–36. R. A. Markus, ‘‘How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2 (1994), 257–71. D. Harmening, Superstitio: U¨berlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlichtheologischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters, Berlin, Schmidt, 1979, 62–7. A. Rouselle, Croire et gue´rir: La foi en Gaule dans l’Antiquite´ tardive, Paris, Fayard, 1990, 196–9.

Part III

Texts The Lives of saints and the invention of saintliness

5

‘‘Whither runnest thou?’’ The conception of saintliness in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius Maaike Zimmerman

Apollonius, a charismatic Neopythagorean sage and wonder-worker, was born in Tyana (Cappadocia) about the beginning of the Christian era.1 He must have enjoyed contemporary and posthumous fame in those cities of the eastern part of the Roman Empire that he visited during his life as a wandering sage;2 in his native town Tyana a cult of Apollonius presumably existed soon after his death. In Aegae (Cilicia) he attached himself for several years to the famous sanctuary of Asclepios, where he performed healings using the methods typical of Asclepios’ cult. Local legends remembered both his miraculous activities as a healer of physical diseases as well as of diseases of the soul, and his superhuman wisdom and prophetic gifts. A more hostile tradition about Apollonius, depicting him as a depraved magician and charlatan, arose equally soon after his death, as can be gathered from Lucian in his Alexander sive Pseudomantis. Himself a native of Samosata in Commagene, Lucian had apparently collected various stories about Apollonius circulating in northern Syria and Asia Minor. He informs his reader that Asclepios’ false priest Alexander of Abonouteichos was a pupil and lover of a certain doctor, who, in turn, had learnt all his tricks from the ‘‘well-known Apollonius of Tyana.’’3 It was nearly a century after his death that a devotion to Apollonius was in vogue at the court of the Severi: Caracalla visited and enlarged his cult shrine in Tyana.4 Severus Alexander is said to have kept a house altar (lararium) with statues of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ, and Apollonius of Tyana.5 Septimius Severus’ wife Julia Domna had already commissioned Philostratus6 to write a biography of Apollonius. In constructing his biography, eight books In honour of Apollonius the Tyanean,7 Philostratus made use of several sources explicitly mentioned by him: local oral traditions; the ‘‘Scrapbook’’ of Damis, close follower and travelling companion of Apollonius;8 the ‘‘Memoirs’’ of Moiragenes; the information about Apollonius’ period in Aegae by Maximus of Aegae; moreover, the author refers to works written by Apollonius himself, and sometimes quotes or paraphrases ‘letters of Apollonius.’ Indeed, an epistolary collection was already circulating under the name of the Tyanean in the second century. Some of the letters in this collection have been recognized as authentic letters, while

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others may have been part of a fictional collection, the publication of which is in itself proof of the considerable renown that Apollonius had won during the second century.9 Philostratus has greatly altered and amplified the picture he found in his material. His work must have appeared shortly after Julia Domna’s death (AD 217). The legend of Apollonius in its Philostratean, enriched version would probably not have persisted had it not been for Sossianus Hierocles. He was the governor of Bithynia and a persecutor of Christians, together with Diocletian, during the Great Persecution (AD 303–4). Almost a century after its publication, he used Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii to propagate Apollonius as a ‘pagan Christ.’ In his work The Lover of Truth, Hierocles praised Apollonius’ divine gifts as ranking above those of Christ. We do not have Hierocles’ work, but Eusebius, who recognized the persuasive power and danger of this pagan propaganda, wrote a thorough critique of the Vita Apollonii in a work Contra Hieroclem, which we do have.10 From this work it is evident that Philostratus’ biography of Apollonius of Tyana had become an important issue in the polemics between pagans and Christians.11 From then onward Philostratus’ version (highly idiosyncratic, as we will see) of the Vita Apollonii obscured all previous traditions about the sage, although he had already become a legend during the century preceding Philostratus’ work. Although the problem of the pre-Philostratean sources has already occupied scholars for more than a century, no consensus has so far been reached. For our purpose it will be enough to refer to the investigation and conclusions of Bowie.12 The ‘historical Apollonius,’ a highly problematic subject,13 will not occupy us here. Instead, in the context of this collection of chapters on ‘The Invention of Saintliness,’ a closer look at Philostratus’ work may help us to find a tentative answer to the following questions: With what aura of saintliness does Philostratus surround his hero? What does this aura tell us about Philostratus’ own ideals and his intentions with the Vita Apollonii? In the course of this investigation it will now and then no doubt be necessary to compare the form, tone, and content of the Vita Apollonii with the Lives of Christian saints, but this is not the aim of this study.

The Life of Apollonius of Tyana Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii can be divided into three parts. In the first three books the birth of Apollonius and his formative years are depicted. He is said to have studied philosophy under the guidance of a Pythagorean philosopher, but soon to have surpassed his master in wisdom and blameless lifestyle. He leaves this master and moves to the cult site of Asclepius in Aegae. There it soon becomes apparent that he is the special favorite of the god, who allows him to act as a healer and counselor of men. A five years’ observation of silence brings Apollonius to a higher level of existence. His mere appearance, without words, is sufficient to silence and placate a furious mob. A journey to India helps him reach the summit: in long and confidential communication

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with the Brahmans he becomes their equal. When he leaves them, the Brahmans testify that Apollonius will already be considered a god during his lifetime.14 In the next three books Apollonius’ travels through the entire Roman Empire are described. From Asia Minor he travels to Greece, and from there to Rome where some problems arise because of Nero’s hatred of philosophers. However, Apollonius triumphs due to his superior wisdom. From Rome he travels to Spain, and reaches the Pillars of Hercules. He returns by way of Sicily to Greece and from there travels to Egypt, reaching even the sources of the Nile. He journeys through the world as a kind of savior. Everywhere he goes he promotes true religious observances and obedience to moral rules; he cures the sick and those obsessed by demons; he frees a city from the plague, predicts the future, and reads people’s hearts. In the fifth book, in Egypt, Apollonius becomes counselor and confidant of Vespasian, the emperor-to-be. In the sixth book our hero visits the gymnosophists in Ethiopia and proves to be superior to them as a philosopher. Then follows, in books seven and eight, the climactic point of the Vita: Apollonius’ confrontation with the tyrant Domitian. Apollonius is summoned to appear before the emperor but comes of his own accord. Put into jail, he is humiliated and tortured but keeps his dignity and shows his spiritual superiority. In front of his fellow prisoners he relieves himself of his chains but puts them on again. In a court trial he disappears when the discussion reaches its climax. After his disappearance Apollonius suddenly reappears among his friends in Dicaearchia. He lives among friends and followers for several years. He travels again to Greece and appears amidst crowds of admirers in Olympia. In Lebadia he descends into the subterranean sanctuary of Apollo and after two days re-emerges with a book containing the doxai of Pythagoras. In Ephesus in Asia Minor he announces to a crowd his vision of the murder of Domitian, which is happening at that exact moment. After this event he disappears; his death is shrouded in mystery; there are even rumors about an ascent to heaven. Apollonius only shows himself once more, to a young man who has doubts about the immortality of the soul.

Biography, hagiography, or a novel? The difficulties of classifying Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii are reflected in the different ways in which the work has been characterized. It has variously been described as a ‘‘romanhafte Heiligenbiographie,’’15 ‘‘une are´talogie litte´raire qui effectivement e´quivaut presque a` un roman,’’16 and a ‘‘romanticized biography’’ or ‘‘vie romanceé.’’17 The work has also been simply classified as an ‘‘ancient novel.’’18 Most scholars regard it as a biography of some sort, since the material itself is biographical in nature. As a biography of a divine philosopher it has been assigned by Cox19 to the same paradigm as Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras and Iamblichus’ Pythagorean Life, because in all three of these biographies the divine philosopher is characterized as a son of

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god. Almost all of these characterizations stress the ‘novelistic,’ ‘romantic,’ or ‘fictional’ qualities recognized in the work. Bowie,21 arguing from ‘The Invention of Damis’22 in conscious evocation of a novelistic tone and setting, also finds support for his interpretation of the work as a novel in form and structure; the title ‘‘In Honor of Apollonius, the Tyanean’’ suggests a novelistic formula. Anderson, after having explored the many different elements in the texture of the Vita Apollonii, concludes: ‘‘It is futile in the end to try to ‘explain’ Apollonius in terms of any single genre,’’ and opts for classifying Philostratus’ work as an encomium in the form of a biography. He further refines the comparison with Xenophon’s Cyropedia, an idea suggested already by others:23 the Vita Apollonii consists, as Xenophon’s work does, of eight books. ‘‘. . . the Cyropedia allows romance and encomium into history, and its literary prestige served to legitimize the practice; the additional element of hagiography in Philostratus merely reflects a difference in the nature of his subject.’’24 Although this chapter attempts to show that the element of hagiography cannot be regarded as ‘additional’ to the Vita Apollonii, I agree with Anderson that a discussion of the question of genre will not further our understanding of Philostratus’ work.

Shared motives A closer look at the Vita Apollonii reveals quite a few analogies with the early Lives of Christian saints, and the Vita Apollonii has, accordingly, often been considered a ‘‘pagan hagiography.’’25 It is probably more to the point to conclude with Angenendt and others that, in the period of the Roman Empire, pagans, Jews, and Christians shared a partially common ‘hagiographic discourse,’ which, so to speak, ‘was in the air.’26 Just like, for instance, Athanasius’ Vita Antonii,27 the Vita Apollonii has a tripartite structure (see the outline above): early youth – development – end. As in Athanasius’ work, the closing sections show the highest dramatic tension, and in both works much attention has been paid to providing proofs and witnesses for the immortality of the hero. Moreover, one could point out many ‘hagiographical motifs’ in Philostratus’ work: miracles accompanying the birth of the protagonist; struggles against and victory over demons; the performance of healing miracles; the endurance of suffering; the ‘doubting Thomas’ motif.28 Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii abounds moreover with the incidents of plot which early Christian hagiography shared with ancient narrative fiction: extreme beauty of the hero(ine); travel across the known world; storms, shipwrecks; assaults by barbarians; meetings with empresses or emperors; resurrections from apparent death; devotion to a certain aim or an all-consuming passion.29 Anderson points to the fact that ‘‘many of the minor incidents in V.A. . . . are firmly rooted in the social and economic history of the Eastern empire. A number of the traits assembled by Peter


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Brown as characteristics of Syrian holy men in the late empire apply much earlier to Apollonius.’’30 Are we entitled, then, with Dodds,31 to regard Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii as just a ‘‘pagan specimen of the literary genre of hagiography, common to Christians and pagans?’’ As has been shown by other scholars, it is a mistake to call hagiography a ‘genre’; therefore Van Uytfanghe32 opts for another approach: he elaborates Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘‘discours hagiographique,’’ by defining four constituents characteristic of ‘hagiographic discourse’ (these constituents will be presented in detail below, in the section ‘‘A hagiographic discourse?,’’ pp. 84–7). In this way texts from various ‘genres’ can be designated as hagiographic discourse, provided they exhibit all of these four constituents. Non-Christian texts, too, can thus be taken into consideration. Van Uytfanghe designed this analytical model as a contribution to the so far unresolved question of whether Christian hagiography can be explained from the pagan hagiography of late antiquity, or vice versa. Below we will show, with a few examples, that, indeed, Van Uytfanghe’s constituents of hagiographic discourse can all be found in Philostratus’ work. However, since every author puts the performative function of this hagiographic discourse into the service of his own and his intended public’s ideals, it is necessary to start with a brief survey of the information we have on the author and his circle of readers.

The author and his readers Philostratus (170–245) practiced his profession as a sophist in Athens, and later in Rome. His introduction to the court of the Severi (see above) was due to the intellectual interests of Septimius Severus’ wife, Julia Domna. In his collection of Lives of Sophists, Philostratus mentions several important ‘sophists’ as his teachers. These teachers, in turn, had been taught by Hadrian of Tyre, who himself had been a pupil of the famous Herodes Atticus. As a biographer of famous sophists, Philostratus is an important source of information for us on the cultural ideals of the representatives of the Greek literary e´lite in the Antonine and Severan periods.33 It was Philostratus himself who coined the term ‘Second Sophistic’ for the complex of cultural phenomena that these generations of ‘sophists,’ who performed and taught rhetoric in the Roman Empire, represented. This term indicates that Philostratus viewed these cultural phenomena as a ‘renaissance’ of the sophistic movement of fifth-century Athens. The sophists portrayed by Philostratus all belonged to the cultural e´lite of society and moved around in an international and cosmopolitan milieu where loyalty to the Roman Empire went hand in hand with a determined Hellenism, thoroughly rooted in the past. Many of the representatives of the Second Sophistic attained prominent positions in their own cities as well as at the imperial court. In Philostratus’ rather anecdotal biographies of these sophists, several constant factors can be recognized in the ethos and perspective of these professional rhetors, an ethos and perspective

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with which their biographer and fellow sophist Philostratus fully identifies himself: these sophists all regard themselves as the preservers and adorners of an idealized Hellenic past within a Roman present. These virtuoso rhetors and their enthusiastic fans felt themselves to be united with a revived classical Hellenic past, which had a normative value, but which they felt entitled and able to emulate.34

A hagiographic discourse? We must now explore the presence in the Vita Apollonii of the four constituents of hagiographic discourse as proposed by Van Uytfanghe:35 The first constituent of hagiographic discourse according to Van Uytfanghe is that it is made known that the protagonist stands in a special, intrinsic relationship to God or to the divine, without being a god in the full sense of the word. As Van Uytfanghe himself notes,36 non-Christian texts in particular often give the degrees of divinity a human being might attain. In the Vita Apollonii the special relationship of Apollonius with the divine already reveals itself in the legends surrounding his birth: he is said to be a reincarnation of Proteus;37 the Tyaneans consider him to be a ‘‘son of Zeus’’;38 in other passages the author never in his own person declares Apollonius to be a god or a divine being, but duly reports that others regard him as such. Some examples may suffice: In a passage where Damis has just been told that Apollonius does not need him as an interpreter during their travels, because he knows all languages and can even read people’s unspoken thoughts, it is then stated: ‘‘Thereupon the Assyrian [¼ Damis] worshipped him, when he heard this, and regarded him as a demon.’’39 After Apollonius has decided to leave the Brahmans, ‘‘having embraced Apollonius and declared that he would be esteemed a god by the many, not merely after his death but while he was still alive, they turned back to their place of meditation.’’40 When Apollonius has arrived in Sparta, and is welcomed as a guru for youths and adults alike, and as ‘‘the honor of the old men,’’ we are told: ‘‘Now there was a Corinthian who felt piqued at all this, and asked whether they were also going to celebrate a theophany for him. ‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘by Castor and Pollux, everything is ready anyhow.’ But Apollonius did not encourage them to pay him such honors, for he feared they would arouse envy.’’41 Apollonius has been thrown into jail. Damis has just witnessed how Apollonius can easily take his leg out of its chains: ‘‘Damis says that it was then for the first time that he really and truly understood the nature of Apollonius, to wit that it was divine and superhuman.’’42 When Apollonius is taken to court, and is questioned by the emperor Domitian: ‘‘Next, the emperor asked, ‘Why is it that men call you a god?’


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‘Because,’ answered Apollonius, ‘every man that is thought to be good, is honored by the title of god.’ ’’43 In many passages Philostratus emphasizes that what people interpret as ‘divinity’ is in fact based on exceptional wisdom or devotion. We must also keep in mind that Apollonius is being presented as a second Pythagoras. Iamblichus notes that Aristotle had already acknowledged that three kinds of rational beings exist – gods, men, and beings like Pythagoras.44 Cox discusses the different conceptions of divinity in biographies of holy philosophers.45 Christian saints also stand in a particular relationship to God, or Christ. Christ, or God, ‘lives’ in the saint, or (in the case of martyrs) suffers in him. But it is always made clear that the saint’s particular relationship with God is based on the typical biblical notion of grace, and the saint always humbly states his/her dependency on the grace of God. This is time and again brought out in a number of passages in Athanasius’ Vita Antonii.46 The second constituent of Van Uytfanghe’s general hagiographic discourse concerns the relationship between the biographer’s pronouncements and ‘historical reality.’ Stylization of biographical data often takes place in three successive stages: the subjectivity of the ‘holy man’; oral tradition; the literary mise en forme by the author. The importance and degree of these stages may differ, but one has always to assume a minimum of ‘kerygmatic distortion.’ The literary mise en forme in the Vita Apollonii has, indeed, led to a considerable degree of distortion. Philostratus at the outset of his work announces the literary program to which he has committed himself, at the request of Julia Domna. He tells us that a descendant of Apollonius’ disciple and companion Damis has handed Damis’s ‘Notebook’ over to Julia Domna, and ‘‘Now I belonged to the circle of the empress, for she was a devoted admirer of all rhetorical exercises; and she commanded me to recast and edit these essays, at the same time paying more attention to style and diction of them; for the man of Nineveh had told his story clearly enough, yet somewhat awkwardly.’’47 Philostratus has put a maximum of effort into the service of literary brilliance. On every page of his narrative the prominence of Philostratus the sophist and virtuoso writer with all his brilliance is often an obstacle for the reader who is trying to form a picture of the hero, Apollonius. The reader is not only treated to all the stylistic refinements of the sophist’s repertoire, like ecphrases, adoxa and paradoxa, bon mots, gnomes, etc., ad nauseam. The author presents Apollonius as a connoisseur and art critic, who excels in elegantly handling all kinds of sophistic themes.48 For instance, Philostratus involves his sage in an elaborate gesture to correct Homer, by interviewing the ghost of Achilles and restoring the tomb of Palamedes.49 I quote this example from Anderson’s50 chapter ‘‘Apollonius of Tyana: A Holy Man in a Sophist’s World?’’ Anderson there51 discusses the considerable degree of overlap between Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists and the Vita Apollonii: ‘‘At least some of Philostratus’ sophists turn out close to holy men, while Apollonius is assimilated to the role of an ideal sophist.’’52 Anderson gives a wealth of examples from the Vita Apollonii.

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More than philosophical or religious issues, Greek history and Greek literature are the subjects that Apollonius discusses with the Brahmans. Apollonius and Damis are overjoyed at the profound Hellenism of these Brahmans and at the excellent Greek they speak! However, as John Elsner has shown convincingly, the profound Hellenism which pervades Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius serves a sacred cause, and is therefore part and parcel of the hagiographic discourse of the V.A.53 The third constituent of hagiographic discourse according to Van Uytfanghe is that the text has a performative rather than an informative function, and is composed with a view to at least one of the following aims: apology (for instance, refuting a false image) and/or idealization of the hero (for whom the writer wants to evoke admiration or even to establish a cult), and a pedagogical purpose: educating the reading public by way of the exemplary thoughts and deeds of the hero, who represents an exemplary lifestyle. Philostratus states in his programmatic statements in the Vita Apollonii that he has undertaken to ‘correct’ his source material in two ways: he does not want his public to pay any attention to ‘‘Moeragenes, who composed four books about Apollonius, and yet was ignorant of many of the circumstances of his life.’’54 About this work of Moeragenes we hear from Origen55 that it was entitled Memorabilia of Apollonius the Tyanean, magician and philosopher (Ta Apolloˆniou tou Tyaneoˆs magou kai philosophou apomnemoneuˆmata). It has now been generally accepted that Moeragenes did not represent a tradition hostile to Apollonius, but that Philostratus objected to the presentation by Moeragenes of Apollonius as a philosopher and a magician.56 Philostratus also expressly states that he wants to clear Apollonius of the calumny that he was a wizard (as, for instance, Lucian represented him).57 It is his aim to present Apollonius as a pursuer of the ideal of Pythagoras, and, indeed, as ‘‘more divine than Pythagoras.’’ The honest effort to represent Apollonius as a true philosopher in every way reveals a great deal about the expectations of Philostratus and his contemporaries about what a true philosopher should be,58 but less about the life of Apollonius. The apologetic tendency59 of the Vita Apollonii results in a deliberate vagueness about the true nature of Apollonius, and a continuous effort to rationalize the miracles performed by him, or else gloss over them. For instance, two miracles are reported: Apollonius has been accused of le`semajeste´ of Nero and summoned to court by Tigellinus; when someone starts reading a long indictment against the sage, the letters disappear and the bookroll turns out to be blank. Only a few words are devoted to this miracle, and these are immediately followed by an extensive discussion between Tigellinus and Apollonius, in which the latter emphatically interprets all his wisdom and prophetic powers as a gift of the gods. Then follows the story of the resurrection by Apollonius of a bride who died on her wedding day; it is expressly and repeatedly suggested to be a case of Scheintod.60


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The pedagogical purpose is there: on many occasions the moderate Pythagorean asceticism of Apollonius, free from any kind of rigorism and self-torture, is propagated as an exemplary lifestyle. Apollonius often propagandizes the purity of cult rituals and bloodless sacrifices. An equally strong educational appeal for the reader, however, inheres in the theme of preserving and, where necessary, restoring the time-honored Hellenic culture, a theme that obtrusively pervades the whole work. There is a wide gap between the performative function of Philostratus’ ‘hagiographic’ work, addressing an intellectual e´lite with a nostalgic message, and the performative function of, for instance, the Vita Antonii, describing an exemplary life for the whole Christian community to imitate, as becomes clear right from the Prologue, and again in the final chapters, of the Vita Antonii.61 As the fourth constituent of hagiographic discourse, Van Uytfanghe points to themes and archetypes that give shape to and converge with the portrait of Bieler’s theios aneˆr:62 a rather static portrayal of mankind with a strong ethicalspiritual dimension, reflected in virtutes. These virtutes are to be understood in both senses of the word: high moral virtues, including asceticism, as well as supernatural and, if desired, thaumaturgical gifts.63 Bieler, indeed, in his study is able to quote examples from Philostratus’ V.A. for most of the topics of the image of the theios aneˆr. Philostratus’ Apollonius is certainly depicted as being no ordinary mortal: he exhibits prophetic and thaumaturgical gifts. However, faithful to his apologetic purpose, Philostratus does much to rationalize these gifts and to ascribe them wherever possible to Apollonius’ superhuman wisdom. After having reached perfection during his visit to the Brahmans, Apollonius only has to remain true to himself.64 On the contrary, the Christian ‘Gottesmensch’ must work hard to remain worthy of God’s grace.65

The role of hagiographic discourse It is evident that the Vita Apollonii, indeed, exhibits all four constituents of Van Uytfanghe’s general hagiographic discourse. However, in Philostratus’ work the hagiographic discourse proper seems almost incidental when compared to the overwhelming mass of sophistic material and embellishments. Philostratus no doubt worked from sources on the Life of Apollonus of Tyana. The elements of hagiographic discourse that we meet in his work may well go back to a more focused hagiographic discourse in one of his sources.66 Philostratus had other goals: he had to entertain and please his literary circle, with the result that in his Vita Apollonii the literary entertainment and sophisticisms drown out the hagiographic discourse proper. This is, of course, a logical consequence of one of the aims that the author had set himself: improving on the ‘Notebook’ of Damis at the request of Julia Domna (see above). But because of this aspect of the Vita Apollonii the work lacks the cohesion and purpose that pervades a life of a Christian saint like Athanasius’ Life of Antony.67 This Life and other Christian biographies of

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saints were directed to the Christian community, members of which sought both a model to imitate and an attested intercessor in heaven. Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii was intended for a small circle of sophistic literary and antiquarian connoisseurs, who would revel in the kind of sophistic flourishes and intellectual tours de force that the hero of the Vita Apollonii has to offer them. Philostratus probably never intended his work to be a ‘sinner-to-saint-tale,’ describing a hero’s life-long struggle against evil. Far from conveying to its readers a message of future salvation, Philostratus in his Vita Apollonii presents the readers with ‘‘a living continuation of the sacred culture and identity of ancient Greece through the sacred character of Apollonius who surpasses all holy men past and present.’’68 Thus the saintliness itself of Philostratus’ Apollonius became a backward-looking creation. From an interesting collection of articles, proceedings of a colloquium ‘Du he´ros paıën au saint Chre´tien,’ held in Strasbourg in 1995,69 it becomes clear that a fruitful way of investigating the elements of continuity as well as the elements of rupture between paganism and Christianism is the study of the emblematic figures of both: change of religion was also a change of models, and this change is incarnated in the passage from ancient hero to Christian saint: upon the hero followed the sage-philosopher; the martyr, who is the first saintly figure of Christianity, combines qualities of hero and sage. And from the heroism of the martyrs the chain goes on to the heroism of virtutes in the Christian saints. The Apollonius we meet in Philostratus’ Vita appears to be an uneasy hybrid composite of ancient hero, philosopher-sage, and lateantique saintly figure; this may well be the result of the hybrid program that Philostratus had set himself when embarking upon the commission given to him by Julia Domna, and of his and his circle’s cultural outlook.

Later development Despite Philostratus’ efforts to suppress the belief in Apollonius as a wonderworker, it is exactly as such that he lives on for many centuries in a nonPhilostratean tradition. In the Vita Apollonii there is no mention of Apollonius visiting Byzantium; and Apollonius is said to have despised Antioch because of the lack of Hellenistic culture on the part of its inhabitants.70 However, it is in Antioch and Byzantium that beneficial talismans provided by Apollonius were believed to possess magical power and to avert all kinds of evil. Christian writers often feel obliged to define their position concerning the persistent belief in these magical objects.71 Some of these continued to exist in Byzantium until the crusades at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the end the popular belief in Apollonius’ talismans leads to a new explanation by Christian leaders: Apollonius is able to work these miracles through the power of Christ.72 Finally, Apollonius even receives a place among Christian saints: in a Greek prayer a ‘‘holy Balinas’’ is mentioned:73 Balinas was the Arabic name for Apollonius.74


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Notes 1 The title of this study is taken from Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 1, 8, where it is said that, during his stay at the sanctuary of Asclepius in Aegae (Cilicia), Apollonius became such a celebrity that people from all around flocked to Aegae to visit him. Hence the Cilician proverb: ‘‘Whither runnest thou? Is it to see the stripling?’’ References to Philostratus’ work are from F. C. Conybeare, Philostratus. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. The Epistles of Apollonius and the Treatise of Eusebius. With an English Translation, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1st ed., 1912, 6th ed., 1989. 2 M. Dzielska, Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History, Rome (L’ ‘‘Erma’’ di Bretschneider), 1986, 51–84. 3 Lucianus, Alexander sive Pseudomantis, 5: ed. A. M. Harmon, Lucian. With an English translation, 8 vols, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1979, 4, 182–3. Lucian’s hostility towards mysticizing Pythagoreanism is generally known; see also Dzielska, 1986, 86–9, with literature in notes. 4 According to Cassius Dio, 77, 18, 4: ed. U. P. Boissevain, Cassius Dio, 5 vols, Berlin, Weidmann, 1895–1901, 3, 397. 5 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 6, 21, 3: ed. Th. Mommsen, Leipzig, J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1903–9; Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Lampridius, Vita Alexandri, 29, 2: ed. E. Hohl, W. Seyfarth, and Ch. Samberger, Leipzig, Teubner, 1965. See also C. BertrandDagenbach, ‘‘Alexandre Se´ve`re, ses he´ros et ses saints: ou quelques pieuses impie´te´s d’un bon empereur,’’ in G. Freyburger and L. Pernot (eds), Du he´ros paıën au saint chre´tien: Actes du colloque organise´ par le centre d’Analyse des Rhe´toriques Religieuses de l’Antiquite´, Strasbourg 1–2 dećembre 1995 (E´tudes Augustiennes, Se´rie Antiquite´ 154), Paris, 1997, 95–103. 6 See below in the pararagraph ‘‘The author and his readers’’ (pp 83–4) and note 33 for information on Philostratus. 7 This is the literal translation of the title of Philostratus’ biography. The work is now commonly known as ‘‘the Vita Apollonii,’’ and abbreviated V.A. 8 In V.A., 1, 3 we are told that a descendant of this Damis had brought to Julia Domna the ‘‘tablets’’ (deltoi) containing these memoirs. Julia Domna then commanded Philostratus, who belonged to her salon, to write a biography of Apollonius on the basis of these hitherto unknown memoirs. Scholars are divided on the question of the genuineness of this Damis source. Some reject the ‘‘memoirs of Damis’’ altogether as a fabrication of Philostratus, in conscious evocation of a novelistic tone and setting for his biography. So E. L. Bowie, ‘‘Apollonius of Tyana: Tradition and Reality,’’ in W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds), Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt, 1972–, Berlin and New York, 1978, 2,16,2, 1652– 99, there 1653–5 and 1663–7. Other scholars opt for ‘Damis’ as a pre-Philostratean forgery by neo-Pythagorean admirers of Apollonius. See W. Speyer, ‘‘Zum Bild des Apollonius von Tyana bei Heiden und Christen,’’ Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Antike und Christentum, 17 (1974), 47–63, there 48–9. Still others attempt to rehabilitate Damis’s memoirs as a genuine source. See G. Anderson, Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century A.D., London, Croom Helm, 1986, 155–73; cf., however, the review of Anderson’s monograph by J. R. Morgan in Classical Review, 38 (1988), 235–6. See on ‘Damis’ as a possible Pythagorean pseudepigraph of the second century AD, and remodeled by Philostratus, R. Goulet, ‘‘Les vies de philosophes dans l’Antiquite´ tardive et leur porteé myste´rique,’’ in F. Bovon et al. (eds), Les Actes Apocryphes des Apoˆtres: Christianisme et monde paıën, Geneva, Labor et Fides, 1981, 161–206, 177–8 and notes. An illuminating discussion of the Damis issue may be found in J. A. Francis, ‘‘New Questions to Old Answers: On Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius,’’ American Journal of Philology, 119 (1998), 419–41. 9 The standard edition and discussion of the Letters is now R. J. Penella, The Letters of Apollonius of Tyana: A Critical Text with Prolegomena, Translation and Commentary, Leiden, Brill, 1979. 10 The treatise of Eusebius is easily accessible at the end of the second volume of Conybeare’s edition of Philostratus (see note 1). 11 The story of the epiphany of Apollonius before Aurelianus, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Flavius Vopiscus Aurelian, 24, 2–9: ed. E. Hohl, W. Seyfarth, and Ch. Samberger, Teubner, Leipzig, 1965, can be seen in the light of this same propaganda: Apollonius persuades Aurelianus not to destroy Tyana; Aurelianus builds a temple for Apollonius there. For further information on all stages of the tradition about Apollonius see G. Petzke, Die Traditionen u¨ber Apollonius von Tyana und das neue Testament, Leiden, Brill, 1970. See also Dzielska, 1986, 97–9.

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12 Since Bowie’s profound investigation of this question in his ‘‘Apollonius of Tyana’’ (see note 8), various reactions and adjustments have appeared. These are extensively discussed in J. J. Flinterman, Power, Paideia and Pythagorism: Greek Identity, Conceptions of the Relationship Between Philosophers and Monarchs and Political Ideas in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, Amsterdam, Gieben, 1995, 67, with all literary references in notes. 13 See, e.g., on the ‘elusive’ nature of the historical figure of Apollonius, Flinterman, 1995, 52–3, with references. 14 V.A., 3, 50. On the significance of these travels as a reflection of Apollonius’ spiritual progress see J. Elsner, ‘‘Hagiographic Geography: Travel and Allegory in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana,’’ Journal of Hellenic Studies, 117 (1997), 22–37. 15 E. Schwartz, Fu¨nf Vortra¨ge u¨ber den griechischen Roman, 2nd ed., Berlin, De Gruyter, 1943, 135. 16 B. P. Reardon, Courants litte´raires Grecs des IIe et IIIe sie`cles apre`s J-C. (Annales litte´raires de l’Universite´ de Nantes 3), Paris, les Belles Lettres, 1971, 265. We will not go into the intricate problem of ‘aretalogy’ as a ‘genre.’ See the discussion and literary references in P. Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, 47–54. 17 Flinterman, 1995, 97. 18 T. Ha¨gg, The Novel in Antiquity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, 115–17; cf. also N. Holzberg, The Ancient Novel, London and New York, Routledge, 1995, 18–19. 19 Cox, 1983, 34–6. 20 See below, for the elusive identity of Philostratus’ Apollonius as a sage who is a son of god. 21 Bowie, 1978, 1665. 22 See note 8. 23 For instance Bowie, 1978, 1665, note 49. 24 Anderson, 1986, 236. 25 See M. J. M. Van Uytfanghe, ‘‘L’Hagiographie: Un ‘genre’ Chre´tien ou antique tardif?,’’ Analecta Bollandiana, 11 (1993), 135–88, there 147, and note 44, for examples of the use of the term ‘‘pagan hagiography’’ for V.A. in scholarly literature. See, for an interesting new approach to the difficulties inherent in discussing hagiography in terms of genre, H. U. Gumbrecht, ‘‘Faszinationstyp Hagiographie: Ein historisches Experiment zur Gattungstheorie,’’ in C. Cormeau (ed.), Deutsche Literatur im Mittelalter: Kontakte und Perspektiven, Hugo Kuhn zum Gedenken, Stuttgart, Metzler-Verlag, 1979, 37–84. 26 Van Uytfanghe, 1993, 170; see also A. Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien: Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom fru¨hen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart, Munich, Beck, 1994, 31. 27 See W. Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, I: Von der Passio Perpetuae zu den Dialogi Gregors des Großen, Stuttgart, Anton Hiersemann-Verlag, 1986, 116–20 on the scholarly discussion on the relation between the Vita Antonii and possible ancient literary ‘predecessors.’ Berschin, 119, concludes: ‘‘daß es das gesuchte Vorbild der Antoniusvita vielleicht doch nicht gibt, sondern daß hier eine neue Form geschaffen wurde.’’ 28 Miracles around birth: V.A., 1, 4–6; struggle with demons: V.A., 2, 4; 3, 38; 4, 10; 4, 25; healing miracles: V.A., 3, 39–40; 6, 43; endurance of suffering: V.A., 7, 21 ff.; ‘doubting Thomas’ motif: V.A., 8, 31. 29 See R. Pervo, ‘‘Early Christan Fiction,’’ in J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman (ed.), Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, 239–54; J. Perkins, ‘‘Representation in Greek Saints’ Lives,’’ in idem, 255–71; G. Huber-Rebenich, ‘‘Hagiographic Fiction as Entertainment,’’ in H. Hofmann (ed.), Latin Fiction: The Latin Novel in Context, London and New York, Routledge, 1999, 187–212. 30 See Anderson, 1986, 145–6, with examples. 31 E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1965; paperback, 1990, repr., 1991, 31. 32 Van Uytfanghe, 1993, 147–9. See also the Introduction to this volume. 33 Flavius Philostratus (c. AD 170–245) from Lemnos; he belonged to a Greek literary family, the precise details of which are not certain. There is general consensus that ‘our’ Philostratus is Suda’s ‘Philostratus II,’ and the author of the Life of Apollonius, of the Lives of the Sophists and of the Eikones, as well as Love Letters, and several minor meletai and dialexeis. See Reardon, 1971, 186, note 68, with literature. Philostratus and his Lives of the Sophists and Life of Apollonius are discussed in their cultural context in the chapter ‘‘Philostratus’’ in S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World AD 50–250, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, 380–400.


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34 For a thorough exploration of the cultural horizons of the Second Sophistic see G. Anderson, The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire, London and New York, Routledge, 1993. 35 See note 25. Van Uytfanghe, 1993, 170–9 discusses the ‘‘specific Christian hagiographic discourse within the general hagiographic discourse’’ for each of the four constituents. In our study we will deal mainly with the ‘‘general hagiographic discourse,’’ but we will occasionally refer to the ‘‘specific Christian hagiographic discourse’’ in comparison. 36 Van Uytfanghe, 1993, 148, note 49. 37 V.A., 1, 4. 38 V.A., 1, 5. 39 V.A., 1, 19. 40 V.A., 3, 50. 41 V.A., 4, 31. 42 V.A., 7, 38. 43 V.A., 8, 5. 44 Iamblichus, Vita Pythagorica: ed. L. Deubner, Leipzig, Teubner, 1937, 6, 31. 45 See note 16. 46 See Van Uytfanghe, 1993, 171 and note 159; Angenendt, 1994, 69: ‘‘Vir Dei – Famula Dei.’’ See also J.-C. Fredouille, ‘‘Le he´ros et le saint,’’ in Freyburger and Pernot, 1995, 11–25, there 24: ‘‘Car, en de´finitive, la saintete´ c’est l’he´roı¨ sme plus la graˆce.’’ 47 V.A., 1, 3. 48 A list of the whole gamut of contemporary sophistic literary forms to be found in V.A. is given by Reardon, 1971, 267 and note 98. 49 V.A., 3, 27: Homerus, Ilias. 18, 375: ed. A. T. Murray (Loeb Classical Library 171), Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1st ed., 1925; 2nd ed., 1999. 50 Anderson, 1986, 128. 51 Ibid., 121–33. 52 Ibid., 124. 53 See Elsner, 1997, 36. 54 V.A., 1, 3. 55 Origenes, Contra Celsum, 6, 41: ed. and trans. M. Borret (5 vols), 3, Paris, 1969. 56 See Bowie, 1978, 1673–9; D. H. Raynor, ‘‘Moeragenes and Philostratus: Two Views of Apollonius of Tyana,’’ Classical Quarterly, 34 (1984), 222–6. 57 V.A., 1, 2. See, on Lucian’s representation of Apollonius, note 3 above. 58 See J. Hahn, Der Philosoph und die Gesellschaft: Selbstversta¨ndnis, o¨ffentliches Auftreten und popula¨re Erwartungen in der hohen Kaiserzeit, Stuttgart, Steiner-Verlag Wiesbaden, 1989. 59 See Cox, 1983, 10–16 on the strongly apologetic or polemic tendency of biographies of Greek philosophers, especially Pythagorean biographies. It often resulted in stylized exaggeration of virtues (or vices, if the biography was hostile), and this became a standard ingredient of the biographies of holy philosophers. 60 V.A., 4, 34–5. 61 See Vita Antonii, the Prologus, and, e.g., 93–4: ed. Vita di Antonio. Introduzione di C. Mohrmann. Testo critico e commenta a cura di G. J. M. Bartelink. Traduzione di P. Citati e S. Lilla, 5th ed., Milan, Mondadori, 1991; see also Van Uytfanghe, 1993, 173–4 on the difference in performative function of ‘‘general hagiographic discourse’’ and specific Christian hagiographic discourse. 62 L. Bieler, THEIOS ANER: Das Bild des ‘go¨ttlichen Menschen’ in Spa¨tantike und Fru¨hchristentum, 2 vols, Vienna, Oskar Ho¨fels, 1935–6, 2nd ed., Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967. 63 See Angenendt, 1994, 69–88: ‘‘Der Gottesmensch,’’ with bibliographical references in notes; especially on virtutes, 74–80. 64 V.A., 6, 35. 65 See Angenendt, 1994, 74–80. 66 See note 8. 67 For Athanasius’ work as a very well-structured and purposeful kind of text, see K. Holl, ‘‘Die schriftstellerische Form des griechischen Heiligenlebens,’’ Neue Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r das classische Altertum, 29 (1912), 406–27. See also Berschin, 1986, 119, note 15. 68 Elsner, 1997, 36. 69 See note 5. 70 V.A., 1, 16 and 3, 58.

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71 Speyer, 1974, 56–63 quotes many interesting examples. See also W. L. Dulie`re, ‘‘Protection permanente contre des animeaux nuisibles assureé par Apollonius de Tyane dans Byzance et Antioche: Evolution de son mythe,’’ Byzantinisches Zeitschrift, 64 (1970), 247–77. 72 Speyer, 1974, 63. 73 Ibid., 63. 74 In Arabic literature there is a whole corpus of Balinas’s works. See Dzielska, 1986, 112–27, with a wealth of literary references in the notes.

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The West European Alexius legend With an Appendix presenting the medieval Latin text corpus in its context (Alexiana Latina Medii Aevi, I) Louk J. Engels

Preface1 The legend of Saint Alexius and its echoes in West European literature and art have intrigued many scholars ever since the 1840s. While it is true that the period of the greatest flourishing of Alexius veneration (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) has received the least attention – not surprising, perhaps, given the interest in the Middle Ages, but curious nevertheless – so many publications have been devoted to the origin of the legend and its reception in the Middle Ages that enough was believed to be known about the subject to justify a study summarizing the research. This was undertaken already seventy years ago by Francesco Addonizio. His La leggenda di S. Alessio nella letteratura e nell’arte (1930) proved disappointing, but the project as such was considered in no way premature by Rudolph Altrocchi, who wrote in his review: ‘‘The time is surely ripe for a complete treatment of the Legend of Saint Alexius, both in its oriental origins and in its literary development in Europe in the Middle Ages.’’ Baudouin de Gaiffier was right in reacting skeptically to this statement.2 Even today scholars interested in writing the history of the Alexius legend have found themselves confronted with controversial issues as well as considerable lacunae and weak spots in the research. Contrary to the hypothesis of a Syriac origin, formulated by Arthur Amiaud in 1889 and still dominant today, there is, for example, Margarete Ro¨sler’s theory, unrefuted since 1933, that the story originated in Byzantium. Charles E. Stebbins’s prediction of 1973 that systematic research would soon bring certainty about the origin of the legend has not yet been fulfilled.3 The majority of the Alexius texts from the Near East that have become known since 1889 have not yet been investigated, and only a small start has been made with the editing of the many Greek texts. This means that the changes made in the legend when it was introduced into the West cannot yet be identified with any certainty. A Latin prose vita discovered in 1941 (BHL

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289, App. s. IX4–X1) shows that the legend circulated in a different form in Spain for a considerable time before it became known in Rome during the last quarter of the tenth century. Contrary to what was previously believed, the story of Alexius therefore reached the West at more than one place and in various versions. The question then arises whether the implicit assumption underlying recent filiation research, namely that all the Latin Alexius texts with the exception of the vita found in Spain derive from a single Latin ‘‘Urtext,’’ can go unchallenged. The state of research into the Latin Alexius texts is determined to a large extent by their position and role in the history of reception. A great deal of the work has focused either on reconstructing the dissemination and development of the legend in the West or on studying antecedents of the vernacular texts that appeared on the scene from the eleventh century onward. There is no denying that this research has been fruitful, but its orientation is as a rule determined by the underlying intentions. Repeatedly new Latin texts are published, the corpus is divided into types based on content, relations among Latin texts and between Latin and vernacular texts are investigated, and comparative studies are made of the treatment of the story and the development of themes and episodes in Latin and other texts. What has been lacking, however, is research in which the Latin texts themselves, both individually and as a corpus, occupy a central position. The part played in Alexius research by specialists in medieval Latin language and literature can only be called a modest one. Their main contribution has been editions of poems. Yet the transmission of the most influential and widely disseminated early prose vitae has hardly been studied along the lines of textual criticism, to say nothing of the history of reception. The editions used are based on a fraction of the manuscripts in which these texts are preserved, and consequently their value is doubtful. Not even preliminary editions are available of most of the epitomae. A large part of the Latin corpus is therefore terra incognita. The texts have been subjected to almost no literary analysis. Nor have they been studied in any depth in terms of their context, that is, as part of the richly varied hagiographic dossier – the Alexius texts in the vernacular and other evidence of Alexius veneration such as the liturgy, patrocinia (monasteries, chapels, altars, etc., with Alexius as their patron saint), relics, persons and also places named after the saint, administrative and literary sources, and works of art – or in the light of the general and specific historical situation in which they originated and functioned. This is a weak spot as well, for as the study of the Old French Chanson de saint Alexis has shown, information about the historical context plays an important supportive role in tracing and explaining the developments in the story and the changes in the image of the saint. A great deal of painstaking research is needed, therefore, to make the time ripe for a work summarizing the development of the medieval Latin Alexius legend, to say nothing of the Western legend in its totality. It goes almost without saying that the state of research into the Latin text corpus has adverse effects for the study of Alexius texts in the vernacular.

The West European Alexius legend

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This article, the first of several that I hope to publish under the title Alexiana latina medii aevi, is intended mainly to provide orientation. It deals first with the present state of knowledge regarding the origin of the Alexius legend and its introduction in the West and subsequently sketches its reception in the West into the twentieth century. Therefore, on the one hand this contribution touches on the theme of the present volume as well as on its converse, namely the demythologizing of a saint. On the other hand, it aims at presenting the much larger whole of which the Latin text corpus constitutes one part. The section on the Middle Ages gives an impression of the importance of the hagiographic dossier in the broader sense and of the historical context for tracing and explaining developments in the ‘‘matie`re’’ and the ‘‘message’’ of the legend. Information that can shed light on the context in which the medieval corpus of Latin and vernacular Alexius texts developed has also been collected and juxtaposed with the evolution of the corpus in the Appendix, to which reference will be made in this chapter as often as possible. The remaining articles will deal with Latin texts and will be predominantly philological in character. Alexiana III, which discusses the relation between the prose vita BHL 287 and its sources, the vitae BHL 286 and 290, appeared already at the end of 1999.

The West European Alexius legend Origin and first signs that it was known in the West A period of about four and a half centuries separates the time in which the story of Alexius takes place and the moment when the legend appeared on the scene with the distinctive components it would manifest in the West. Considering the historical persons who play a role in the legend when Alexius dies, namely the emperors Arcadius (395–408) and Honorius (395– 423) and usually Pope Innocent (the first of this name held office from 402 to 417), the man of God would have died at the beginning of the fifth century, between 402 and 408.4 But the oldest document containing features of the standard Western story is a Greek hymn from the ninth century, the Alexius canon attributed to Josephos Hymnographos (c. 816–86; App. 868). This hymn does not recount the life of the saint in great detail; as is often the case in hymnody and homiletics, the author assumes familiarity with the legend and calls up the image of the man of God by briefly mentioning elements from his life story.5 The earliest irrefutable evidence for the existence of Alexius veneration in ancient Rome is of an even later date, namely 986–7 (see App. 986–7). According to the dominant tradition, he was born there around 350 as the only and long-awaited child of distinguished and immensely wealthy parents, Euphemianus and Aglae¨s, and he married a woman of high birth. Although he left the city when he fled the world on his wedding night sponsa intacta, and lived for years a life of total self-denial among beggars

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in Edessa in the East, he returned to his parents’ home incognito and continued his ascetic life there under even harsher circumstances. When he died, a voice from heaven ordering the Romans to look for the man of God and ask him to pray for Rome caused a great commotion in the city. Emperors and the pope joined the frantic search. They found him dead, and only at their request did he give up ‘‘the letter’’ clutched in his hand, the account he had written of his experiences, finally revealing who he was. As his body was being carried to the church for burial, the sick were healed, and ever afterwards prayers offered at his grave were answered. How is it possible that in Rome of all places the name of Alexius appears in no sources for centuries? Why did the silence about all this continue for so long, and why was the silence broken in Byzantium earlier than in Rome itself? Did the Rome of the story perhaps refer not to the city on the Tiber but to Constantinople, the new Rome? The old texts reveal little in the way of an answer to this last question. A few Greek texts and a late Carshuni text (Arabic in Syriac script) explicitly mention the old Rome or include topographic details that identify the city as such.6 In the Middle Ages no one ever questioned whether Alexius actually hailed from the old Rome. In the heyday of the Alexius cult, when the Bollandist Daniel Papebroch (1626–1714) left some room for doubt, he was promptly called to order by the Spanish Inquisition.7 Questions of this kind have intrigued scholars for centuries. The search for answers, which began early in the eighteenth century, has been described many times.8 The Bollandist Joannes Pinius (Jean Pien, 1678–1749),9 who prepared the section on Alexius in the Acta Sanctorum, was already struck by the centuries-long silence, and his low opinion of the historical value of the Latin and especially the Greek Alexius vitae10 led him to search for older sources. With the help of contacts in Rome he became acquainted with an Arabic story about a Man of God from Edessa who had come from Rome. The story is preserved in the Vatican MS. syr. 199 (olim 55), which dates from 1545. This Carshuni text showed surprising similarities to the Greek and Latin Alexius story. But the Man of God died in Edessa, where his grave was found to be empty soon after his burial; he then turned up alive in Rome, where he died a second time. Pinius understandably considered the text unreliable. But he was confronted with the existence of a much older Syriac text that ended with the burial of the Man of God in Edessa. This text seemed reliable to his informants, but it was inaccessible. Pinius drew no conclusions about a possible relation between the Man of God and Alexius. He wrote a separate account of the tradition about the Man of God who died in Edessa and published a Latin translation of the first part of the Arabic text. After describing the problem, Pinius called on scholars to bring to light the old Syriac text.11 The present status quaestionum is determined largely by the research of Arthur Amiaud (1889), Louis Duchesne (1890), and Margarete Ro¨sler (1933). Amiaud followed the trail found by Pinius to the Near East. He published two Syriac texts about a Man of God from Rome who went to


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Edessa. The one (BHO 36–40) is short and extremely old; it was probably written in Edessa in the years 450–75 and is preserved in manuscripts from the sixth century (one of them may even date from the fifth century). The other is longer and of a later date (the manuscripts are from the ninth to thirteenth centuries); it first presents verbatim the old Syriac story about the Man of God and then, after a short transitional text, adds a sequel (BHO 41). In the transitional section the compiler states that the second story is about the same Man of God and is derived from the account about him written in Rome.12 The old Syriac text shows striking similarities to the first part of the Alexius story that surfaced later, but also deviates from it on several points. All of the persons who appear in the story, including the main character, remain nameless, except for the bishop of Edessa, Mar Rabbula, a well-known historical figure (in office 412–36).13 When one of the servants sent to search for the Man of God by his father tells the bishop about the person who fled the world, he does not believe the strange story. But after the Man of God dies in Edessa and is buried in the graveyard reserved for foreigners, and the sacristan, who alone knew the man’s secret, informs the bishop, Rabbula rushes to the cemetery to have the holy man transferred to a suitable place of rest. But the grave is empty except for the rags in which the Man of God had been buried. This impressed the bishop so deeply that he stopped construction on buildings intended to keep his name alive and from then on used all the money he had available to care for strangers, the poor, widows, and orphans. In the later Alexius story, however, which gives names to most of the characters, Mar Rabbula no longer plays a role. The second part of the much later Syriac text (BHO 41), on the other hand, closely resembles the second part of the standard version of the Alexius story. Although the saint is still referred to as the Man of God or Mar Riscia (‘‘Prince’’), his father, the pope, and his chancellor Aethius bear the same names as they do in the Alexius legend.14 After the saintliness of the Man of God has become known, he leaves Edessa in order to continue his ascetic life in Tarsus, where no one knows him. But providence brings him to Rome, where he practices his asceticism in the courtyard of his parents’ palace. He dies seventeen years later and, after his identity becomes known, is buried in St Peter’s. Of course the compiler of the later Syriac text also realized that by combining the old Edessan and the later ‘Roman’ tradition the Man of God dies twice, first in Edessa and later in Rome. The compiler’s connecting text is largely an attempt to explain this curiosity. Amiaud’s comparative study of the two Syriac texts and the Greek and Latin versions of the Alexius story known to him – fewer than we know of today – convinced him that the old Syriac account of the Man of God from Rome (BHO 36–40), which seemed to him reasonably reliable, was the origin of the Alexius legend. He concluded that it became known in Constantinople, where it underwent adaptation (very likely in the sixth century). Among other changes, the death of the Man of God in Edessa was replaced by the

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revelation of his saintliness by the Mother of God, and a sequel was added in which the Man of God returned to Rome and died there. This sequel was probably written with the story of the Byzantine saint John Calybita (end of the fifth century) in mind. Also the son of prominent Roman (in this case eastern Roman) parents, this saint, the story goes, secretly forsook the world and was plagued by the devil with memories of his parents after he withdrew into a monastery far from home. In order to face the temptation at the place where it would be ever present, he returned home to live in a hut in the front courtyard of his parents’ house. When his death was near, he revealed to his parents who he was.15 A combination of traditions about two different saints – who as a result even today are confused or considered identical in East and West16 – gave rise, Amiaud maintained, to what he termed the ‘‘le´gende byzantine,’’ the precursor of the Alexius legend. This story subsequently spread through the East and the West. It also became known in Syria, where the later Syriac version of the story of the Man of God indicates that the old local tradition was perpetuated and combined unaltered with a translation of the second part of the Byzantine legend (BHO 41).17 In the course of time, elements of the ‘‘le´gende byzantine’’ also found their way into the first part of the old Syriac legend; the Carshuni text known to Pinius also seems to be an interpolated version of this kind.18 Duchesne tried to determine when the Alexius legend became known in Rome. The oldest trace of Alexius that he found in the sources was the mention of the saint in two documents from 986–7 confirming benefactions to a monastery founded in 977 at the church of the martyr Boniface of Tarsus on the Aventine by the Greek patriarch Sergios (d. 981), who had fled to Rome. Saint Boniface, tradition has it, was the steward of a rich Roman matron, Aglae¨s (also the name of Alexius’ mother in the standard legend). After her conversion she sent Boniface to Tarsus to obtain relics of the martyrs who had given their lives for the faith there during the persecutions under Emperor Diocletian (shortly after 300). In Tarsus he joined the persecuted Christians and was tortured and beheaded. His Passio was translated into Latin in the seventh century (App. s. VII). In Rome Boniface was considered a Roman – mistakenly so, for he came from the Greek East – and it was believed that servants had brought his body to Rome, where Aglae¨s initially had it buried along the Via Latina but later transferred it to the church that she had built for him on the Aventine. In reality the Boniface Church was probably founded only around 600; it is first mentioned in documents dating from the seventh century (App. s. VI4–VII1).19 Under the second abbot, Leo, the monastery founded at this church by Sergios acquired great prestige. Home to both Greek and Latin monks who lived according to the Rule of Basil the Great and the Rule of Benedict respectively, it became a center for missionary activities in the Near East as well as central and northern Europe. The documents in question (App. 986–7) mention Alexius together with Boniface as patron of the monastery. Considering that in the succeeding years the Alexius cult developed very rapidly in the abbey on the


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Aventine, Duchesne concluded that it was quite likely the Greek monks of this community who introduced the legend in Rome ‘‘pour l’e´dification du public et pour le bien de leur monaste`re.’’20 The perfectly complementary conclusions of Amiaud and Duchesne have in general been favorably received – thanks in part to the authority of Gaston Paris, who endorsed them years before they were published.21 It is true that those responsible for shaping scholarly opinion continued to wrestle with the question of which Rome the legend originally meant,22 and there was also criticism of certain points in Amiaud’s argument which in my opinion are indeed debatable.23 Some scholars also tried to make a case for the Roman origin of the legend, or at least an early introduction of the cult in Rome.24 But this did not prevent the ideas of Amiaud and Duchesne from being considered the most plausible reconstruction of the origin of the Alexius legend and its dissemination in Rome. They imply that the saint as described in the standard legend did not exist. The commentary on the Martyrologium Romanum in the edition of the Bollandists (1940) states that at most the old Syriac legend of the Man of God who died in Edessa contains a core of historical truth. In 1915 the Benedictine Order removed Alexius from its calendar (the list of saints’ festivals and feasts of the Church), and the celebration of Alexius in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church on 17 July, obligatory since 1570, became optional in 1961 with the introduction of the revised Missale and Breviarium Romanum. The natalis sancti Alexii confessoris is no longer a general church festival; it may be celebrated with a mass as a festum particulare if desired, but only a commemoratio is now prescribed.25 This in no way means that the quest for antecedents of the western legend should be considered closed. We are dealing with something resembling a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces still missing. In a situation of this kind any solution will inevitably be speculative; others are always conceivable,26 and when previously unknown pieces turn up it may be necessary to revise the reconstruction. A revision of this kind has actually been in order for some time. In 1933 Margarete Ro¨sler published a short Greek text (BHG 56c) that shows striking similarities to the oldest Syriac account of the Man of God, but differences as well. The bishop of Edessa, for example, does appear in the story but in a less prominent role (his name is not mentioned), and the empty grave is missing. According to Ro¨sler this Greek text proves that the Alexius legend has Byzantine origins and that these lie at the root of the Syriac tradition. Her find has attracted relatively little attention, and the responses to the conclusions she drew from it have been mixed.27 More of a stir was created by the discovery of a Latin prose vita (App. s. IX4–X1) that circulated in northern Spain from 925–50 or earlier, in other words before Alexius appears to have been known in Rome, until about 1200. This story deviates from the standard Latin legend, and the text shows signs of an Arabic background. Perhaps, then, the legend not only reached the West at more than one place and in various stages of development, but was also transmitted along different routes, namely from the Byzantine world and from the Near

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East. In any case, Duchesne’s findings for Rome cannot be applied to the entire Latin West, as has at times been suggested. They would also have to be adjusted for Rome itself, if it should prove true that Alexius is depicted on an eighth-century fresco in the crypt of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii on the Aventine.28 Since the early twentieth century quite a number of manuscripts have been found containing Alexius texts that have not yet been studied, from areas where the legend is thought to have originated. Of those from the Near East, only the Ethiopian ones, which are of a relatively recent date, have been investigated.29 As far as the Greek Alexius corpus is concerned (BHG 51– 56), only a fraction of the manuscripts noted in catalogues, etc., were used for editions, and only four of the more than twenty versions of the vita BHG 51 listed up to now in the BHG and its Auctaria, in expectation of critical editions, have become available in print. We therefore have an incomplete picture of the state in which the legend reached the West from the Byzantine world. The contamination with the Calybita legend explains the most obvious differences between the Old Syriac Story of the Man of God from the city of Rome and the standard Western legend, but certainly not all of them. This is a serious handicap for the study of the relations between the various versions in which the standard Latin legend began circulating around the year 1000. And it is not yet possible to test the hypothesis that the Greek legend was in turn influenced by its Latin counterpart.30 A plea for resuming systematic research into the antecedents of the Western Alexius legend is therefore more than justified.

The Alexius legend in the Middle Ages Of the Latin vita BHL 289 discovered in 1941 no trace has been found outside Spain.31 The fact that it came to light therefore in no way undermines the idea that the Alexius legend in the West was mainly disseminated from Rome. In 986–7 we finally have firmer ground to stand on with regard to Rome. Unlike the situation in Burgos and its surroundings, where familiarity with the legend appears to be documented exclusively by legendaria (manuscripts with collections of saints’ lives),32 we here have a monastery under the patronage of Alexius. This community cultivated specific ways of venerating him and cherished everything that testified to the special ‘historical’ tie between the monastery and its second patron. The monks had a wide range of vested interests – material and immaterial – in the prestige enjoyed by their patron saint and were therefore intent on maintaining and increasing his fame. In the decades around the year 1000 the Boniface and Alexius monastery, which had experienced a rapid flourishing and now enjoyed excellent connections, was extremely well equipped to carry out this mission. It made its second patron more famous than its first33 and remained, with ups and downs, the main center of Alexius veneration right into modern times. We have no exact picture of the circumstances leading to Alexius’ patronage over the monastery and the state of the legend at that time, but the devel-


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opments from 986–7 onward can be traced in considerable detail, thanks to the information that has been collected about both the Alexius veneration and the early history and position of the monastery.34 A lectionary (a manuscript with texts to be read aloud or sung during the liturgy) from SS. Bonifatii et Alexii, compiled in 1058–72 and consisting mainly of a collection of texts about the two patron saints, already includes a variety of texts about Alexius: a Vita in prose, a collection of miracles credited to the intercession of Alexius and Boniface, a rhythmic poem, and a sermon (App. 985–90, 1012, s. XI1–XI2 and 1056–7).35 The transmission and content of these texts warrant the conclusion that they were written for the benefit of the Alexius cult on the Aventine. The works are all by unknown authors, except for the sermon, which is by Peter Damian (c. 1007–72). We can reasonably assume that the other authors were monks of the monastery or at least had some connection with the monastery. An Alexius sermon preached by Adalbert of Prague (956–97) during his stay at SS. Bonifatii et Alexii (App. 995–6) has been preserved elsewhere. Already at an early point, then, the hagiographic text corpus available to the monastery showed the typical diversification. It definitely included one (BHL 286) and perhaps more than one of the three prose vitae circulating around the year 1000 which recounted the ‘authentic’ story of Alexius; readings from this vita were also included in the liturgy. Furthermore there was a text in rhythmic stanzas extolling Alexius and presenting a summary account of his life – this may have been intended for singing during the worship service – and two sermons preached during the celebration of the feast of Alexius, in which Bible texts are used to help shape a message from the story and encourage imitation. Finally, there are descriptions of a number of miracles performed on the intercession of the saint after his death; these constitute the proof of his saintliness and his care for those who venerate him. A Translatio (a report of the transferral of his bones to their new resting place and of the accompanying miracles) could not be expected in Alexius’ case, for according to the legend he was buried in the monastery church. What history still had in store, however, was an Inventio (a report about the discovery of his physical remains), composed in the early thirteenth century (App. 1217); and around 1200 a vita in metrical verse, probably written in the monastery, was added to the lectionary (BHL 297f; App. s. XII). The hagiographic dossier in a broader sense – the totality of information about the development and spread of Alexius veneration, of which the text corpus constitutes one part – takes the form in this milieu of documents, reports about patrocinia, information about the dissemination of hagiographic texts, etc. The monks made zealous – and perhaps questionable – efforts to strengthen the ties with their second patron, documenting history as it should have been. The documents gradually start mentioning a ‘‘donation of Euphemianus’’ (Alexius’ father), which supposedly formed the basis for the monastery’s property. First Otto III (980–1002) confirmed to Abbot Leo per interventum Notkerii episcopi Leodiensis the possession of ‘‘the house of

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Euphemianus with the vineyard, land, and olive grove and trees of all kinds belonging to it, as it belonged of old to the saints Boniface and Alexius.’’ Subsequently Otto III and Pope Sylvester (999–1003) authenticated a copy of an extremely old document that had become illegible – undoubtedly a forgery – in which the prefect Euphemianus ‘‘out of love for God and for our dearly beloved son Alexius’’ donated to Saint Boniface his two palaces, one of which was located near the Boniface church (App. 996 and 1002). In the twelfth century this information is set forth in greater detail in an innovative vita (BHL 292, App. 1130–75), which reports how the life story written by Alexius shortly before his death closed with the disposition ‘‘that his father and mother should offer to God in its entirety the inheritance due to him, on which he for God’s sake made no claim, for the salvation of their souls and so that the memory of himself would live on forever’’; the monastery they founded in Rome shows, the author maintains, with what devotion they followed these instructions (pp. 312 and 314–15). The historical context repeatedly sheds light on the information we have about the early dissemination of the legend and the veneration of Alexius. The monastery maintained excellent relations with popes, princes, and prelates. Pope Gregory V (996–9) was a relative of Abbot Leo, Emperor Otto III was said to have given his costly coronation robe to the Saints Boniface and Alexius (App. 996), at two different times Adalbert of Prague spent a few years in residence there, and as we have seen above, Notker of Lie`ge (sed. 972–1008) promoted the interests of the abbey.36 Undoubtedly this network of relationships played an important part in making the ‘Roman’ vita (BHL 286) by far the most influential Alexius text. More than a hundred manuscripts containing it have been preserved. About twenty manuscripts are known from the eleventh century alone; of these approximately as many come from France and Wallonia – where the vita BHL 288 was also well represented in the eleventh and twelfth centuries – as from Italy (and one from Austria).37 The earliest patrocinia of Alexius in Hungary and Germany (App. 993 and 1014) are evidently also a result of the relations with SS. Bonifatii et Alexii. Very soon Monte Cassino, where Alexius veneration took root no later than the first quarter of the eleventh century, also did its part in spreading the legend. Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) donated relics to the abbey, the feast of Alexius is mentioned in eleventh-century Cassinese calendars (App. 1023 and s. XI), and the library contained not only vitae but three other texts about him as well (the Alexius sermons of Adalbert of Prague and Peter Damian, and the Miracula). The vitae BHL 286 and 290 were used as the basis for the vita BHL 287, compiled here in the early eleventh century; this work was known elsewhere in Italy around 1100, but it enjoyed its greatest popularity in England from the beginning of the twelfth century onward (in the thirteenth century it was also available in Portugal).38 It has also been suggested that the Alexius poem BHL 296 (App. 1075) may have been written in Monte Cassino.39


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In a short time, therefore, the foundation was laid for the dissemination of the legend, apparently for the most part by monks. In addition to the Benedictines – oddly enough there is no evidence of Alexius veneration in Cluny – other orders such as Cistercians, Premonstratensians, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carthusians began to venerate Alexius. Women, both in convents and in communities of beguines, did so as well; their Alexius devotion is documented by manuscripts from women’s monasteries, but their names are rarely known. The first woman about whom we are better informed is Theodora, better known as Christine of Markyate (c. 1097– c. 1155–66), who according to her Vita written shortly after her death, had vowed in her youth to preserve her virginity. She managed to keep her vow despite the opposition of her family, who forced her to marry. She finally became a nun in St Albans (1131) and from there founded the priory of Markyate. The prayer book she owned (known as the St Albans Psalter; App. 1123) contains the Old French Chanson de saint Alexis. She undoubtedly read the story of Alexius as a confirmation of the correctness of her own choice, but to claim that it was included in the psalter as ‘‘pie`ce justificative’’ is, in my opinion, unwarranted.40 In these circles Alexius primarily served as a model for renunciation of the world and asceticism, for learning to take leave of all earthly things (possessions and comfort, family and sexual relations) by means of exercises in suffering, humility, and self-denial, supported by prayer and fasting; the purpose of these exercises was to follow Christ alone and to obtain a hundredfold reward in eternal life (cf. Matt. 19,29). Prelates and their clerics came to know the legend in Rome and elsewhere via the monks. In France, the oldest Alexius offices have been found in breviaries of cathedral or collegiate chapters. The legend was part of the ‘‘matie`re de Rome,’’ which spoke to people’s imagination not only in the days of the renovatio imperii but in the later Middle Ages as well. Alexius’ heroic asceticism would have been appealing to the clergy in the time of the Gregorian church reform, when the advocates of this movement could use his virtues as a weapon in the struggle against prevailing abuses.41 Both of these factors could have stimulated the Alexius devotion of Peter Damian (App. 1056–7). For clerics and lay nobility Alexius was, moreover, a saint from their social class, an ‘‘Adelsheiliger’’ (a saint of noble birth).42 They, together with Otto III, followed in the footsteps, so to speak, of the ancient emperors Arcadius and Honorius who had honored him. In vernacular texts Alexius’ nobility appears in much sharper profile than in Latin texts; but in the latter as well his education, which in the monastic vitae consisted only of the litterae and the studia spiritualia (or ecclesiae doctrina), is occasionally expanded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to include service at the emperor’s court. One poet presents him as praying to God: ‘‘You know that I could have been a knight and a senator.’’43 In this saint, then, one could see a forerunner of the knights who in the eleventh and twelfth centuries chose the militia Christi above the military life. An exemplum circulating in the thirteenth century about the well-known miles conversus

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Simon, Count of Cre´py-en-Valois (d. 1082) – compared by his contemporary biographer with Alexius because he persuaded his wife on their wedding night to enter a convent – tells of how he died in Rome on a cot underneath a set of stairs, circumstances identical to those in the accounts and visual depictions of Alexius’ death current at the time (App. 1093 and 1255).44 If we can believe the Miracula, lay persons at the beginning of the eleventh century were already calling on Alexius to intercede for them.45 It is certain that Alexius veneration began taking root among the burgher class in cities of Germany, France, Italy, and the Low Countries in the twelfth century. Reform-minded clerics and the new orders that sprang up in their wake preached about him. What remains of these sermons shows that he was considered a helper in time of need and a shining example of the renunciation of prestige, riches, and family ties.46 As helper in times of need he also functions in the story of Herman of Tournai, who with certain details reminiscent of the Alexius legend tells how the monk Henricus successfully called on Alexius, ‘‘who had lain for seventeen years as a stranger in the house of his father.’’ Henricus requested help for the conversa Mainsendis, who had been expelled from the community by her mother superior because of some minor offense and, deathly sick as she was, had to take her bed and live outside, under the wooden stairs of the house that had once belonged to her. Dishwater from the kitchen at the top of the stairs ran down over her where she lay (App. 1095). Tradition has it that the rich merchant Petrus Valdes, founder of the Waldensians, experienced a change of heart in 1173 after hearing a ioculator tell the story of Alexius. Even if this anecdote is fictional and therefore unreliable as a picture of the times, it nevertheless documents Alexius’ significance as an example for the voluntary poor at the time of narration (around 1220).47 Other realities and ideals of those days gave rise to new features in the profile of the saint. As early as the twelfth century the man who renounced the world and ended up in Edessa became a pilgrim intent on reaching the Holy Land.48 This explains how he came to be the patron saint of pilgrims. The outsider, who during his life turned his back on those dear to him and retired into solitary anonymity for God’s sake, but even as a beggar gave away everything he could possibly do without,49 and whose intercession already immediately after his death brought healing to the sick, became the patron saint of beggars and lepers as well as an example for those who practiced charity. Bishop Burchard II of Halberstadt (1059–88) founded an Alexius hospital; a similar institution was established in Neustadt a century later and subsequently in Exeter as well (App. 1059–88, 1143, and 1170). The first of an impressive series of Alexius patrocinia in beguine communities dates from around 1255 (see App.), and shortly after 1300 begards and beguines, who in the Low Countries in particular devoted themselves to works of charity such as caring for the sick and burying the dead, chose him as their patron.50 It is hardly surprising that already at an early point Alexius texts in the vernacular made the legend accessible to believers who knew no Latin and


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had previously depended on oral transmission or on instant translations, such as the cleric Gerold inserted into his sermons about holy soldiers preached at the court of Hugh of Avranches around 1070.51 French had a clear lead over the other languages with the Chanson de saint Alexis, dated by some as mideleventh century but by most as closer to 1100. Italy followed much later with the Ritmo marchigiano di sant’Alessio (end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century), only part of which has been preserved. The Alexius in verse written by Konrad von Wu¨rzburg (c. 1274) at the request of the citizens of Basle initiated the German Alexius literature and marks the moment at which nearly all the European languages began to follow suit.52 In the second half of the fourteenth century the first miracle plays make their appearance; the only one preserved in its entirety is the Miracle de Nostre Dame de saint Alexis.53 The earliest vernacular texts derive directly from Latin works, for the most part from the old prose vitae. In specific cases it is difficult to determine exactly which Latin sources were used because of the creativity and freedom with which they were adapted (by the poet of the Chanson de saint Alexis, for example) and because of the gaps in our knowledge about the Latin corpus owing to lacunae in the transmission or in the study of the texts that have survived. In the course of time, translators also applied themselves to the abridged Latin versions that from the thirteenth century onward appeared in legend collections such as the Legenda aurea (App. 1261–6) and in other compilations.54 In a number of language areas, such as those of Dutch and Spanish, translations of popular Latin abridged versions and collections of exempla introduced Alexius to the vernacular public before separate Alexius texts were circulating.55 As more vernacular texts became available that could serve as models,56 the direct influence of the Latin legend diminished, although translations of the Latin Alexius texts continued to be made throughout the Middle Ages (App. s. XIV and XV). For the study of the Latin Alexius corpus, knowledge of the vernacular texts is important because they, in turn, could have influenced Latin works, either as source texts or because general trends in the vernacular legend most likely did not completely bypass the authors of Latin texts.57 Clerics, even though they were not the primary public intended, would certainly have had some interest in and knowledge of what was circulating in this area – especially considering that the vernacular texts often originated in their own ranks. But aside from the possibility of a certain symbiosis of Latin and vernacular hagiographic texts,58 the knowledge of vernacular texts heightens sensitivity to the adaptation of the legend and of the image of Alexius to changing circumstances. In the Latin texts, which monks and clerics familiar with age-old codes wrote for their peers, changes of this kind penetrate less easily and appear in less distinct form than in texts that, even if authored by clerics,59 target a public that was not as well equipped to handle subtle allusions to spiritual concepts and was better served by accommodations to their own experiences, ways of thinking, and literary conventions. Knowledge of the adaptations of the

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‘‘matie`re’’ of the legend and the changes in the image of Alexius in the vernacular texts sharpens one’s eye for traces of this process in the Latin Alexiana. The visual arts also shed light on the reception of the legend. The oldest report about depictions of Alexius in the West dates from the early eleventh century (App. 1012), and the saint first figures unmistakably in a fresco in S. Clemente in Rome (App. 1099–1102). For the rest there are a few illustrations from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Latin and Old French manuscripts from England, Germany, and France.60 Initially visual portrayals seem to have functioned more as a support for readers meditating on Alexius texts than as a ‘book for the illiterate.’ They depict episodes from the legend and indicate which events were considered high points: the marriage, Alexius taking leave of his bride and departing from Rome, the mocking of Alexius by the servants after his return home, and the recognition of who he was, thanks to the letter the Pope took from his hand after he was found dead. This selection set a trend that the visual arts would follow for centuries. From the beginning there were also the attributes that came to be permanently associated with Alexius: the pilgrim’s dress and the stairs under which texts of the late eleventh century already had him living.61 A didactic function for a broad public first manifests itself in the mid-fourteenth century with the large increase of images in churches.62 In the fifteenth century three types of static representations of Alexius were developed that eventually found wide acceptance: sitting or lying under a set of stairs, with or without pilgrim’s attributes; standing as a pilgrim with the stairs in his hand; and standing as a pilgrim without stairs. Around 1500 images of Alexius under the stairs are regularly situated under a real stairway (App. s. XV4 and 1503). The oldest depiction to my knowledge of Alexius with a set of steps in his hand is in a miniature from Catherina de Cleves’ book of hours (App. 1440). An early example of Alexius standing as a pilgrim without the stairs is the painting by Andrea Mantegna (App. s. XV). Although Alexius acquired a place in church worship at an early point, with his feast-day (natalis) celebrated in the West, as mentioned above, on 17 July (in the Greek Orthodox Church on 17 March), his distinctive profile appears to have emerged considerably later. As the Appendix shows, churches, chapels, and altars here and there were dedicated to him from the tenth century onward, and starting in the eleventh century his feast can be found in calendars of monasteries, bishoprics or orders and in martyrologies (works giving summary information about the martyrs and other saints venerated by the Church). The spread of his cult was not ‘directed’ by the central Church authority by means of a formal canonization – even though popes consistently recognized Alexius as a saint63 – but was the result of a spontaneous development determined by contacts and local factors. Consequently the liturgical status of the festival differed from one place to another, as did the degree of ceremony connected with its celebration.64 The liturgy of the Mass and the choral prayers obligatory for monks and canons


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(the officium divinum performed together at set times of the day, also known as hours, or hour prayers) followed the general formula for festivals of the category of saints to which Alexius belonged, namely confessors who had not been bishops (the Commune confessoris non episcopi). Prose texts and songs for the feast-day of Alexius – in other words, elements of a Proprium (a special formulary) – have come down to us from the eleventh century onward. The prose texts are passages from vitae (or sermons) used for readings (lectiones) during Matins (matutini [cantus], the choral prayer of the late night or early morning). In legendaries and similar collections, markings in the texts used in the service regularly indicate which parts served as readings in the liturgy, and around 1100 readings begin to be included in the breviaries (manuscripts with all the texts for the liturgy).65 The oldest liturgical songs date from no later than the second half of the eleventh century (two hymns, App. s. XI2–XI3 and 1100, and perhaps also the poem BHL 297d, App. s. XI1–XI2). In the twelfth century Alexius figures in the litany of the St Albans psalter (App. 1123). The offices from France that have come down to us from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, however, continue to rely heavily on the Commune, with the exception of the readings. Starting in the second half of the fourteenth century there are increasing numbers of hymns and sequences (App. s. XIV and XV) and in the fifteenth century more prayers,66 but a genuine Proprium was not developed until the Alexius cult had reached its apex. Even a rough charting of the hagiographic text corpus shows that time brought changes to the image of Alexius as an inspiring and encouraging example. New times produce different types of saints and – this is our concern here – adapt the image of saints from the past. Clearly, the past lives on thanks to a function it fulfills in a receiving environment. In order to continue speaking to the faithful, whose spirituality, ideals, and needs keep changing, the story of an ‘old’ saint undergoes repeated revisions. Reconstructing this process, the ‘internal’ history of the legend, requires painstaking analysis of the hagiographic dossier in its entirety and in its historical context, for the purpose of recognizing and explaining trends and distinguishing between general tendencies and individual innovations. This point merits some further consideration and will also help color in the panorama, at least here and there, before we leave the Middle Ages. As a rule, trends are related to the evolving context. On the one hand the old vitae remained in circulation and their sober story was read with different eyes. As a result, certain details that for many years had not drawn much attention were suddenly used to add contemporary features to the image of the saint. Thanks to a few words in the standard Latin legend, which as we have seen (note 49) were highlighted from the late eleventh century onward, Alexius became, for example, the model for almsgiving by people who were far from rich. On the other hand, in order to meet the expectations of the target group, the story was brought closer to contemporary reality, norms, and experiences. This is evident from both altered details and more radical

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adjustments to the narrative. The standard Latin legend tells how Alexius stayed in the atrium of the church of the Mother of God in Edessa and how after seventeen years her image there revealed his saintliness to the sacristan, instructing him to lead the Man of God into the church. The symbolism of this act is underscored by a reference to Psalm 140,2. When the legend is paraphrased in hymns of the fifteenth century, this elevation acquires a realistic social touch: the sacristan first denies the outcast entry to the church and stands corrected by the Mother of God.67 Apparently her intervention had led centuries earlier to an association of Alexius with Mary veneration (App. 1161). Three of the four Latin prose vitae of the standard legend mention at an earlier point in the story – immediately after Alexius’ arrival in Edessa – the image of Christ’s face venerated in Edessa.68 This image plays no further role in the story, and in some descriptions of Alexius’ stay in Edessa it has simply disappeared.69 In the Chanson de saint Alexis and in a few Latin vitae in verse from the eleventh and twelfth centuries it is omitted, but the Mary icon appears in its place; and in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century versions of the Chanson, Alexius visits this image of Mary in order to pray immediately upon his arrival in Edessa.70 Perhaps this substitution was partly motivated by the Roman tradition, according to which patriarch Sergios took with him to Rome the Mary icon that had spoken in Edessa; it was venerated in SS. Bonifatii et Alexii on the Aventine and can still be seen there today.71 But when Mary veneration was at its peak, the idea that Alexius, who opted for chastity, had a special reverence for Mary and found favor with her would have been taken for granted. This in itself would sufficiently explain the trend to associate the Alexius cult with Mary veneration. A Latin Mary miracle applies the label castitatis domina to Mary, suggesting a link with Alexius’ virginitas (App. s. XIV), and a hymn states that Mary was pleased with him (AH XXIII, no. 179, str. 4). In the Miracle de Nostre Dame (App. 1380) – which includes the image of Christ in Edessa – Alexius calls on the Mother of God and she intervenes, not only in Edessa but also at the moment his soul is received into heaven.72 In the fifteenth century Joseph Bripius (App. 1450) calls the saint a venerator of Mary (vs 169–70) and an Italian Alexius poem begins with an invocation of the Immaculata (App. s. XV).73 By far the most spectacular innovation is the ever greater role played by Alexius’ bride and by his relationship with her. In the standard Latin legend, where she is originally nameless – the name Adriatica first appears around the middle of the twelfth century – she is not even portrayed as agreeing to Alexius’ departure, and it is taken for granted that she remains faithful to her husband. While the Man of God lives as a stranger in his parents’ house, he has no contact at all with her, and in the events following his death she is merely an observer until she is allowed to express her grief – after his parents and in fewer words than they used. In later texts, where she has too many names to list here, she does speak out clearly when Alexius tells her that he intends to leave her. In the old version of the Alexius poem O re di gloria (App. s. XIV4) she points out to her husband that he can buy off his vow to go on a


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pilgrimage by making donations to churches and hospitals and other worthy causes.74 In this text, which also includes major innovations in the ‘‘matie`re,’’ her faithfulness and Alexius’ trust in her are sorely tried by the devil.75 From the twelfth century onward, neither the Latin nor the vernacular texts portray the spouses as living completely separate lives after Alexius’ return, even though his wife still fails to recognize him. In the interpolated version of the Chanson de saint Alexis, Lesigne takes food to the stranger, and shortly before his death he almost reveals to her who he is.76 In the Latin prose vita BHL 292 and the related German texts, the Man of God, taken in as a stranger by his father, pretends to have met Alexius on his pilgrimage, and he often tells Adriatica about her husband in order to console her.77 In this branch of the tradition, known as the ‘bridal legend,’ the dead Man of God does not give up his letter to the pope but to his wife – although in a few cases this innovation is combined with the usual train of events.78 Little wonder, then, that the Latin vita BHL 292 presents the couple as united not only in heaven (as in some other texts, such as the Chanson de saint Alexis), but also in the grave; as Adriatica’s wish to be buried with him is fulfilled, Alexius’ bones make the tender gesture commonly found in stories of this kind.79 It is unmistakable that the inventiveness (and wide reading) of the authors also plays an important role in the following of trends. This is certainly the case when the story itself raises questions that some readers would be inclined to ask, but offers no answers. Certain questions turn up repeatedly. Why, for example, does the voice from heaven order the Romans to look for the saint ‘‘and ask him to pray for Rome’’? Unsatisfied with general answers such as ‘‘so that God would forgive the Romans their sins’’ (BHL 298, p. 363.20–21) or ‘‘so that the city would never experience war’’ (BHL 297, str. 94), Eustache, prior of Fontaine-Notre-Dame and author of the Tombel de Chartrose (App. 1330), looked for a more specific reason. In Augustine he found mention of the invasion of Italy by the Goths and other tribes under the leadership of Radagaisus in 405 (De civitate Dei 5,23), and he concluded that it was thanks to Alexius’ intercession that Emperor Arcadius had managed to avert this threat from Rome.80 Various answers have also been given to the question of why Alexius was led back to Rome. In this case each of the three options is found in more than one text. According to some it was a ruse of the devil tolerated by God, but in the majority of cases it was seen as a special intention of providence. For Peter Damian the return was the next rung on the ladder to perfection, and a similar view was held by the author of vita BHL 292. Others sought an answer in the story itself. One poet has Alexius surmising that God did not want him to continue living as a beggar at the expense of people who themselves had few possessions (BHL 297). Repeatedly the conclusion is drawn that God wanted, at least to a certain extent, to answer the prayers of the parents who wished to see their son again. This can be found in the text linking the earlier and later Syrian version, in the oldest Latin vita (BHL 289), in a Greek Alexius text written around the year 1000 (BHG 56d), and in the

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Ethiopian life of Alexius (terminus ad quem c. 1425).81 With innovations of this sort the historical context remains more in the background and the text evokes from individual readers responses determined primarily by their own inventiveness. If the responses agree, this does not necessarily mean that the oldest source influenced the next one. Any interdependency among the last four texts mentioned above is, in fact, highly unlikely. What the authors have in common is their approach to the problem, and this apparently leads to similar conclusions over great distances in space and time. ‘‘Quellenforschung’’ therefore threatens to underestimate the inventiveness of authors, not only when it posits an unknown source instead of allowing for the possibility that a work might contain something original, but also if it uses similarities of this sort to conclude, without plausible arguments, that the later text borrowed from the earlier one.

Alexius veneration at its height (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) When the uniform regulation of the liturgy as set forth by the Council of Trent went into effect for virtually the entire Roman Catholic Church in 1570, the natalis sancti Alexii confessoris acquired a complete Proprium. A short time later the church on the Aventine was elevated to the title church of a cardinal (1587) and a new generation of relics began to circulate. In 1697 the liturgical status of the festival reached its zenith. South and North America also came to know about Alexius.82 He was not only a saint of the Counter-Reformation Church and its hierarchy, but also of the people. Alexius texts in this period therefore range from scholarly literature via chapbooks to folk songs.83 From samples taken from the electronic catalogues of a few important libraries it appears that parts of the literary Alexius dossier for this period have only been roughly charted, to say nothing of studied. For this reason an attempt will be made here to fill in some of the lacunae in the notes. Latin prose vitae, epic or lyric poems, hymns, and dramatic texts were written well into the eighteenth century.84 In literary prose and verse the legend was retold in Italian, French, German, and Spanish – Italian poets in particular seem to have devoted lyric poems to Alexius.85 Of all these works, the only one to my knowledge that has been researched is the Vita di sant’Alessio of the Marquis Anton Giulio Brignole Sale (1605–65), which remained popular right into the nineteenth century. In keeping with the taste of the times, this text blends what was considered history with ancient and romantic fiction and depicts Alexius as a champion of chastity.86 It goes almost without saying that the legend is well represented in devotional hagiography. Of all the collections that reached a diverse public, none had a wider sphere of influence than the Spanish Flos sanctorum, translated as it was into many languages and reprinted right into the nineteenth century.87 The innkeeper in Wallis who, with tears in her eyes, told Goethe


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the story of Alexius probably knew it from the Legende der Heiligen of the Capuchin Martin of Cochem (1633–1712).88 Alexius also found a place in edifying and didactic works, such as the Geistreiche Sinn- und Schlussreime of Angelus Silesius (1624–77), better known since the second edition (1674) as the Cherubinischer Wandersmann, and the Ta¨gliche Erbauung eines wahren Christen by Joseph Giulini (III, Augsburg, 1755, 583, illustrated with an engraving by M. Seidler of the mocking of Alexius).89 The Alexius legend in prose, verse, and song circulated on a very large scale in simple printed form, often as thin booklets or pamphlets, usually illustrated with woodcuts. The text in these chapbooks is in many cases borrowed, either freely or verbatim, from existing versions. In Italy, for example, the reception of O re di gloria extends from the first edition of 1490 through twenty-one printings – some with the same title, others with different ones – right into the nineteenth century (App. 1490),90 and in Spain and France the influence of the Flos sanctorum is unmistakable.91 Perhaps the diversity of circulating texts is less great than the titles of all the little printed works suggest.92 In addition to the legend, the booklets often contain songs, points for meditation, prayers, etc.93 These also suggest that the printers used everything at their disposal.94 Some editions are aimed at specific groups of readers, such as pilgrims or the ‘‘enfants religieux’’ (the target group of what came to be known as the ‘‘Bibliothe`que bleue,’’ a name which now designates a genre), or originate in a specific milieu, such as that of the Alexian brothers.95 But as the titles indicate, they give the same general picture of Alexius: he is still the model of long-suffering, patience, chastity, and voluntary poverty, virtues guaranteed to be rewarded, as well as an intercessor and miracle-worker. But he endures trials and tribulations on a much larger scale than previously.96 Outside the Roman Catholic Church this Alexius image has under certain circumstances provoked harsh criticism.97 Occasionally clerics also took Alexius to task. L’Abbe´ du Prat (nom de plume of Jean Barrin, 1640–1718, who concluded his career as vicar general of the bishopric of Nantes) wrote as prior of Boulais a roguish dialogue between nuns about sex in the convent, entitled Veńus dans le cloıˆtre, ou la nonne ećlaireé (1683). In this text Sister Angela initiates Sister Agnes into the secrets of homosexuality and heterosexuality in the convent and tells with sympathy the story of their fellow sister Dosithea, who when tempted by the flesh sought comfort in vain from Alexius. That this paragon of chastity was not even touched by the beauty of his wife on their wedding night was not to his credit, according to the narrator.98 An anonymous author parodied the popular hymn ‘‘Peuple chre´tien chante un nouveau cantique’’ in a Provençal Cansoun de Sant Alexis, and the intention of the southern Netherlandic Liedeken van den H. Alexius, hoe hy syn ouders huys verliet om armoede te lyden en naedien wederom ontvangen is (‘‘Song of Saint Alexius, how he left his parents’ house to suffer poverty and was later received again’’; Ghent, 1840) may have been playful as well: it was, in any case, sung to the tune of ‘‘Bachus den goeden God prys ik vol deugden’’ (‘‘Bacchus I praise, good God full of virtues’’).99

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Alexius has often appeared on the stage. In the tradition of late-medieval miracle plays there were the Sacre rappresentazioni di sant’ Alessio performed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the earliest mention dates from 1525), mainly in the cities of Tuscany.100 Jesuit drama expanded into school drama in the vernacular, and one of the last representatives of this tradition is The Hidden Gem (1859), written for the anniversary of St Cuthbert’s College, Ushaw (Durham) by Cardinal N. P. S. Wiseman.101 Higher forms of theater also produced pious versions of the legend in the early seventeenth century.102 The material was well suited to the taste of classical and baroque dramaturges, lending itself to special stage effects for scenes in which Alexius is beset by devils or encouraged by angels and to intrigues surrounding the wife he left behind – possibilities especially exploited by Agostin Moreto and Desfontaines.103 In Italy musical dramas were devoted to the subject of Alexius. Stefano Landi composed his baroque opera Il sant’ Alessio using a libretto by Cardinal Giulio Respigliosi (the later Pope Clement IX). Like Desfontaines, Respigliosi adhered strictly to the classical doctrine of the three unities: the action takes place in Rome on the day of Alexius’ death, which means that the saint’s letter has to illuminate everything that happened earlier and elsewhere. Cardinal Francesco Barberini financed the premie`re (Rome, 1631–2), for which the painter Pietro da Cortona (1597–1669, known for his S. Alessio morente) designed the dećors. In addition to this successful opera, we know of five oratorios.104 By way of conclusion, the legend also reached its high point in the visual arts.105 The three types of static portrayals developed in the fifteenth century are well represented; well-known examples are the image of Alexius as a pilgrim by G. B. Caccini (sixteenth century), the plaster relief of Alexius under the stairs by Andrea Bergondi in the ‘‘capella della scala di Sant’Alessio’’ in the church on the Aventine (c. 1780), the painting by Tommaso Oreggia (1868) with the same theme, and the altarpiece by J. J. Steinfels in the monastery church of Brˇ evnov showing Alexius with the stairs in his hand (1715–19). Episodes from the legend also continued to inspire artists, particularly the mocking of Alexius by the servants, a scene that had long been popular, and the events at Alexius’ bedside after his death. Some episodes undergo certain variations that are not wholly unexpected: when parting from his wife, Alexius points to a Madonna and Child (eighteenth century), and from the seventeenth century onward portrayals of his death often show his soul being carried to heaven. But artists also opt for less common subjects, such as Alexius giving alms to the poor (Prospero Fontana, sixteenth century), the servants of his father bringing him food and drink (J. H. Mager, 1718), or the moment when the servant caring for Alexius discovers that he is dead (Jacques Callot, 1636, and Georges de La Tour, 1649).


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The twentieth century: beginning of a new phase of reception? In the twentieth century the Alexius legend continued to serve as material for the visual arts.106 Some of the literary works follow the age-old tradition and present Alexius as an inspiring example for believers; the old story is retold without essential changes in order to convey a religious message. The authors of these works continue to place themselves in the service of the story and its message.107 But on the other hand the legend also starts losing ground, so to speak, to the authors. The story acquires an overlay of contemporary problems or messages, such as psychological analysis in the drama by Henri Gheón (‘‘what did Alexius want, what motivated him, and how did people around him experience what he did?’’) and criticism of the Church in the piece by Karl E. Theodor (‘‘away from the Church that obscures the gospel’’).108 In Felix Braun’s drama Legende von Alexius, invention oversteps bounds that to my knowledge had never been transgressed before. Alexius is no longer an only child: he has a younger brother, Publius, who marries Magdalena, a sister of Alexius’ bride Ruth. During the absence of his brother, Publius makes advances to the lonely Ruth, and after Alexius’ return he is afraid of missing out on the inheritance. In the hour of his death Alexius manages to put things right, and his father, who out of grief had reverted to heathenism, also rediscovers the true faith. But the innovations make it necessary for the author to place the recognition of the main character before his death and to let the curtain fall as the bells toll to announce that he has died.109 By adding Publius and eliminating Alexius’ letter, the author takes liberties with the basic pattern of the legend that had been respected for a millennium. A new turn becomes visible in the reception. With a variation on the metaphor of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one might say that Alexius begins to live as a stranger in the house of his reception.110 His story functions more and more as an intriguing myth about what can motivate people and about their relation with their environment. Ida F. Go¨rres lifts it out of the past and uses a few essential elements from it as the basis for her novelle Die Braut des Alexius; set in the milieu of the landed gentry around 1700, it focuses on the price paid by Alexius’ wife Veronika for the behavior of her husband that remains a riddle to her. The Dutch writer Belcampo makes some changes in the content when he reproduces the legend in his Alexius; most importantly, the pope reads Alexius’ letter silently and keeps its contents to himself. This enables the author to disclose his hero’s ‘true’ motives for renouncing the world by means of an old literary device, but one which was ‘in the air’ at the time this novel was written: the letter turns up later in the papal archives. The motives are areligious and strongly reminiscent of the ideals of the alternative youth of the 1960s.111 Undoubtedly the time has passed in which Alexius could enjoy widespread fame nurtured mainly by pious devotion and ecclesiastical veneration. But

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even stripped of its religious dimension, his legend seems to retain momentum for a secularized age. The decrease or even disappearance of the affinity with the norms and values underlying the old story makes for a radical change in the reception context: the story continues to fascinate, but its meaning becomes a riddle, and as a result the legend is more than ever before shaped by the receiving time. The effects of this can be seen in two outstanding novels in which the Alexius theme plays a role likely to evoke mixed feelings in readers familiar with the legend and its history.112 On the other hand, it is reassuring that not only art works from the past will keep the memory of Alexius alive. Translation by Myra Scholz

Notes 1 Bibliographic references and abbreviations are explained in the bibliography. App. refers to the Appendix. The Latin and vernacular Alexius texts are quoted from the most recent edition mentioned in the Appendix. Depending on the type of work and its presentation in the edition used, reference is made to the chapter (ch.), section (§), page (p.), column (c.), line (1.), verse (vs), strophe (str.), or critical apparatus (appar.); when references to the vita BHL 286 or 290 include two section numbers, the first number is that in my edition and the one in parentheses the number in Sprissler’s. 2 B. De Gaiffier, ‘‘Intactam sponsam relinquens: A propos de la Vie de s. Alexis,’’ AB, 65 (1947), 157–95, there 185, n. 1. 3 Ch. E. Stebbins, ‘‘Les origines de la le´gende de saint Alexis,’’ Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 51 (1973), 497–507, there 507. 4 Sigebert of Gembloux (App. 1105) places Alexius’ death in 405, precisely in the middle of this period. 5 The works of Joseph Hymnographos are at times difficult to distinguish from those of ´ ` o_ _ o o&. ´ Josephos Studites (c. 761–832); cf. Eu. I. Tomadakis, I! Bıo&

` _ , Athens, 1971. If the latter Josephos should prove to be the author of the hymn, this would have almost no consequences for the history of the legend. 6 Synaxarium Constantinop., 17 March no. 1: ed. Acta SS., Propyl. Novembr., c. 543; BHG 53, p. 201: ed. H. F. Massmann, Sanct Alexius Leben in acht gereimten mittelhochdeutschen Behandlungen. Nebst geschichtlicher Einleitung so wie deutschen, griechischen und lateinischen Anha¨ngen (Bibliothek der gasammten deutschen National-Literatur 9), Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 1843; BHG 54, p. 192: ed. Massmann 1843; BHG 56d, ch. 1: ed. F. Halkin, ‘‘Une le´gende grecque de saint Alexis (BHG 56d),’’ AB, 98 (1980), 5–16, there 7; BHG 56e, ch. 1: ed. B. Latysˇ ev, Menologii anonymi byzantini saec. X quae supersunt, I, Petersburg, 1911 (repr. Subsidia Byzantina lucis ope iterata 12, Leipzig, Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1970), 245; BHG 56c: ed. M. Ro¨sler, ‘‘Alexiusprobleme,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r romanische Philologie, 53 (1933), 508–28, there 509 and 515; MS. Vatic. syr. 199: ed. (of a Latin translation) Acta SS. Iul. IV, 266D. 7 Acta SS. Iul. IV, 238F–39C; A. Amiaud, La le´gende syriaque de saint Alexis, l’homme de Dieu (Bibliothe`que de l’Ećole des Hautes E´tudes 79) Paris, Vieweg, 1889, xxxix and lxxv–xxix. 8 The most recent descriptions, however, Stebbins 1973 and C. J. Odenkirchen, The Life of St. Alexius in the Old French Version of the Hildesheim Manuscript. The original text reviewed, with comparative Greek and Latin versions, all accompanied by English translations; and an introductory study, a bibliography, and appendices (Medieval Classics: Texts and Studies 9), Brookline, MA and Leyden, Classical Folia Editions, 1978, 11–34, leave out some important information. 9 J. Perierus, ‘‘Elogium reverendi patris Joannis Pinii,’’ Acta SS. Sept. III, 1–12. 10 Acta SS. Iul. IV, 248F–49B, 249C–50A, and 251C–D. 11 Acta SS. Iul. IV, 262–70.


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12 Amiaud 1889 gives a French translation of the oldest text (1–9), of the transitional text (10– 11), and of the second part of the later text (11–17); Odenkirchen 1978, 13–20, gives an English translation of the oldest text. 13 Cf. H. J. W. Drijvers, ‘‘Die Legende des heiligen Alexius und der Typus des Gottesmannes im syrischen Christentum,’’ in M. Schmidt (ed.), Typus, Symbol, Allegorie bei den o¨stlichen Va¨tern und ihren Parallelen im Mittelalter (Eichsta¨tter Beitra¨ge 4), Regensburg, Friedrich Pustel, 1982, 187–217 and ‘‘The Man of God of Edessa, Bishop Rabbula and the Urban Poor: Church and Society in the Fifth Century,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies, 4 (1996), 235–48. 14 The reading Innocentius, however, is the result of an editorial intervention; cf. Amiaud 1889, xliii and lxxviii. 15 Cf. G. Calio` and J.-M. Sauget, ‘‘Giovanni Calibita,’’ Biblioth. SS., VI, 1965, 640–3; see also App. s. VI and 868. 16 Cf. Acta SS. Iul. IV, 238E–F; Amiaud 1889, lxix and lxx, n. 2; L. Gna¨dinger, Eremitica: Studien zur altfranzo¨sischen Heiligenvita des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fu¨r romanische Philologie 130), Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer, 1972, 13; BHG Nov. Auct., 100. R. M. Dawkins, Modern Greek Folktales, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1953, 384–8, also takes a Modern Greek story of John Calybita for a representative of the Alexius legend. 17 Amiaud 1889, xxviii–lxxix. 18 Amiaud 1889, liv–v. 19 BHG 279–82; A. Amore and M. V. Brandi, ‘‘Bonifacio de Tarso,’’ Biblioth. SS., III, Rome, 1963, 324–6; L. Duchesne, ‘‘Notes sur la topographie de Rome au moyen-aˆge. VII: Les le´gendes chre´tiennes de l’Aventin,’’ Me´langes d’archeólogie et d’histoire, 10 (1890), 225–50, there 226–34; E. Follieri, ‘‘Santi occidentali nell’innografia bizantina,’’ Atti del convegno internazionale sul tema: L’oriente cristiano nella storia della civilta` (Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Anno CCCLXI, Quaderno 62), Rome, 1964, 251–71, there 252–3. 20 Duchesne 1890, 245. 21 G. Paris, ‘‘La Vie de saint Alexi en vers octosyllabiques,’’ Romania, 8 (1879), 163–80, there 163–5; the same is true of M. F. Blau, ‘‘Zur Alexiuslegende,’’ Germania, 33 (1888), 181–219, there 181, n. 2. 22 Amiaud 1889, lxxv–ix, after long hesitation, opted for Rome, Paris at first for Constantinople (1879, 164) but later for Rome (review of Blau 1888, Romania, 18 [1889], 299–302, there 299–300), Ro¨sler first for Rome (Die Fassungen der Alexius-Legende, mit besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung der mittelenglischen Versionen [Wiener Beitra¨ge zur englischen Philologie 21], Vienna and Leipzig, Braumueller, 1905, 8 and 47), then for Constantinople (Sankt Alexius: Altfranzo¨sische Legendendichtung des 11. Jahrhunderts [Sammlung Romanischer U¨bungstexte 15], Halle, Niemeyer, 1928, ix), and finally again for Rome (1933, 515). More recently there seems to be a trend favoring Constantinople; cf. Stebbins 1973, 506– 7; Odenkirchen 1978, 33; P. Golinelli, La leggenda di sant’Alessio in due inediti volgarizzamenti del Trecento e nella tradizione letteraria italiana (I classici cristiani 273–4), Siena, Cantagalli, 1987, 15–16. 23 Duchesne, in his review of Amiaud (Bulletin critique, 10 [1889], 263–6), considered the oldest Syriac text much less reliable than Amiaud, not only because of the empty grave; Mar Rabbula’s change of heart seemed to him intended as a lesson for prelates who needed to reassess their priorities. Ro¨sler, 1905, 1–19, and 1928, vii–x, who was familiar with many more Greek Alexius texts than Amiaud but had never come across the ‘‘le´gende byzantine’’ that was supposed to have been so successful, refused to believe in its existence and saw no reason to simply subscribe, as Amiaud did, to the idea of a Syriac editor who rather clumsily combined two contradictory traditions because he thought they dealt with one and the same saint. 24 F. Plaine suggested that both the Latin Alexius legend and the Syriac tradition might go back to the letter written by Alexius before his death (‘‘La Vie syriaque de Saint Alexis et l’authenticite´ substantielle de sa vie latine,’’ Revue des questions historiques, 51 [1892], 560–76 – dissenting reactions in AB, 11 [1892], 473, and Revue des questions historiques, 53 [1893], 545– 50). According to Chevalier and G. M. Dreves, the MSS. containing the hymn Cantemus omnes arbitro (App. 1100) were written around the year 1000, which meant that their common antecedent could date from a time prior to Sergios’ arrival in Rome (cf. U. Mo¨lk, ‘‘Deux hymnes latines en l’honneur de saint Alexis,’’ in J. de Caluwe´ and H. Se´pulchre (eds), Me´langes de philologie et de litte´ratures romanes offerts a` Jeanne WatheletWillem [Marche Romane 28], Lie`ge, 1978, 455–64, there 457). S. Zakrewski singled out

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26

27 28

29

30 31 32

33

34

Louk J. Engels San Clemente as the place in Rome where, thanks to Greek connections, the Alexius cult could have been introduced – or at least given a new lease of life – as early as the mid-ninth century (cf. Ro¨sler 1905, 5). L. Herrmann ventured the opinion that the Latin poet Commodianus (third or fifth century) was the prototype of Alexius (‘‘Qui est saint Alexis?,’’ L’antiquite´ classique, 11 [1942], 235–41); F. Tailliez (‘‘Qui est saint Alexis?,’’ Orientalia christiana periodica, 11 [1945], 216–22) tried to provide more solid underpinning for this hypothesis, B. de Gaiffier discussed it skeptically (AB, 62 [1944], 283); cf. also K. D. Uitti, ‘‘The Life of Saint Alexis,’’ in idem, Story, Myth, and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050–1200, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973, 3–64, there 10, n. 8. Acta SS., Propyl. Decembr., 292 (ad Martyrol. Rom. Iulii 17, 1); F.-W. Servaes, Joseph Bripius, De laudibus sancti Alexii: Untersuchungen und kritischer Text, Inaugural-Dissertation der Universita¨t zu Ko¨ln, 1966, 7–8; Decree of the Congregation for the Rites of 26 July 1960 in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 52, vol. II, no. 10, Vatican City, 15 August 1960, 593–740, there 692 and 706 – for this last reference I am grateful to R. C. M. van Glansbeek, secretary of the bishopric of Groningen. Uitti 1973, 35–6, n. 13, mentions as an alternative to Duchesne’s hypothesis the possibility that the monks of S. Bonifatii augmented an incomplete Roman tradition with Greek elements. A Greek life of John Calybita had, in fact, been translated into Latin about a century before Sergios’ arrival (App. 868). Odenkirchen 1978, 31–2, shares Ro¨sler’s view; Uitti 1973, 9–10, n. 7, 31–2, n. 12, and 35–6, n. 13, considers it attractive but not compellingly proven. E. Josi and R. Aprile, ‘‘Alessio,’’ Biblioth. SS., I, Rome, 1961, 814–23, is illustrated with a photograph of this fresco (815–16). According to the caption it is a depiction of Alexius, but this is not evident from the picture, and the fresco is not even mentioned in the article itself. E. Krausen, ‘‘Alexius von Edessa, Mann Gottes,’’ Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, V, Freiburg i. Br., Herder, 1973 (repr. 1990), 90–5, there 90–1, and G. Binding, ‘‘Alexios v. Edessa,’’ LexMA, I, 1980, 384, reproduce the information given in the caption, but acording to H. Hager, Die Anfa¨nge des italienischen Altarbildes: Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte des toskanischen Hochaltarretabels (Ro¨mische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana 17), Munich, Schroll, 1962, 28, and H. Toubert, ‘‘Rome et le Mont-Cassin: nouvelles remarques sur les fresques de l’e´glise infe´rieure de Saint-Cle´ment de Rome,’’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 30 (1976), 1–33, there 9–10, the old frescos are too damaged to determine what they portray. The oldest mention of a visual depiction of Alexius in Rome dates from the early eleventh century (App. 1012). The Ethiopian texts have been published by E. Cerulli, Les vies e´thiopiennes de Saint Alexis l’homme de Dieu (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 298–9; Scriptores Aethiopici 59–60), Louvain, Peeters, 1969. Cf. also BHO 42–4, 306, and 1024; A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluß der christlich-pala¨stinensischen Texte, Bonn, 1922 (repr. Berlin, de Gruyter, 1968), 96–7 and 348; G. Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, I: Die U¨bersetzungen (Studi e Testi 118), Vatican City, 1954, 497–8. De Gaiffier 1947, 189, n. 1, asked that attention be given to the Armenian texts. Duchesne 1890, 241, n. 2; Ro¨sler 1905, 28, and 1933, 522; H.-G. Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich, Byzantinisches Handbuch II, 1, Munich, C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1959, 577. Cf. U. Mo¨lk, ‘‘Die a¨lteste lateinische Alexiusvita (9./10. Jahrhundert): Kritischer Text und Kommentar,’’ Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 27 (1976), 283–315, there 301. Although the mention of the feast of Alexius in the calendar of Onã (App. s. XII4–XIII1) has been linked by B. de Gaiffier to this prose vita, which was known in nearby Silos as well as elsewhere, it could also be a first indication of the penetration of the standard Latin legend in Spain. This is still true today: Ch. E. Stebbins, A Critical Edition of the 13th and 14th Centuries Old French Poem Versions of the ‘‘Vie de saint Alexis’’ (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fu¨r romanische Philologie 145), Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer, 1974, 64, confuses Boniface the martyr with Pope Boniface (418–22). Documents and epigraphic sources have been published by A. Monaci, ‘‘Regesto dell’Abbazia di Sant’Alessio all’Aventino,’’ Archivio della reale Societa` Romana di Storia Patria, 27 (1904), 351–98 and 28 (1905), 151–200 and 395–449, and A. Degrassi, La raccolta epigrafica del chiostro di S. Alessio, Rome, 1943 – repr. with an updated bibliography: P. Pensabene, Frammenti antichi del Convento di S. Alessio (Quaderni di storia dell’arte 20), Rome, Istituto di Studi Romani, 1982; cf. also G. Ferrari, Early Roman Monasteries: Notes


35 36

37

38 39 40

41

42 43

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for the History of the Monasteries and Convents at Rome from the Vth to the Xth Century (Studi di antichita` cristiana 23), Vatican City, 1957, 78–87. Important studies: B. Hamilton, ‘‘The Monastery of S. Alessio and the Religious and Intellectual Renaissance in Tenth Century Rome,’’ Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 2 (1965), 265–310 – repr. in idem, Monastic Reform, Catharism and the Crusades 900–1300 (Collected Studies Series 97), London, Variorum Reprints, 1979 (no. III); K. Bosl, ‘‘Das Kloster San Alessio auf dem Aventin zu Rom: Griechisch-lateinisch-slavische Kontakte in ro¨mischen Klo¨stern vom 6./7. bis zum Ende des 10. Jahrhunderts, Kulturbewegung im Mittelmeerraum im archaischen Zeitalter Europas,’’ in H. G. Beck and A. Schmaus (eds), Beitra¨ge zur Su¨dosteuropaforschung (Beitra¨ge zur Kenntnis Su¨dosteuropas und des Nahen Orients 10), Munich, R. Trofenic, 1970, 15–28. The work of F. M. Nerini (abbot of SS. Bonifacio e Alessio), De templo et coenobio sanctorum Bonifacii et Alexii historica monumenta, Rome, 1752, has of course been superseded on a number of points, but it remains important for its documentation. Cf. G. de Luca, Di uno antico lezionario nella biblioteca del Seminario Romano Maggiore: Notizie ed Estratti (Lateranum, Pubblicazioni del Pontificio Seminario Romano Maggiore 1926, 2), Rome, 1926, 25–63. For more details cf. the studies mentioned in note 34 and K. F. Werner, ‘‘La le´gende de saint Alexis: un document sur la religion de la haute noblesse vers l’an Mil?,’’ in M. Sot (ed.), Haut moyen aˆge: culture, e´ducation et socie´te´. Etudes offertes a` Pierre Riche´, Paris, Publidix, 1990, 531–46, there 535–7. For old MSS. of BHL 286 and 288 from France and Wallonia cf. U. Mo¨lk, ‘‘La Chanson de saint Alexis et le culte du saint en France aux XIe et XIIe sie`cles,’’ Cahiers de civilisation me´die´vale, 21 (1978), 339–55, there 347–8, and App. s. X4–XI1, XI, XI4–XII1, and XII. One of the oldest MSS. of BHL 286 is from Fleury (St Benoıˆ t-sur-Loire); possibly this is related to the contacts between Abbot Abbo of Fleury and Abbot Leo of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii (cf. Werner 1990, 538). The presence of MSS. of BHL 286 and 288 in Wallonia and the mention of Alexius in an eleventh-century calendar of Stavelot (App. s. XI) call to mind Bishop Notker of Lie`ge. L. J. Engels, ‘‘Alexiana Latina Medii Aevi, III: The Relationship Between the Prose Vitae BHL 286, 287 and 290,’’ Sacris Erudiri, 38 (1998–9), 373–441, there 381–6. K. Forstner, ‘‘Das mittellateinische Alexisgedicht und die zwei folgenden Gedichte im Admonter Codex 664,’’ Mlat. Jb., 5 (1968), 42–53, there 49. This idea was developed by C. H. Talbot, The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth Century Recluse, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959, 26, and O. Pa¨cht, ‘‘The Chanson of St Alexis,’’ in O. Pa¨cht, C. R. Dodwell, and F. Wormald, The St Albans Psalter (Albani Psalter) (Studies of the Warburg Institute 25), London, 1960, 126–46, there 135–7, with reference to the passage in the vita where Christina tries to persuade her husband, who had been smuggled into her bedroom, to follow her example (Vita Christinae 10: ed. Talbot, 50). But aside from the situation, which is simply stereotypical (cf. for men and women who wanted to preserve the carnis munditia De Gaiffier 1947 and Gna¨dinger 1972, 47–8, n. 122), there is no indication that the author was thinking specifically of Alexius when writing this. He in fact mentions a different example, much more applicable to the case of Christina, namely Saint Cecilia. Nor was Alexius one of the saints that Christina added to the calendar out of personal devotion, although she did add certain women whose circumstances resembled her own (cf. F. Wormald, ‘‘The Calendar and Litany of the St Albans Psalter,’’ in O. Pa¨cht, C. R. Dodwell, and F. Wormald 1960, 23–55, there 26). Moreover it is not certain, as far as I am aware, that the psalter was made for Christina. – See for information on the Alexius veneration in St Albans App. 1115–19, 1123, and s. XII2. Cf. R. Strecke, Zur geschichtlichen Bedeutung des altfranzo¨zischen Alexiusliedes (Europaïsche Hochschulschriften XIII, 60), Frankfurt am Main/Berne/Las Vegas, Lang, 1979, who also still assumes (19 and 22) that Bruno of Toul, the later reform pope Leo IX, was the author of the metric vita BHL 296; see, however, App. 1075. Cf. Werner 1990. Cf. BHL 296, vs 37–8: Tandem imbutus litteris aulam intravit caesaris (cf. Chanson de saint Alexis, vs 35: puis vait li emfes l’emperethur servir) and BHL 292, p. 306: Quum itaque decem et septem annorum expletis curriculis ad secularia quoque armorum militaturus exercicia vocaretur per triennium cum imperatoribus conversatus vicesimo demum (domum ed.) anno vinculo coniugali a parentibus dicatur; BHL 297, str. 44: Scis quod esse potui miles et senator. Compare this with the description, for example, given by Alexius’ father in the Chanson de saint Alexis, vs 401–20, of the life he had envisioned for his son and with the complaint of Euphemianus in the Vie saint Alexi in

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45 46 47

48 49

50

51 52

Louk J. Engels octosyllabic verse (App. 1180), vs 735–9, that he would find it easier to accept the death of his son if he had died on the battlefield. The list of saints compared to Alexius extends from Simon de Cre´py via Eleázar de Sabran and Delphine de Signe, who did not consummate their marriage (App. 1327), to Benedictus Labre (1748–83: Gna¨dinger 1972, 12–14) and Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916: Chr. Storey, An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Alexis Studies [La Vie de Saint Alexis] [Histoire des ideés et critique litte´raire 251], Geneva, Droz, 1987, 271). The son of a muliercula from Cerveteri was healed at Alexius’ grave, and a well-to-do merchant was freed from his imprisonment by pirates thanks to Boniface and Alexius (BHL 299, §1–2 and 3–4). Besides the Latin sermon by Honorius of Autun (App. 1130), a German sermon by the Franciscan Berthold of Regensburg (App. 1260) has also been preserved. H. Bo¨hmer, ‘‘Waldenser,’’ Realenzyklopa¨die fu¨r protestantische Theologie und Kirche, XX, Leipzig, 1908, 799–840, there 808, concluded after comparing the sources that the Anonymous of Lyon, who reports this (App. 1173), is a reliable informant; H. Grundmann, Religio¨se Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 3rd ed., Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970, 445–6, Gna¨dinger 1972, 24–8, and A. Gieysztor, ‘‘Pauper sum et peregrinus. La le´gende de saint Alexis en Occident: un ideál de pauvrete´,’’ in M. Mollat (ed.), E´tudes sur l’histoire de la pauvrete´, I, Paris, Sorbonne, 1974, 125–39, there 137, among others consider his story historical. But J. Guiraud, Histoire de l’Inquisition au moyen aˆge, I: Origines de l’Inquisition dans le Midi de la France. Cathares et Vaudois, Paris, Picard, 1935, 235–7, does not so much as mention it, and K.-V. Selge, Die ersten Waldenser, I (Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 37,1), Berlin, De Gruyter, 1967, 231–40, considers it fantasy. For example, in the interpolated version of the Chanson de saint Alexis (App. s. XII4), vs 341– 53, and the vita BHL 292, p. 308. Cf. also AH XXXVII, no. 113, str. 4b, and AH XXV, no. 9, in 1. Noct., Resp. 2. In the old Latin vitae this takes place in Edessa (e.g. BHL 286, §18: de elemosinis, quae ei dabantur, quantum sibi sufficeret reservabat, cetera uero pauperibus erogabat), but in the Chanson de saint Alexis in both Edessa and Rome (vs 98–100 and 251–5); the latter eventually came to be widely accepted. Initially they were called Cellites (or Cellite brothers and sisters), but at the end of the fourteenth century they began taking on the name of Alexius. The Congregatio Fratrum Alexianorum, which was persecuted in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, is still active today in Europe and North America in the field of psychiatric care. Cf. A. Mens, ‘‘Cellites ou Alexiens,’’ Dictionnaire d’histoire et de geógraphie eccle´siastiques, XII, Paris, 1953, 118–22, and ‘‘Cellite (Alessiane) e Celliti (Alessiani),’’ in G. Pellicia and G. Rocca, Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione, 2nd ed., II, Rome, 1975, 748–55; Chr. J. Kaufmann, The History of the Alexian Brothers, New York, The Seabury Press, 2 vols, 1976–8. Cf. L. J. Engels, ‘‘Matie`re de France dans l’hagiographie me´diolatine: les saints chevaliers convertis,’’ in H. van Dijk and W. Noomen (eds), Aspects de l’e´popeé romane: Mentalite´s, ideólogies, intertextualite´s, Groningen, Egbert Forsten, 1995, 363–71, there 364–5. For the medieval French Alexius texts cf. Storey 1987, 15–59, and R. Bossuat, Manuel bibliographique de la litte´rature française du moyen aˆge, Melun, Librairie d’Argenes, 1951, nos. 39–65 and 3207, and its Supple´ment 1949–53, Paris, 1955, nos. 6024–32, Second supple´ment 1954– 60, Paris, 1961, nos. 7118–29, and F. Vielliard and J. Monfrin, Troisie`me supple´ment, I, Paris, 1986, nos. 647–93. For the Italian, Storey 1987, 67–70, and Golinelli 1987, 30–73. For the German, Storey, 63–5, H.-F. Rosenfeld, ‘‘Alexius,’’ Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., I, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1978, 226–35, and R. Lo¨ffler, Alexius: Studien zur lateinischen Alexius-Legende und zu den mittelhochdeutschen Alexiusdichtungen, Inaugural-Diss. Albert-Ludwig-Universita¨t, Freiburg i. Br., 1991, 139–251. For the Norwegian and Provençal, Storey, 73 and 75–6. For the Portuguese, Storey, 74–5, and V. Minervini, ‘‘Sul testo latino della ‘Vita di Sant’Alessio’ del codice Alcobacense XXXV,’’ Studi mediolatini e volgari, 15–16 (1968), 101–19, there 115–16, and for the Spanish, M. Ro¨sler, ‘‘Versiones espanõles de la legenda de San Alejo,’’ Nueva revista de filologıá hispańica, 3 (1949), 329–52. For the Dutch, Storey, 63, and J. Deschamps, ‘‘Nieuwe fragmenten van Van den vos Reynaerde,’’ in E. Rombauts and A. Welkenhuysen (eds), Aspects of the Medieval Animal Epic (Mediaevalia Lovaniensia I,3), Leuven and The Hague, Louvain University Press, 1975, 199–206, there 200–1. For the English and Scottish, Storey, 61–2, and J. Burke Severs (ed.), A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, II, Hamden, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1970, 564–5. For the West Slavic, Storey, 74, F. Repp, ‘‘Die alt-tschechische Alexiuslegende,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r slavische Philologie,


53

54

55

56

57 58

59 60

61

62

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23 (1955), 284–315, C. Verdiani, ‘‘Il Ritmo polacco su Sant’Alessio (1454),’’ Ricerche slaviche, 15 (1967), 41–112 and 16 (1968–9), 3–100, and Gieysztor 1972, 126. Cf. R. Lebe`gue, ‘‘Saint Alexis (Miracle de Notre Dame de),’’ in R. Bossuat, L. Pichard, and G. Raynaud de Lage (eds), Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, I, Paris, Fayard, 1964, 667, and E. Lalou, ‘‘Miracles de Notre Dame par personnages,’’ Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age, Paris, Fayard, 1992, 1016–17. Of a German Alexiusspiel (fifteenth century) only the beginning has been preserved; cf. Rosenfeld 1978, 232–5. See also App. s. XV4. The languages into which the Legenda aurea was translated or adapted include Catalan (1275–1300), Swedish (Fornsvensk Legendarium c. 1300, also by Olaus Gunnari [d. 1461]), French (Pseudo-Beleth translation after 1325, Jean de Vignay’s Le´gende doreé c. 1350), Italian (Tuscan in second half of fourteenth century, repeatedly in the fifteenth century, by Nicolo` Manerbi among others), German (first in Alsatian, in first half of fourteenth century; then four more versions, the last in 1488), Middle Dutch (southern Middle Dutch 1357, northern shortly before 1450), Czech (c. 1360), and English (Gilte Legend 1438, William Caxton’s Golden Legend 1483). Cf. A. Vitale-Brovarone et al., ‘‘Legenda aurea. B: U¨berlieferung und Rezeption,’’ LexMa, V, 1991, 1797–1801; Golinelli 1987, 38; Lo¨ffler 1991, 224–37; Burke Severs 1970, 565. Moreover the Alexius chapter had its own reception in, for example, Latin (BHL 291a) and Italian (App. s. XIV1, XIV, and XV). Among the languages into which the Gesta Romanorum were translated are German (starting in the late fourteenth century), English (mid-fifteenth century), and Middle Dutch (1481); cf. V. Mertens and H. Sauer, ‘‘Gesta Romanorum,’’ LexMA, IV, 1988, 1409–11. Vincent of Beauvais’s version of the legend (App. 1244) was adapted in Middle Dutch by Jacob van Maerlant, and in Spain a translation of the Alexius exemplum from the Alphabetum narrationum by Arnold of Lie`ge (App. s. XV) was circulating before the oldest Vida de sant Alexo (App. 1282/3–8, s. XV and 1520). The Chanson de saint Alexis was interpolated c. 1180, rhymed in the thirteenth century, and rewritten in quatrains c. 1350 (cf. G. Paris and L. Pannier, La Vie de saint Alexis, poe`me du XIe sie`cle, et renouvellements des XIIe, XIIIe et XIVe sie`cles [Bibliothe`que de l’Ećole des Hautes E´tudes 7], Paris, 1872). Prose versions were made of Konrad’s Alexius (cf. Lo¨ffler 1991, 155–60), and the Italian Alexius poem O re di gloria (c. 1400?) was printed from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century with adjustments (App. 1490). The Low German Grosse Seelentrost (App. s. XIV2–XIV3) was translated into Middle Dutch (c. 1425), Danish, and Swedish (cf. J. Deschamps, ‘‘De Middelnederlandse handschriften van de grote en de kleine Der sielen troest,’’ Handelingen der Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis, 17 [1963], 111–67, and H. Beckers, ‘‘Seelentrost,’’ LexMA, VII, 1995, 1680). See App. 1075 and 1130–75. The term symbiosis is borrowed from J. Rychner, ‘‘La Vie de saint Alexis et le poe`me latin Pater Deus ingenite,’’ Vox Romanica, 36 (1977), 67–83, there 83. Epic traditions in the vernacular found their way into Latin works at an early point, e.g. in the Waltharius (ninth or tenth century) and the Fragment of The Hague (c. 980–1030); cf. J. M. Ziolkowski, ‘‘Epic,’’ in F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (eds), Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, Washington, DC, Catholic University of America Press, 1996, 547–55, there 550. Such as Tetbald of Vernon, canon of the church of Rouen, who has been named as the possible author of the Chanson de saint Alexis (Paris and Pannier 1872, 43–5). See above, note 28, and App. 1123, 1130–5, 1162, and s. XIII4. I assume that the detailed description of MS. Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 12471 in Paris and Pannier 1872, 199–224, correctly characterizes the miniature in this manuscript and that the statement that it depicts the pope at Alexius’ deathbed (ibid., 6) rests on a misunderstanding. – The portrayal of Alexius in the Cathedral of Monreale (App. s. XII) stands in the Byzantine tradition. Cf. Chanson de saint Alexis, vs 218 (as well as 231, 246, 261, 345, 354, and 486) and the rhythmic poem BHL 296, vs 166 and 185–6. In the Latin text corpus the living under the stairs is also mentioned in the prose vita BHL 292, p. 310 (twelfth century), the sequence AH IX, no. 116, str. 61 (fourteenth century), the hymn AH XXIII, no. 179, str. 7, and in Joseph Bripius’ Alexius poem, vs 215–16 (1450). See also above, p. 104 (the Mainsendis anecdote). Cf. Krausen 1973 and D. Steyaert, ‘‘De verspreiding van de verering van Sint-Alexius,’’ Arca Lovaniensis artes atque historiae reserans documenta, 18 (1989), 171–93. In other ways as well there is more documentary evidence against than for the hypothesis that an Alexius cycle on a church wall influenced the composition of the Chanson de saint Alexis (H. Lausberg, ‘‘Zum

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65

66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73 74

75 76 77

Louk J. Engels altfranzo¨sischen Alexiuslied,’’ Archiv fu¨r das Studium der neueren Sprachen, 191 [1955], 202–13, and ‘‘Kann dem altfranzo¨sischen Alexiuslied ein Bilderzyklus zugrunde liegen?,’’ Archiv fu¨r das Studium der neueren Sprachen, 195 [1959], 141–4). The oldest surviving Alexius cycles date from much later; they are found on church walls and windows and in Latin MSS. (App. s. XIV, XIV4–XV1, and 1480). It is conceivable, however, that already at an early point professional story-tellers used a series of pictures of the episodes as visual aids when narrating the Alexius story; cf. Golinelli 1987, 29–31. Formal canonization was not yet common at the time Alexius’ fame was starting to spread. According to Uitti 1973, 36, n. 13, a procedure to declare the Man of God a saint was initiated in 993 in Rome, but he mentions no source (perhaps his statement is based on De Gaiffier 1947, 160 and n. 5). In SS. Bonifatii et Alexii it was of course celebrated with great splendor (it also determined the liturgy during the following Octave, see note 65) and in thirteenth-century Le Bec the natalis sancti Alexii also appears from the calendar to have been an important festival (App. s. XIII); but in cathedral or collegiate churches elsewhere in France and in the breviary of the Dominican order it had a lesser status (Mo¨lk 1978A, 345–6; App. 1307). Early examples of the marking of lectiones can be found in MS. Roma, Arch. capit. S. Pietro in Vatic. A.4 (eleventh century), with its text of a version of vita BHL 290 divided into nine readings, and in the lectionary of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii, where the sermon of Peter Damian is divided into eighteen readings, six each for the Solemnitas itself, the Dominica infra Octavam, and the Octava); for the breviaries cf. Mo¨lk 1976B. Cf. Acta SS. Iul. IV, 246B–D. AH XXXVII, no. 113, str. 7a–b; XXV, no. 10, in 2. Noct., Resp. 3. In BHL 288, §16, this image is identified as the portrait that Christ, according to the later Abgar legend (sixth century), sent to King Abgar IV of Edessa in response to his request to come and heal him. In BHL 286 and 287 the image is mentioned but Abgar is not. BHL 290, §14 (16), on the other hand, tells of the letter that Christ, according to the older Abgar legend (from the fourth century), sent to Abgar. For the Abgar legend cf. E. Kirsten, ‘‘Edessa, 10.a: Abgar-Legende,’’ Realenzyklopa¨die fu¨r Antike und Christentum, IV, Stuttgart, 1959, 588–93. The image of Christ is not mentioned, for example, in the Vie de saint Alexi in octosyllabic verse or in the Tombel de Chartrose (App. 1180 and 1330). Chanson de saint Alexis, vs 86–90; interpolated version, vs 362–82; rhymed version, vs 365–82; version in quatrains, str. 60–2; BHL 296, vs 106–14; 293, vs 54; Eufemianus erat, vs 54–5. Exactly how old this tradition is I do not know. The icon of the ‘‘Avvocata’’ (Mary Intercessor) presently found in a chapel of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii, which in time came to be ascribed to the evangelist and painter Luke, dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century; it may be a replacement for an earlier icon. In the crypt of the church a fresco, also from the early thirteenth century, shows Mary with Child enthroned between Boniface and Alexius. Cf. Hager 1962, 28 and 50–1. Vs 1600–19, 1682–1765, and 2296–2362. According to a rhymed office, God leads Alexius back to a church of Mary in Rome: navim scandens nutu Dei Romam tendens ad templum Mariae (AH XXV, no. 9, in 2. Noct., Resp. 1, Vers.). O re di gloria, p. 340 (later versions: Ro¨sler 1905, 158–9). Cf. for the role of the bride in the Chanson de saint Alexis Uitti 1973 and U. Mo¨lk, ‘‘Saint Alexis et son e´pouse dans la le´gende latine et la premie`re chanson française,’’ in W. Van Hoecke and A. Welkenhuysen (eds), Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century (Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, Series I, Studia 8), Louvain, Louvain University Press, 1981, 162–70, among others. In the interpolated version of the Chanson the farewell conversation accounts for more than 15 per cent of the text (vs 124–318) and in the Vie saint Alexi in octosyllables about 12.5 per cent (vs 161–282); in the Latin prose vita BHL 286, on which the latter text was very likely based, this was less than 3 per cent. O re di gloria, pp. 342–4 (Ro¨sler 1905, 163–9). For a characterization of O re di gloria cf. Golinelli 1987, 78–9. Vs 789–90 and 980–1030; cf. also vs 826–81. BHL 292, pp. 310–11; Middle High German ‘‘Alexius A’’ (App. s. XIII4–XIV1), vs 614– 86.


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78 BHL 292, pp. 313–14; German ‘‘Alexius A,’’ vs 851–84, and O re di gloria, pp. 350–1 (Ro¨sler 1905, 181–3). In the interpolated version of the Chanson de saint Alexis the pope does take the letter, but it flies out of his hands to the bosom of Lesigne (vs 1083–1127). 79 BHL 292, p. 315, and, for example, the German ‘‘Alexius A,’’ vs 1124–35. Stories about a person’s remains welcoming a deceased husband or wife into their common grave can be found from the first quarter of the fourth century; cf. Laudes Domini, vs 26–31 (ed. P. van der Weijden, Laudes Domini, Amsterdam and Paris, 1967, 38); Gregory of Tours, In gloria confessorum, 73 (about Reticius of Autun: ed. B. Krusch, MGH, Script. rer. Merov. I,2, 1885, 792), and Chronicon Turonense, ad a. 1140 (about Peter Abelard: ed. P. Dronke, Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies, Glasgow, University of Glasgow Press, 1976, 51). 80 Tombel de Chartrose, vs 698–715 and 891–942; Eustache was identified as the author of this work by Chr. Kriele, Untersuchungen zur Alexiuslegende des Tombel de Chartrose (14. Jhdt), Dissertation, Mu¨nster, 1967. Centuries earlier a copyist had responded very differently to the words ut oret pro Roma in the vita BHL 286: he changed them to read ut oret pro vobis; cf. Engels 1998–9, 428–9 (appar. ad BHL 286, §47 [48]). 81 Cf. BHG 54: ed. Massmann 1843, p. 195; Gesta Romanorum, 15, p. 299; Peter Damian, sermo 28, 1. 129–32 and 219–32; BHL 292, p. 309; BHL 297, str. 64; BHO 41: ed. Amiaud 1889, 11; BHL 289, ch. 11; BHG 56d, ch. 6: ed. Halkin 1980; Ethiopian life of Alexius, ch. 20: ed. Cerulli 1969, II, 36. 82 Sckommodau 1956, 168 and 172–3; A. P. Frutaz, K. Rathe, and P. Toschi, ‘‘Alessio, santo,’’ Enciclopedia Cattolica, I, Vatican City and Florence, 1949, 817–20, there 818; Acta SS. Iul. IV, 241F–42F, 243F–44A, and 245E–46A; Steyaert 1989, 174–5, 177, and 182–3. 83 The Italian canti popolari in particular have been subjected to thorough study; cf. C. Marchiori, Leggenda di sant’Alessio nella tradizione popolare italiano, Genoa, Tilgher, 1975, and Golinelli 1987, 89–97. French and Provençal songs have been published by V. Smith, ‘‘Chants de Velay et du Forez: Chants de saints et de damne´s,’’ Romania, 4 (1875), 437–52, there 442–4, J. A. Fuentes, E´tablissement et commentaire du texte des chansons sur la le´gende de St Alexis, thesis on microfilm, Universite´ de Laval, 1967, and D. Arbaud, Chants populaires de la Provence, II, Aix, 1864, 25–32. For the German language area cf. A. Wrede, ‘‘Alexius,’’ Handwo¨rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, I, Berlin and Leipzig, 1927, 261– 2, n. 3 and 4 – for the fairy tale ‘‘Armut und Demut fu¨hren zum Himmel’’ (Kinderlegende 4) of the Grimm brothers (1857) also H.-J. Uther, Bru¨der Grimm, Kinder- und Hausma¨rchen, Munich, Diederich, 1996, III, 191–2 and IV, 373–4 – and for Greece, S. Salaville and E. Dalleggio, Karamanlidika, I: 1584–1850 (Collection de l’Institut français d’Athe`nes 47), Athens, 1958. 84 Aloysius Lipomanus (1500–59) included a translation made by Pier Zino da Verona of a Byzantine Alexius life attributed to Symeon Metaphrastes (tenth century) in his Vitae sanctorum priscorum patrum (VII, 28, ad 17 March), and Laurentius Surius (1523–78) took it over in his De probatis sanctorum historiis (III, 208–9, ad 17 July); cf. F. M. Esteves Pereira, ‘‘Le´gende grecque de l’Homme de Dieu saint Alexis,’’ AB 19 (1900), 241–53, there 242. In Rome a prose vita by the Carmelite Filippo Maria di S. Paolo and an anonymous Alexius epic were dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Barberini the Elder (see p. 112); from circles near him an anonymous ode Splendor o puber sacra lux olympi has come down to us as well, and the monks of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii also dedicated to him their edition of the old vita BHL 286, printed in 1636 by Fr. Corbiletti in Rome; cf. De Luca 1926, 20–1. For hymns cf. RH nos. 4742, 22772, 24850, 31855, 33857, 36845, 36984, 37033, 38241, 39610, 40089, 40877, and 40891; for odes, RH nos. 20815, 29759, and 32106. In the southern Netherlands the Jesuit Franciscus Raemundus composed an Alexias in seven Latin elegies (Antwerp, 1628; cf. Servaes 1966, 96–7), and the Augustinian Michael Hoyer included a version of the legend based on Surius’ text in his Historiae tragicae (Brussels, 1652, 135–51; cf. Massmann 1843, 34, n. 1). An anonymous Comoedia de S. Alexio (Vienna, 1589) and the S. Alexius of J. Keller (Fribourg, Switzerland, 1593) opened the series of Latin Jesuit dramas (J.-M. Valentin, Le theáˆtre des Je´suites: Re´pertoire chronologique des pie`ces representeés et des documents conserve´s, 1555– 1773, 2 vols, Stuttgart, Anton Hiersemann, 1983–4, I, 33 [no. 288] and 38 [no. 333]; cf. also the Index des sujets in part II, s.v. Alexius). Very likely Charles de Lignie`res’s Alexius, tragoedia, Paris, 1665 (copy in the Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich) also belongs to this genre. Dating from the eighteenth century are, e.g., Sanctus Alexius in partria peregrinus, Straubing, 1722 (Bayer, Staatsbibl., Munich), Carbunculus in tenebris . . . sive D. Alexius confessor domi suae peregrinus of B.X. Reisinger, Vienna, c. 1730 (O¨sterreich. Nationalbibl., Vienna), Exul in partria . . . Alexius, Teuto-Brodae, 1750 (Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich), Sanctus Alexius, drama,

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87 88

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Louk J. Engels Ingolstadt, 1763 (Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich). E. M. Szarota, Das Jesuitendrama im deutschen Sprachgebiet, II,2: Tugend- und Su¨ndensystem, Munich, Fink, 1980, 2053–68, reproduces the text of the Latin-German program booklet of S. Alexius Peregrinus, Leoben, 1639. Jean-Pierre Camus (1582–1653), Bishop of Bellay, wrote an Alexis, roman de spiritalite´, Paris, 1622 (Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich), Agustino Lampugnani L’heroe mendico, overo de’ Gesti di S. Alessio Romano libri cinque, Milan, 1645 (Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich), the productive Jesuit Paul de Barry a Vie de saint Alexis, Avignon, 1661 (Acta SS. Iul. IV, 254B), and Norberto Caimi a Vita di S. Alessio, patrizio Romano, probably already Rome, 1772 (exx. of the edition Rome, 1822 in Bibl. Apost. Vatic., Vatican City, and Bibl. Com., Cesena). Hans Jakob Christoffel Grimmelshausen (1625–76) included the story of Alexius in his Continuatio des abentheurlichen Simplicissimi (Gna¨dinger 1972, 14–21), Goethe in a letter of 1779 (see below, note 88). Friedrich Krug von Nida (1776–1843) recounted it in Fauque´’s Frauentaschenbuch of 1822, and Julius Hartmann (1836–1916) gave it a place in his Frauenspiegel aus dem deutschen Alterthum und Mittelalter, mit einem Anhang, enthaltend Briefe und Dichtungen deutscher Frauen des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1868, 162–8). For the Alexius legend in Eduard Mo¨rike’s Maler Nolten (1832) cf. Gna¨dinger 1972, 9–10. Toma´s Lopez wrote a Vida, peregrinacio´ y mort del benaventurat sant Aleix, fill de Eufemiano senador de Roma, Palma, 1874 (Storey 1987, no. 242). The legend was retold in verse by, e.g., Commensino (Palermo, 1662; cf. G. Vitaletti, ‘‘Tradizioni carolingie e leggende ascetiche raccolte presso Fonte Avellana,’’ Archivum Romanicum, 3 [1919], 409–510, there 462, n. 3) and Michel’ Angelo Poletti (on the basis of a Greek text, Lucca, n.d. [cf. F. Babudri, ‘‘La leggenda di Sant’Alessio ‘Omo de Dio’ in un manoscritto settecentesco istriano di Parenzo,’’ Archivum Romanicum, 24 [1940], 238–84, there 257; printings from 1855, 1859, and 1875 in Bibl. Nat., Paris) and in Spanish ‘‘por una hermana de Lucas del Olmo,’’ Madrid, 1764 (cf. Ro¨sler 1949, 334). For the sonnets of Girolamo Casio de’ Medici (sixteenth century) and Giampiero Cavazzoni Zanotti (eighteenth century) cf. Golinelli 1987, 81. Krug von Nida sang Alexius’ praises in his Schwertlilien, Halle, 1827. Exemplars of A. Palli, Alessio, romanzo storico (reviewed in Antologia 27 [1827]), of Segneri, Vitta e` mort degl S. Alexis conf. (Ro¨sler 1905, 196), and of the version by Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten (1758–1818; cf. Massmann 1843, 41) I have not yet been able to find. Published in Rome and Genoa, 1648; details in Golinelli 1987, 81–4. The work was reprinted many times: Venice, 1663 (Golinelli, 81, n. 12), Genoa et al., 1650 (Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich), and Lucca, 1698 (Bibl. Univ., Turin); it was imitated by C. M. Ronchetti, Vita di sant’Alessio, patrizio romano, Monza, 1893 (Golinelli, 103, n. 5) and translated twice: Le Saint Alexis . . . par le R. P. Pierre de Saint-Andre´ C. D., Aix, 1674 (Altrocchi 1935, 238) and L’E´poux fugitif, ou l’Histoire de la vie admirable de S. Alexis. . . par messire G. de Golefer, 2e e´dition, Paris, 1667 and 1677 (exx. in Bibl. Nat., Paris). The best-known edition (Madrid, 1599–1601) was published by Pedro de Ribadaneyra S. J. (1526–1611); cf. for his Spanish predecessors and successors Ro¨sler 1905, 193, and 1949, 333–4. Cf. F. Wagner, ‘‘Zur Rezeption des lateinischen Mitellalters durch Johann Wolfgang Goethe (I),’’ Mlat. Jb., 15 (1980), 172–90, there 175, and Gna¨dinger 1972, 11, n. 21; for an English translation of Goethe’s letter of 11 November 1779 (Werke, XIX [Weimar, 1899], 280–5) see Odenkirchen 1978, 159–61. Gna¨dinger 1972, 85, n. 257; Krause 1973, 92, Abb. 2. A distant descendant of the Low German Grosse Seelentrost (see above, note 56) is Den dobbelen Zielentroost ende vaderlyke leeringe, troostelijk voor de godvrugtige Christene Zielen Gesteld by maniere van Saemenspraeke tusschene eenen Vader en zyne Kinderen, Ghent, 1759. For descriptions of Italian chapbooks see G. Milchsack and A. d’Ancona, Due farse del secolo XVI, riprodotte sulle antiche stampe. Con la descrizione ragionata del volume miscellaneo della Biblioteca di Wolfenbu¨ttel contenente poemetti popolari italiani, Bologna, O. Romagnoli, 1882 (repr. 1968), 85–9; Babudri 1940, 256–7; and Golinelli 1987, 79–81. The source is clearly indicated in the titles Historia del bienaventurado san Alexo, sacada a la letra del Flos santorum que escribio´ el Padre Alonso de Villegas, Co´rdoba, n.d. (Bibl. Nat., Paris) and La vie admirable de saint Alexis, vrai miroir de patience et de chastete´, tire´ des Fleurs des Vies des Saints, Toulouse, n.d. (Ch. Nisard, Histoire des livres populaires, ou de la litte´rature du colportage depuis le XVe sie`cle jusqu’a` l’e´tablissement de la Commission d’examen des livres du colportage (30 novembre 1852), 2nd ed., Paris, E. Dentu, 1864, 161, n. 1). A Vie de monsieur saint Alexis, avec l’Antienne, Rouen, n.d., may have served as a model for the Cantique spirituel sur la vie et peńitence de saint Alexis, which is included with ‘‘re´flexions’’ in the Recueil de cantiques spirituels, contenant les


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cantiques de sainte Genevie`ve, de Notre-Dame de Liesse, de saint Hubert, etc., E´pinal, n.d. (1840?, described by Nisard 1854, 158–66, who also prints the text of the song and the comments). There are also separate printings of this song: Cantique spirituel sur la vie etc peńitence de saint Alexis, Clermont-Ferrand, 1858, n.p., 1869 and Maˆcon, 1869 (exx. in Bibl. Nat., Paris); it was very likely also included in the Recueil de cantiques spirituels, contenant les cantiques de Ste Genevie`ve, de St Hubert, de St Alexis et sur le jugement universel etc., n.p., n.d. (Bibl. Nat., Paris). The Romance en que se declara la vida, muerte y milagros del bienaventurado San Alexo, Co´rdoba, n.d. (Bibl. Nat., Paris) and the regularly republished Vida, muerte y milagros del bienaventurado San Alexo, Co´rdoba, 1822 (Ro¨sler 1949, 334), are products of the same printer, Gabriel Garcı´ a Rodrı´ guez. In some cases this is evident from the title (see also the preceding and the following notes): Abre´ge´ de la vie de saint Alexis, tire´ de la Vie des saints, avec des re´flexions et un cantique sur la vie du meˆme saint, E´pinal, n.d. (Nisard 1854, 161, n. 1). In other cases it is clear from the description: the Vida, peregrinacio, y mort del benaventura´t sant Aleix, fill de Eufemiano senador de Roma. Ara novament traduhida de Castella´ en nostre vulgar Cathala´, Manresa, 1820?, contains a song and two prayers (Ro¨sler, 1949, 334, and Storey 1987, no. 241). At times the story is almost lost under a wash of addenda: Alexianische Andacht, Bestehend in einer Betrachtung u¨ber das Leben des Heiligen Alexii, wie auch Kurze Tag-Zeiten, Litaney, Gebetter und Gesa¨nger vor und zu Sanct Alexius, auch Anda¨chtige Meß-Anho¨rung fu¨r die armen Seelen im Fegfeuer, 3rd printing, Sultzbach, 1762 (microfiche Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich). Texts for meditation are offered in A. Meucci, Considerazioni sulla vita di sant’Alessio, patrizio Romano, Rome, 1899 (Bibl. Apost. Vatic., Vatican City). To judge from the titles, the text of La Vie de S. Alexis, vrai miroir de patience et de chastete´; avec les beaux miracles qu’il a faits apre`s sa mort, Troyes, n.d. (eighteenth century? Bibl. Nat., Paris), in La Vie de saint Alexis vrai miroir de patience et de chastete´, avec les beaux miracles qu’il a fait apre`s sa mort et un Cantique a` l’honneur de saint Alexius, sur l’air Que de tristesse, etc., Troyes, n.d. (cf. G. Bolle`me, ‘‘Religion du texte et texte religieux: Une vie de saint dans la Bibliothe`que bleue,’’ in J.-C. Schmitt [ed.], Les saints et les stars: Le texte hagiographique dans la culture populaire, Paris, Beauchesne, 1983, 65–75, there 70), and in La Vie de S. Alexis, ve´ritable miroir de patience et de chastete´, sa mort et ses miracles avec le cantique a` la fin, Montbe´liard, n.d. (1840? Storey 1987, no. 260) was combined with a song that was also printed separately: Cantique spirituel a` l’honneur de saint Alexis, miroir de patience et de chastete´, sur l’air Que de tristesse, Tours, n.d. (Nisard 1854, 161, n. 1). An Elojio historico en honra y gloria del bienaventurado San Alexo, hijo del grande Eufemiano, senador Romano, Barcelona, 1820? – nearly identical printings Madrid, 1846, Valencia, 1858, Madrid, 1875 – was written for pilgrims en route to the image of S. Marı´ a del Mar, where an Alexius relic brought from Rome could be found ever since 1790 (Ro¨sler 1949, 234). The Vie de Saint-Alexis, confesseur. 5e sie`cle was printed at least seven times in the nineteenth century in the Bibliothe`que des enfants pieux, published in Tours (exx. in Bibl. Nat., Paris). The Alexian milieu produced Het seldsaem leven, uytmuntende deughden ende wonderlycke doodt van den H. Alexius oorsprongh der Alexianen (geseyt) Celle-broeders, Ghent, 1686 (Royal Libr., Brussels), Het wonder leven, uytnemende deughden, kostelycke doodt van den H. Alexius Belyder, oorsprongh der Alexianen en voortgangh der selve, Louvain, 1694 (Royal Libr., Brussels and Bibl. Nat., Paris), and Alexius, oorspronck der Alexianen, (geseyt) Celle-broeders. By een vergadert uyt verscheyde geloofwaardige Autheurs, Maastricht, 1711, compiled by Seraphin Vos (Universiteitsbibl., Nijmegen) – besides ‘‘Het zeldsaem Leven in ’t kort bescreven’’ (11–44) this booklet includes eight meditations (3–8), a hymn (44–6), and a prayer (47). For a description of this image cf. Bolle`me 1983. In Kentish Town, London, where frictions arose around 1850 between the Roman Catholic mission, whose church was dedicated to Alexius, and its Anglican environment, the legend was drawn into the discussion after being told in detail in a Catholic book protesting intolerance; in the Anglican response Alexius came under fire (Storey 1987, nos. 89–90). This short work, often reprinted under the title Les de´lices du cloıˆtre, ou la nonne ećlaireé, is dedicated to the abbess of Beaulieu. It was translated into English and Dutch; the oldest of the Dutch printings (1694) – there were at least three – was republished with an introduction by A. N. W. van der Plank, Venus in het Klooster of de Nonne in haar Hembde (Populair proza uit de 17e en 18e eeuw 3), Deventer, Uitgeverij Sub Rosa, 1983. I am grateful to Dr J. P. de Valk, The Hague, for bringing this work to my attention. Cf. Altrocchi 1935; Storey 1987, no. 169 (I have not yet been able to examine the Liedeken).

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100 A. Cioni, Bibliografia delle Sacre Rappresentazioni, Florence, Sansoni, 1961, 81–5 sums up 16 printings from the years 1517–1627; these, too, often contain woodcuts (the editions Florence, 1554 and 1570, as many as eight and the edition Florence, 1610, six). The text of the edition Siena, 1612, reproduced by V. de Bartholomaeis, Laude drammatiche e rappresentazioni sacre, II, Florence, Le Monnier, 1943 (repr. 1967), 255–88 (cf. also III, 248) is in some ways reminiscent of the Miracle de Nostre Dame de saint Alexis (here too, e.g., the emperors Arcadius and Honorius are the ones who take the initiative for Alexius’ marriage). Babudri 1940, 259–60, mentions a seventeenth-century popular play that was still being performed in the nineteenth century and a ‘‘May play,’’ Maggio della vita e morte di S. Alessio (Volterra, 1867 and 1881). 101 An early representative of school drama appears to be the Tragicomedia van de heiligen en edelen confessoor Alexius, Ghent, 1611 (Bayer. Staatsbibl., Munich); Gna¨dinger 1972, 15, n. 35, lists nineteenth-century school dramas about Alexius in the German language area. The Hidden Gem was translated into French in 1875 and into German in 1892 (Storey 1987, no. 261). I have not yet been able to examine Alexius Angelus, Drama in 4 Aufzu¨gen by Carl Adelmann, Wu¨rzburg, 1890 (Universita¨tsbibl. Wu¨rzburg). 102 Girolamo Marzi, S. Alessio, commedia spirituale, Orvieto, 1608; this piece remained in the repertoire for about a century (cf. Golinelli 1987, 85, to which should be added Lucca, second half of seventeenth century, and Ronciglione, 1689 [exx. in Bibl. Naz., Rome]). Balthazar Dı´ az, Auto de San Aleixo, 1613 (cf. E. Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur: Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher La¨ngsschnitte, Stuttgart, Kro¨ner, 1961 [8th ed. 1992], 34); Ortensio Scamocca S. J., Sant’Alessio, tragedia sacra, Palermo, 1621 (Golinelli 1987, 85). 103 Augustin Moreto y Cabana, La vida de San Alexo, 1654 (described in Frenzel 1992, 34 – later editions: Valencia, 1676 [ex. in Bibl. Nat., Paris] and 1703 [Massmann 1843, 40]); Desfontaines, L’illustre Olympie ou le saint Alexis, trage´die, Paris, 1645 (exx. of Paris, 1645 and 1648, and of Caen, 1721, in the Bibl. Nat., Paris; also printed in Troyes, 1661, and Paris, 1666: Storey 1987, no. 258). Other known dramas are by L. de Massif, Le charmant Alexis, 1655 (Frenzel 1992, 34) and Pietro Bernardo Palmaro, Genoa, n.d. (seventeenth century; Golinelli 1987, 85). 104 In a somewhat altered form Landi’s work was given new performances in Rome (1634), Reggio Emilia (1645), and Bologna (1647). Its revival at the Salzburger Festspiele of 1977 sparked new interest in the piece, and it was recorded on CD in 1995; cf. M. Murata, ‘‘Landi, Stefano’’ and ‘‘Sant’ Alessio,’’ in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, London, Macmillan, 1992, II, 1094–5, and IV, 171–2; B. Feuchtner, ‘‘Unter der Treppe: William Christies glorreiche Ausgrabung von Landis ‘Il Sant’Alessio’,’’ Opernwelt: Die internationale Opernzeitschrift, 38.1 (1997), 58. The oratorios are by Arcangelo Spagna, Pellegrino nella patria, 1663 (Storey 1987, no. 257), Bernardo Pasquini, Sant’ Alessio (text by monsign. Bernini), Modena, 1687 (Golinelli 1987, 85–6), Camilla de Rossi, S. Alessio, 1707–10 (B. Garvey Jackson, Arias from oratorios by woman composers of the eighteenth century, I, Fayetteville, AR, c. 1987, Camilla de Rossi, Two arias for male voice, two trumpets and strings, ibid., c. 1990, and Camilla de Rossi, Seven sinfonias [1707–1710] for strings and continuo, ibid., c. 1996) and by two anonymous composers: Concentus sacer in honorem s. Alexii, Lucca, 1689 (Golinelli 1987, 86) and Sant’Alessio, oratorio a quattro voci, Rome, 1722 (Bibl. Apost. Vatic., Vatican City). 105 Cf. besides Krausen 1973 (with illustrations) also A. Pigler, Barockthemen: Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, 2nd ed., Budapest, Akade´miai Kiado´, 1974, I, 408–9; Storey 1987, nos. 274–5; Golinelli 1987, 38, n. 2; illustrations also in Josi and Aprile 1961 and Steyaert 1989. For descriptions and reproductions of woodcuts cf. Milchsack and D’Ancona 1882, 84–9, and S. Vrtel-Wierczyński, Starapolska legenda o s´w Aleksym na poro´wnawczem tle literatur slowian´skich (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjacio´l Nauck, Prace Komisji Filol. 9), Po´znan, 1937. 106 Cf. Krausen 1973, 93. 107 S. Sansi, Un pellegrino del V secolo. Dramma, Rome, 1901; A. Muzzi, Miracoli fatti da sant’Alessio in vita e in morte, Florence, Salani, 1907; P. Do¨rfler, Die Braut des Alexius. Novelle, Munich, Ko¨sel & Pustet, 1926; A. Beltramelli, Leggenda di san Fabiano. Dramma, published in Il Secolo XX (Milan), 25 (1926), 829-37, with music composed by Francesco Balilla Petrella and performed in Bologna in 1939; F. Ghisi, Sant’Alessio. Vita, morte e miracoli: Devozione spirituale per coro e orchestra, narrata dal popolo su antichi testi anonimi e motivi musicali profani del medioevo in 4 episodi, Florence, Olschki, 1957. =


125

108 H. Gheón, Le pauvre sous l’escalier, Paris, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue française, 1920; Karl E. Theodor, Alexius: Ein Weltfriedenstraum, Leipzig, Xenien-Verlag, n.d. (1916). For Benjamin Jarne´s’s literary experiment with the legend (San Alejo, Madrid, Ed. Literatura, 1934) cf. H. Th. Oostendorp, ‘‘El sentido de San Alejo de B. Jarne´s (reinterpretacioń de una leyenda antigua),’’ Neophilologus, 56 (1972), 417–34. 109 F. Braun, Fru¨he und spa¨te Dramen, aus den Jahren 1909 bis 1967 (O¨sterreichische Dramatiker der Gegenwart), Vienna, O¨sterreichische Verlagsanstalt, 1971, 225–80. 110 The lecture ‘‘Der Dichter und seine Welt’’ of 1907, in which the poet’s residence in the house of this time is compared to that of Alexius in his parents’ house, was published in H. von Hofmannsthal, Die Beru¨hrung der Spha¨ren, Berlin, Fischer, 1931, 42–72. 111 I. F. Go¨rres, Die Braut des Alexius und andere Ma¨dchengeschichten, Freiburg im Br., Herder, 1949, 261–93; Belcampo, Rozen op de rails, Amsterdam, Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1979, 7– 30. 112 K. Raeber, Alexius unter der Treppe oder Gesta¨ndnisse vor einer Katze. Roman, Darmstadt and Neuwied am Rhein, Luchterhand, 1973 (cf. F. Lennartz, Deutsche Schriftsteller des 20. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel der Kritik, III, Stuttgart, 1984, 1363–5) and Carl Mandelartz, Der andere Alexius: Die Lebensgeschichte des A. Schmidt, Duisburg, Gilles und Francke, 1977.

Appendix: the medieval Western Alexius dossier This chronological synopsis of the medieval corpus of Alexius texts and of data about the Alexius veneration is intended to further fill in the picture given above of the dossier documenting the reception of the Alexius legend in Europe. The subsections that appear flush with the left margin contain information about the spread of the veneration, such as patrocinia, relics, places where the feast of Alexius was celebrated, persons named after the saint, places outside Italy (the cradle of the Western legend) where manuscripts of the Latin prose vitae of the standard legend were available, and depictions of the legend in the visual arts. In the indented subsections the Alexius texts in Latin and in the vernacular are presented as one corpus because – innovations notwithstanding – they stand in a single tradition established by Latin texts and perpetuated by texts in both Latin and the vernacular, with the latter based either directly or indirectly on the former. Many of the data reported here can also be found in other publications about the Alexius legend or in reference works. It nevertheless seemed advisable to compile this appendix, because information that elucidates the reception context in which the Alexius texts were written and read is scattered here and there in Alexius studies but escapes the notice of many scholars; and a great deal of valuable material in a wide variety of sources has not yet, to my knowledge, been brought to scholarly attention. It is therefore worthwhile to track down and publish data of this kind. As yet there is no integrated survey of the corpus of Alexius texts in Latin and the vernacular, although it could be put to good use, offering researchers a panorama of the whole, of which they study parts or aspects, and facilitating their exploration of adjacent areas where they might find relevant information. With some regret I have left the Greek legend out of consideration (apart from the section about the antecedents) because so little is still known about its development and its relation to the Latin legend. The information that sheds (or can shed) light on the the text corpus usually indicates ‘‘what is in the air’’ or visualizes the context in which the Alexius literature flourished. Occasionally it substantiates the Alexius veneration in places or milieus in which texts originated or were preserved. In some cases, as with Monte Cassino, this is self-evident. In other cases it is uncertain – I cannot, for example, prove or even make a convincing case for the idea that the move of the Dominican convent in Rome to S. Sabina in 1221 was partly responsible for the sizable contribution made by members of this order to the Latin Alexius corpus. Doubts about the relevance of certain data did not, however, stand in the way of reporting them, because it is usually specialized

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information that throws some light on seemingly insignificant facts. Others will have to judge the value of some of the data. In the case of Lucca (see below, ad s. XI4–XII1) I did not make an effort to hide my own knowledge of the textual tradition, even though that meant overstepping the bounds of the format. The intention was not to provide a complete list but a representative one. The list of texts does not include all Latin church songs, nor is mention made of the integral translations of works like the Legenda aurea and the Gesta Romanorum (see above, note 54). The information about manuscripts of the Latin prose vitae of the standard legend outside Italy aims only to give a picture of the rapid rise and spread of three of these vitae outside their country of origin (the exception is BHL 290, see below, ad s. X4– XI1) and for this reason is limited to the first centuries after they were written. In order to prevent misunderstandings, it should be pointed out that the manuscripts localized with sufficient certainty constitute only a part of the textual evidence that did not originate in Italy, and that the reproduction of these prose vitae continued inside and outside Italy in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries despite the success of the abridged versions of the Latin legend. Because dating is often a matter of rough estimates, the chronological ordering has to take into account both specific years (either exact or approximate, as terminus ad or post quem, for example) and periods (centuries or quarters of them, such as s. X, s. XIII3). In each case the information datable by year precedes that which can be only roughly dated in the relevant period. Antecedents of the Western Alexius legend 450–75 s. VI s. VI4–VII1 s. VII 868 t.p.q. s. IX

Old Syriac Story of the Man of God from the city of Rome (BHO 36–40; ed. Amiaud 1889, 3–14 and 29–44). Oldest Greek life of John Calybita (BHG 868; ed. Migne, PG 114, 568–81). Founding of the church of the martyr Boniface of Tarsus (y 304) on the Aventine in Rome. Oldest mention in De locis sanctis martyrum (c. 635–45), 191, and Itinerarium Malmesburiense (648–82), 15, 109–10 (ed. CCL 175, 322 and 328). Latin translation of the Passio Bonifatii mart. Tarsi (BHL 1413; ed. Acta SS. Mai III, 280–3). Latin translation of the life of John Calybita by Anastasius Bibliothecarius (c. 811/12–c. 879; BHL 3456; ed. AB 15, 1896, 257–67). Syriac Other Story of the same Man of God, written in the City of Rome (BHO 41; ed. Amiaud, 15–28 and 45–55). ´ Alexius canon of Josephos Hymnographos (c. 816–86), inc. ! ! & ˇ ´ o ˆ oˆ oo ˇ o_o, ˇ (ed. M

_ o, ˆ IV, Rome, 1898, 100–5; Latin transl.: Pinius 1725, 247E–48F). Cf. J. Szo¨ve´rffy, A Guide to Byzantine Hymnography, II, Brookline, MA and Leyden, 1979, 22–9 and 127.

Data about the spread of the Alexius veneration and the forms it took Alexius texts in Latin and the vernacular s. IX4–X1 977 986–7 990

Oldest Latin prose vita (BHL 289), Spain. Transmitted in four MSS. from Spain; ed. Va´zquez de Parga 1941, 248–58; Fa´brega Grau II, 1955, 365–70; Mo¨lk 1976A, 304–10. Patriarch Sergios of Damascus flees to Rome and founds a monastery at S. Bonifatii on the Aventine: Peter Damian, epist. 72 (ed. K. Reindel, MGH, Briefe d. deutsch. Kaiserzeit, IV,2, 1988, 361–2). Donation documents in which Alexius is mentioned alongside Boniface as patron of the monastery on the Aventine (ed. Monaci 1904, 365–9, nos. 2–3). Profession of Adalbert of Prague as monk of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii, where he stayed in the years 989/90–2 and 995–6; cf. F. Machilek, ‘‘Adalbert von Prag,’’ Theologische Realenzyklopa¨die, I, 1977, 410–14.

The West European Alexius legend 993

127

The abbey church of Brˇ evnov (Bru¨nn near Prague) is dedicated to Benedict, Boniface, and Alexius and endowed with papal privileges; cf. Sckommodau 1956, 170–1. 985–90 c. Latin prose vita BHL 286, Rome. By far the most influential prose vita: transmitted in more than one hundred MSS. from all over Europe (91 summed up by Lo¨ffler 1993, 277–83 [Fassung C]). Several text versions; ed. Pinius 1725, 251–3 (taken over with or without minor alterations by, among others, Massmann 1843, 167– 71; Rohlfs 1963, 15–23; Stebbins 1974, 149–53; Odenkirchen 1978, 34–51); Sprissler 1966, 107–53 (text II; reworked by Engels 1998–9, 414–41).

995–6 996

First mention of the existence of a Latin Alexius vita in Rome, in Adalbert of Prague’s homily (see below); ed. Voigt 1898, p. 363.3. Coronation of Otto III in Rome, t.p.q. for the donation of his coronation robe to Alexius; cf. Miracula ss. Bonifatii et Alexii (BHL 299, §9; see below, ad 1012) and Werner 1990, 544. Document in which Otto III confirms possessions of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii (ed. Monaci 1904, 371–4, no. 5); cf. Werner, 544. 995–6

s. X4–XI1

Adalbert of Prague (956–97), Homilia in natali s. Alexii confessoris (BHL 298; ed. Voigt 1898, 358–65, taken over by Sprissler 1966, 102–6), delivered in SS. Bonifatii et Alexii on the Aventine; based on a Latin prose vita and on Beda Venerabilis, sermo 1,13. Fragments from this sermon are interpolated at the end of the vita BHL 286 in MS. Florence, Bibl. Medicea-Laurenz. Amiat. 2 (eleventh century); cf. Sprissler, 153 (appar. text II, sigl. Am).

Mention of Alexius in versions of the Martyrology of Bede from Italy, possibly Rome; cf. Sckommodau, 170. MSS. of the prose vita BHL 286 in southern Italy (Naples, Bibl. Naz. XV.AA.12) and in Fleury (Orleáns, Bibl. Munic. 342); cf. CCHL Naples, 20629 and CCHL Orleáns, 722, and see also above, note 37. s. X4–XI1 Latin prose vita BHL 288, Italy. Transmitted in more than thirty MSS., remarkably many of which come from northern France and Belgium (26 MSS. summed up by Lo¨ffler, 276–7 [Fassung B]). Several text versions (for instance those listed in BHL Nov. Suppl. as BHL no. 290b, 290d, and 290g); ed. CCHL Brussels, I.1, 223–7; Ro¨sler 1905, 118–54; Sprissler, 107–53 (text IV); Lo¨ffler, 12–17. Latin prose vita BHL 290, Italy. Transmitted in more than twenty MSS., nearly all of which are from Italy; cf. Lo¨ffler, 284–5 [Fassungen D and E], and Engels, 400–1, n. 51. Several text versions (BHL 290a, 290c, 290e, 290f, and others); ed. Sprissler, 107–53 (text III, BHL 290a); Engels, 414–41 (BHL 290c).

1002 1012 c. 1014

1022–35 1023

Otto III and Pope Silvester II authenticate a copy of an old document about the so-called donation of Euphemianus (ed. Monaci 1904, 363–5, no. 1); cf. Werner, 544. Oldest mention of a wall painting of Alexius (together with Boniface of Tarsus): Miracula ss. Bonifatii et Alexii (BHL 299, §4; see below, ad 1012). Stay of Bishop Meinwerk of Paderborn (sed. 1009–36) in Rome, where his prayer was heard by Alexius – t.p.q. for the founding of an Alexius chapel in Paderborn: Vita Meinwerci, 26, 154, and 162 (ed. F. Tenckhoff, MHG, Script. rer. Germ., Hanover, 1921, 31, 81–2, and 85); cf. Werner, 537. Copy made of Adalbert’s Alexius sermon and of the Miracula BHL 299 (see below, ad 1012) in Monte Cassino; cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 344. Pope Benedict VIII donates Alexius relics to Monte Cassino: Leo Marsicanus, Chronicon monast. Casinensis 3,29 (ed. W. Wattenbach, MGH, Script. VII, 1846, 720); cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 344.

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Louk J. Engels 1012 c.

Miracula ss. Bonifatii et Alexii, written by a cleric who had some connection with SS. Bonifatii et Alexii in Rome, but probably did not belong to the community. Transmitted in two collections (BHL 299 and 300); ed. Pinius, 258–61 (omitting a part of §8, already printed in Acta SS. Mai III, 280, n. 4, and also found in Baronius, an. 1004, §viii–x); G. H. Pertz, ‘‘Ex miraculis S. Alexii,’’ MGH, Script. IV, 1841, 619–20 (§8–13). 1 Latin prose vita BHL 287, Monte Cassino; based on BHL 286 and s. XI 290. Transmitted in approximately twenty MSS., mainly from Italy and England (cf. Lo¨ffler, 284–5 [Fassung F]; Engels, 385–6, n. 24); ed. Miscellanea Cassinese 1 (1897), parte agiografica, 10–18, and 9 (1931), 16–17; Pa¨cht 1960, 144–6; Sprissler, 107–53 (text I; reworked by Engels, 414–41). s. XI1–XI2 Latin Alexius poem, inc. Lingua carnis cantet, in rhythmic stanzas (BHL 297d), Rome; very likely based on the prose vita BHL 286. Transmitted in MS. Rome, Bibl. Pontif. Athen. Lateran. (c. 1056– 72, lectionary of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii), with musical notation; ed. De Luca 1926, 46–55. 1059–88 1068

Mention of an Alexius hospital in Halberstadt, founded by Bishop Burchard II: Gesta episc. Halberstadensium (ed. L. Weiland, MGH, Script. XXIII, 1874, 100 and 106). Oldest mention of a person named after Alexius, the Bohemian comes Alexius, died in battle in 1087: Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum, II,25 (ed. R. Ko¨pke, MGH, Script. IX, 1851, 82). s. XI2–XI3 Oldest Alexius hymn, inc. Summis laudem preconiis (RH no. 19763), France (Champagne); ed. Chevalier 1893, 224; Mo¨lk 1978B, 464, and 1981A, 151–2. 1056–7 t.p.q. Peter Damian (c. 1007–72), sermo 28 In honore sancti Alexii confessoris, very likely intended for the monastery on the Aventine; ed. Migne, PL 144, 652–60; Lucchesi 1983, 162–70. 1075 t.p.q. Rhythmic Alexius poem, inc. Pater Deus ingenite (BHL 296; Walther, Initia no. 13802), Rome (or Monte Cassino?). The arguments of Sprissler, 21–6, for attributing it to Pope Leo IX (Bruno of Toul, * 1002, sed. 1048–54) have been convincingly refuted by Forstner 1968. Unmistakable similarities to the Chanson de saint Alexis (see below, ad 1100) testify to a relationship which is still a matter for disagreement; cf. M. Perugi (ed.), La Vie de saint Alexis (Textes litte´raires françaises 529), Geneva, A. Droz, 2000, 55–9.

1093 t.p.q. 1095 c.

1099–1102

Reference to Alexius and his bride in the Vita Simonis comitis Crespeiensis (ed. Acta SS. Sept. VIII, 746); cf. De Gaiffier 1947, 177–8. Anecdote about the monk Henricus, who successfully appealed to Alexius in Tournai to aid the sick conversa Mainsendis: Herman of Tournai, Liber de restauratione monasterii s. Martini Tornacensis (c. 1140–2), 69 (ed. G. Waitz, MGH, Script. XIV, 1883, 307); see above, p. 104. t.p.q. San Clemente, Rome, Alexius fresco in the lower church: return to Rome, the pope with the letter at the deathbed, the dramatic mourning of parents and bride; cf. Toubert 1976, 8–11 and fig. 1. 1100 t.a.q. Chanson de saint Alexis, oldest Alexius text in the vernacular; ed. Rohlfs 1963. Cf. Storey 1987, nos. 34–42. 1100 t.a.q. Alexius hymn, inc. Cantemus omnes arbitro (AH XIV, no. 97; RH no. 2592), Rome or vicinity; ed. AH XIV, 103; Chevalier 1893, 199; Mo¨lk 1978B, 462–3.

s. XI

Mention of the feast of Alexius in calendars of Monte Cassino, Lure (FrancheComte´), and Stavelot; cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 344, 349, and 351. MSS. with Latin prose vitae outside Italy: BHL 286 in Admont, Vendoˆme, Montie´ramey, Paris (?), Metz, Lobbes, Aulne – in MS. Berne, Bu¨rgerbibliothek 114 the text begins unabridged, but is then shortened, perhaps for liturgical use

The West European Alexius legend s.XI4–XII1

129

(cf. Lo¨ffler, 53); BHL 288 in St Salvator/Polling, Saint-Ghislain, SaintSepulchre/Cambrai. Alexius office in a breviary of Saint-Loup, Troyes (three readings from BHL 286); cf. Mo¨lk 1976B, 237–42. Church in S. Alessio near Lucca – six MSS. from s. XII1 to s. XII4–XIII1 with a Latin prose vita can still be found in the Bibl. Capitolare in Lucca; cf. Steyaert 1989, 171; CCHL Lucca, 818, 9157, 10093, 10335, 11548, and 1177. MSS. with Latin prose vitae outside Italy: BHL 286 in Chaˆlons-sur-Marne, Clairvaux, Trier; BHL 288 in Saint-Ge´rard/Brogne and Malme´dy. s. XI4–XII1Metric Alexius poem, inc. Duxit Romanus vir nobilis Eufemianus (BHL 294; Walther, Initia no. 5047), in leonine hexameters; origin unknown, probably based on the prose vita BHL 286. Ed. VrtelWierczyński 1937, 192–204; Wagner 1964, 86–99.

1105 c.

Oldest mention of Alexius in historiography: Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronicon, ad a. 405 (ed. L. Bethmann, MGH, Script. VI, 1844, 305). Used by, among others, Vincent of Beauvais (see below, ad 1243), Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica (interpolated in Neufmoustier), ad a. 406 (ed. P. Scheffer-Boichorst, MGH, Script. XXIII, 1874, 688), the editors of the fourteenth-century marginalia in the lectionary of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii, f. 45 and 128 (ed. De Luca 1926, 21), Iacobus de Guisia (last quarter of fourteenth century), Annales Hannoniae, 8,24 (ed. E. Sackur, MGH, Script. XXX,1, 1896, 116) and by Walter Bower (c. 1450), Scotichronicon, 7.1 (ed. D. E. R. Watt, Scotichronicon, IV, Aberdeen, 1994, 2). 1113 Mention of persons bearing the name of Alexis: a monk of Saint-Pierre de Preáux (near Pont-Audemer in Normandy) and a canon of Soissons; cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 348–50. 1115–19 Consecration of an Alexius chapel in St Albans; cf. Pa¨cht, 135. 1119 Alexius altar in Pru¨fening; cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 353, n. 75. 1120–30 t.a.q. Feast of Alexius mentioned in a calendar of Canterbury (behind 13 May, the feast of Boniface of Tarsus); cf. Pa¨cht, 134. 1120–30 c. Alexius mentioned in the Martyrology of Fećamp; cf. J. Dubois, ‘‘A la recherche de l’e´tat primitif du martyrologe d’Usuard: Le ms. de Fećamp,’’ AB 95 (1977), 43–71, there 63. 1123 t.a.q. MS. Hildesheim, Bibl. des Jesuitenkollegs (St Albans Psalter): Alexius included in the litany (cf. Wormald 1960, 32, no. 108) and at the beginning of the Chanson de saint Alexis a miniature: Alexius taking leave of his bride, departing from home, and paying passage while boarding a ship; cf. Pa¨cht, Pl. 35; Odenkirchen, frontispiece; U. Mo¨lk, La Chanson de saint Alexis. Fac-simile´ en couleurs du ms. de Hildesheim publieé avec introduction et bibliographie (Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Go¨ttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse, Jahrg. 1997, Nr. 2), Go¨ttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997. 1 Alexius office in an ordinal of Rheinau; cf. Mo¨lk 1976B, 242–3. s. XII 1130–5 MS. Stuttgart, Wu¨rttemberg. Landesbibl. Bibl. MS. fol. 58 (Passional, from Zwiefalten), illuminated initial at the beginning of vita BHL 286 (f. 12): mocking of Alexius, the pope at his deathbed; cf. S. Von Borries-Schulten, Die romanischen Handschriften der Wu¨rttembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, 1: Provenienz Zwiefalten, Stuttgart, Anton Hiersemann, 1987, 65–70 and Abb. 98. 1133 Coronation of Emperor Lotharius III von Su¨pplingenburg and his wife Richenza in the Lateran church and in SS. Bonifatii et Alexii: Chronicon imperatorum et pontificum S. Bartholomaei in insula Tiberina, a. 1133 (ed. O. HolderEgger, MGH, Script. XXXI, 1903, 217); Annales Reicherspergenses, a. 1133 (ed. W. Wattenbach, MGH, Script. XVII, 1861, 454). 1143 Alexius church and hospital in Neustift (Freising); cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 353, n. 75; Steyaert, 178. 1130 c.

Honorius of Autun, Speculum Ecclesiae, Sermo Dominicae 2ae post Pentecosten (Migne, PL 172, 1043–50). The sermon closes with a summary of the Alexius legend (probably based on the prose vita

130

Louk J. Engels

1130–75

1152/4–92 1159–61 1159–81 1161 1162 c. 1170 1173 1183 c.

The prior of Wymondham (a cell of St Albans where the contemporary BHL 287 MS. Oxford, Bodl. Libr. Magd. 53 was written) has the name Alexis; cf. Pa¨cht, 134 and 143, n. 2. Archbishop Wichmann of Magdeburg ordained an Allexius as Bishop of Brandenburg: Gesta archiepisc. Magdeburgensium, contin. prima, I,29 (ed. W. Schum, MGH, Script. XIV, 1883, 416). Mention of a Roman subdeacon with the name Alexius; cf. Werner, 542. Mention of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii in descriptions of Rome written during the pontificate of Pope Alexander III (ed. Valentini and Zucchetti 1946, 361 and 438). ˛ Poland); Consecration of a Mary and Alexius church in Tum (in the Leczyca, cf. Gieysztor 1974, 399. MS. Stuttgart, Wu¨rttemberg. Landesbibl. Cod. hist. fol. 415 (from Zwiefalten), illustration in the Martyrologium Usuardi (f. 50): mocking of Alexius under the stairs; cf. Von Borries-Schulten 1987, 97–111 and Abb. 251. Alexius hospital in Exeter; cf. Steyaert, 179. Conversion of Petrus Valdes (see above, p. 104): Anon. Laudunensis (c. 1220), Chronicon universale, a. 1173 (ed. O. Cartellieri and W. Stechele, Leipzig and Paris, 1909, 20–2). Mention of a Premonstratensian dean of Hildeburgeroth named Alexius: Arnold of Lu¨beck, Chronica Slavorum III,6 (ed. J. M. Lappenberg, MGH, Script. XXI, 1869, 148). /

s. XII2

BHL 290) which also found its way into an unpublished fifteenthcentury adaptation of the Legenda aurea; cf. CCHL Bolland., 459k. Latin prose vita BHL 292, Italy? Based on a vita of the standard legend as well as on a text related to the poem Deus pater ingenite and the Chanson de saint Alexis (see above, ad 1075 and 1100). Transmitted in ten MSS., all but one of which are from southern Germany and Austria (cf. Lo¨ffler, 286–7 [Fassung H]) and also found without prologue (BHL 292a); ed. Massmann, 157–66; Eis 1935, 304–15.

1180 t.a.q. Old French Vie de saint Alexi in octosyllabic verse; ed. Paris 1879. s. XII4

Mention of monks with the name Alexius in the Obituary of Monte Cassino; cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 344–5. s. XII4

s. XII

Li Roumans de saint Alessin (‘‘re´daction interpoleé’’ of the Chanson de saint Alexis); ed. Paris and Pannier 1872, 222–59. La vie saint Alexis, in prose, probably based on BHL 288; ed. Lutsch 1913.

Mention of the feast of Alexius in calendars of Poitiers, St Albans and St Neots; cf. CCHL Paris Bibl. Nat., III, 670; Mo¨lk 1978A, 342–3. Alexius relics in the Benedictine monastery Lorch (Schwa¨bisch Gmu¨nd): Historia Friderici magni imperatoris (ed. O. Abel and L. Weiland, MGH, Script. XXIII, 1874, 385). Monreale, Dom, mosaic: Alexius depicted as an ascetic; cf. Krausen 1973, 91. MSS. with Latin prose vitae outside Italy: BHL 286 in Kremsmu¨nster (?), Lambach (two), Windberg, Zwettl, Zwiefalten, Paris, Senlis (?), Saint-Denis/ Reims, Saint-Serge/Angers, Anjou (?), Rouen (?), Jumie`ges, Verdun, Cologne, Gladbach, Trier, Echternach, Corbie, Saint-Bertin, St Albans; BHL 288 in Saint-Thierry/Reims, Marchiennes, Anchin, Saint-Amand; BHL 287 in Tynemouth and Wymondham. s. XII

Metric vita, inc. Praestans magnatis summe vir nobilitatis (BHL 293; Walther, Initia no. 14443), origin unknown – the attributions to Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035–1123) by Pinius (250D–51A) and to Tetbald of Vernon (eleventh century, see above, note 59) by L. Herrmann (‘‘Thie´baut de Vernon,’’ Le moyen aˆge, 40 [3e se´rie 11], 1940, 30–43) are dubious; the poem is based on BHL 286. Ed. Pinius, 254–6 (without the last three lines); Wagner 1973, 156–69.


131

Metric vita, inc. Eufemianus erat (BHL Nov. Suppl. sub 7bis; Walther, Initia no. 5956), origin unknown, probably based on the prose vita BHL 286; ed. Wagner 1965, 153–64. Vita in distichs, inc. Sanguine preclaro preclarior Euphimianus (BHL 297f), Rome, probably based on BHL 288; ed. De Luca 1926, 56–63. Metric vita, inc. Civis Romanus regum par Eufemianus; origin unknown, unpublished and source not yet identified. The text (in MS. Kynzˇvart 75, f. 126–49v), is incomplete: the ending is missing from the moment when the emperors are about to carry Alexius’ body; cf. H. Houben, St Blasianer Handschriften des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts. Unter besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung der Ochsenhauser Klosterbibliothek (Mu¨nchener Beitra¨ge zur Media¨vistik und Renaissance-Forschung 30), Munich, Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1979, 125–31. Abridged version of BHL 286, transmitted in fifteen MSS. from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and in the fifteenth century also used in the office; inc.: Tempore archadii et honorii imperatorum euphemianus cum uxore sua tecla (in some MSS. agl(a)es) sterili et sancta. Ed. Lo¨ffler, 269– 75; cf. CCHL Bibl. Vatic. 26139 and 26483. s. XII4–XIII1 Mention of the feast of Alexius in a calendar of Onã, northern Spain (on 22 June!); cf. B. de Gaiffier, ‘‘Un calendrier franco-hispanique de la fin du XIIe sie`cle,’’ AB 69 (1951), 282–323, there 303, and see also above, note 32. s. XII4–XIII1 Vita in Goliardic strophes, inc. Multi post dominice tempus passionis (BHL 297; Walther, Initia no. 5468 and 11383); origin unknown, based on the prose vita BHL 287. Transmitted in two versions, one of 581 vs, the other of 735 vs (cf. Lo¨ffler, 129–31); ed. Leyser 1840 (short version). Ritmo marchigiano di Sant’Alessio; ed. Dionisotti and Grayson 1965, 45–75. 1217

1221

Controversy between the canons of St Peter’s and the monks of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii about the place where Alexius was buried: with Alexius’ help, the monks did find the bones of their patrons in their church, whereas the canons could not prove their allegations; cf. Duchesne 1890, 246–8. Dominican convent in Rome moved from S. Sisto to S. Sabina on the Aventine, beside SS. Bonifatii et Alexii; cf. M.-H. Vicaire, LexMA, III, 1985, 1204. 1217 t.p.q. Angelus, abbot of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii, Inventio Alexii confessoris et Bonifacii martyris an. 1217. Dedidatio ecclesiae. Repositio reliquiarum. Alia (BHL 301), Rome; ed. Nerini 1752, 205–9 (first part) and 213–22 (excerpts from the second part).

1231

Pope Gregorius IX hands over SS. Bonifatii et Alexii to the Premonstratensians; cf. Frutaz, Rathe and Toschi 1949, 819. 1243

1244 c. 1245 c.

Jean de Mailly O.P., Abbreviatio in gestis et miraculis sanctorum (c. 1225–30), suppl. 18: Alexius legend based on the prose vita BHL, added either by the author himself when supplementing the collection or by an early continuator. Unpublished; cf. G. Philippart, ‘‘Le manuscrit 377 de Berne et le Supple´ment au Le´gendier de Jean de Mailly,’’ AB 92 (1975), 63–78, there 688. Vincent of Beauvais O.P. (c. 1200–64), Speculum historiale, 18(19), 43–6 (BHL 291): slightly abridged version of the prose vita BHL 286; ed. Douai, 1624 (repr. Graz, 1965), 708–9. Bartolomeo da Trento O.P. (y 1251), Liber epilogorum in gesta sanctorum, 235: Alexius legend based on the prose vita BHL 286 (ed. Paoli 2001) and Passionale de sanctis, 64: greatly abridged summary of BHL 286 (ed. Gobbi 1990, f.62v–64).

132

Louk J. Engels

1250 c. 1255 c.

1260 c. 1272 c. 1274

Alexius church in Ferrara: Salimbene de Parma, Chronica, a. 1250 (ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH, Script. XXXI, 1905–13, 427). Exempla with features of the Alexius legend in E´tienne de Bourbon O.P. (y1261), Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus, I,7 (no. 63, Simon de Cre´py, see above, pp. 103–4) and III,2 (no. 173, a miles conversus dies in Constantinople with an account of his life in his hand, the emperor helps carry him to his grave); ed. Lecoy de la Marche 1877, 66–7 and 151–3. Founding of a beguine chapel dedicated to Alexius, Maria Magdalena, and Begga in Edingen (Belgium); cf. Steyaert, 176. Berthold of Regensburg O.F.M. (c. 1210–72) preaches in German about Alexius; cf. Massmann, 37 and 39, n. 1. Founding of the Alexius beguinage in Dendermonde (Belgium); cf. Steyaert, 176. Alexius church in the beguinage of Mechelen (Belgium); cf. Steyaert, 176. 1261–6

Jacobus de Varagine O.P. (1230–98), Legenda aurea, 90 (BHL 291): Alexius legend based on a version of the prose vita BHL 286; ed. P. Maggioni 1998, I, 621–6. This very popular abridgment was also used for reading during the office (cf. CCHL Orleáns, 10838); it has been prefaced by an etymology of the saint’s name (ed. Graesse 1890, 403) and provided with a prologue (BHL 291a). 1273 t.a.q. Odo of Chaˆteauroux O.P. (1190?–1273), sermo 941 In festivitate sancti Alexii, unpublished; cf. Schneyer, Repetitorium 4, 1974, 470. 1274 c. Konrad von Wu¨rzburg, Middle High German verse legend Alexius; ed. Gereke 1926. s. XIII3 1278 1279

Mention of the feast of Alexius by Hugo van Trimberg (c. 1230–c. 1313), Laurea sanctorum, 205–6 (ed. H. Grotefend, Anzeiger fu¨r Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit, N.F. 17 (1870), 301–11). Alexius priory of the Vallombrosiani in Bigiano; cf. Steyaert, 179. Mention of a dean of Olomouc, canon of Prague, named Alexius: Chronica Boemorum, contin. canonicorum Pragensium, II (ed. R. Ko¨pke, MGH, Script. IX, 1851, 195–6). 1282/3–8

s. XIII4

MS. Paris, BN fr. 12471 (interpolated version of the Chanson de saint Alexis), f. 51v: miniature with the wedding of Alexius; cf. Paris and Pannier, 213 (see above, note 60). s. XIII4

s. XIII

Jacob van Maerlant, Spiegel Historiael III.3, 21,61–25,76: rhymed Middle Dutch Alexius legend based on Vincent of Beauvais (see above, ad 1244); ed. M. de Vries and E. Verwijs, Leyden, E. J. Brill, 1861–79 (repr. Utrecht, HES Publishers, 1982), II, 173–8.

Abridged version of the prose vita BHL 286 (different from the version mentioned above, ad 1243) added in Jean de Mailly’s Abbreviatio; unpublished. Cf. Lo¨ffler, 92–5. Alexius legend in the Va¨terbuch, vs 39035–40050 (ed. Reissenberger 1914), and in the Ma¨rterbuch, vs 18287–646 (ed. Gierach 1928).

Alexius offices in breviaries of Beauvais, Chaˆlons-sur-Marne, Senlis, and Soissons; twelve lectiones prescribed during the office on 17 July in a calendar of Le Bec. Cf. Mo¨lk 1976B, 234–6, and 1978A, 343 and 345. s. XIII

Rodrigo de Cerrate O.P., Vitae sanctorum, 128: Alexius legend; unpublished. Liber notitiae sanctorum Mediolani, 33bis: Memoria sancti Alexii; ed. Magistretti and Monneret de Villard 1917, 41B–D. Extremely short epitome of the prose vita BHL 286 in breviaries from Chaˆlons-sur-Marne; ed. Mo¨lk 1976B, 235–6. Abridged version of the Latin prose vita BHL 286 in MS. Paris, Bibl. de l’Ars. 935, unpublished; cf. Ro¨sler 1905, 25. Version of the Latin prose vita BHL 288 for liturgical use in five Roman MSS. from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century;


133

unpublished. Cf. CCHL Rome, 888, 2384, 2687, and 3498 (MSS. A.8 and A.9); Lo¨ffler, 26–7. Adaptation of the sequence Adest nobis dies alma for the feast of Alexius, Le Bec; cf. AH LIII, 385. Versus de s. Alexio, Cysoing: eight rhyming pentameter couplets and three distichs, perhaps a poetic exercise; ed. Wagner 1975, 205. Vie de saint Alexis in laisses (follows the Latin standard legend, but not BHL 286); ed. Stebbins 1974. Li Vie saint Alesin et comment il mourut (‘‘re´daction rimeé’’ of the Chanson de saint Alexis); ed. Paris and Pannier 1872, 279–317. Middle High German verse legend ‘‘Alexius I’’ (fragment); ed. Toischer 1884. s. XIII4–XIV1 Alexius hours in ordinals of the collegiate church of Saint-Pierre in Lille, the cathedral in Marseille and Saint-Re´my in Reims, and in a breviary of Chaˆlonssur-Marne; cf. Mo¨lk 1976B, 233–5 and 244. s. XIII4–XIV1 Slightly abridged version of the Latin prose vita BHL 286 in MSS. St Paul (im Lavanttal), Benediktinerstift 100/3, and London, Brit. Libr. Arund. 330; unpublished. Cf. Lo¨ffler, 82–4. Version of the vita BHL 286 for liturgical use, abridged from the point where Alexius installs himself at the church of Mary in Edessa, in MS. Rome, Bibl. Vallic. VII; unpublished. Cf. CCHL Rome, 322142. Abridged version, probably of the Latin prose vita BHL 287, in MS. Mainz, Stadtbibl. I 106; unpublished. Cf. G. List and G. Powitz, Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Mainz, I, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1990, 181–2. Middle High German verse legend ‘‘Alexius A’’; ed. Eis 1935, 256– 303. Bonvesin da la Riva (c. 1250–1313/15), Italian life of Alexius in verse; ed. Monaci and Arese 1955, 458–62. Middle Dutch rhymed life of Alexius; cf. Deschamps 1975, 200–1. Provençal life of Alexius in verse; ed. Suchier 1883, 125–55 and 520–5. Old Portuguese Vida de Sancto Alexo (prose); ed. Allen 1953. Old Norse Alexis saga; ed. Jońsson 1927, 47–53. 4 s. XIII –XIV2 Middle High German verse legend ‘‘Alexius B’’; ed. Rosenfeld 1965. 1307

The General Chapter of the Dominican order decides to include three lectiones about Alexius in the office for 17 July; cf. Reichert 1899, 24. 1307 t.p.q. Epitome of the vita BHL 286 for the office of the Dominican order (BHL 291b) and an abridged version of this epitome for the breviarium portatile (BHL 291c); ed. Reichert 1899, 28–30 and 30– 1. 1308–10 Alexius exemplum in the Alphabetum narrationum of Arnold of Lie`ge O.P.; unpublished (see below, ad s. XV).

s. XIV1

Mention of the feast of Alexius in Consuetudines of Monte Cassino; cf. Mo¨lk 1978A, 344. Founding of the lay brotherhood of Alexians or Cellites; see above, p. 104. s. XIV1

1327

Guillelmus de Rinterio O.P. (Guillaume Bernardi de Narbonne, y1336), sermo 149 In festivitate sancti Alexii, unpublished; cf. Schneyer, Repetitorium 2, 1970, 431. Italian prose translation of the Alexius life from the Legenda aurea; ed. Manuzzi 1844, 7–13.

Eleázar of Sabran (y1323), in the petition for his canonization (BHL 2521), is described as even more admirable than Alexius because of his twenty-sevenyear chaste marriage; cf. De Gaiffier 1947, 177–8.

134

Louk J. Engels

1329 1350

First mention of an Alexius hospital set up by the Cathedral Chapter in Mainz; cf. Lo¨ffler, 151, n. 4. Alexius chapel and altar consecrated in Mainz; cf. Rosenfeld 1978, 234. 1330 c.

Eustache of Fontaine-Notre Dame, Tombel de Chartrose, 18: ‘‘De saint Alexis, qui fut XVII ans chiex son pere comme povre,’’ based on the Latin standard legend; ed. Stebbins 1974, 101–26. 1342 t.a.q. Gesta Romanorum, 15: De vita sancti allexii filii euphemiani imperatoris, based on the Legenda aurea; ed. Oesterley 1872, 296–300. 1343–9 Alexius legend in the prose legendarium of Hermann von Fritzlar; ed. Massmann, 186–9. 1347 t.a.q. Middle High German verse legend ‘‘Alexius C’’ (based on the Latin Dominican epitome; see above, ad 1307); ed. Massmann, 77–85. Bernard Gui O.P. (y1331), Speculum sanctorale, 39: abridged version s. XIV2 of the prose vita BHL 286; unpublished. Cf. CCHL Paris, Bibl. Nat., III, 55439 (MSS. lat. 5406 and 5407). Paulinus Venetus O.F.M. (1270/4–1344), Historia satyrica, 177,26 (MS. Rome, Bibl. Apost. Vatic. Vat. lat. 1960, f. 200 va–vb): Alexius legend based on BHL 286; unpublished. I owe this information to Dr B. Roest, Basle. Petrus Calo O.P. (yc. 1348), Legendae de sanctis, 479; unpublished. Cf. BHL, Nov. Suppl., 39 (sub 2 ter). Konrad von Haimburg O. Carth. (y1360), rhymed prayer in hymn form Salve, sancte o Alexi (AH III, no. 55; RH no. 18216); ed. AH III, 85–6. 2 s. XIV –XIV3 Alexius legend in the Low German Grosse Seelentrost: 1,18; ed. M. Schmitt, Der Grosse Seelentrost: Ein niederdeutsches Erbauungsbuch des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Niederdeutsche Studien 5), Cologne and Graz, Bo¨hlau, 1959, 24–7. La vie saint Alexis (‘‘re´daction en quatrains’’ of the Chanson de saint Alexis); ed. Paris and Pannier 1872, 346–87. Middle Dutch Sente Alexis legende (prose, based on the standard legend); cf. J. Van den Gheyn, Catalogue des manuscrits de la bibliothe`que royale de Belgique, III, Brussels, Lamertin, 1903, 43629. 1360 c.

Alexius church on the Aventine mentioned by Nicola´s Rosell O.P., Collectanea de mirabilibus civitatis Romae, 5 (ed. Valentini and Zucchetti 1946, 182). 1369–72 s. XIV3

1395 t.p.q.

Petrus de Natalibus, Catalogus sanctorum et gestorum eorum, 6, 107: Alexius legend based on the Legenda aurea; ed. Vicenza 1493, fol. 120d. Oldest Middle English Alexius poem (VLN Version); ed. Schipper 1877.

Healing of Francesca Romana after Alexius appeared to her: Ioh. Matteotti, Vita S. Francescae Romanae I,2 (ed. Acta SS. Mart. II, *94). 1380 c. Miracle de Nostre Dame de saint Alexis; ed. Paris and Robert 1883. s. XIV3–XIV4 Middle High German verse legend ‘‘Alexius K’’; ed. Rosenfeld 1966; Hester 1981. Oldest version of the Italian Alexius poem O re di gloria; ed. s. XIV4 Altrocchi 1925. Middle English Alexius poems LT Version and Laud 622 Version (ed. Furnivall 1878, 17–79) and verse legend in the Scottish Legendary (based on the Legenda aurea; ed. Metcalfe 1896, I, 441–57).

s. XIV

Alexius mentioned in the Martyrology of Lo (Belgium); cf. M. Coens, ‘‘Martyrologes belges manuscrits de la Bibliothe`que des Bollandistes,’’ AB 85 (1967), 113–42 and 339–78, there 355. Alexius cycle on church windows in Ko¨nigsberg (Neumark); cf. Krausen, 94. Alexius chapel (patron for pilgrims) at the old Elbe bridge in Dresden; cf. Lo¨ffler, 223, n. 1. Alexius chapel in Kaysersberg (Alsace); cf. Steyaert, 179.


135

Description of the possessions of Euphemianus on the Aventine in a marginal note in the lectionary of SS. Bonifatii et Alexii, f. 129 (ed. De Luca 1926, 21). s. XIV

Abridged version of an Alexius vita in MS. Oxford, Bodl. Libr. Lyell Empt. 5; unpublished. Cf. A. de la Mare, Catalogue of the Collection of Medieval Manuscripts bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, by James P.R. Lyell, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, 286. Metric Alexius vita, Vir quidam magnus Rome fuit Eufemianus (BHL 295; Walther, Initia no. 20422), origin unknown; presumably based on the prose vita BHL 287. Transmitted in six MSS., in versions of different length; ed. Massmann, 176–9 (148 vs); Vrtel-Wierczyński, 206–15 (267 vs). A new edition was announced (Mlat. Jb. 1, 1964, 224) but to my knowledge has not appeared. Miraculum Mariae about Alexius, Italy; ed. Cerulli 1969, II, xviii. Latin verse legend with unclear incipit (Altum cor et sal vir...) and verse structure; transmitted incomplete (257 vs), origin unknown. Unpublished; cf. Lo¨ffler, 134. Alexius sequences in use in Vorau (AH IX, no. 115; RH no. 27457), Prague (AH IX, no. 116; RH no. 24998) and Meissen (AH XXXVII, no. 112; RH no. 14893). Italian lives of Alexius in prose, based on the standard legend; partly published (ed. Venice, 1861; Battelli 1924, 493–500; Altrocchi 1915), still partly unpublished (cf. Golinelli 1987, 40–1). Three Italian prose translations of the Alexius life from the Legenda aurea; ed. De Luca 1954, 1141–7; Golinelli, 50–73. Old French Saint Aleux, in prose; ed. Keidel 1896. Czech life of Alexius; ed. Repp 1955.

s. XIV4–XV1 MSS. Rome, Bibl. Apost. Vat. lat. 8541 and Turin, Bibl. Naz. I.ii.17: cycles of illustrations from Alexius’ life; cf. CCHL Bibl. Vatic., 22745, and Lo¨ffler, 53. New Alexius church (see above, ad s. X4–XI1) in Lucca; cf. Steyaert, 179. The Alexius legend influences the Myste`re de s. Bernard de Menthon; cf. Gna¨dinger 1972, 21–4. s. XIV4–XV1 Abridged version of a Latin vita not yet identified in MS. Trier, Stadtbibl. 1148; unpublished. Cf. CCHL Trier Stadtbibl., 19210. Alexius legend in Der Heiligen Leben; unpublished. Cf. Lo¨ffler, 200–8. Alemannic verse legend ‘‘Alexius F’’; ed. Massmann, 118–39. Middle English Alexius poem in northern dialect (Cotton Version); ed. Furnivall, 20–79. 1409 1420 c.

Alexius chapel in Regensburg; cf. Steyaert, 178. Report of preaching about Alexius on his feast-day in the beguinage in Mechelen (see above, ad 1274), which stood under his patronage: Joh. Gielemans, Novale sanctorum 3,24 (ed. Anecdota Gielemans, 436). s. XV1

1440 c. 1449 1453

Middle High German Alexius legend in the Bebenhausener Legendar; ed. Lo¨ffler, 214–15. Alexius legend in the Northern Homily Cycle (AG version); ed. Horstmann 1881, 174–88.

Miniature in the book of hours of Catharina de Cleves: Alexius with stairs in his hand; cf. J. Plummer, The Hours of Catherine de Cleves, London, Barrie and Rockliff, 1966, Pl. 142. Alexius chapel in Bogenberg (Germany); cf. Steyaert, 177. Alexius co-patron of the Church of Mary in Salzburg/Mu¨lln; cf. Steyaert, 180. 1431 c. 1450

Prose version of Konrad von Wu¨rzburg’s Alexius (see above, ad 1274); ed. Palmer 1979. Joseph Bripius (1377/8–1457), De laudibus sancti Alexii (BHL 297h; Walther, Initia no. 9229); panegyric (959 hexameters), based on the Latin prose vita BHL 286. Ed. Servaes 1966, 106–37.

136

Louk J. Engels

1470 1472 1477

Alexius one of the patrons of a hospital chapel in Erfurt: Notae dedicationum Montis s. Petri Erfordensis (ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH, Script. XXX.1, 1896, 485). Alexius chapel in Cologne; cf. Steyaert, 178. Alexius and Augustine chapel of the Alexians, Aachen; cf. Steyaert, 177. 1454 Polish verse legend; ed. Verdiani 1967–68/9. s. XV2–XV3 Iohannes Gielemans (y1487), Sanctilogium (MS. Vienna, O¨sterr. Nationalbibl. FF s.n. 12807–10), f. 284–5v: abridged Alexius vita, source not yet identified; unpublished. Cf. CCHL Gielemans, 17.

1480 c. 1481 1481–97 1490

Boppard am Rhein, Carmelite church: fresco-cycle with Alexius’ life story; cf. Krausen, 94. St Alexius chapel of the Cellite brothers in Ghent; cf. Steyaert, 176. Miniature in the breviary of Jean d’Amboise: Alexius with the stairs in his hand; cf. Krausen, 93. First of the twenty-one printings of the Alexius poem O re di gloria (see above, ad s. XIV4); cf. Cioni 1963, 92–6. Synoptic edition of three printings: Ro¨sler 1905, 156–89. 1480 t.a.q. Boninus Mombritius, Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum, f. 23r–24v: reproduces the version of the Legenda aurea; ed. Paris, 1910, I, 49–51 (and 621). 1488 Alexius song by Jo¨rg Preining, Augsburg; ed. Massmann, 147–56.

s. XV4

Reports of performances of miracle plays about Alexius in Compie`gne (1476, 1485) and Metz (1498); cf. Lebe`gue 1964. Strasbourg, cathedral: wood sculpture (under the pulpit steps) of the mocking of Alexius; cf. Krausen, 91–2. Edingen (Belgium), Beguine chapel (see above, ad 1255): statue of Alexius with stairs in his hand; cf. Steyaert, 186 (Pl. 3). s. XV4

s. XV

Giovanni Garzoni (c. 1420/30–1505), Vita beati Alexii (BHL 292d), on the basis of the Latin prose vita BHL 286; transmitted in two Bolognese manuscripts (cf. CCHL Bologna Bibl. Univ., 3273 and 3479); unpublished. Cf. Lo¨ffler, 90–1.

Andrea Mantegna, painting: Alexius as a pilgrim; cf. Josi and Aprile 1961, 822. The Alexius legend influences Valentin et Orson; cf. Dickson 1929, 251–65. Bad Oberdorf (Bavaria), altar panel: Alexius with stairs in his hand, together with Saint Ottilia; cf. Krausen, 93. Alexius church in St Katharein an der Laming (Austria); cf. Steyaert, 180. Hospital of the Alexians in Neuss; cf. Steyaert, 178. Alexius monasteries of the Cellite brothers in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Brielle, Tiel, Utrecht, and Kampen and of the Cellite sisters in ’s Hertogenbosch; cf. Steyaert, 180. s. XV

Alexius hymns in use in Seckau (AH IV, nos. 117 and 118; RH nos. 12361 and 8617), Konstanz (AH XXIII, no. 179; RH no. 32983), Augsburg (AH XXIII, no. 190; RH no. 10058), Cividale, Piacenza, and Mainz (AH LII, nos. 92–93; RH nos. 1007 and 11608). Alexius sequences in use by the Windesheimers and in Bilzen, Belgium (AH XXXVII, no. 113; RH no. 11722), in Switzerland (AH LV, no. 55; RH no. 21426), and Utrecht (AH VIII, no. 122; RH no. 7572). Rhymed offices for the feast of Alexius from Meissen (AH XXV, no. 9; RH no. 26798), Mainz (AH XXV, no. 10; RH no. 15100), and Seckau (incomplete; AH XXV, no. 11; RH no. 25961). Rhymed prayers in hymn form O Alexi, flos amoris (Carthusian, AH XXIX, no. 249; RH no. 30192) and Ut inter spinas lilium (from Lehnin, AH XXXIII, no. 31; RH no. 34256). Italian Alexius poem Madre benigna immaculata e pura (printed c. 1495); cf. Golinelli, 79–80.


137

Two unpublished Italian translations of the life of Alexius from the Legenda aurea and one of the Latin standard legend (the latter in MS. Lucca, Bibl. Governativa 880); cf. Golinelli, 42–3. German Alexiusspiel (fragment); ed. Rueff 1925, 207–16. Alexius exemplum by Arnold of Lie`ge (see above, ad 1308–10) in English and Spanish translations of the Alphabetum narrationum; ed.: Banks 1905, 399–401; Verdaguer 1881, II, 138. 1501 1503 1515

Alexius one of the patrons of the castle chapel in Sonthofen; cf. Steyaert, 178. Donauwo¨rth, Stadtpfarrkirche, sculpture by Gregor Erhart (under the stairs of the tabernacle): Alexius sleeping under his stairs; cf. Krausen, 92. Earliest mention of a Sacra rappresentazione di sant’Alexo: Florence, in the monastery S. Salvatore; cf. Golinelli, 84. 1520 c.

Spanish Vida de sant Alexo; ed. Ro¨sler 1949, 335–44.

Bibliography (including editions of Alexius texts) and abbreviations AB Acta SS. Addonizio 1930 Adrianova 1917

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G. Battelli, Le piu` belle leggende cristiane, tratte da codici e da antiche stampe, commentate e illustrate, Milan, Ulrico Hoepli, 1924 F. Halkin, Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca (SH 8A), 3 vols, 3rd ed., Brussels, 1957 (repr. 1986) F. Halkin, Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca. Auctarium (SH 47), Brussels, 1969 F. Halkin, Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca. Novum Auctarium (SH 64), Brussels, 1984 Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis (SH 6), 2 vols, Brussels, 1898–9 and 1900–1 (repr. 1949) H. Fros, Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis. Novum supplementum (SH 70), Brussels, 1986 P. Peeters, Bibliotheca hagiographica orientalis (SH 10), Brussels, 1910 (repr. 1954, 1970) Bibliotheca Sanctorum, Rome, Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Universita` Lateranense, 1961– G. Binding, ‘‘Alexios v. Edessa,’’ LexMA, I, 1980, 384 M. F. Blau, ‘‘Zur Alexiuslegende,’’ Germania, 33 (1888), 181– 219 and 34 (1889), 156–87 G. Bolle`me, ‘‘Religion du texte et texte religieux: Une vie de saint dans la Bibliothe`que bleue,’’ in J.-C. Schmitt (ed.), Les saints et les stars: Le texte hagiographique dans la culture populaire, Paris, Beauchesne, 1983, 65–75 J. Burke Severs (ed.), A Manual of Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, Hamden, The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1970 Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis, Turnhout, Brepols, 1966– A. Poncelet, Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum bibliothecae Vaticanae (SH 11), Brussels, 1910 (repr. 1961, 1983) H. Moretus, ‘‘Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum bibliothecae Bollandianae,’’ AB 24 (1905), 425–72 A. Poncelet, ‘‘Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum Bibliothecae Universitatis Bononiensis,’’ AB 42 (1924), 320–70 Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum bibliothecae regiae Bruxellensis (SH 1), I, 2 vols, Brussels, 1886, 1889 ‘‘De codicibus hagiographicis Iohannis Gielemans canonici regularis in Rubea Valle prope Bruxellas,’’ AB 14 (1895), 5– 88 (also as a separate volume: Brussels, 1895 [repr. 1961]) B. de Gaiffier, ‘‘Catalogue des passionnaires de la Bibliothe`que Capitolaire de Lucques,’’ in idem, Recherches d’hagiograpie latine (SH 52), Brussels, 1971, 77–131 ‘‘Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum bibliothecarum Neapolitanarum,’’ AB 30 (1911), 137–251 J. Van Straeten, Les manuscrits hagiographiques d’Orleáns, Tours et Angers (SH 64), Brussels, 1982 Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum antiquiorum saeculo XVI qui asservantur in Bibliotheca Nationali Parisiensi (SH 2), 3 vols, Brussels, 1889–93 A. Poncelet, Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum bibliothecarum Romanarum praeter quam Vaticanae (SH 9), Brussels, 1909 (repr. 1981) M. Coens, ‘‘Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum latinorum Bibliothecae Civitatis Treverensis,’’ AB 52 (1934), 157–285 Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, Turnhout, Brepols, 1954– E. Cerulli, Les vies e´thiopiennes de Saint Alexis l’homme de Dieu (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 298–9; Scriptores Aethiopici 59–60), Louvain, Peeters, 1969 U. Chevalier, Poe´sie liturgique du moyen aˆge (Bibliothe`que liturgique 1), Paris, A. Picard, 1893

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D. Gobbi, Bartolomeo da Trento, domenicano e agiografo medievale, Passionale de sanctis (Bibliotheca Civis 3), Trento, Gruppo Culturale Civis, 1990 P. Golinelli, La leggenda di sant’Alessio in due inediti volgarizzamenti del Trecento e nella tradizione letteraria italiana (I classici cristiani 273–4), Siena, Cantagalli, 1987 Th. Graesse, Jacobi a Voragine Legenda aurea, 3rd ed., Breslau, 1890 (repr. Osnabru¨ck, Otto Zeller Verlag, 1969) H. Hager, Die Anfa¨nge des italienischen Altarbildes: Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte des toskanischen Hochaltarretabels (Ro¨mische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana 17), Munich, Schroll, 1962 F. Halkin, ‘‘Une le´gende grecque de saint Alexis (BHG 56d),’’ AB 98 (1980), 5–16 Idem, ‘‘Vie de S. Alexis (BHG 52m),’’ in F. Halkin and A.-J. Festugie`re, Dix textes ine´dits tire´s du meńologe impe´rial de Koutloumous (Cahiers d’orientalisme 8), Geneva, Patrick Cramer, 1984, 81–93 I. M. Hester, A Hitherto Unpublished Version of the Alexius Legend: University of Pennsylvania Manuscript Ger 4, Diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1981 (unpublished) C. Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden: Neue Folge, Heilbronn, 1881 (repr. Hildesheim, Olms, 1969) F. Jońsson, AM 623, 4o: Helgensagaer, Copenhagen, 1927 E. Josi and R. Aprile, ‘‘Alessio,’’ Biblioth. SS., I, 1961, 814–23 Chr. J. Kaufmann, The History of the Alexian Brothers, 2 vols, New York, The Seabury Press, 1976–8 G. C. Keidel, An Old French Prose Version of La Vie de Saint Alexis, Baltimore, Friedenwald Company, 1896 E. Krausen, ‘‘Alexius von Edessa, Mann Gottes,’’ Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, V, Freiburg i. Br., Herder, 1973 (repr. 1990), 90–5 B. Latysˇ ev, Menologii anonymi byzantini saec. X quae supersunt, I, Petersburg, 1911 (repr. Subsidia Byzantina lucis ope iterata 12, Leipzig, Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1970) R. Lebe`gue, ‘‘Saint Alexis (Miracle de Notre Dame de),’’ in R. Bossuat, L. Pichard and G. Raynaud de Lage, Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, I, Paris, Fayard, 1964, 667 A. Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, le´gendes et apologues tire´s du recueil ine´dit d’E´tienne de Bourbon, Dominicain du XIIIe sie`cle, Paris, Librairie Renouard, 1877 Lexikon des Mittelalters, Munich and Zu¨rich, Artemis Verlag (I–VII.9) and LexMA Verlag (VII.10–IX) and Stuttgart and Weimar, J. B. Metzler (Registerband), 1980–99 P. Leyser, ‘‘Leben des heiligen Alexius,’’ in M. Haupt and H. Hoffmann (eds), Altdeutsche Bla¨tter, II, Leipzig, 1840, 273–87 R. Lo¨ffler, Alexius: Studien zur lateinischen Alexius-Legende und zu den mittelhochdeutschen Alexiusdichtungen, Inaugural-Diss. AlbertLudwig-Universita¨t, Freiburg i. Br., 1991 I. Lucchesi, Sancti Petri Damiani sermones ad fidem antiquiorum codicum restituti (CCCM 57), Turnhout, Brepols, 1983 E. Lutsch, Die altfranzo¨sische Prosaversion der Alexiuslegende, Berlin, Frenkel, 1913 G. P. Maggioni, Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea (Millennio medievale 6, Testi 3), 2 vols, Florence, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998 M. Magistretti and U. Monneret de Villard, Liber notitiae sanctorum Mediolani, Milan, 1917

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141

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Odenkirchen 1978

Oesterley 1872 Pa¨cht 1960

Palmer 1979 Paoli 2001 Paris 1879 Paris 1889 Paris and Pannier 1872

Paris and Robert 1883 Pinius 1725 Reichert 1899 Reissenberger 1914 Repp 1955 RH

Rohlfs 1963 Rosenfeld 1965 Rosenfeld 1966 Rosenfeld 1978 Ro¨sler 1905

E. Monaci, Crestomazia Italiana dei primi secoli, ed. a cura di F. Arese, Citta` di Castello, Soc. Ed. Dante Alighieri, 1955 F. M. Nerini, De templo et coenobio SS. Bonifacii et Alexii historica monumenta, Rome, 1752 Ch. Nisard, Histoire des livres populaires, ou de la litte´rature du colportage depuis le XVe sie`cle jusqu’a` l’e´tablissement de la Commission d’examen des livres du colportage (30 novembre 1852), 2nd ed., Paris, E. Dentu, 1864 C. J. Odenkirchen, The Life of St Alexius in the Old French Version of the Hildesheim Manuscript. The original text reviewed, with comparative Greek and Latin versions, all accompanied by English translations; and an introductory study, a bibliography, and appendices (Medieval Classics: Texts and Studies, 9), Brookline, MA and Leyden, Classical Folia Editions, 1978 H. Oesterley, Gesta Romanorum, Berlin, 1872 (repr. Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963) O. Pa¨cht, ‘‘The Chanson of St Alexis,’’ in O. Pa¨cht, C.R. Dodwell and F. Wormald, The St Albans Psalter (Albani Psalter) (Studies of the Warburg Institute 25), London, 1960, 126–46 N. F. Palmer, ‘‘Eine Prosabearbeitung der Alexiuslegende Konrads von Wu¨rzburg,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r deutsches Altertum, 108 (1979), 158–80 E. Paoli, Bartolomeo da Trento, Liber epilogorum in gestis sanctorum (Millennio Medievale, Testi 4), Florence, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001 G. Paris, ‘‘La Vie de saint Alexi en vers octosyllabiques,’’ Romania, 8 (1879), 163–80 Idem, rev. of Blau 1888, Romania, 18 (1889), 299–302 G. Paris and L. Pannier, La Vie de saint Alexis, poe`me du XIe sie`cle, et renouvellements des XIIe, XIIIe et XIVe sie`cles (Bibliothe`que de l’Ećole des Hautes E´tudes 7), Paris, 1872 (repr. Paris, Vieweg, 1887) G. Paris and U. Robert, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, VII, Paris, Socie´te´ des anciens textes français, 1883 J. Pinius, ‘‘De S. Alexio Confessore Romae vel, ut alia acta ferunt, Edessae in Syria,’’ Acta SS. Iul. IV, 1725, 238–70 B. M. Reichert, Acta capitulorum generalium Ordinis fratrum Praedicatorum, II (Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum historica 4), Rome and Stuttgart, 1899 K. Reissenberger, Das Va¨terbuch (Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters 22), Berlin, Weidmann, 1914 F. Repp, ‘‘Die alt-tschechische Alexiuslegende,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r slavische Philologie, 23 (1955), 284–315 U. Chevalier, Repertorium hymnologicum. Catalogue des chants, hymnes, proses, se´quences, tropes en usage dans l’E´glise latine depuis les origines jusqu’a` nos jours, 6 vols, Louvain and Brussels, Lefever, 1892–1921 (repr. 1969) G. Rohlfs, Sankt Alexius: Altfranzo¨sische Legendendichtung des 11. Jahrhunderts (Sammlung romanischer U¨bungstexte 15), 4th ed., Tu¨bingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963 H.-F. Rosenfeld, ‘‘Eine Bearbeitung des Alexius B aus dem 15. Jh.,’’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 66 (1965), 91–107. Idem, ‘‘Eine mittelhochdeutsche Alexiuslegende (K),’’ in K. Rudolph etc. (eds), Festschrift fu¨r Walter Baetke, Weimar, Hermann Bo¨hlaus Nachfolger, 1966, 284–97 Idem, ‘‘Alexius,’’ Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., I, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1978, 226–35 M. Ro¨sler, Die Fassungen der Alexius-Legende, mit besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung der mittelenglischen Versionen (Wiener Beitra¨ge zur


Ro¨sler 1928 Ro¨sler 1933 Ro¨sler 1949 Rueff 1925 Rychner 1977 Schipper 1877 Schneyer, Repetitorium Sckommodau 1956 Servaes 1966 SH Sprissler 1966

Stebbins 1973 Stebbins 1974 Steyaert 1989 Storey 1987 Suchier 1883 Talbot 1959 Toischer 1884 Toubert 1976 Uitti 1973 Valentini and Zucchetti 1946 Va´zquez de Parga 1941 Venice 1861

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englischen Philologie 21), Vienna and Leipzig, Braumueller, 1905 (repr. New York, 1964) Eadem, Sankt Alexius: Altfranzo¨sische Legendendichtung des 11. Jahrhunderts (Sammlung romanischer U¨bungstexte 15), Halle, Niemeyer, 1928 Eadem, ‘‘Alexiusprobleme,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r romanische Philologie, 53 (1933), 508–28 Eadem, ‘‘Versiones espanõles de la legenda de San Alejo,’’ Nueva revista de filologıá hispańica, 3 (1949), 329–52 H. Rueff, Das rheinische Osterspiel der Berliner Handschrift ms. Germ. fol. 1219, Berlin, Weidmann, 1925 J. Rychner, ‘‘La Vie de saint Alexis et le poe`me latin Pater Deus ingenite,’’ Vox Romanica, 36 (1977), 67–83. J. Schipper, Englische Alexiuslegenden aus dem 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (Quellen und Forschungen 20), Strassburg and London, Tru¨bner, 1877 J.-B. Schneyer, Repetitorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters fu¨r die Zeit von 1150–1350, Mu¨nster, Aschendorff, 1969– H. Sckommodau, ‘‘Alexius in Liturgie, Malerei und Dichtung,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r romanische Philologie, 72 (1965), 165–94 F.-W. Servaes, Joseph Bripius, De laudibus sancti Alexii: Untersuchungen und kritischer Text, Inaugural-Dissertation der Universita¨t zu Ko¨ln, 1966 Subsidia Hagiographica, Brussels, 1886– M. Sprissler, Das rhythmische Gedicht ‘‘Pater Deus ingenite’’ und das altfranzo¨sische Alexiuslied (Forschungen zur romanischen Philologie 18), Mu¨nster/Westf., Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966 Ch. E. Stebbins, ‘‘Les origines de la le´gende de saint Alexis,’’ Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 51 (1973), 497–507 Idem, A Critical Edition of the 13th and 14th Centuries Old French Poem Versions of the ‘‘Vie de saint Alexis’’ (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fu¨r romanische Philologie 145), Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer, 1974 D. Steyaert, ‘‘De verspreiding van de verering van SintAlexius,’’ Arca Lovaniensis artes atque historiae reserans documenta, 18 (1989), 171–93 Chr. Storey, An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Alexis Studies (La Vie de Saint Alexis) (Histoire des ideés et critique litte´raire 251), Geneva, Droz, 1987 H. Suchier, Denkma¨ler provenzalischer Literatur und Sprache, I, Halle, 1883 C. H. Talbot, The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth Century Recluse, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959 W. Toischer, ‘‘Sanct Alexius,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r deutsches Altertum, 28 (1884), 67–72 H. Toubert, ‘‘Rome et le Mont-Cassin: nouvelles remarques sur les fresques de l’e´glise infe´rieure de Saint-Cle´ment de Rome,’’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 30 (1976), 1–33 K. D. Uitti, ‘‘The Life of Saint Alexi,’’ in idem, Story, Myth, and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050–1200, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973, 3–64 R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Codice Topografico della Citta` di Rome, III, Rome, 1946 L. Va´zquez de Parga, ‘‘¿La ma´s antigua redaccioń latina de la leyenda de San Alejo?,’’ Revista de bibliografıá nacional, 2 (1941), 245–58 Vita di santo Alessio confessore romano, scrittura inedita del buon secolo, Venice, 1861

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Verdaguer 1881 Verdiani 1967–68/9 Voigt 1898 Vrtel-Wierczyński 1937

A. Verdaguer, Recull de eximplis e miracles, gestes et faules e altres ligendes ordenades par A.B.C., 2 vols, Barcelona, 1881 C. Verdiani, ‘‘Il Ritmo polacco su Sant’Alessio (1454),’’ Ricerche slaviche, 15 (1967), 41–112, and 16 (1968–9), 3–100 H. G. Voigt, Adalbert von Prag: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Kirche und des Mo¨nchtums im zehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin, Westend, 1898 S. Vrtel-Wierczyński, Starapolska legenda o s´w Aleksym na poro´wnawczem tle literatur slowian´skich (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjacio´l Nauck, Prace Komisji Filol. 9), Po´znan, 1937 F. Wagner, ‘‘Die Verslegende vom hl. Alexius ‘Duxit Romanus vir nobilis Eufemianus’,’’ Mlat. Jb., 1 (1964), 78–99 Idem, ‘‘Die metrische Alexius-Vita ‘Eufemianus erat, ceu lectio sacra revelat’,’’ Mlat. Jb., 2 (1965), 145–64 Idem, ‘‘Das Alexius-Gedicht des Bru¨sseler Codex Nr. 8883–94,’’ in D. Schmidtke and H. Schu¨ppert (eds), Festschrift fu¨r Ingeborg Schro¨bler zum 65. Geburtstag (Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 95. Band, Sonderheft), Tu¨bingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1973, 144–69 Idem, ‘‘Versus de sancto Alexi,’’ Mlat. Jb., 10 (1975), 202–5 H. Walther, Initia carminum ac versuum Medii Aevi posterioris latinorum: Alphabetisches Verzeichnis der Versanfa¨nge mittellateinischer Dichtungen, 2nd ed., Go¨ttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969; supplements in Mlat. Jb., 7, 1972; 8, 1973; 9, 1974; 12, 1977; 15, 1980; 16, 1981 K. F. Werner, ‘‘La le´gende de saint Alexis: un document sur la religion de la haute noblesse vers l’an Mil?,’’ in M. Sot (ed.), Haut moyen aˆge: culture, e´ducation et socie´te´. Etudes offertes a` Pierre Riche´, Paris, Publidix, 1990, 531–46 F. Wormald, ‘‘The Calendar and Litany of the St Albans Psalter,’’ in O. Pa¨cht, C. R. Dodwell and F. Wormald, The St Albans Psalter (Albani Psalter) (Studies of the Warburg Institute 25), London, 1960, 23–55 A. Wrede, ‘‘Alexius,’’ Handwo¨rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, I, Berlin and Leipzig, 1927, 261–2 =

Wagner 1964 Wagner 1965 Wagner 1973

Wagner 1975 Walther, Initia

Werner 1990

Wormald 1960

Wrede 1927

7

Bernward of Hildesheim A case of self-planned sainthood? Bernhard Gallistl

Bernward, bishop of Hildesheim from 15 January 993 until his death on 20 November 1022, was a political figure of considerable importance as tutor of the young Otto III and later as imperial bishop. Today his name is primarily associated with the works of art that he commissioned and on which he left such a clear personal stamp that art historians have grouped them under the term ‘Bernwardian art.’1 Surviving works include not only the famous double bronze doors and the Christ Column of Hildesheim Cathedral but also the large statues of the ‘Golden Madonna’ and ‘Ringelheim Crucifix,’ as well as some smaller castings – the silver Bernward crucifix, the ‘Erkanbald Crook’ (Erkanbaldkru¨mme), a pair of silver candlesticks – and a number of (mainly liturgical) books. Bernward’s most important achievement was the foundation of St Michael’s Monastery or Michaeliskloster. Located north of the cathedral and city settlement, this monastic complex included a church that decisively influenced the great tradition of Romanesque church architecture in the Rhine region. He also designated the place in front of St Mary’s Altar in St Michael’s Church as the site of his own grave. The construction began with the chapel, which he consecrated on 10 September (the beginning of the Constantinople festival of the Elevation of the Cross) in the year 996, for the cult of the cross fragment given to him by Otto III. Around the beginning of the new millennium – the exact date is disputed – Bernward decided to expand the edifice into a large Benedictine monastery. On 28 September 1015 he was able to consecrate the crypt, built on the west side, and on 28 September 1022, a few weeks before his death on 20 November, the entire monastery. The wording of the document has survived in which Bernward, on 1 November 1019, transferred all his possessions to St Michael’s Monastery.2 Opinions differ as to how faithful the surviving text is to the original. There is agreement in any case that the introductory passage is authentic.3 It is an extremely valuable passage, for here a bishop who lived at the turn of the last millennium gives a theological and confessional declaration of the inner origins and purpose of his bequest, officially designating it for ‘‘the salvation of my lords and emperors, of myself and my successors, as well as of all those whose legacies I have acquired.’’ It holds:

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Bernhard Gallistl Every creature with the name ‘human being’ was made by his Creator in such a way that, in accordance with the law of nature, he prefers to serve his Creator rather than the creature. It is true that association with things distracts him; yet this fundamental constitution, to the extent that the person is in possession of his reason, keeps guiding him back to the path of his original destiny. However, the greater the corrections a person experiences by the grace of God, the more fervently he feels united to God in all things. This would not be possible if God did not draw everyone toward Himself with his mighty hand. Thus the succoring mercy of God finds its expression in the human longing for grace, and adapts itself to the individual person. If we look for examples of this we immediately find a divine answer: after Adam’s fall and the long age of exile Abraham believed the Lord, and precisely that was counted to him for righteousness. By contrast Moses, who gave the Law, became a leader and teacher of the people of Israel both by God’s outreaching grace and through his own merits. And Elijah, worker of miracles, gave evidence of a similar holiness in that he did not experience the limit of human years but was carried away in a fiery chariot to eternal judgment. It surpasses our understanding, and we would never be finished if we wanted to penetrate these questions more deeply with our reason. Enough evidence is found in the example of David, who with a strong hand rose up mightily in battle. Clear as daylight is the evidence of the holy Solomon, who after building the temple of God, cleansed himself in accordance with the laws of his religion and brought himself closer to God by participating in cultic mysteries, he who was found to be without equal as a penitent. To all of them God revealed the special nature of their merits through their respective manner of deeds, so that in time they will remain different from all others, always, by virtue of merit and deed, and in eternity they will be equal to the angels. In view of this I, Bernward, appointed bishop by God’s election and not of my own merit, have given long thought to how I, learned court clerk, tutor and keeper of documents of Emperor Otto III of blessed memory, might be deserving of heaven, by what architecture of merit, by what achievement. Seized by God’s grace, trembling at the excess of my sins, and at the same time filled with longing for divine grace, I considered first one thing, then another, as a means to satisfy eternal mercy and achieve salvation for my soul. But with my modest resources I had to fear that whatever I might intend, I would either not be able to begin it at all or in any case would never be able to complete it. Nevertheless the wish to carry out my intention grew stronger and stronger inside me, even if my circumstances at the time did not allow me to undertake anything. But behold, God’s will and ancient decree singled me out to be raised up to the glorious throne of a bishop. And so that the flock of the Lord would not be thrown into confusion for lack of a shepherd, or our Mother Church become a widow, as it were, the

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Spirit of Peace caused everyone to be of one heart and one mind at the election of the new bishop. Then, having ascended the throne of the church of Bennopolis, I wanted to carry out in deed that which I had long been planning in my heart, that is, I wanted to prepare a felicitous memorial to my name as someone who had built churches, instituted the service of God in them, and donated all his possessions to the Lord. Now God’s decrees are hidden but always just. I therefore began, with the joyous consent of the faithful, to construct a new house of God, and in doing so both fulfilled my own promise and served the best interests of Christendom, to the praise and glory of the name of the Lord, by settling monks there, beloved of God. However, when the foundations of the building had been laid, and the outlines of the individual rooms were already visible, I was stricken with fever and was ill for five years, so that no digression into earthly matters – praise be to thee, Christ! – would delay the progress of the undertaking. But since nothing on earth occurs without a reason, I believe and trust that the Lord was chastising me with his chastisements, yet he did not deliver me up unto death, and thus prevented the work of my hope from being interrupted because of my absence. I caused monks to occupy this place, which was dedicated to God, the holy cross, the ever pure Virgin Mary and the holy archangel Michael. I united them here according to the principle that, being removed from the activity of this world as laid down in the rule of monks, they might be free of all hindrances of worldly duties. Therefore, with the consent of the Lord and Emperor Henry and of my superior, the archbishop Erkanbald, whom I, together with my fellow brothers, consecrated as archbishop, I gave away everything I had inherited or acquired by my private means in worldly goods, estates, farms, lands, fields, pastures, waters, forests, meadows, churches, relics, books, gold, and silver, and whatever else there might be. Aside from what I bequeathed to the Altar of the blessed Mary in the cathedral in the form of golden crowns, chalices, candlesticks, vestments, and other paraments, I made over everything by the hand of my testamentary guardian to God and his saints for the use and benefit of the brothers. I have bequeathed it for the salvation of my aforementioned Lords and Emperors, of myself and my successors, as well as of all those from whom I have acquired inheritances, so that the servants of Christ, free of all earthly duties, secure in the protection of my successors, may enjoy peaceful times and devote themselves to the life of pious contemplation for the salvation of all men. If, however, someone should come after me, cleric or lay person, who tries to infringe on this or is even so bold as to seize this property by force, I ban him with the sword of the Word of God and His saints; all curses will break upon him, all blessing flee from him. He will thus be blotted out in heaven and on earth and will have his part with Judas and with those who wanted to possess the temple of God as their inheritance. Moreover the heirs shall attempt, on the authorization of God and

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Bernhard Gallistl myself, to regain possession of the property when they see an intruder residing on their portion of the inheritance.

Bernward is here developing an unusual conception of his personal holiness. From the idea – already put forward in similar form by certain church fathers and derived, in the last analysis, from Stoic doctrines of the soul4 – of the innate, natural striving for God with which, together with reason, human beings were endowed at creation, and which keeps asserting itself in life, there follows the idea of the direct guidance that God grants to the individual person. Bernward’s orientation for these reflections is clearly the Augustinian dialectic of creatio–conversio–formatio.5 The result of this process is described here as saintliness, in words taken in part from the definition of saintliness found in the Epistle to the Romans, which states: Scimus autem, quoniam diligentibus Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum, iis, qui secundum propositum vocati sunt sancti. Nam quos praescivit, et praedestinavit conformes fieri imaginis Filii sui, ut sit ipse primogenitus in multis fratribus. Quos autem praedestinavit, hos et vocavit: et quos vocavit, hos et iustificavit: quos autem iustificavit, illos et glorificavit. (Rom. 8, 28–30). (And in everything, as we know, he [God] co-operates for good with those who love God and are called saints, sancti, according to this purpose. For God knew his own before ever they were, and also ordained that they should be shaped to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the eldest among a large family of brothers; and it is these, so foreordained, whom he has also called. And those whom he called he has justified, and those whom he justified he has also given his splendor.) The image of God embedded in every human being comes to realization in the predestined calling to saintliness. If Bernward understands the individual striving of human beings for grace as the form taken by a merciful God, he also relates the creation of humanity in the image and likeness of God to God’s assumption of human form in the incarnation, which he locates within the individual person. This brings him close to the mystical conception of an inner birth of God.6 Well-known callings from the Old Testament are cited as proof of this divine guidance. After the general paradigm series (actually declared to be sufficient evidence) Abraham–Moses–Elijah, which follows the counterparadigm of Adam, the father–son pair David and Solomon are mentioned as well. Of all these figures he considers it equally true, pari examine sanctitatis, that through their own merit, merita, they have realized divine election as saintliness, cumque et divina preveniente clementia tum et exigentibus meritis. Bernward thus touches on the theme of merita, of the role of human merit in the total process of salvation. In the Augustinian view, the very possibility of human merit is already a consequence of grace.7 Calling – and this is true of all the paradigms cited – means revelation of the essence of true merit.


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Human merit first comes about with the knowledge of the precedence of God’s creative and redemptive will. This knowledge, which God reveals to his elect, determines their specific form of life in this world, and their participation in the holy community comprising both human beings and angels in the world to come. At this point Bernward focuses these reflections on his own situation by turning the issue of the foundation of human merit into a question of his personal life commitment. The key term here is architecture of merit, meritorum architectura, which he considers the precondition for heavenly reward – a phrase which brings together all the major themes of the text. On the one hand, of course, the founder wants to declare his building plans a spiritual work. On the other hand, the term he chooses brings the reader full circle, back to the specially mentioned examples of David and Solomon. Augustine, in his City of God, gave the following explanation of the promise, found in Nathan’s great salvational speech to David (which is also the calling of Solomon), of the construction of Solomon’s temple: Again, when he says, a little farther on, ‘‘Now begin, and bless the house of your servant for all eternity . . . ,’’ the reason is that he was about to have a son through whom his posterity would be traced down to Christ, and thanks to Christ his house was destined to become eternal, and to be the house of God. It is the house of David because of its descent from him; but it is also the house of God because it is God’s temple, built not of stones, but of human beings, for the people to dwell there for ever with their God and in their God, and for God to dwell there with his people and in his people. Thus God will fill his people and the people will be full of their God, when God will be all in all, being himself our prize in peace, as he is our strength in war. For this reason Nathan’s words, ‘‘the Lord will bring you news that you will build him a house,’’ were afterwards repeated in David’s statement: ‘‘For you, Lord omnipotent, the God of Israel, have made a revelation to your servant, saying that I shall build you a house.’’ Now we build this house by living good lives, and God also builds it by helping us so to live. For ‘‘unless the Lord builds a house, those who build it have labored to no purpose.’’ When the final dedication of this house arrives, then will come the fulfillment of what God said to Nathan in this passage, ‘‘Then I shall establish a place for my people Israel; and I shall set them there, and they will dwell by themselves, and shall be disturbed no more. And the son of wickedness will not continue to humiliate them as he has done from the start, from the time when I set up judges over my people Israel.’’8 Against the backdrop of Augustinian allegorical interpretation,9 Bernward’s expression architectura meritorum equates a holy form of living with construction of the temple and participation in the company of angels. Right living – possible only through the grace of God – appears here as the human con-

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tribution to God’s work of salvation as creatio continua. The further definition of such saintliness as participation in the company of angels, angelicis spiritibus fierent coequales, can be explained in terms of Augustinian angelology, in which human beings predestined to sainthood fill the gap rent in the company of angels by the fall of Lucifer and his followers, which Augustine equated with the creation of light on the first day. In describing this angelic society of the ecclesia sursum, Augustine also uses the image of the heavenly temple, an edifice that arises from the communion of the saints with God. Viewing the temple of Jerusalem as the earthly image of the heavenly edifice gives the templebuilder Solomon, of all the examples cited of Old Testament saintliness, his special exemplary quality for Bernward and his plans. Solomon’s temple had long been claimed as a model for prominent church buildings.10 Bernward goes beyond the usual comparison, however, by emphasizing Solomon’s identity as a penitent rather than his kingship. Viewing Solomon as a penitent was in itself not all that unusual.11 One of the proverbs attributed to him was responsible for this association: novissime ego egi penitentiam et respexi, ut eligerem disciplinam (Prov. 24,2). But the building of the temple – often presented conversely as an external work to which the misdeeds of Solomon form a moral contrast – is otherwise never linked to his role of penitent. Bernward, however, makes precisely this connection in order to point out the parallel between the biblical temple-builder and his own spiritual biography. The profound awareness of sin that overwhelmed the young court chaplain is nothing other than God’s own call of grace – as he states already in the first lines, the magnitude of grace can be measured by the degree of divine correction. Bernward expressed this awareness of sin even more pointedly in his document of 99612 concerning the first foundation on St Michael’s Hill. Embedded in the consciousness of sin is the certainty of grace. Bernwardus huius sancte sedis vocatus episcopus, divinae miserationis gratia tactus, insuper et fratrum nostrorum karitate doctus is how he characterizes himself in a document dating from his first years as bishop,13 where he stipulates that the tithe revenues of his priests be used for the restoration of the churches in the bishopric and at the same time for a foundation in memory of himself and his predecessors – as well as for the spiritual good of the empire. This portrayal of a saint experiencing his calling as a flood of guilt feelings is not atypical14 – it might, in fact, serve as a point of departure for a study of sainthood along the lines of depth psychology. Thus Bernward sees his relation to Solomon in the calling to counterbalance his guilt with the decisive meritorious work of constructing a house of God and establishing religious services. Just as Solomon moved steadily closer to God through the worship services in his temple,15 he too wants to create with his memorial foundation ‘‘a means of salvation for his soul,’’ and thus to achieve saintliness and a new likeness to God. Bernward incorporates his ‘cursus honorum,’ by which he rose first to the rank of court chaplain and tutor of the young king and subsequently to that of imperial bishop, into the personal history of his calling, and


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does so in such a way that it appears to be an essential part of the story – as he did previously in the document of 10 September 996. And it is very likely true that only upon attaining the office of bishop in his home territory did it become legally possible for him to transfer all his personal possessions to a foundation. There is no doubt that Bernward’s line of thinking places him very close to the type of the medieval mystic. The awareness of sin that assails him in his spiritual experiences, and his conception of God as assuming individual form for each believer, are also notable mystic elements in his confession. Also striking here is that Bernward’s certainty about becoming a saint never seems to waver. Indeed, on this point his initial experience of sin could possibly be interpreted as guilt feelings and decompensation for his sense of greatness, precisely because there was no way for him to overcome it psychologically.

Remembrance and the construction of sainthood An impetus for ‘planning’ one’s own sainthood in this way can be found in the very qualities attributed to bishop-builders at the time as well as to founders. All through the Middle Ages, founders and special benefactors were viewed ‘‘on the whole as at least potential saints,’’16 just as the line between memorials for the dead and veneration of saints was generally fluid. Certain common connections between burials, liturgical memorials, oral traditions of liturgical remembrance, and historiography are also evident in this text. Of essential importance is the tie with the religious community living on the donated property17 – in this case St Michael’s Monastery. In addition to the memorial foundation, however, the work of construction itself was given particular weight among the ‘exteriora’ of a bishop’s activities. All medieval builders of religious edifices could find inspiration and justification for their work in the concept of God as the great opifex.18 This comes to clear expression here as well, when Bernward emphasizes his likeness to the Creator. But in Ottonian culture in particular – the sphere in which all of this is taking place – ‘‘building enterprises were simply intrinsically capable of elevating a bishop or an abbot to the rank of sainthood.’’19 Although there is no doubt that St Michael’s Monastery was the foundation closest to Bernward’s heart, it was not his only accomplishment in the area of construction. The account of his life also tells how he built a splendid new addition (now lost) to the cathedral, consisting of a stone wall around the bishop’s fortified residence (the foundations of which have recently been uncovered), as well as defensive castles to strengthen the borders of his bishopric. His efforts to maintain and renovate the churches of his diocese have been mentioned earlier. If we compare Bernward with other founders and bishop-builders, we see that he goes much further than they do by articulating a theological justification. The religious underpinning with which he introduces the document stipulating his donation, and which sets it apart from comparable founding

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documents, might be viewed simply as a literary device. Parallel statements by Bernward and others in his milieu, however, indicate that the text represents an authentic confession. This is especially true of his claim that he will be accepted into the company of angels. The inscription on his bronze doors,20 declaring that Bernward of blessed memory, dive memorie, caused these doors to be hung as a memorial to himself, ob monumentum sui, at the front of the ‘angelic temple,’ in facie angelici templi, reinforces the association of memorial donation, Solomon’s temple,21 and angelic holiness. The phrase ‘angelic temple’ is not, as has often been suggested, an allusion to St Michael’s Church, with its angelic patron. The bronze doors were in all probability made for the cathedral, where they hang today. The term rather harks back to an ancient liturgical formula22 that expresses the holiness of a building by declaring that it belongs to the world of the angels. It is in fact more likely that this same conception of angelic holiness moved Bernward to select a patron angel for his monastic foundation and to place angels’ chapels (‘‘angel choirs’’),23 corresponding to the nine orders of Dionysius the Aereopagite, on the upper levels of the transepts and in the west apse of its church. The idea that the founder, in his burial, joins the community of the monastery, of the saints represented by the church’s relics,24 and of the angels,25 comes to expression on the inscribed plaque placed in St Michael’s Church during Bernward’s lifetime, or at least not long after his death: VENITE CONCIVES NOSTRI DEVM ADORATE VESTRI PRESVLIS BERNWARDI MEMENTOTE.26 The other surviving foundation inscriptions and donation records of Bernward reinforce by their very numbers the impression given here that his aspirations far exceeded the usual claims of a founder. The reason for this can be found in the specific religious-political situation of the time. Bernward’s pupil Otto III – with the authority derived from his ties to both the Western and the Byzantine imperial line – had heightened his predecessors’ ideal of Renovatio imperii and attempted to translate it into concrete action. Until now too little attention has been paid to the fact that St Michael’s Monastery also served as a memorial for the imperial house. Otto III had donated not only the relic of the cross, for which Bernward erected the Cross Chapel in 996, but also lands to provide a living for the clerics who were called there pro remedio animae suae suorum cunctorum memoria. His successor Henry II, who also completed the construction of the cloister, called up the memory of the donation and renewed it with an eye to a memorial for himself and his wife Kunigunde. This reinstatement of an imperial memorial, stipulated in a document from 1013,27 was no doubt connected with the newly undertaken expansion of the foundation into a large monastery. Bernward also seems to have had the imperial memorial foundation in mind when, in his donation document of 1019, he states that the first initiative dated back to his time at court, and when he expressly mentions in this connection the name of Otto III, qualifying it with the phrase beatae memoriae. Already at that time


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the remembrance of rulers constituted an important part of a medieval bishop’s duties. It is hardly coincidental either that the founding of the Cross Chapel took place only a few months after the coronation of Otto III on Ascension Day 996. Generally speaking, it was not uncommon for rulers to found churches and monasteries on the occasion of their coronation. Moreover the cross of Christ was closely associated – particularly in Byzantium, but also in the West – with the institution of the empire; the memory of Emperor Constantine’s building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem played an important role here. Special significance was therefore already attached to the imperial dimension at the founding. In this context it should perhaps also be noted that the exterior of St Michael’s Church was subsequently built in a style strongly reminiscent of the church of Memleben, constructed by Otto I in memory of his father Henry I a few decades earlier.28 In addition, the liturgical layout of the interior of St Michael’s Church reflects the imperial ideology prevalent at the time of its foundation. In the eastern part of the church, for example, opposite the western ambulatory crypt and the Cross Altar, there is a recognizable quotation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its Anastasis Rotunda and Golgotha.29 The Anastasis quotation thus belongs to the type of west choir with crypt. Bernward designated the area of the crypt as the site of his grave. We are told that other bishops of the time had their burial places constructed on the model of the Anastasis Rotunda: Konrad of Konstanz, who built the Mauritius Chapel,30 for example, and Meinwerk of Paderborn the Bussdorf Church. In the latter case the reason for this was expressly stated: ‘‘In order to secure for himself the entry into the heavenly Jerusalem, he erected at Paderborn that copy of the earthly [Jerusalem], for the continual service of which he appointed canons.’’31 In Jerusalem, too, the area around the Holy Sepulchre was a favorite burial place. What stands out sharply about the Anastasis quotation in St Michael’s Church, however, is that it appears together with the quotation of Golgotha, the other important liturgical site in the Jerusalem church. The Cross Altar complex under the Triumphal Arch at the eastern intersection of the nave not only alludes as an architectural ensemble to the site of Golgotha, but at the same time evokes the eschatological idea, associated with this place, of the final World Empire. It was precisely in Bernward’s time, with the thousandth anniversary of Christ’s death imminent, that people were increasingly expecting the end of the world, the time when the last emperor of all Christendom would lay down his crown at Golgotha and hand over his power to the returning world ruler Christ. The final great battle with the Antichrist would, according to the prophecies, also take place at this time. The large cross that had been placed on the bronze column behind the Cross Altar in the eastern part of St Michael’s Church, together with the circular candelabra hanging above it, allude specifically to the apocryphal topos that predicted that Christ’s triumphant return would be heralded by a cosmic cross in

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a circle of light. The relic of the true cross donated by the emperor, which formed the cultic center of the foundation, brings the imperial connotations of the Jerusalem allusions in the monastery church into even sharper focus. The choice of St Michael as patron fits into this larger picture as well. The archangel Michael is often associated with imitations of the Holy Sepulchre, because of their function as burial sites and Michael’s role as escort of the soul.32 In addition to his significance for the individual deceased person, however, Michael was also an eschatological figure, namely the future military leader in the battle against the Antichrist. This undoubtedly also explains his role as patron angel of the imperial army. The clearest link to the emperor, however, is found in the figures on the bronze column itself, which supported the large Crucifix of the Last Days.33 The shaft and base of this casting, known as the ‘Christ Column’ or ‘Bernward Column,’ have survived and stand today in the south transept of the cathedral. The shaft, which portrays the public life of Jesus in a rising spiral of relief, was obviously a sacred version of the great imperial columns of Rome with the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, and Byzantium with those of Theodosius and Arkadios. Embedded in the Golgotha quotation, then, is also an allusion to the imperial city of Rome, which Otto II wished to reestablish as the metropolis of a universal Christian empire. Bernward’s bronze doors can also be interpreted as a quotation of imperial Rome, and at the same time as a reflection of the current political situation. Although the inscription on the doors refers with the phrase in facie templi to the temple of Jerusalem, it also alludes to the prominent bronze gate of Rome, which legends identified with the one in Jerusalem, namely the large ancient doors at the entrance of St Peter’s Basilica.34 Legend had it that these bronze doors – probably part of the Constantinian edifice – had originally served as the main gate of the temple of Jerusalem, and had been brought to Rome as part of Vespasian’s booty. The bronze gate and four side gates of the Roman coronation church had been copied already by Charlemagne in his Palatinate Chapel in Aachen. Noteworthy here is that precisely in the first years of the new millennium Archbishop Willigis of Mainz commissioned the casting of a large bronze door for his new cathedral, which he consecrated in 1009, but which immediately after that was destroyed by fire, and that his inscription identified it as the first of its kind to be made since Charlemagne. Bernward’s bronze doors were hung, according to the inscription, in the year 1015.35 Recent research has also shown that the copper used in the casting of the doors for the two cathedrals had the same origin. It seems clear that Bernward had the Mainz doors and their claim to uniqueness in mind when he commissioned his own doors a few years later. Scholars have interpreted the Mainz doors, as well as the new cathedral building in which Willigis imitated the overall plan of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as an expression of his claim – in opposition to the Aachen tradition – that Mainz should now be declared the place where German kings would be

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crowned. In the year 1002, after the death of Otto III, Willigis was already able to carry through on his claim and crown Henry of Bavaria king in spite of the opposition of a majority of the German peoples. Like the other prominent figures from Saxony, all of whom favored the opposing candidate, Eckehart of Meissen, Bernward did not attend the coronation of Henry II in Mainz. Soon after the confusion about the throne was clarified, however, Bernward appears, at least according to his Vita, to have been reconciled with Henry. Did Bernward want to counter the claim of Mainz by similarly transforming the entrance of his cathedral to resemble that of St Peter’s, and by making his bronze doors, with their highly decorative relief, considerably more artistic? We know that there was a deep-seated conflict between Mainz and Hildesheim regarding the rights to the convent of Gandersheim,37 a conflict that had begun already under Osdag, who occupied the see before Bernward’s predecessor, and which would continue for several decades after Bernward’s death. By taking over the Hildesheim bishopric, Bernward inevitably became involved in this conflict and had to take a firm stand against his former benefactor Willigis. This ‘Gandersheim controversy’ was very likely rooted in imperial politics. Gandersheim, founded by the progenitor of the Ottonians, Liudolf, was the special institution and burial place of the imperial family. This meant that the diocese to which Gandersheim belonged would also be the ‘home diocese’ of the emperor. As the extensive personal union of the court chapel with the Hildesheim Cathedral chapter at the time indicates,38 Hildesheim did in fact function as imperial home diocese and thus played a decisive role – not only under the Ottonians but also later under the Salians by reason of the Palatinate of Goslar, which belonged to the bishopric – in the appointing of imperial administrators. It is obvious that this would have led to friction with the metropolitan of Mainz who, as Archchancellor, was head of the Court Chapel. It appears that Bernward was trying to counteract the efforts of Mainz to present itself as a new coronation city, a kind of imperial metropolis north of the Alps, by strengthening and expanding his own episcopal see and turning Hildesheim into a second Rome. This was accompanied by a noticeable tendency to upgrade his own office of bishop. The phrase DIVE MEMORIE, which he claims for his own name on the door inscription, had its origins in Byzantine administrative language of late antiquity.39 By describing himself in his sarcophagus inscription as SERVUS SERVORUM DEI, he even lays claim to the title of successor to St Peter.40 Bernward’s efforts to prepare his own sainthood41 can be explained in terms of an attempt to elevate his bishopric to the political and religious center of the empire. St Michael’s Church, which contains his grave, reinforces this tendency by displaying characteristics of a monument to an imperial ruler.

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An imperial saint Although Bernward was eventually canonized for completely different reasons, the Vita Bernwardi 42 compiled for the canonization procedure still contains detailed passages aimed, it seems, at portraying the character of an imperial saint. This is especially true of the account of Bernward’s journey to Rome, where he stayed from 4 January to 20 February 1001, and where he supported Otto in his struggle against the rebels. Bernward is depicted as playing a key role in this political-military event. It was he who gave the emperor the wise advice to continue the siege of Tivoli; and with the Imperial Lance in his hand, he led the sortie of the emperor and the entire garrison out of the surrounded imperial palace on the Palatine. On the return journey, the report maintains, Bernward called together an Imperial Diet of the Italian estates in Pavia and, after crossing the Alps, met with King Rudolf in Saint Maurice d’Agaune. In other words, immediately following Otto’s last Roman enterprise, Bernward held talks with those wielding power in the two subkingdoms of Italy and Burgundy. There is no way to determine the extent to which this report corresponds to actual events. Another contemporary source, for example, ascribes the successful advice about Tivoli to Saint Romuald. However, essential elements in the speech of the emperor to the rebellious Romans as cited in Bernward’s Vita can be traced back specifically to the Renovatio program of Otto III and the discussion that took place around it at the time – as for example the emperor’s relegation of the Saxon tribes behind the new ‘‘citizenry’’ of the ‘‘Romans.’’43 On the other hand, when the Vita tells of a decisive defeat of the rebellious Romans instead of the actual hasty flight of the emperor from Rome, it is apparently not a matter of error but conscious propagandistic falsification of the facts. The only event in Rome mentioned after the account of the sortie is a visit by Bernward to St Paul’s Basilica, which we know was located just outside the city walls, inside a papal fortress (‘Johannopolis’). Even more at odds with the facts, perhaps, is the report in the Vita about Bernward’s presence at the coronation in Mainz in the year 1002 – an event that the Hildesheim bishop, out of loyalty to Eckehart of Meissen, had in fact boycotted. This can very likely be explained in terms of the desire to obliterate the memory of the bishop’s initial opposition to Henry II. Also important here is that, according to this account, Bernward placed in the hands of the newly crowned king the Imperial Lance, which was not really one of the insignia used at the crowning of German kings at all, but very specifically at the coronation of a Roman emperor. In reality, however, Henry had managed to take possession of both the insignia of the German monarchy and the Imperial Lance when the funeral procession of Otto III was passing through his Bavarian territory, and this no doubt contributed to his being recognized as king. In any case, here, as in the description of the sortie on the Palatine, Bernward is associated with the Holy Lance, the symbol of the imperial Roman ruler. Apparently the author of these passages was attempting to


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portray him as a great priestly figure at the side of the emperor in the sense of a regnum–sacerdotium dualism. The writer of the Vita identifies himself in the introduction as Thangmar, tutor of Bernward. It is difficult to say exactly who this Thangmar was. Nevertheless there is apparently an original layer of text covering the years up to and including the turn of the millennium. The glowing report of the journey to Rome represents only one of the levels of this Vita text, however. An earlier version survives which contains only the passages relating to the Gandersheim controversy. The author of this text very likely made use of a collection of archival documents, which he compiled and edited into a coherent account. The editor of the Vita probably chose to use this ‘Gandersheim Memorandum’ as the framework for his work – not only because he wanted to sanction the Hildesheim claim to Gandersheim, but especially because the documentation of these legal proceedings, which extended over Bernward’s entire episcopate, offered a solid foundation for a complete chronology of this period in Hildesheim history. A third basic layer of the Vita derives from other relevant documents, such as the inscriptions on the grave of the bishop and the donation document discussed at the beginning of this article. The more stereotypical descriptions of universal saintly qualities such as precociousness, asceticism, and acts of charity form the most superficial, and probably latest, layer of text. The final version of the Vita was probably composed only at the time of the canonization process, for which a life description was, of course, required. Bernward’s name was put forward a few years after the canonization of Godehard, who succeeded Bernward to the office of bishop. He had died in 1038, but already in 1061, at the new consecration of the cathedral, he was venerated as its patron, probably at the instigation of the bishop. In the year 1131 Bishop Bernhard I succeeded in obtaining the papal canonization of Godehard. This same bishop was given the consent of the metropolitan of Mainz for an altar at Bernward’s grave. In the sacramentary that the monk Ratmann wrote for the monastery in 1159, Bernward is already portrayed as a patron saint of equal stature to the archangel Michael.44 Extensive efforts made by Abbot Theoderich II with the papal legate Cardinal Cynthius of Rome finally led to the papal canonization of Bernward on 8 January 1193 and to his solemn elevation to the altar on 16 October 1194. The motives for Godehard’s canonization had been political – during his lifetime Godehard was an effective monastic reformer and could therefore function as a symbolic figure of the papal reform party. As a result the Godehard cult spread over the entire empire. The subsequent canonization of Bernward, on the other hand, had only a regional impact. Bernward veneration remained limited to the Hildesheim bishopric. His canonization should very likely be viewed in close connection with the precedent of Godehard; the final redaction of the Bernward Vita also used the two Godehard Vitae by Wolfhere as points of orientation. Bishop Bernhard’s only possible motive for initiating Bernward’s veneration was to reinforce the significance of Godehard by canonizing his predecessor. Abbot

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Theoderich must have seen him first of all as the founder of his monastery. This founding role had, of course, already determined that he would be a pivotal figure in the cult of the community and that his grave would be a site of liturgical activity.45 In the meantime, soon after Godehard’s canonization, a second large Benedictine monastery had been established in Hildesheim, dedicated to the memory of the new saint. It is understandable that the monks of St Michael’s now felt pressed to elevate their founder to the altar as well. This might also explain the remark of the author that the bishop joined St Michael’s Monastery a few days before his death, for that made it possible to place a Benedictine founder alongside the Benedictine abbot Godehard.46 Contrary to Bernward’s own intention, however, an imperial political motive for his canonization was completely lacking. It has even been noted47 that the assistance normally provided by the emperor in cultic acts of this kind was omitted from Bernward’s elevation to the altar. Bernward’s motives relating to the politics of the empire had therefore been completely forgotten. It is true that under the Salians, too, Hildesheim remained an important administrative center, thanks to the concentration of royal lands in Saxony. But with the demise of the Ottonian line, it could no longer claim dynastic significance as the king’s home bishopric. While Henry II still attached importance to his memorial in St Michael’s Monastery and to his royal canonicate in the Hildesheim Cathedral, these imperial connections of the episcopal see lost their significance under the Salians and Hohenstaufens. Bernward’s significance as a saint was therefore also restricted to his role of local bishop and monastery founder. In keeping with this limitation, the patronage of the cross, once of central importance in St Michael’s Monastery and associated with the idea of empire, retreated behind, or, more accurately perhaps, merged with this veneration of the founder. The great architectural changes introduced in the monastery church in the second half of the twelfth century should also be understood in this context. The cross relic took on a new exterior form at this time as well, namely that of the ‘Large Bernward Cross,’ which can still be seen today. A legend referred to in Bernward’s Vita (or invented by its author) relates how this cross reliquary was made by Bernward himself and how an angel helped him complete the shape around the missing fourth fragment. The legend therefore indicates that the significance had shifted from that of emperor’s relic to work of the founder. Until the secularization of the monastery the Large Bernward Cross was displayed in St Michael’s Church, not only on the Festival of the Finding of the True Cross (3 May and 15 September) but also on the anniversary of Saint Bernward’s death on 20 November. Like the cross reliquary, the art works donated by or otherwise ascribed to Bernward also came to be viewed as relics of the saint. There is some evidence that Bernward himself constructed the crypt for the preservation and veneration of the cross relic. Did some wooden tegurium for the cross reliquary stand in the center of the


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crypt perhaps, as in the Mauritius Rotunda of Konrad of Konstanz? The high passage of the crypt was certainly constructed for processions around a central cultic object. Only with the institution of the Bernward cult did the grave, which Bernward had planned in front of St Mary’s Altar, become the architectural center that it is today. Did it formerly lie more to the east, toward the middle aisle, as Konrad of Konstanz had placed his grave on the outside wall of his Rotunda? In any case it appears that the extension across the west transept was not the only change made to the crypt by Abbot Theoderich II.49 According to the Vita, Bernward himself had decided that his grave should be placed in front of St Mary’s Altar, which today stands at the closed (previously open) west end of the crypt. Evidence that this altar, and with it the grave of the founder, was later moved to a new location can be found in the fact that the altar had to be reconsecrated in 1097. It cannot be excluded, however, that Bernward himself envisioned the future veneration of his burial place at its present location. To all appearances, the canonization procedure and the establishment of Bernward’s cult altered or falsified the authentic documents drawn up during his lifetime, making it difficult to isolate them within the texts that have been handed down to us. Nevertheless a comparison of his personal testimonies allows us to conclude that Bernward was clearly aiming for his own veneration as a saint, and that the Ottonian imperial idea of the Renovatio imperii Romanorum served as his point of reference and inspiration. Translation by Myra Scholz

Notes 1 A comprehensive survey of Bernward research can be found in the exhibition catalogue M. Brandt and A. Eggebrecht (eds), Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen, 2 vols, Hildesheim, Bernward Verlag and Mainz, Von Zabern, 1993. 2 K. Janicke (ed.), Urkundenbuch des Hochstifts Hildesheim und seiner Bischo¨fe, 6 vols, Leipzig, Hirzel, 1896, 1, no. 62. Also literally quoted in Thangmari Vita Bernwardi: ed. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica [MGH]. Scriptores 4, Hanover, 1841, 779–80. Cited here from H. Kallfelz (ed.), Lebensbeschreibungen einiger Bischo¨fe des 10.–12. Jahrhundert (Ausgewa¨hlte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 22), Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd ed., 1986, 350–5. Still of fundamental importance for interpreting the text is W. von den Steinen, ‘‘Bernward von Hildesheim u¨ber sich selbst,’’ Deutsches Archiv fu¨r Erforschung des Mittelalters, 12 (1956), 331–62. 3 The parallels, discussed later in this chapter, to other texts by Bernward can be seen as further evidence. 4 Cf. J. Haussleiter, ‘‘Erhebung des Herzens,’’ in Reallexikon fu¨r Antike und Christentum, VI, Stuttgart, 1966, 18–21. Especially striking is the similarity to Cicero, De Legibus I, 9,26: ed. K. Ziegler, 3rd ed., Heidelberg, Kerle, 1950, 32. 5 Cf. Augustinus, De genesi ad litteram, 1.3–1.5: ed. Patrologia latina [PL] 34, 221–2. 6 For the historical development of the idea of the innner birth of God, see H. Rahner, ‘‘Die Lehre der Kirchenva¨ter von der Geburt Christi im Herzen der Glaübigen,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r katholische Theologie, 59 (1935), 333–418. 7 Augustinus, De genesi ad litteram, 8,12: 382–3. 8 Augustinus, De Civitate Dei, 17,12: in English translation: Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. H. Bettenson, Hammondsworth, Penguin Books, 1972, 742–3.

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9 Augustine elaborates on the comparison of temple and company of angels in De Civitate Dei, 17,9, as well as in his Enarratio in Psalmos 137, 4: ed. PL, 37, 1776. The latter text also contains the phrase ‘‘non desperemus nos futuros aequales angelis’’ (according to Luke 20,36). The iconological program of Bernward’s bronze doors was also clearly influenced by Augustinian theology. Cf. B. Gallistl, ‘‘Die Tu¨r des Bischofs Bernward und ihr ikonographisches Programm,’’ in S. Salomi (ed.), Le porte di bronzo dall’ antichita` al secolo XIII (Acta Encyclopaedica 15), Rome, Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990, 145–82. 10 Cf. G. Bandmann, ‘‘Tempel von Jerusalem,’’ in E. Kirschbaum et al. (eds), Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, IV, Rome, Herder, 1972, 255–60. Perhaps the exemplary nature of the construction of holy places in the Bible also plays a role in the mention of Moses, who established the tabernacle, and Elijah, who rebuilt the altar on Mount Carmel. 11 For example, Cyrillus of Jerusalem, Katechesen, 2,13: ed. J. Nirschl (Bibliothek der Kirchenva¨ter 62), Kempten, Ko¨sel, 1871; Hieronymus, Commentaria in Ezechielem, 13,43: ed. PL, 25, 419; and Epistola 79: ed. PL, 22, 729. On the topos cf. C. Ma¨rtl, ‘‘Ein angeblicher Text zum Bußgang von Canossa: de poenitentia regum,’’ Deutsches Archiv fu¨r Erforschung des Mittelalters, 38 (1982), 555–63. 12 ‘‘immensitatem criminum meorum attendens,’’ in Urkundenbuch Hildesheim 1896, 1, no. 38. Cf. B. Gallistl, Die Bernwardsaüle und Michaeliskirche zu Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Olms, 1993, 23, note 7. The emphatic confession of sin also reflects a tendency of the time; Bernward’s pupil Otto III, for example, is said to have experienced similarly deep feelings of penitence. See Thietmar, Chronicon, 4,48: ed. and trans. W. Trillmich (Ausgewa¨hlte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 9), 5th ed., Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974, 164. 13 Urkundenbuch Hildesheim 1896, 1, no. 49, where he explains: ‘‘ob perpetuam memoriam nostri et antecessorum nostrorum . . . et preces pro totius imperii saluti.’’ 14 W. Bo¨hme, ‘‘Christus in uns – biblische Grundmuster mystischer Erfahrung,’’ in idem (ed.), Zu dir hin: U¨ber mystische Lebenserfahrung von Meister Eckhart bis Paul Celan, Frankfurt am M., Insel Verlag, 1987, 33–42, here 34, holds: ‘‘The experience of the distance of God is not yet actually a mystical experience, yet there can be no mystical experience without it. The pain and the actual inadequacy, the consciousness of one’s own worthlessness and lostness torture the mystic more and more as his longing for union with God increases, a union he has perhaps already experienced.’’ 15 Solomon’s sainthood was proven on the one hand by Yahweh’s answer to the prayer made at the dedication of the temple (II Kings 9,3–9). The Church fathers, however, also understood the Song of Songs, believed to be composed by Solomon, as a text describing the ascent to God: ‘‘[Salomo] ita Canticum Canticorum ad eos proprie facit, qui tantum superna desiderant,’’ according to Jerome, Commentarius in Ecclesiasten, 1: ed. PL, 23, 1013. 16 C. Sauer, Fundatio und Memoria: Stifter und Klostergru¨nder im Bild 1100–1350 (Vero¨ffentlichungen des Max Planck Instituts fu¨r Geschichte 109), Go¨ttingen, Vanden Hoeck-Ruprecht, 1993, 195; cf. 201. 17 M. L. Laudage, Caritas und Memoria mittelalterlicher Bischo¨fe (Mu¨nstersche Mittelalterschriften 3), Cologne and Vienna, Bo¨hlau, 1993, 320, holds: ‘‘Apparently bishops preferred to entrust their ‘memoria’ to monastic or religious communities whose obligation of liturgical remembrance of them derived less from an official tie than from a personal one.’’ Cf. ibid., 318 and 325. 18 W. Giese, ‘‘Zur Bauta¨tigkeit von Bischo¨fen und A¨bten des 10. bis 12. Jahrhunderts,’’ Deutsches Archiv fu¨r Erforschung des Mittelalters, 38 (1982), 388–438, here 438. 19 P. Jezler, ‘‘Gab es in Konstanz ein ottonisches Osterspiel?’’ in R. Adolf, L. Schmugge, and P. Stotz (eds), Variorum munera florum: Latinita¨t als pra¨gende Kraft mittelalterlicher Kultur. Festschrift fu¨r Hans F. Haefele, Sigmaringen, Thorbecke, 1985, 91–128, here 92–3. 20 The inscription on the doors can be dated paleographically to 1015, the date mentioned in the inscription itself, or only slightly later. Cf. H. Drescher, ‘‘Einige technische Beobachtungen zur Inschrift auf der Hildesheimer Bernwardstu¨r,’’ in M. Gosebruch and F. N. Steigerwald (eds), Bernwardinische Kunst, Go¨ttingen, Goltze, 1990, 71–8. 21 ‘‘in facie templi’’ is the Biblical expression for the front side of the temple structure. Cf. B. Gallistl, Der Dom zu Hildesheim und sein Weltkulturerbe: Bernwardstu¨r und Christussaüle, Hildesheim, Bernward, 2000, 33. 22 Evidence in Greek (nao`n ha´gion angelikoń) in Encomium S. Marciani, 12: ed. Acta Sanctorum, 14 Iunii, 3rd ed., Paris and Rome, 1867, vol. 23, 282. For a liturgical explanation of the formula cf. C. D. Fonseca, ‘‘La dedicazione di chiese e altari tra paradigmi ideologici e strutture


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istituzionali,’’ in Santi e demoni nell’ alto medioevo occidentale (Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’ alto medioevo 36,2), Spoleto, Presso la Sede del Centro, 1988, 925– 46, here 945. On the subject of gallery altars with patron angels as a type cf. A. Mann, ‘‘Doppelchor und Stiftermemorie,’’ Westfa¨lische Zeitschrift, 111 (1961), 149–262, here 193–4. In the columns of the crypt alone Bernward had deposited sixty-six relics. He placed more relics in the capitals of the main aisle. Cf. Brandt and Eggebrecht, 1993, 2, 538–40. Ephesians 2,15; Hebrews 12,22–33. In the liturgy for the consecration of churches the following antiphon accompanies the reception of the relic saints: ‘‘Ambulate sancti Dei ingredimini in civitatem Domini, aedificata est enim vobis ecclesia nova, ubi populus adorare debet majestatem Domini.’’ On the age of the inscription cf. Brandt and Eggebrecht, 1993, 2, 13–14 and 25. Urkundenbuch Hildesheim 1896, 1, no. 52. On the larger theme of prayer memorials cf. G. Althoff, Amicitiae und Pacta: Bu¨ndnis, Einung, Politik und Gebetsgedenken im beginnenden 10. Jahrhundert (MGH. Schriften 37), Hanover, Hahn, 1992. Cf. G. Leopold and E. Schubert, ‘‘Otto III. von Sachsen: Die ottonische Kirche in Memleben, Geschichte und Gestalt,’’ in A. von Euw and P. Schreiner (eds), Kaiserin Theophanu: Begegnung des Ostens und Westens um die Wende des ersten Jahrhunderts, Cologne, Stadt Ko¨ln, 1991, 371–82. Cf. Gallistl, 1993, 113–19. On the west choir as place of the founder’s grave cf. Mann, 1961, 202–30. For the chandelier above the pillar and cross (cf. Golgotha) in the eastern part, see Chronik des Mo¨nchs Ferdinand Stolten (Dombibliothek Hildesheim hs. 114b, 64r.). Cf. A. Reinle, Zeichensprache der Architektur: Symbol, Darstellung und Brauch in der Baukunst des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, Zu¨rich, Artemis, 1976, 113–78. Vita Meinwercki episcopi patherbrunnensis, 216: ed. F. Tenckhoff (MGH. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 59), Hanover, Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1921, 218. Jezler, 1985, 103. Cf. B. Gallistl, ‘‘Die Urgestalt der Hildesheimer Christussaüle,’’ Archiv fu¨r Liturgiewissenschaft, 32 (1990), 27–46. Gallistl, 1993, passim. The exemplary nature of the bronze doors of St Peter’s also explains why the monumental bronze doors of the late Middle Ages north of the Alps are found exclusively in localities of public ruler presentation, such as Augsburg (the place where the Ottonian emperors preferred to hold court and the gathering point for the royal expeditions to Italy), St Zeno in Verona (the lodging place of German kings after they crossed the Alps), St Denis (the coronation place and burial site of the French kings), Gnese (the capital city of the Polish empire under Miezko III), Plozk (the burial place of several Polish kings; the doors of Plozk are today found in Novgorod). The bronze doors of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople can also be placed in this broader context. H. Drescher, ‘‘Zur Technik bernwardinischer Bronzegu¨sse,’’ in Brandt and Eggebrecht, 1993, 1, 337–51. S. Weinfurter, ‘‘Der Anspruch Heinrichs II. auf die Ko¨nigsherrschaft 1002,’’ in J. Dahlhaus and A. Kohnle (eds), Papstgeschichte und Landesgeschichte: Festschrift Hermann Jakobs, Cologne and Vienna, Bo¨hlau, 1995, 121–34, here 131–2. Cf. H. Goetting, ‘‘Bernward und der grosse Gandersheimer Streit,’’ in Brandt and Eggebrecht, 1993, 1, 275–82. Cf. J. Fleckenstein, Die Hofkapelle der deutschen Ko¨nige (MGH. Schriften 16), 2 vols, Stuttgart, Hiersemann, 1966, 1, 15, and 128–9; and by the same author ‘‘Rex canonicus: U¨ber Entstehung und Bedeutung des mittelalterlichen Ko¨nigskanonikats,’’ in P. Classen and P. Scheibert (eds), Festschrift Percy Ernst Schramm, 2 vols, Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1964, 1, 57–71. Cited as a formula for living rulers by P. E. Schramm, Kaiser, Rom, Renovatio: Studien zur Geschichte des ro¨mischen Erneuerungsgedankens vom Ende des Karolingischen Reiches bis zur Investiturstreit, 3 vols, Berlin, Teubner, 1929, 1, 47, note 4; 264, note 11. A quasi-papal claim is also contained in the name ‘‘Bennopolis’’ (Bernward’s City), used for the Hildesheim bishop’s fortified residence in the document of 1 November 1019 as quoted at the beginning of this study. In Rome and the surrounding area, papal establishments were given names such as ‘‘Gregoriopolis’’ (Ostia) after Gregory IV and ‘‘Johannopolis’’ (um S. Paolo fuori le mura) after John VIII. Cf. L. Pani Ermini, Santuario e citta` (Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’ alto medioevo 36), Spoleto, Presso la Sede del Centro, 1989, 837–77, here 876.

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41 On the subject of the dynastic canonization politics of the Ottonians cf. P. Corbet, Les saints ottoniens: Saintete´ dynastique, saintete´ royale et saintete´ feminine autour de l’an Mil (Beihefte der Francia 15), Sigmaringen, Thorbecke, 1986. And G. Wolf, ‘‘Sanctae feminae venerabiles der Ottonen,’’ in J. Peterson (ed.), Politik und Heiligenverehrung im Hochmittelalter (Vortra¨ge und Forschungen 62), Sigmaringen, Thorbecke, 1994, 222–30; for Hildesheim cf. B. Gallistl, Epiphanius von Pavia: Schutzheiliger des Bistums Hildesheim (Hildesheimer Chronik 7), Hildesheim, Bernward, 2000. 42 Thangmari Vita Bernwardi, 1–56: ed. Pertz, 754–82. On Bernward’s Vita cf. K. Go¨rich and H. H. Kortu¨m, ‘‘Otto III., Thangmar und die Vita Bernwardi,’’ Mitteilungen des Instituts fu¨r o¨sterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 98 (1990), 1–57, and J. Nolte, ‘‘Tercii Ottonis imperatoris didascalus: Die Vita Bernwardi von Thangmar,’’ in R. W. Keck and E. Wiersing (eds), Vormoderne Lebenslaüfe (Beitra¨ge zur historischen Kulturforschung 12), Cologne and Vienna, Bo¨hlau, 1994, 131–49. 43 The repeated mention of his special relationship as confidante to Otto III is a general topos of bishops’ Vitae of this time and therefore has no particular significance. See G. Althoff, Otto III, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996, 199–207, but it is important nevertheless for the dating of these passages. 44 Kept in the Hildesheim Cathedral Treasure, no. 37. 45 Sauer, 1993, 146. 46 Thangmari Vita Bernwardi, 53: 780. 47 J. Peterson, ‘‘Kaisertum und Kultakt in der Stauferzeit,’’ in idem, 1994, 101–46, here 137–8 and 44. 48 Cf. Jezler, 1985, 93. 49 The holy grave, built in the center of the new western rood-loft and probably used as an object in Easter plays, would also be designated for the cult of the cross relic in the western addition of the late twelfth century; see F. Niehoff, ‘‘Das Ostergrab in St Michael,’’ in M. Brandt (ed.), Der vergrabene Engel: Die Chorschranken der Hildesheimer Michaeliskirche, Exhibition catalogue, Hildesheim, 1995, 127–33. The mid-thirteenth-century wooden Adlum crucifix from St Michael’s Monastery (provenance not known) was probably placed above this Easter grave. Cf. Die Kunstdenkmale des Landkreises Hildesheim (Die Kunstdenkmale des Provinz Hanover 24), Hanover, Theodor Schulzes Buchhandlung, 1938, 2–3. Niehoff does not mention this crucifix.

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Dealing with Brother Ass Bodily aspects of the Franciscan sanctification of the self Bert Roest

Officially recognized saints are found in heaven, yet they are made on earth. This volume of studies devoted to saints and the invention of saintliness therefore leaves room for discussion about the ways in which the process of sanctification takes place, and what means were involved in the sanctification of the self. By this I mean the tools or vehicles that people used to act out their religious life, as well as the tools described in its literary emplotment. Dealing foremost with Franciscan holiness, I would like to devote this chapter to some bodily aspects of Franciscan attempts at sanctification. For the body is exactly such a tool or vehicle. In fact, it is the most central one, as in the Christian tradition everybody shares a vulnerable humanity, an existential condition rooted in the intricate relation of body and soul. During the Middle Ages, all those who took their religious life seriously had to cope with their body in view of the extremely ambiguous, if not negative, evaluation of human bodily qualities in the context of the central tenets of Christian holiness. In the course of this chapter, I shall focus primarily on the ways in which Francis of Assisi dealt with the bodily in his own life, and in his admonitory writings. Furthermore, I shall highlight the ways in which Bonaventura’s Legenda Major and other, predominantly Franciscan, hagiographic texts incorporated the saint’s body in a representation of Franciscan holiness for use in the Franciscan order. In addition, I hope to be able to sketch how the bodily aspects of the Franciscan representation of sainthood, based on an imitation of Christ’s humanity, paved the way for a more optimistic, or at least more comprehensive, evaluation of the body and the created world in Franciscan doctrinal and pastoral theology. But first of all, I should like to situate my discussion on the embodiment of Franciscan saintliness in the broader context of medieval studies as a whole. For the study of embodied sainthood stands on the crossroad of several intersecting sub-branches of current medieval scholarship.1

The body in medieval scholarship The history and representation of the human body in medieval culture nowadays receive a lot of attention from a multifarious circle of medievalists. The

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human body figures most prominently in the area of gender studies and in scholarship on later medieval devotional practices. Well-known landmarks in this regard are the seminal works of Caroline Walker Bynum, Karma Lochrie, and Sarah Beckwith, as well as the influential 1994 volume on medieval bodies edited by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin.2 In the areas we referred to, the attention to bodily practices and an embodied religious discourse almost automatically emerges, since the subjects of research – frequently disenfranchised medieval women and the laity in general – had only a limited access to the written word and formalized teaching authority. The means to acquire a voice or authority within the Church for them was very much bound up with bodily action, as a territory where the unprivileged could meet the privileged on more or less equal grounds.3 Compared with almost all other medievalists, scholars of medieval literature have had a head start. They started to explore the literary representation of the human body and its propensities since the late nineteenth century, when the concept of courtly love was coined. Since then, a lot of studies have highlighted the cult of the body in medieval courtly literature (whether vernacular troubadour lyrics or the learned Latin treatises of Andreas Capellanus), as well as its parodies and reversals in the Fabliaux and in chantefables like Aucassin et Nicolette.4 More recently, attention shifted to the category of the grotesque and the grotesque body in medieval vernacular texts. This became fashionable after the translation of Michael Bakhtine’s books on Rabelais and late medieval popular culture,5 and the reception of Camporesi’s works on the incorruptible flesh.6 Specialists in these fields profess a kind of sociocultural history that takes the literary text as point of departure for a tentative reconstruction of popular mentalities. They like to portray a rather negative ‘official’ religious discourse on the sinful body, as a backdrop for the presentation of a more positive, though multifaceted, signification of the human body and bodily pleasures in medieval popular culture.7 This ‘official’ religious discourse is frequently presented as the dominant one, both by scholars looking for marginal voices, like those mentioned above, and by medievalists who profess to work in the mainstream of medieval intellectual history, several of whom have also made significant contributions to our understanding of the representation of the body in medieval monastic and early scholastic thought.8 Usually, the predominantly Latin sources of monastic and scholastic thought explored by these mainstream historians deal with the body in extremely negative terms. A famous example of this is Lothario de Segni’s De Miseria Humanae Conditionis (also known as De Contemptu Mundi), written shortly before the end of the twelfth century. This work of the future pope Innocent III indeed sketches a very bleak picture of the human condition – and this is almost fully centered on the depravity of the body. The three books of De Miseria Humanae Conditionis describe the miserable origin of corporal man, his miserable life on earth, and his miserable fate after his death. For an impression of the book’s bleak

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message, it suffices to cite a few short passages from the first chapter of Book I. Lothario de Segni informs us that Man is made of dust, mud, and ashes. And what is even more base: from sperm, most foul. He is conceived in the itching of the flesh, in the raging heat of lust, in the stench of extravagance. And what is even worse: in the ruin of sin. When he is born, he is destined for work, pain, and sorrow. And what is more miserable: for death. He does evil things, by which he offends God, he offends his nearest neighbors and himself. He does shameful things, with which he has polluted his name, his conscience, and his person. He does vain things, by which he neglects serious, useful, and necessary matters. He will be the fuel of an ever blazing and inextinguishable fire. He will be food for the worm, which will continue to gnaw and forever will consume him. He will be a mass of putrefaction, which will always stink and be horribly filthy.9 In short: man is depraved. His body in particular has been a burden ever since the Fall. For Man is conceived from corrupted blood by means of the heat of lust. . . . Alive the body has generated lice and intestinal worms, dead it will generate worms and flies. Alive it has produced excrement and vomit, dead it will produce putrefaction and stench. Alive it has fattened a single man; dead it will fatten a host of worms. What is fouler than a human carcass? What is more horrible than a dead man?10 Lothario de Segni was but one in a long chain of medieval theological voices that, following both a neo-Platonic and a Pauline tradition, reiterated over and again that the body was a prison of the soul (corpus carcer) and a vestige of death. These theological voices connected the disastrous properties of the human body in its earthly existence with the consequences of original sin. Fallen man had to take care of his soul. The body thereby became foremost a prison from which the soul tries to escape, in order to be united with God. In the end, the soul was to receive an incorruptible body, which would have none of the miserable properties – its vulnerability to lust, pain, aging, and decay – of its transitory namesake. Especially high medieval monastic authors developed a veritable horror corpus, identifying the human flesh with sin and with Eve: the ultimate temptress and cause of man’s perdition. Hence, Bernard of Clairvaux called the human body a crudelis bestia and each person’s own Eve, who had to be tamed and brought under the (male) control of the mind. The body–soul dichotomy therewith retained a highly charged gendered impulse, which was reinforced by contemporary physiological and medical lore about the weakness of the female flesh and the inconstancy of women.

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Faced with such a normative religious discourse on the human body, it is easy to overlook the body as a meaningful site for coherent religious expression. Yet those engaged in the study of medieval theology have also noticed the complex implications of medieval conceptions of the Eucharist and the theological significance of Christ’s incarnation. After all, throughout the medieval period, a good deal of theological discussion was devoted to the Cur Deus Homo question and related Christological issues. The fact that Christ had taken on a human body and had suffered in it could not but have theological significance. Moreover, later thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century theological discussions about the prelapsarian bodies of Adam and Eve, the nature and meaning of bodily resurrection, and the function of the resurrected body in the final beatific vision (visio beatifica), showed a tendency to depict the relationship between body and soul in a more positive light, sometimes stressing the craving of the disembodied soul to be reunited with its bodily counterpart. Apparently, the normative religious discourse was not monolithic. It left room for many different positions with regard to the function and status of the human body.11 The miserable properties of the human body, so eloquently depicted by Lothario de Segni, were not natural, not part of God’s original creation. Hence there was at least a possibility to speak more positively about the body and its properties.12 Bodily death and decay were connected with original sin, which had caused the transitory quality of human existence, and man’s liability to punishment if he did not mend his ways. This focused attention on the carcass rotting in its grave, and on the bodily tortures in hell. Thanks to historians like Philippe Arie`s and their successors, we have become well aware of this medieval obsession with bodily death, and the terrifying depiction of the putrefying human body in medieval art and literature.13 However, the same medieval religious discourse allowed for possibilities to transcend this harsh fate. Not surprisingly, the dead bodies of saints had a privileged position. They were recognized by their odor of sanctity, and by their powers of miraculous intervention. The heart and intestines of dissected saintly bodies provided evidence for the nature of the Trinitarian relations and the instruments of Christ’s Passion. The bones and the wondrous balm or oil streaming forth from the dead bodies of saints healed the sick, protected cities, and safeguarded the quality and plenitude of wine and food.14 Somehow the sanctified body was different. A thorough inversion had taken place: those who had lived by their bodies during their earthly existence, faced decay and eternal bodily punishments afterwards, while those who on earth mortified their bodies in their attempts to follow the teachings of Christ would be glorified in it after death. In other words, the saintly body was the hallmark of therapeutic and protective flesh, changed by a lifelong asceticism from a sack of putrefaction into an incorruptible and wondrous instrument of grace. There was, after all, a possibility for the body, and especially the dead body, to play a positive role.15


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All the different strands of research mentioned thus far deal with different medieval representations of the human body. Yet these representations did not stand isolated from each other, certainly not during the period in which Francis of Assisi developed his own path of sanctification. There were, therefore, different forces at work in the Franciscan sanctification of the self. Some of these were inspired by lay culture (high and low), in which the body was an important, yet ambiguous, entity. Some of them were inspired by ingrained religious and theological conceptions of sin and redemption, and others again by the need to accommodate the message of evangelical perfection to the world at large – for instance, to groups who did not have access to other instruments than their own bodies. They all ensured that Franciscan self-sanctification to a large extent became a bodily phenomenon.

The body in the life and writings of Francis of Assisi For this, we only have to take a short look at Francis’s own conversion and his subsequent way of life. The main outlines of Francis’s conversion are of course well known. As a rather well-off adolescent he seems to have been obsessed with curialitas, a form of behavior inspired by courtly ideals, in which outward appearance (corporal beauty, gestures, manners, clothing, and demonstrations of generosity) were of tremendous importance. In the circle of rich Umbrian merchants and nobles, these qualities were the socially prescribed indications of an inner magnanimity. In the course of a series of conversion experiences from c. 1205 onwards, the socially prescribed obligation of generosity in particular acquired for Francis a wholly different meaning. According to Raoul Manselli, it changed from a courtly generosity, which aimed to prove the nobility of the person in the eyes of the community, into a charitable generosity heedless of its social consequences, which could be enacted by everyone. From this time onwards it was directed at the needs of the poor and the destitute, those who either were living on the fringes of the community, or even were outcasts neglected by all.16 This fundamental change culminated after Francis met a leper, society’s most despised social dead, and in the eyes of society literally the embodiment of physical and moral depravity.17 Francis embraced and kissed the leper, and these bodily acts announced in a dramatic way Francis’s full identification with the poor and the outcasts. This fundamental change enabled Francis to arrive at the conclusion that the suffering of his fellow creatures mirrored the suffering of Christ, and that an imitation of the suffering Christ, and hence an embracing of all bodily suffering, was necessary for all who wanted to call themselves true Christians. The body and its needs were what man and Christ had in common. And it was the arena in which all men, literate and illiterate, clerical and lay, could fight by doing the right things. Consequently, Francis renounced his social position and his wealth, and began a new life as a poor man among the poor. It was in many ways a life of bodily work.

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Soon Francis gathered around him a group of followers, and he recognized the need to formulate his ideal in a straightforward rule, which would help his companions to live the desired imitatio Christi. A first rule was compiled, on the basis of a procedure known as the sortes apostolorum: several times the Gospel was opened at random, and the passages in question were read and collected into a directive. This first rule has not completely survived. Yet we can be certain that many elements of this early rule survived in the extant rules of 1221 and 1223 (the so-called regula bullata, approved by the pope), which are also for the most part compiled from passages drawn from the Gospel.18 For a good impression of the imitatio Christi envisaged by Francis and his early followers, we can, for instance, look at the prologue of the Rule of 1221, which begins with the words: ‘‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the life of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which brother Francis has asked the Lord Pope to concede and confirm for him.’’19 The essence of this evangelical life is subsequently defined as a life in absolute obedience, chastity, and poverty, in order to follow the teachings and the traces of Christ in his life on earth.20 This text, as well as the other writings of Francis and his early followers, proclaim (as does the bulk of the hagiographic literature on Francis) that the teaching of Christ (the doctrina) is chiefly known through the visible traces (the vestigia). This implies that all central elements of the Franciscan imitatio Christi are known first and foremost through their outward appearance, both by the person who tries to follow Christ, and by the onlookers who still have to be converted. Absolute obedience, chastity, and poverty go together with all their vestigia. Conversely, in early Franciscan literature these traces are never autonomous, never free from the essential inward qualities that they denote. Traces are the expression of an inner essence. Every gesture and every bodily action is therefore meaningful, because intrinsically connected with a corresponding disposition of the soul. From Francis’s perspective, the life of Christ on earth provided the concrete model for the direct link between doctrina and vestigia. In the Gospels, Christ teaches and speaks out. But more than that, he acts out his message in all facets of his life. He is obedient towards his earthly parents – witness, for instance, his actions at the wedding feast at Cana. He is subservient to the sick and the crippled, and he cures them. He debases himself before his disciples and washes their feet. And finally, he undergoes all the insults and bodily tortures, including the death on the cross, which is a death of a slave and an outcast. Christ labors and suffers with and in his body, and man can at least aspire to do the same. Francis and his first followers tried to live as closely as possible according to the precepts and the examples of Christ. In the course of time, Francis felt the urge to make this imitatio Christi more and more inclusive, and to approach as closely as possible all aspects of Christ’s life on earth. This evolved into a continuous re-enactment, which implied fasting just as Christ did, suffering just as Christ suffered, and, eventually, being martyred and dying just as the man Christ had been crucified and died. Francis’s asceticism and re-enact-


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ment of Christ’s suffering were so thorough that eventually the ultimate outward traces of Christ’s perfection became visual on Francis’s body. The dramatic apex of this development came in September 1224 on Mount La Verna, where Francis received the stigmata from the six-winged seraph. We can infer from all this that in early Franciscan spirituality and religious thought the outward traces were not only necessary conditions to achieve a full imitatio Christi – hence the practice of poverty, service, and self-mortification, all of which were signs of the search for evangelical perfection. They were also visible tokens of its result. The stigmatized Francis subsequently became literally a tangible model of perfection for his own followers. In the practical re-enactment of the life of Christ the human body stood central, since – thanks to the incarnation – it was, as has been said before, what man and Christ had in common. For Francis, this meant exploiting his own body, which was both medium and obstacle. To use Francis’s own words: the body is Brother Ass, self-willed, recalcitrant, and continually disobedient, yet at the same time capable of carrying the most onerous burdens. On the one hand, the human body is the domestic enemy whom everyone has been carrying along ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve; the enemy who causes man to sin against God. This is the human body as we know it from the dominant high medieval punitive theological discourse. Each and every person who wants to follow Christ must therefore begin with disciplining the body. Once a person succeeds in doing this, says Francis, no other enemy, visible or invisible, is able to harm him.21 On the other hand, the body is both the battlefield on which the salvation of the soul is contested, and an image of God, which will be resurrected to its immaculate glory at the end of times. For man is created in God’s likeness and image. The human flesh is therefore both fertile and vulnerable, both debased and glorious. And its mortification and castigation is the occasion for salvation.22 The suffering Christ provides the strategy for the battle with and by means of the body. To engage in bodily suffering, through asceticism, castigation, and hard labor, implies nothing but to follow Christ ‘‘in tribulation and persecution, in shame and hunger, in infirmity and temptation, and the like. And from these they have received from the Lord everlasting life.’’23 Francis was by no means the first medieval saint to combine a concentration on Christ’s suffering with the desire to imitate literally his physical existence. As Giles Constable’s erudite essay ‘‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’’ makes clear, many aspects of this ideal of literal christoformitas were prefigured in the works and deeds of eleventh- and twelfth-century monks and nuns, including manifestations that recall stigmatization and other comparable tokens in the flesh.24 In many ways Francis’s own attitude towards the body, as it emerges from his own writings, contains many traditional elements in its sometimes rather bleak emphasis on tribulation, persecution, ignominy, hunger, and infirmity. Yet for Francis the body was more than just a burden. It could also express the intrinsic goodness of creation, and it could be the key to the sanctification of the self.

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Hagiographic representations of Francis and other Franciscan saints It is in the hagiographic writings on Francis and his followers, even more than in Francis’s own writings, that we find more passionate, and even optimistic aspects of the Franciscan bodily imitation of Christ’s life on earth.25 Hence the Saints’ Lives devoted to Francis and many of his followers, such as Anthony of Padua, Benevenuto of Eugebio, Ambrose of Massa, and John of Firmano, to name but a few,26 are filled with bodily afflictions that are joyfully received. A good example, derived from the Vita of Benevenuto, relates how this friar, shortly after his entrance into the Franciscan order, joyfully accepted his growing bodily pains, due to the contagion of leprosy. For the narrator of his Vita, Benevenuto’s bodily affliction did not result from sin. Nor did it signify an inner moral depravity. Neither was Benevenuto’s chastisement of his body solely directed at repressing the depraved urges of the flesh. On the contrary, the chastisement of his body and Benevenuto’s endurance of bodily discomfort and pain received a different meaning, as a way to emulate the suffering of Christ.27 The body as an instrument and locus of religious experience was even more important in several Franciscan vitae of female tertiaries, such as Umiliana dei Cerchi,28 Margaret of Cortona,29 and Lucia of Caltagirone.30 The Saints’ Lives devoted to these tertiaries clearly support Caroline Bynum’s thesis concerning the bodily aspects of late medieval female religious expression. The dominant contemporary theological discourse negated the legitimacy of female access to a public theological voice, and identified the sinful flesh, that crudelis bestia, with the sinfulness of Eve and the weak nature of women in general. This train of thought made the incarnation of Christ a highly ambiguous and contradictory event. Not only had Christ, through his birth, taken his flesh from a woman, but through the bleeding and nourishing qualities of his own body he also had taken on some specific feminine characteristics. This divine role inversion gave female religious the option to exploit their own bodily nature in their relation with the incarnate God. The early Vita of Umiliana dei Cerchi (d. 1247) in particular is interesting. This text, compiled shortly after the death of the prospective saint, depicts the whole conversio of the female saint as an ongoing simultaneous offering of body and soul.31 The body of the saint is not solely presented as the stubborn and sinful flesh that has to be overcome through castigation, but becomes the medium by which the saint is able to imitate and to converse with the suffering Christ. In both cases, bodily suffering is welcomed joyfully, and actively pursued.32 In agreement with Christ’s temptation by the Devil, the saint’s body also becomes the locus of suffering instigated by this eternal foe. The Devil tries to distract the saint by showing the dead and mutilated bodies of her deceased relatives. When the saint refuses to be distracted, the Devil unleashes his punishment by inflicting excruciating bodily pains. In this con-


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text, the saint’s body is not the cause of sin, but the victim of the Devil’s malice.33 Whereas these bodily pains inflicted by the Devil aim to instil fear in the saint’s mind, and aim to distract her from her chosen path, the self-mortification of the saint through flagellation and extreme abstinence is intended to discipline ‘‘brother body,’’ frater corpus, and to make it more Christoform, so that a full experience and incorporated understanding can be attained of Christ’s suffering. The body becomes a privileged medium with which Umiliana and her fellow sisters developed a veritable art of love for the incarnate Christ, the bodily manifestations of his suffering and his redeeming actions in this world, exemplified by his sacrifice on the cross and his recurring bodily presence in the Eucharist. In practicing this art of love with bodily exercises, the saint reached such a high level of redemption that she enjoyed the sweet taste of divine bread and wine – in Umiliana’s case this was real food, brought by an angel to sustain (and even intoxicate) soul and body together.34 In the Vita of Umiliana, the castigated and divinely sustained body of the saint also shows the traces, vestigia, of purity, in particular agility and bodily odor. The body of Umiliana is able to lift itself from the ground, and it reveals its special quality to other people through its incredibly sweet odor (inexhaustiva suavitas).35 These traces are divine gifts to the purified human body in this life. This castigated, macerated, and hence redeemed body of the saint is contrasted with the body of the Devil. The latter continues to betray his evil character through his bodily stench, which connects the Devil with bodily death and decay, and also with the spiritual death of the soul. The saint, a fortis athleta, and her bodily vestigia provide examples and physical penitentiary adhortations to the world at large. This explains why God does not allow Umiliana to retreat into the confinement of the monastery. She has to become a Franciscan tertiary, in order to act out her religious practices in the middle of the community.36 Very important for the further theological articulation of the Franciscan program of bodily imitation of Christ, partly by embedding it more thoroughly within the accepted theological tradition, were the writings of Bonaventura, minister general of the Franciscan order between 1257 and 1273, and one of the leading Franciscan authors of his age. In his own commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, particularly in Books II and III, he developed an encompassing anthropology that was rather more positive about the position of the human body than the views professed by many of his learned contemporaries. According to Bonaventura, the soul not only needed the body in its relations with the external world, but it was by means of his body that man became the mediator between the physical world and God. This gave man a unique position in the universe, a position that in essence was even more elevated than that of the angels. For Bonaventura, the body of man in his present fallen state did not differ significantly from the body in the state of innocence. The main difference was that the perfect union

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of body and soul had suffered. In its prelapsarian state, the relationship between body and soul had been in perfect balance. The Fall had destroyed this balance, so that man henceforth not only experienced being his body, but also having a body that was in a sense alienated through sin. Bonaventura, however, advocated that the union of body and soul was natural, as part of God’s original creation. The soul therefore suffered when it was separated from the body at the moment of death, and would only find complete peace when it was reunited at the resurrection.37 The body of man therefore was not to be despised, especially because it was by means of his body that man could engage in a thorough imitation of Christ. And in his Legenda Major, written in 1260 at the request of the general chapter of the Franciscan order, Bonaventura set out to describe how Francis of Assisi had shown the way to do this. Soon after its completion, the Legenda Major became by far the most important hagiographic work within the Franciscan movement. After 1263 it was the single official Saints’ Life of Francis within the order. It was read aloud during refectory readings, during the order’s provincial and general chapter meetings, and on the occasion of the annual feast of Saint Francis. Being one of the few texts with which all Franciscan friars were equally and thoroughly acquainted – next to the Rule, the Gospels, the Psalms, and the standard liturgical formulae – it was programmatic for the construction of a coherent Franciscan self-image from the later thirteenth century onwards. In the Legenda Major, and in particular in its fifth chapter, entitled De austeritate vitae, et quomodo creaturae praebebant ei solatium, Francis’s attitude of disciplining of the flesh in order to redeem the body, and to imitate and commemorate the suffering of Christ, is carefully marked out. Bonaventura’s biography of Francis tells us how the saint made sure to curb the sensual appetites of the body that draw the mind away from God. It relates how Francis accustomed himself to live on the verge of starvation, how he mortified his flesh, seeking coldness and discomfort, and how he punished the flesh whenever its stirring gave rise to impure thoughts, as one would punish a stubborn and headstrong ass.38 In order to evade such tribulations, Francis is said to have banished from his eyes everything that could give rise to bodily desire. Thus he kept away from the sight of women as much as possible, not so much because women were base or impure in themselves – as many monastic writers would suggest – but because the sight of women could make a strong impression. It could rekindle the flame of desire in the flesh already subdued, or could besmirch the splendor of the chaste mind.39 Idleness was a most dangerous foe. It could easily instil impure thoughts, and cause the insubordination of the flesh. Therefore, Francis avoided it at all costs. He wore out his body in hard labor, and subjected it to continual disciplinary restraints. Bonaventura repeatedly tells how Francis treated his body like an ass: it had to be subjected to hard labor, its protests had to be chastised with the whip, and it had to be made content with a frugal diet.40 But in inflicting self-mortification, Francis made sure that neither he nor any


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other friar lost sight of the limits of human self-endurance. Indeed, Francis preached that unlimited self-mortification in itself was at the root of undeserved pride in the strength and reliability of one’s own flesh. Bonaventura therefore relates that Francis was constantly concerned to show discretion, the guide to all virtues, and to achieve the perfect mean between lenity and exaggeration. In this, too, Francis could rely on Christ, the exemplar of every perfection, who during his life on earth had taught true discretion by words and deeds.41 The text of the Legenda Major is not without warnings and lamentations concerning man’s inadequate resources to overcome sin in his fallen state. According to Bonaventura, man’s constant failure, however hard he tried, to live up to the perfect example of Christ, was for Francis a cause of constant sorrow. He often stated that all who aspired to live a perfect life had ample cause to weep daily about their own shortcomings.42 It shows to what extent Bonaventura’s rationale of the Franciscan search for evangelical perfection was still rooted in the established theological tradition. Yet according to this same author, Francis’s own level of perfection in his re-enactment of Christ’s life on earth brought about such a purity of body and soul that he acquired a prelapsarian relationship with the world around him. Nature, indeed the whole of creation, served him as it once had served Adam. Francis showed his extraordinary sanctity by miraculously taming ferocious animals, and by his ability to communicate with his fellow creatures. In this way, at least on a small scale, the prelapsarian peaceful coexistence of man and beast in the Garden of Eden was said to have been temporarily restored.43 In the Legenda Major, Bonaventura explains for other friars in the order that Francis’s perfect imitation of the acts of Christ had to be matched by a perfect imitation of Christ’s afflictions and pains. Hence the reception of the stigmata, which brought to a completion the total similitude of the life of Francis with that of the perfect exemplar, the suffering Christ on the cross – both inwardly in the mind, and outwardly on the body through the tokens in the flesh. By receiving the stigmata, Francis carried with him the image, effigies, of the crucifix, written on his carnal limbs by the finger of the living God.44 Overall, Bonaventura’s treatment of Francis’s bodily practices has primarily uplifting educational objectives, in line with the specific function of hagiography as an educational and adhortatory kind of writing. Hagiographic writings like the Legenda Major gave concrete assistance to friars who wanted to follow the Franciscan rule. They ensured that the Franciscan imitation of Christ was very closely directed by the ways in which Francis and other Franciscan saints had acted out all aspects of Christ’s life on earth, and had embraced the visible tokens that had accompanied Christ’s life on earth. To reinvigorate this imitation, Franciscan leaders, as Francis had done before, repeatedly addressed the Franciscan community with letters and treatises, which systematically urged the friars to think through the way of life presented to them in Franciscan hagiographic accounts. One such letter, written by Bonaventura and known as De Imitatione Christi,

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illustrates the more positive interpretation of the Franciscan search for evangelical perfection in the order after the mid-thirteenth century.45 In De Imitatione Christi, Bonaventura takes up the idea that, thanks to the life of Christ, the unspotted mirror in which the whole of true Christian life is reflected, man is able to know how to reach heaven.46 The life of Christ provides man with a guide, replete with examples concerning the way to reach his proper end. This guide offers mankind five special virtues or special roads to evangelical perfection. These virtues are a profound humility (profunda humilitas), extreme poverty (extrema paupertas), perfect love (perfecta caritas), endless patience (immensa patientia), and astonishing obedience (admirabilis obedientia). Together, these five virtues explain the life of Christ on earth and the life of Francis, his perfect imitator. The examples and explanations used by Bonaventura to make these virtues explicit to his readers again emphasize the concrete. The motto is loquere pauca et operare multa. It is important to note that among these five virtues or roads to evangelical perfection, love holds a special place. For, according to Bonaventura, it is love and love alone that makes man into a son and a disciple of Christ. It is the love for the other, and in a broad perspective the love for everything that is created by God, and hence signifies Him. Therefore not only God but the whole of creation is an object of our love, including flowers, animals, and birds.47 This Franciscan emphasis on love explains why in the utterances and the (self-) representation of Franciscan saints and poets, such as Francis himself, Anthony of Padua, and later Jacopone de Todi, the communication with other creatures and the continual praise of the created world are so important. This is the original background against which the so-called Franciscan merriment should be placed, as well as the Franciscan poetry of love, which made it so easy for Franciscan friars to bridge the gap between religious and lay conceptions of the created world.48 It also explains why Bonaventura, but also friars such as Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Bertram of Ahlen, continued to cherish the theme of the book of nature, at a time when this had become outmoded from a purely Aristotelian metaphysical point of view. For these Franciscan theologians the whole of creation, including the body and soul of man, was a token of the Trinity, as the incarnation of Christ once more had made perfectly clear. No wonder that Franciscan friars, but also male and female tertiaries and beguines connected with mendicant spirituality, hailed the beauty of creation. They were able to observe that the smallest details of creation were reflected in the holy Trinity by means of the humanity of Christ, because it was from the same earth that produced them that Christ had drawn his humanity.49 Seen in this light, the incarnation of Christ is the link between the created and the uncreated world, and one of the most tangible signs of this incarnation in this world is the Eucharist, the moment when bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ. Already in the work of Francis we can trace a deep veneration of the Eucharist, and the transubstantiation of mere created


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matter into the body of Christ. Francis’s Admonitiones are even for the most part devoted to this subject, and they begin, not surprisingly, with a chapter entitled De Corpore Domini.

Dualism, pastoral care, and sexual relations It is customary to situate the Franciscan Eucharist devotion and the Franciscan emphasis on the dignity of the priest involved with this sacrament in the context of the struggle against heresy. Several successful heterodox and heretical movements in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries questioned the whole transubstantiation doctrine, and opted for a far more dualistic conception of reality. For the Cathars or Albigensians the creation was the product of an evil demiurge. They rejected the divine origin of the created world, the doctrines of resurrection, incarnation, and transubstantiation. Aside from the Cathars, who tried to escape from the material world, there existed various Antinomian groups who questioned the reality of the created world altogether and therefore refused to attach great relevance to bodily behavior. The Franciscan order and the Church at large struggled with these dissenting opinions, and it has been argued that both the precise formulation of the transubstantiation doctrine and the measures to promote the Corpus Christi devotion at the fourth Lateran council should be interpreted in this light.50 It is difficult to assess to what extent problems such as these were formative in the development of a Franciscan religious outlook. Nevertheless, Antinomian and Albigensian ideas were diametrically opposed to Franciscan conceptions of the body, the Eucharist, and the created world. Dualist groups frowned at the positive sides of matter and embodiment, and interpreted the creation in itself as a lapse, or as a fake. In Franciscan circles the creation and even the body of man was presented as a tangible expression of the divine. It was marred by sin, yet not intrinsically evil. Even more so, the creation was in essence an act of divine love. This more positive attitude towards the body had an impact on Franciscan pastoral theology. The whole of the early Franciscan program can be interpreted as a sanctification of ordinary life. In the high middle ages, a sanctified life was only available for a spiritual e´lite, more often than not behind the walls of the cloister. The monks fought out the spiritual battles with the hosts of the Devil, and without the ongoing prayer of monks, society as a whole would fall prey to the forces of darkness. The fate of ordinary lay men and women was insecure, and their way of life certainly did not agree with the ascetic ideals cherished by the high medieval spiritual authorities. By making the celibate life of priests a focal point of Church policy, the ecclesiastical leaders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had in fact widened the gap between clergy and laity. It was now clearly delineated who were pure, by abstaining from sexual relations, and therefore were worthy of ministering the sacraments and settling matters of faith and doctrine. The access to religious

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authority and religious expression was thus carefully circumscribed and given to a special caste. Francis, on the contrary, had opened a window of opportunity for religious expression and sanctification to new layers of society, because he took the work and experience of lay people as his point of departure, instead of denouncing it. Even though the Franciscan order itself soon lost much of its lay character – due to its quick clericalization after 1220 – its pastoral program did not lose this universal claim, and provided a context for lay religious expression (for instance, in tertiary movements and lay confraternities). While the Dominicans, who also had this universal mission, were from the outset in particular concerned with teaching the correct doctrine (the things a person should believe), the Franciscans were more inclined to emphasize correct behavior, and the virtuous ways in which people in the world could act out a form of religious perfection. This remained the case even when the two major mendicant orders became increasingly alike in the course of the thirteenth century. Franciscan collections of exempla, Franciscan chronicles, as well as Franciscan sermones ad status acknowledge the fact that the exigencies of the lay body and its day-to-day activities (the work done with the body) should be central focal points for preachers.51 This implied a thorough upgrading of the religious connotations of ordinary life. The activities in the world were not to be condemned, but to be sanctified. Brother Ass was to be disciplined but not discarded. We can even observe this in the treatment of topics like marriage and sexual intercourse by several Franciscan theologians and preachers. From the high Middle Ages onwards, the Church had actually given human sexual relations a place in the Christian life. Marriage was installed as the only proper institution in which carnal relations between man and woman after the Fall could be tolerated, if only to beget offspring.52 And it was not normally envisaged to be an act of pleasure, for sexual pleasure and libidinous lusts were described as burdens of the flesh, caused by the Fall and difficult to control. For this we can refer back to Lothario de Segni: ‘‘Oh extreme baseness of lust, which not only weakens (effeminates!) the mind but also enervates the body; not only does it defile the soul, it also disfigures the person.’’53 Although the Church had elevated marriage to the status of a sacrament, canonists and confessors continually made clear that there was always sin attached to the sexual activities of the married partners. Sexual intercourse was the culpa coniugii. Depending on the amount of lust involved, it was either a venial or a mortal sin. Never was it free from sin, ‘‘because it always happens and is always exercised with some kind of sensual desire and lust.’’54 In his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Bonaventura had rejected this view. In his discussions on the body he went so far as to state that sexual intercourse was part of human nature, that it had existed before the Fall, and even then would have provided pleasure.55 This had repercussions for the representation of human sexuality in Franciscan pastoral theology as well. David D’Avray has given some examples of Franciscan conceptions of


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marriage and sexual intercourse in sermons for lay people, who were not under a religious vow. Important thirteenth-century Franciscan preachers, such as Gilbert of Tournai and Servasanto of Faenza, not only held that marriage was intrinsically good, but also that marital intercourse in itself was not sinful. The Fall of man caused him to indulge in fornication, and to enjoy sex as an end in itself, which was supposed to be wrong. Within marriage, however, the situation was different. Franciscan preachers like these emphasized that marriage was the first sacrament, instituted at the beginning of the world in the earthly paradise, before the Fall of man. This sacramental status had been confirmed by the Lord Christ himself – witness his presence at the wedding of Cana, where he performed his first miracle as the incarnate God. This in itself might not be very shocking, yet these preachers went further. Sexual intercourse helped to create an inseparable bond between the spouses, which was a positive thing. Neither was it intrinsically sinful if within the context of marriage spouses actually enjoyed having sex. As long as sex was not sought as a final goal, it could be enjoyed instrumentally, with the final goal being the generation of children, in order to conserve the being that came from God, and to create new worshipers of God.56 Within the boundaries of discipline and constraint, we see shining through in the work of many Franciscans and their followers a more positive valuation of the created world and the human body. Man was created body and soul. The path of sanctification had to take that into account. The body was not to be discarded; it should be redeemed. It was the interface that enabled man to engage in meaningful religious action, a level where the created could meet its creator.

The mutual love between body and soul: the optimism of Ramon Lull Bonaventura was not the only one who developed a deep-probing rationale for the necessary coexistence of body and soul in the process of sanctification. At the end of the thirteenth century, Ramon Lull presented a very radical view on the relationship between body and soul. Lull was a layman, who apparently was involved with the Franciscan third order of lay penitents. Throughout his active career as missionary and scholar, he wanted to show the necessary interrelatedness of God and His creation. He argued that God could not be separated from His creation, and that He is present both in generation and corruption, in matter and in spirit. Lull could not agree with mainstream scholastic thought, which obscured or rejected the life of the body – as a prison from which the soul (the substantial form of man) should free itself. Rejecting dominant views on bodily depravity and its burden of original sin, Lull posited a natural desire of the soul to be together with the body, and vice versa. For him, as for Bonaventura, this is the final cause or objective of the resurrection.57 And in order to be loved and to love, the body has to

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have a certain autonomy and perfection in and of itself. Being part of God’s creation, this is only natural. In Ramon Lull’s view of the universe, there is a fundamental and ongoing interaction between God and the created world. The being of God and the being of man intersect, yes, even presuppose each other. Nowhere is that more clearly visible than in the incarnation of Christ, presented not so much as a saving act, but as a necessary precondition of the creation as such. The creation is a theophany, without there being a real gap between nature and spirit, between the life of Christ and the life of the world. Everything that happens in the universe is in the first place functional as a glorification of God, whose greatness is exhibited through the unity between creator and created in the incarnated Christ. There exists, therefore, an intrinsic link between the creation and the incarnation of Christ, independent from the original sin of man, which indeed plays only a marginal role in the work of Lull. The suffering of Christ’s humanity on the cross is more a way to honor its kinship with God. The incarnation of Christ and the existence of saints in the created world after the Fall of man indicated, according to Lull, that the human body cannot be dispensed with or simply be portrayed as evil or weak. Confronted with the dominant Aristotelian theology taught in the schools, which conceived the (rational) soul to be the essence (substantial form) of man, Lull asked why God, when He created the world and man, in that case had not been satisfied with the soul in itself. Nevertheless, He had created the body. Lull was convinced that the creation of man after the likeness and the image of God, as well as the incarnation of Christ, presupposed a great affinity between God and man as a whole (body and soul). The body therefore could not be totally devoid of a divine element, even when the flesh was weak and subject to death and decay. This also implies that the ascetic experience of man seeking God should not be considered only as a mortification of the flesh. For Lull it also was a recognition of the dignity of the flesh that wanted to participate in honoring God, a theme that we encountered earlier in the vitae of the Franciscan friars, sisters, and tertiaries. The whole of mankind participated in this interrelatedness with the Divine. Hence everyone should be able to acknowledge it in his or her life. This not only accounts for Ramon Lull’s ongoing missionary attempts among the Arabs, but also explains his large-scale production of Latin and vernacular writings. The whole world was his intended audience, for in his eyes each man was worthy of faith. Hence, in his vernacular Blanquerna, a ‘novel’ in five books on sanctity in matrimony, monasticism, priesthood, apostolate, and eremitical life, it is shown how in all different states of life man has the possibility of sanctification. The experience of the incarnate Christ and the intuition that man’s destiny lies in the unity with God can be reached in each form of perfect life, both in matrimony and in the hermitage. With the right intentions every human activity can be sanctified, for each and every activity is embedded in God’s creation and reflects Him.58


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Conclusion In the course of this chapter, I have tried to point out various forces that were at work in the Franciscan sanctification of the self. Some of these are inspired by lay culture (high and low), in which the body is an important, yet complex, entity. Some of them are inspired by ingrained religious and theological conceptions of sin and redemption, which stress the corruption of the body, but need to take the body into account in relation to Christ’s salvific deeds. Others again are inspired by the need to accommodate the message of evangelical perfection to the world at large, which implies a sanctification of the ordinary. Partly under the influence of the Franciscan ideal of imitating Christ in word and deed, the body became very important in the late medieval search for evangelical perfection. But the ways in which this corporeality was displayed in late medieval hagiographic and mystical writings remained very ambiguous. The saint’s body attained an incorruptible character, and hence became a vestige of man’s prelapsarian bodily nature, as well as a signifier of the perfect bodies that the beati would enjoy after the day of judgment. For Franciscan saints and their fellow travelers, the road towards that incorruptible body, that perfect companion of the purified soul, had been pointed out by Christ. Within Franciscan hagiographic narratives, the at times extreme identification with the suffering Christ, in which the saints did not stop short of selfmutilation, the panegyric on the creation as an expression of the love of God, was coupled with self-inflicted pain. Physical suffering became the means par excellence for demonstrating love towards God, the loving Creator, and towards Christ, the redeemer. Suffering had been the rule for Christ during his earthly existence, and consequently for his saints as well. Particularly in the vitae of female tertiaries, this imitation through suffering was pushed to extremes, not least because of the limitations placed on other forms of female religious expression. Francis, and those male and female imitators of Christ who came after him, wanted to share in Christ’s bodily suffering. But for many Franciscan authors and hagiographers the cravings of the body remained strongly connected with original sin, temptation, and death. The body itself was weak and continually seemed to distract the soul from the contemplation of the Divine. Brother Ass was obstinate. Its failures were a constant reminder that man was alienated from his Creator, and its decay was a constant reminder of the horrors of death and what might follow afterwards, if man did not mend his ways. For centuries to come, the horrible message of Lothario de Segni’s De Miseria Humanae Conditionis found its way to the literary and visual representations of death, and the transitory character of the flesh would become the single most important topos of penitentiary adhortations, many of which can also be found in the sermon collections of celebrated Franciscan preachers.

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The Franciscan reorientation of the role of the body in the salvific process can not be separated from the traditions on which it fed, nor from pressing contemporary concerns. Faced with radical dualism – which struck at the heart of accepted transubstantiation and incarnation doctrines – and with the need to extend the message of salvation to the laity, the religious authorities had to reconsider the place of the body. Starting out as a layman in awe of the Church, Francis of Assisi was able to formulate and to act out an answer appealing to laity and religious authorities alike. By focusing on the imitation of the suffering Christ, he made the body into an instrument that in principle could be used by all. From Francis onwards, the imitation of Christ’s bodily suffering would become an ever more important theme in later medieval hagiography.59 In the wake of these developments, theologians and thinkers such as Bonaventura and Lull were able to develop a more positive valuation of the body and the created world. In their writings, the status of body and soul was embedded in an anthropology that emphasized the mutual love between body and soul.

Notes 1 I should like to express my gratitude to NWO (the organization that provided me with a Talent Stipendium to explore Italian library collections) and to the KNAW (the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, which has granted me a three-year fellowship to pursue my studies in later medieval religious life and thought). In addition, I should like to thank Professor Dr Leonardi and his colleagues at the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini in Florence, as well as Professor Dr John van Engen and his staff at the Notre Dame Medieval Institute, all of whom were of great help in the preparation of this chapter. 2 See for instance C. Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987; idem, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York, Zone Books, 1991; idem, ‘‘Why all the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,’’ Critical Inquiry, 22 (1995), 1–33; K. Lochrie, ‘‘The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh and Word in Mystical Discourse,’’ in A. J. Frantzen (ed.), Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, Albany, New York, 1991, 115–40; S. Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings, London, Routledge, 1993; S. Kay and M. Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994. 3 For more recent works dealing with these issues, see for instance M. Grazia Calza`, Dem Weiblichen ist das Verstehen des Go¨ttlichen ‘Auf den Leib’ geschrieben: Die Begine Maria von Oignies (d. 1213) in der hagiographischen Darstellung Jakobs von Vitry (d. 1240), Diss. Albert-LudwigsUniversita¨t zu Freiburg i. Br., Bibliotheca Academica (Sammlung interdisziplina¨re Studien Band 3), Freiburg, Ergon Verlag, 1999. 4 See for instance J. Hall Martin, Love’s Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the Courtly Lover, London, Tamesis, 1972; A. de la Croix, L’erotisme au moyen aˆge: Le corps, le de´sir et l’amour, Paris, Gallimard, 1999. 5 M. M. Bakhtine, L’Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire du Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, trans. A. Robel, Paris, Gallimard, 1970. 6 P. Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folkore, trans. T. Croft-Murray, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988. The original title is La carne impassibile, Milan, Jaca Books, 1983. 7 For the ways in which these different discourses interacted, and how the vernacular culture of laughter was able to destabilize the closed theological discourse, see M. Corti, ‘‘Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture,’’ New Literary History, 10 (1979), 341–64. In a more poststructuralist fashion, this problem has received renewed attention after the appearance of


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Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, where laughter means both liberation and the destruction of order and authority. See on this Th. Coletti, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs and Modern Theory, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988. See for instance R. Bultot, ‘‘Bonte´ des creátures et me´pris du monde,’’ Revue des sciences philosophiques et theólogiques, 62 (1978), 361–94; P. Courcelle, ‘‘Tradition platonicienne et traditions chre´tiennes du corps-prison,’’ Revue des Etudes Latines, 43 (1965), 406–43; P. Daubercies, ‘‘La theólogie de la condition charnelle chez les maıˆ tres du haut moyen aˆge,’’ Recherches de theólogie ancienne et me´die´vale, 30 (1963), 5–54; R. Gre´goire, ‘‘Introduction a` une e´tude theólogique du me´pris du monde,’’ Studia monastica, 8 (1966), 313–28. Recently, the monastic representation of the body has been taken up again in I. Tolomio, ‘‘Corpus carcer’ nell’alto medioevo: Metamorfosi di un concetto,’’ in C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio (eds), Anima e corpo nella cultura medievale, Florence, SISMEL, 1999, 3–20. Lothario de Segni, De Miseria Humanae Conditionis: ed. Patrologia Latina [PL], 217, 702–3: ‘‘Formatus est homo de pulvere, de luto, de cinere: quodque vilius est, de spurcissimo spermate: conceptus in pruritu carnis, in fervore libidinis, in fetore luxuriae: quodque deterius est, in labe peccati; natus ad laborem, dolorem, timorem: quodque miserius est, ad mortem. Agit prava, quibus offendit Deum, offendit proximum, offendit seipsum; agit turpia, quibus polluit famam, polluit conscientiam, polluit personam; agit vana, quibus negligit seria, negligit utilia, negligit necessaria. Fiet cibus ignis, qui semper ardet, et urit inextinguibilis: esca vermis, qui semper rodit, et comedit immortalis: massa putredinis, quae semper fetet, et sordet horribilis.’’ Ibid., 757: ‘‘Conceptus enim homo de sanguine per ardorem libidinis putrefacto. . . . Vivus generavit pediculos et lumbricos, mortuus generabit vermes et muscas; vivus produxit stercus et vomitum, mortuus producet putredinem et fetorem; vivus hominem unicum impinguavit, mortuus vermes plurimos impinguabit. Quid ergo foetidius humano cadavere? Quid horribilius homine mortuo?’’ For the development of this latter aspect of theological thought, see especially R. Heinzmann, Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferstehung des Leibes von Anselm von Laon bis Wilhelm von Auxerre, Mu¨nster, Aschendorffse Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962; Ch. Trottmann, La vision beátifique: Les disputes scolastiques a` sa de´finition par Benoıˆt XII (Bibliothe`que des Ećoles Françaises d’Athe`nes et de Rome 289), Rome, 1995; idem, ‘‘Sulla funzione dell’anima e del corpo nella beatitudine: Elementi di riflessione nella scolastica,’’ in Casagrande and Vecchio, 1999; C. Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (Lectures on the History of Religions Sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, New Series 15), New York, Columbia University Press, 1995, esp. 229–317. This becomes visible in several twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholastic discussions of the natural body. There was a widespread theological consensus that, before the Fall, man’s body did not succumb to death and decay. A major point of discussion was whether this ‘immortality,’ or at least its capacity not to die (possse non mori), was a condition of the original body itself, the result of a special grace, or related to the fruits of the tree of life in Paradise. Cf. A. Zimmermann, ‘‘Natur und Tod gema¨ß Thomas von Aquin,’’ in idem and A. Speer (eds), Mensch und Natur im Mittelalter (Miscellanea Mediaevalia XXI, 22), Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 1992, 767–78; L. Cova, ‘‘Morte e immortalita` del composto umano nella teologia francescana,’’ in Casagrande and Vecchio, 1999, 107–22. A real pioneer in this field was Alberto Tenenti. See his monograph, Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel rinascimento, Turin, Einaudi, 1957. Since Ph. Arie`s, L’homme devant la mort, Paris, Seuil, 1977, in particular, the history of death has become very popular. See for instance M. Vovelle, La mort et l’occident de 1300 a` nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, and the more recent volume by P. Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996. The theological implications of the fascination for the dead corpse have received a fascinating treatment in F. Santi, ‘‘Il cadavere e Bonifacio VIII tra Stefano Tempier e Avicenna,’’ Studi Medievali, 28 (1987), 861–78. Cf. A. Vauchez, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in C. Che`ne et al. (eds), Micrologus VII: Il cadavere/The corpse, Florence, SISMEL, 1999, 1–10 (esp. 5–7). See the contribution of Angenendt to this volume, as well as M. Lauwers, ‘‘La mort et le corps des saints: La sce`ne de la mort dans les Vitae du haut moyen aˆge,’’ Le Moyen Age, 94 (1988), 21–50. R. Manselli, San Francesco d’Assisi, Rome, Bulzoni, 1982, 3, 23–6, 44. On the medieval association of leprosy with bodily death and sexual depravity, and therefore its association with heresy, see R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1987, 45–60.

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18 There exist many editions of the works of Francis. I have used François d’Assisi. Ecrits. Texte latin de l’e´dition K. Esser, trans. Th. Desbonnets et al. (Sources Chre´tiennes 285), Paris, Cerf, 1981. 19 Ibid., 122: ‘‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Haec est vita evangelii Jesu Christi quam frater Franciscus petiit a domino papa concedi et confirmari sibi.’’ 20 Ibid., 122: ‘‘sequi doctrinam et vestigia Domini Nostri Jesu Christi.’’ 21 Admonitiones, 10: De Castigatione corporis, in ibid., 102: ‘‘dum hoc fecerit, nullus alius inimicus visibilis vel invisibilis ei nocere poterit.’’ 22 C. Walker Bynum, ‘‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,’’ in Bynum, 1991, 116. 23 Admonitiones, 10: De Castigatione corporis, in Desbonnets, 1981, 100: ‘‘in tribulatione et persecutione, verecundia et fame, in infirmitate et tentatione et ceteris aliis; et de his receperunt a Domino vitam sempiternam.’’ 24 G. Constable, ‘‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,’’ in idem, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, 143–248. Constable argues that Francis was probably the first person to have visible marks that are known from precise early descriptions to have resembled those of Christ. Yet he was not the first person to have borne marks of suffering that were considered to resemble the wounds of Christ. Constable mentions Dominic Loricatus, Humbert of Igny, and Stephen of Obazine, ibid., 215–16. Cf. on these issues also Ch. Frugoni, ‘‘Saint Francis, a Saint in Progress,’’ in S. Sticca (ed.), Saints: Studies in Hagiography, New York, Binghamton, 1996, 161–73. 25 Constable, 1995, 193. On the bleak sides of Francis’s anthropology, see G. Leff, ‘‘The Franciscan Concept of Man,’’ in A. Williams (ed.), Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves, London, Longman, 1980, 217–37. 26 For a listing of the most important Franciscan saints’ Lives in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, see the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation Reading the Book of History: Intellectual Contexts and Educational Functions of Franciscan Historiography (ca. 1220–1350), Groningen, Regenboog Press, 1996. 27 See Dialogus de Gestis Sanctorum Fratrum Minorum: ed. F. Delorme (Bibliotheca Franciscana Ascetica Medii Aevi 5), Quaracchi, 1923, 74–5. 28 Vita Umilianae: ed. Acta Sanctorum [AASS], Maii 4, 3rd ed., Paris/Rome/Brussels, 1863–1925, vol. 15, 385–400. 29 See especially Iunctae Bevegnatis Legenda de Vita et Miraculis Beatae Margaritae de Cortona: ed. F. Iozelli (Bibliotheca Franciscana Ascetica Medii Aevi 13), Rome, 1997, 183–9, 206–7, 214–16, 294–5, 418–19. 30 Vita Luciae: ed. AASS, Sept. 7, 3rd ed., Paris/Rome/Brussels, 1863–1925, vol. 46, 344–6. 31 Vita Umilianae, 388D: ‘‘nunc autem facultatibus privata, animam meam et corpus totaliter tibi trado.’’ Ibid., 388F: ‘‘Nam distractis omnibus quae habere potuit, omnia pauperibus distribuit, et corpus et animam fideliter domino mancipavit.’’ 32 Umiliana goes as far as to wish that she might be burned at the stake by some cruel tyrant: ibid., 394E. 33 Ibid., 390A: ‘‘disparuit diabolus cum figmentibus suis, percutiens eam graviter in renibus, ita quod ex percussione illa collisi sunt dentes ad invicem tam fortiter, ut ex collisione illa prae dolore dentium fere quindecim diebus cibaria masticare non poterat bono modo.’’ 34 Cf. ibid., 392F: ‘‘affuit quidam puer . . . medium panem portans, et dixit: Surge et comede, quando tibi videbitur expedire . . . et de illo medio pane vixit tota hebdomada illa.’’ 35 Ibid., 395F: ‘‘Decoravit etiam corpus ejus Deus duobus praecipuis donis, clarificati corporis vestigium praetentibus, agilitatis scilicet et odoris: quia pluries orando in aere levata est. . . . Corpus ejus magnam etiam praetendebat odorem, quadam inexhausta suavitate plenum.’’ 36 Cf. ibid., 389B. 37 L. Mauro, ‘‘Il corpo nella riflessione antropologica bonaventuriana,’’ Doctor Seraphicus, 64 (1997), 29–50. With thanks to Francesco Santi who provided me with this article. See also Bynum, 1995, esp. 247–55 and Cova, 1999, 112 f. 38 Bonaventura, Legenda Major, V: ed. Seraphici Doctoris S. Bonaventurae Legendae Duae de Vita S. Francisci Seraphici, Quaracchi, 1923, 47–8: ‘‘Eia, inquiens, frater asine, sic te decet manere, sic subire flagellum. Tunica Religioni deservit, sanctitatis signaculum praefert, furari eam libidinoso non licet; si quo vis pergere, perge.’’ 39 Ibid., 49: ‘‘Non enim securum esse putabat, earum formarum introrus haurire imagines, quae possunt aut edomitae carnis resuscitare igniculum, aut pudicae mentis maculare nitorem.’’ 40 Ibid., 49–50: ‘‘Otium autem omnium malarum cogitationum sentinam docebat summopere fugiendum, exemplo demonstrans, rebellem carnem et pigram disciplinis continuis et frucuo-


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sis laboribus esse domandam. Unde corpus suum fratrem asinum appellabat, tanquam laboriosis supponendum oneribus, crebris caedendum flagellis et vili pabulo sustentandum.’’ Ibid., 50–1: ‘‘non autem ei placebat districtionis severitas, quae pietatis non induit viscera nec est discretionis sale condita. . . . Docuit insuper eos discretionem sequi ut aurigam virtutum, non eam, quam caro suadet, sed quam edocuit Christus, cuius sacratissimam vitam expressum constat esse perfectionis exemplar.’’ Cf. E. Duffy, ‘‘Finding St Francis: Early Images, Early Lives,’’ in P. Biller and A. J. Minnis (eds), Medieval Theology and the Natural Body (York Studies in Medieval Theology I), York, Brewer, 1997, 193–236. Ibid., 51–2: ‘‘Et quoniam Agnum sine macula crucifixum non est possibile homini carnis infirmitate circumdato sic perfecte sectari, quin aliquas contrahat sordes; ideo documento certo firmabat, eos qui perfectionis vitae invigilant, quotidianis debere se lacrymarum emundare fluentis.’’ Ibid., 84: ‘‘Consideratione quoque primae originis omnium abundantiori pietate repletus, creaturas quantumlibet parvas fratris vel sororis appellabat nominibus, pro eo quod sciebat, eas unum secum habere principium.’’ Ibid., 92: ‘‘Pie igitur sentiendum de pietate viri beati, quae tam mirae dulcedinis et virtutis fuit, ut domaret ferocia, domesticaret silvestria, mansueta doceret et brutorum naturam homini iam lapso rebellem ad sui obedientiam inclinaret.’’ On the changing attitude towards nature immanent in this Franciscan ‘love of creation,’ see J. E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, New York and London, Routledge, 1994, 167–78; R. D. Sorrell, St Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes towards the Environment, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988. The latter work places Francis’s views of ‘nature’ in their proper medieval context and exploits the link between Francis’s views of the created world and his eremitical ideals of meditation. Bonaventura, Legenda Major, 138: ‘‘intellexit vir Deo plenus, quod sicut Christum fuerat imitatus in actibus vitae, sic conformis ei esse deberet in afflictionibus et doloribus passionis, antequam ex mundo transiret.’’ Ibid., 139: ‘‘se non per martyrium carnis, sed per incendium mentis totum in Christi crucifixi similitudinem transformandum. Disparens igitur visio mirabilem in corde ipsius reliquit ardorem, sed et pedibus apparere coeperunt signa clavorum, quaemadmodum paulo ante in effigie illa viri crucifixi conspexerat.’’ Ibid., 141: ‘‘descendit angelicus vir Franciscus de monte, secum ferens Crucifixi effigiem, non in tabulis lapideis vel ligneis manu figuratam artificis, sed in carneis membris descriptam digito Dei vivi.’’ Bonaventura, Epistola de imitatione Christi: ed. Bonaventura, Opera Omnia, VIII, Quaracchi, 1898, 499–503. Constable, 1995, 234. This mirror image, which alludes to Wisdom 7,26, is also exploited in David of Augsburg’s treatise on the composition of the exterior and interior man. Epistola de imitatione Christi, in Bonaventura, 1898, 501. D. L. Jeffrey, The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1975, 43–81; Sorrell, 1988, 42 f, 46 f. Cf. Bynum, 1987, 254. See on this especially M. Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, 44–60, 105–46; M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cf. G. Miccoli, ‘‘La proposta cristiana di Francesco d’Assisi,’’ Studi medievali, ser. 3a, 24 (1983), 17–73. The Church had to defend the institution of marriage both against misgivings from monastic die-hards, who saw it at best as a form of legitimized fornication, and against the outright rejection of marriage by several twelfth-century heretical groups. See on this dialectic L. Paolino, ‘‘Amore e matrimonio negli eretici medievali,’’ in Ovidio Capitani, Scritti degli allievi Bolognesi: ed. M. Consiglia de Matteis, Bologna, Patron, 1990, 125–58. Lothario de Segni, De Miseria Humanae Conditione, 725: ‘‘O extrema libidinis turpitudo, quae non solum mentem effeminat, sed etiam corpus enervat, non solum maculat animam, sed foedat personam.’’ Hugoccio of Pisa, cited from R. Weigand, ‘‘Liebe und Ehe bei den Dekretisten des 12. Jahrhunderts,’’ in W. van Hoecke and A. Welkenhuysen (eds), Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century (Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, S. I., Studia 8), Louvain, Leuven University Press, 1981, 41–58, here 54: ‘‘numquam tamen fit sine peccato, quia semper fit et exercetur cum quodam pruritu et quodam voluptate.’’ Bonaventura, In II Sent, d. 20, a. q. 3: ed. Bonaventura, 1898, II, 481: ‘‘quod in decisione seminum et commixtae sexum tempore naturae institutae aliqua fuisset delectatio, moderata,

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tamen et mensurata, secundum quod exigebat hominis rectitudo et secundum quod eam volebat temperare hominis ratio.’’ The apex of human perfection in the state of innocence was in fact the absence of sterility. See Mauro, 1997, 31. D. L. D’Avray, ‘‘Some Franciscan Ideas about the Body,’’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 84 (1991), 344–63. Raymundi Lulli, Opera Omnia, IV: ed. I. Salzinger, Mayence, 1729, 528: ‘‘anima naturaliter amat corpus . . . si non est resurrectio anima perdit illam naturam amoris.’’ See on these different elements of Lull’s thought L. Sala-Molins, La philosophie de l’amour chez Raymond Lulle, Paris, Mouton, 1974, and especially F. Santi, ‘‘Santita` dei laici e glorificazione della carne in Raimondo Lullo,’’ in Santi e santita` nel secolo XIV (Atti del XV convegno internazionale, Assisi, 1987), Perugia, 1989, 139–95. For the many implications of this phenomenon, see the studies of Bynum (see notes 2, 11, and 22) and R. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and their Religious Milieu, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984, 89–121.

9

Saints and despair Twelfth-century hagiography as ‘intimate biography’ Ineke van ‘t Spijker

In Saint Anselm and His Biographer, R. W. Southern distinguishes several biographical patterns on which Eadmer, the author of the Vita Anselmi, could draw when he set out to write the Life of Anselm: the heroic pattern, which shaped the Vita Martini but also the earlier Anglo-Saxon hagiography, the commemorative pattern of, for example, the Lives of the abbots of Cluny, the secular pattern of Einhard’s Vita Caroli Magni, and finally, the tradition of the Lives of the Desert Fathers with their pious conversations.1 Except for the secular pattern, there are traces of all of them in the Vita Anselmi, but it is the tradition of the desert, beginning with the Life of Anthony, with its conversations between abbas and their disciples, that enabled Eadmer to construe his Vita as an ‘intimate biography.’ The Vita Anselmi is only one of a growing number of twelfth-century Saints’ Lives which, for all their common hagiographic elements, strike the reader who is familiar with the genre as giving a more personal portrait than can be found in earlier vitae. The Life of Aelred by Walter Daniel, but also lesser known vitae, the Life of Hugh of Grenoble by Guigo, the Carthusian prior, the Life of Hugh of Marchiennes, written by one of the saint’s friends, all share a quality of interiority. This quality, its literary construction, and its relation to the genre is what we shall explore in this chapter. For the Vitae of Anselm, Aelred, Hugh of Grenoble, and Hugh of Marchiennes do belong to the hagiographic genre. These Lives were intended by their authors to be Saints’ Lives. Eadmer, for all his initial ambition to write ‘‘the complete record of a personality, which had captured his loyalty and admiration at their first meeting forty years earlier,’’2 added miracles to bring his Life ‘‘into line with the Lives and Miracles of the other Canterbury saints.’’3 Walter Daniel is conscious of writing about a saint, in obedience to his abbot’s command. Guigo the Carthusian wrote at the request of Pope Innocent II to provide a Vita and Miracula, after the decision to canonize Hugh of Grenoble – although he did not comply with the second part of the demand, to write Miracula. The anonymous author of the Life of another Hugh, abbot of Marchiennes, may not have achieved similar recognition – there never was an official cult of Hugh – but he nevertheless presents his hero as a speculum sanctitatis.

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However, these texts offer a sense of directness, in their presentation of the saint’s conversation with his followers, and a sense of access to the saint’s inner life and thoughts. This sense of directness and intimacy can only be partially accounted for by the hagiographer’s acquaintance with his subject: there had always been hagiographers who had known their saints personally, but familiarity does not automatically lead to an intimate portrait in the sense that Southern ascribes to the Vita Anselmi.4 On the other hand, the picture of the privata conversatio, the private life of Anselm, which Eadmer had left out of his Historia and which he attempts to present in his Vita, is quite different from our ideas about private life. It should rather be connected with the developments towards an increasingly interiorizing religiosity to which Anselm has contributed so much. Southern has shown the connection between Anselm’s interiority and Eadmer’s presentation of it. Of course, the introduction of concepts such as ‘interiority’ or ‘inner life’ only begs the question. What do we mean by ‘interiority,’ something that we take so much for granted but which threatens to elude us as soon as we want to approach it? The inwardness of the homo interior who is so emphatically present in the monastic writings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is different from modern conceptions of interiority, as will become clear very soon, but also from contemporary notions of inwardness outside the monastery. What constitutes this monastic interiority? What are the ways in which hagiography, functioning for its readers or listeners as a model, a forma vivendi – at first sight, that is, something exterior – incorporates this interiority in its discourse? The only possible approach to these questions will be a sketchy and fragmentary one. By concentrating on intimate biographies we explore, of course, only a small part of the voluminous production of hagiography from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Even within this limited corpus we can distinguish two patterns. As we shall see in the first part of this chapter, in Eadmer’s portrayal of Anselm or Walter Daniel’s Life of Aelred the inner life of these saints is much elaborated upon. This will enable us to explore some of the characteristics of twelfthcentury interiority. However, Eadmer and Walter Daniel leave out certain elements, such as doubt and despair, which, unfitting as they may seem at first sight in a Saint’s Life, can be found in some other vitae, where they can be seen to contribute to the delineation of their heroes’ inner life. We shall discuss the role of doubt and despair in these vitae in the second part of this chapter. In order to be able to provide a background for these elements in the Saints’ Lives discussed in the second section, reference will be made to contemporary writings, monastic and otherwise, in the third part. Doubt and despair will then be shown to be constituent parts of the growing interiority of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at least as this interiority was experienced in the monastic surroundings where the vitae were read.5 In this third part, their importance will be related to intellectual developments and to pastoral concerns.

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Intimate biographies In the case of the Vita Anselmi, Eadmer pays much attention to Anselm’s conversations with his brethren. As Southern shows, these conversations do not involve the usual rhetorical devices for presenting a general opinion.6 As we can gather from his own writings, his Prayers and Meditations, and his letters, they are meant to evoke the atmosphere in which Anselm instructed his pupils and presented his thoughts. These letters, according to Southern, ‘‘were private in coming from his inner experience, public in seeking to provoke in others a religious life which all could share.’’7 Small incidents, a hare that, chased by the saint’s company, seeks refuge with Anselm, a bird on a string with which a boy is playing, provide Anselm with material for his instruction, they will become parables about the imprisoned human soul. In the Vita, Anselm shares with his brothers his memories of his childhood: how as a little boy, living in the mountains, he imagined God and his court on top of the mountains,8 or his memories of his entry into monastic life, playfully recounting how he measured the disadvantages of Cluny and Bec, the one place being too severe, the other being dominated by Lanfranc, so that he would be condemned to intellectual fruitfulness or intellectual insignificance.9 Later he shares with them his anxieties about his episcopal duties, starting in a cheerful way, but ending in bitter tears.10 Twelfth-century conceptions of ‘molding the person’ can give us some further suggestions as to the contemporary notion of the ‘inner life.’ In the Vita the saint’s ideas about monastic education are illustrated when Anselm is presented as discussing how to ‘form’ young people. He uses a – traditional – metaphor, of wax and seal: the wax must not be too soft or too hard, that is, one should form a pupil at the right age,11 and not use harsh methods, as he tells an abbot who is frustrated by his educational task, because this will only result in suspicion and jealousy and evil thought in the pupils, who are like tree-shoots that should have some space to grow. Anselm introduces another metaphor, that of a goldsmith who molds a leaf by pressing it gently.12 These metaphors indicate one aspect of the meaning of interiority: the interior, a domain defined by affective and rational faculties, can be framed as a work of art – in the medieval sense of the word, ars, imitating and even completing nature. Walter Daniel’s vivid portrait of Aelred shows another element that is implied in interiority. Again we are reminded of the necessity to qualify this notion: interiority, far from involving modern notions of personal originality as a guarantee of authenticity, is fulfilment of a pre-existing pattern, imitation of an imago. The death-bed scene, where the author succeeds in bringing together ‘‘two quite different modes of expression: the individual and the ideal,’’13 tells us how Aelred utters his final words: in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum, echoing, in accordance with the Benedictine liturgy of compline, not only Psalm 30 but at the same time the words of the dying Christ according to Luke 23,46, in this way realizing an Imitatio Christi.

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Intimacy and interiority, then, do not imply a distinguishing individuality, and are not meant to do so. On the contrary, if there is anything altogether forbidden in monastic life, it is singularitas, the wish to stand out. Bernard of Clairvaux’s De gradibus humilitatis, a comment on the steps of humility of the Rule of Benedict that treats the steps of pride as well, makes this abundantly clear: singularitas is the fifth step on a downward way.14 According to the description in the Vita Aelredi, part of the paradisaical character of the life of the first Cistercians in England is due to the fact that all are subject to the same laws, and equality reigns and personal standing is merged in the equality of each and all, there is no inequitable mark of exception.15 The only distinction is in greater sanctity.16 Of course it is by his greater, unsurpassable sanctity that Aelred distinguishes himself. He gives an example to his brothers of incredible forgiveness towards an enemy even when still at the court of the Scottish king David,17 but he also sets an example of meditation and prayer. He would meditate on what seems to be a program composed of the facts of salvation history, of creation and reparation. As to prayer, he said, ‘‘only two meet together in prayer, the man and God Himself.’’ He would scarcely pray without tears, which he called ‘‘the embassies between God and man, they show the whole feeling of the heart.’’ Without tears ‘‘prayer is not strong enough to pierce the clouds of heaven.’’18 Anselm’s and Aelred’s conversations, their cogitations, and prayers are thus presented as constituting and exemplifying an inner way of life, also accessible to their fellow-monks. The saints show what it means to ‘‘enter the inner chamber of your mind’’:19 Anselm’s appeal at the beginning of his Proslogion, which is after all a prayer, summarizes what is proposed in many other monastic writings from the period. Placed at the beginning of the Proslogion, a prayer containing a rational investigation of God’s existence, it also hints at some of the intellectual problems that, as we shall see, await the inner life if one lacks Anselm’s logical rigor. The direction in which one should proceed on this way is also indicated, in Anselm’s Meditationes as in many other writings. The inner life can be modeled like the outer life. Aelred ‘‘compacted the ark of his life,’’20 a formula that recalls Hugh of Saint-Victor’s treatises on the building of an inner ark.21 In his Instructio Novitiorum, Hugh wrote that the novices should prepare themselves, by humility, like wax, to receive the seal that is the saint-exemplar, the restored Imago Dei.22 By applying a seal in which the interior dimension is so important, this example can be incorporated in the broad program of instruction that Hugh, like other writers, offers his readers.

Doubt and inner temptations In this program as it is presented by Hugh and others, the temptations of the inner life, and the struggle against them, figure in a way that differs from the vitae discussed so far. Of course, according to their biographies, both Anselm and Aelred were confronted with adversities in their outer lives, which are

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interpreted as the machinations of the Devil; and they both triumphed. Anselm may have thought that his struggle to find the one argument to solve the problem of God’s existence was a temptation of the Devil.23 But the real character of his difficulty was unmasked when one night during matins, inter nocturnas vigilias, by divine illumination, he found what he had been looking for. Whatever Anselm’s anxieties as they become apparent in his Prayers and Meditations,24 according to their hagiographers the inner life of these saints seems to develop without the vicissitudines which characterize the itinerary of their fellow-brothers. These brothers may have found the seal they were supposed to apply lacking in exemplariness: they would not know by these lives how to ‘‘learn our weakness from our failure.’’25 The novices for whom William of Saint-Thierry, ‘‘urged by their disquiet, anxious rather than dangerous,’’ wrote his Speculum Fidei,26 in order to support their faith, could have admired Anselm and Aelred for their faith. They would not recognize in these Lives their own anxiety – which, by the way, William took as a first indication of their ardor. This seems natural: is not the distance between the saint and his fellow-men implied in the very concept of saintliness, no matter how intimately the saint may converse with his brothers?27 However, it is just such an element of doubt and inner temptations that gives hagiography a new dimension in some Lives to which I shall now turn. One of these vitae is the Life of Hugh of Grenoble.28 Hugh of Grenoble (1052– 1132) was probably a student at the cathedral school of Reims at the time of Bruno, whose conversion marks the beginning of the Carthusian order. The attention of Hugh of Die, the papal legate, was drawn to him when he was a canon at Valence, and Hugh of Die played an important part in his election as a bishop of Grenoble. During the procedures, Hugh fell victim to temptations. We shall return to this topic later. Once a bishop, Hugh was strongly attracted to the monastic life. He stayed at La Chaise-Dieu for a year, and returned to his see only when Pope Gregory VII urged him to do so. Shortly afterwards master Bruno founded La Chartreuse, near Grenoble. From then on Hugh was a regular visitor to La Chartreuse. It was Guigo, the fifth prior of the Carthusians, who wrote the Life of Hugh. Although Guigo was much younger than Hugh, he had known the bishop from 1106 until his death and in the Life he leaves the record of many conversations with him, just as Eadmer recorded the conversations of Anselm. Guigo is very brief about Hugh’s episcopal activities, which are known to us from other sources. He summarizes them by saying that anyone can see how things improved after Hugh accepted the episcopacy, and he concentrates on Hugh’s monastic inclinations.29 This is nothing new, though. There were many bishop-saints who were saints just because they had integrated monastic values into their lives.30 What characterizes Hugh’s monastic aspiration, even outside the monastery, as it is portrayed by Guigo, is a strong emphasis on the inner life. According to a passage that is reminiscent of Hugh of Saint-Victor’s instruction to novices, he ‘‘never ceased to put himself in front of himself, to investigate

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his risks or his progress.’’31 After his return from La Chaise-Dieu, ‘‘his claustrum consisted in the vigilant circumspection with which he tamed not only the corporeal senses but also the cognitions of the heart; his abbot was justice . . ., his community were his religious fellows, even the whole church, he loved them so much that he could not tolerate their adversities or their prosperity without being moved.’’32 When he visited La Chartreuse, Bruno had to send him back to his flock, and when he wanted to sell his horses and to become an itinerant preacher, Bruno admonished him not to do so, for fear that he would extol himself, or, as a bishop, be accused of singularitas, or be unable to support the hardships of such a life.33 Many people came to confess to Hugh, who in this way propagated the ideal of circumspectio. He wept with those who wept, or else by his own tears he moved sinners to weep for their sins. As in the Vita Anselmi, Hugh’s ideas about contacts with other people are shown in his conversations. He accepted women as well as men, but he avoided looking at them. Once a friend, Airaldus, said that it could not do any harm to look at a woman: he, Airaldus, could do it without endangering himself spiritually. Hugh’s answer is revealing of his susceptibility: one should not only avoid seeing the face of women, but even of men, because, as everyone can make out from experience, it happens by the communion of human mutability and by compassion, that the affects of the person one sees pass with incredible speed to the onlooker, and by being with one who is angry, one becomes angry, with a sad person one becomes sad, with a lascivious person one becomes lascivious. For everyone it is enough to have his own feelings, and not to transcribe those of another into himself.34 Hugh’s feelings may have been enough not only for himself but for his companions also. At the lectio during the meals he would urge the reader to repeat passages that especially moved him, and he would weep so much that his appetite went away and that of his companions was tempered. Once they knew this, whenever they noticed the approach of such an outburst, they would give a sign to the reader and make him wait a little, to avoid the trouble.35 As these instances show, according to the Vita Hugh was as preoccupied with introspection as Anselm and Aelred. What distinguishes his Vita from the Lives of these two saints, however, is not only the emphasis on what one might call his affective responsiveness, but especially the attention that the author gives to the temptations from which Hugh suffered, and the nature of these temptations. From the time of Saint Anthony, saints had been considered the special target of the attacks of the Old Enemy, as a matter of course. And we can interpret Anthony’s fantastic temptations as inner temptation in disguise. As Cassian’s Collationes and Institutiones show, the early monastic tradition was fully aware of the soul as the field of temptation. However, in the hagiographic

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tradition as it developed in the West, the Adversary fought the saint by means of human opposition or disastrous events, leaving the inner person of the saint untouched. Hugh’s Vita is remarkable because it integrates temptations into its representation of Hugh’s inner life. They began when he was in Rome to be consecrated as a bishop: There, waiting for the consecration, in the prime of his service of God, in the beginning of his sacred service, still raw and inexpert in these things, he incurred a very heavy attack of the Old Enemy, which would not cease to excruciate his pious soul, sometimes violently, sometimes mildly, until the time of the illness to which he would succumb. And lest he should be exalted – because by the merits of his life and his illustrious deeds he would gain fame and glory by God’s people – he was given a messenger of Satan to buffet him, like the blessed apostle (II Cor. 12,7). Just so, according to the prophet Zechariah, when the high priest Joshua presented the mystery of the true Savior, Satan was standing at his right hand to resist him (Zechariah 3,1). And this is no wonder, when he even dared to tempt God the Maker and Ruler of all, when He had put on human flesh, and finally, after having shown Him all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, saying to Him: All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me (Math. 4, 8–9), he tried to persuade him to commit idolatry. As thus by an incredible presumption he suggested idolatry to the Lord, so to his servant by viperish machination he suggested blasphemy, that is, that he would think something unworthy of God or the things pertaining to Him. But as it was with the Lord, Satan was vanquished and confused by the servant with help from the Lord, and retreated.36 Hugh regarded this temptation as a sign of God’s displeasure because of his acceptance of the episcopate. The way he proceeded proved to be the proper remedy. He presented his thoughts to Hugh of Die. The legate sent him to the pope, Gregory VII, who knew how to console him, as he was ‘‘neither raw nor inexpert in these things’’: he told Hugh that God chastens those whom He loves; the harder the chastening, the more clearly it was a sign of his paternal love. The Devil had sensed in advance how much damage he would suffer from Hugh and how great would be the profit for God’s people, so with God’s permission – an unspoken allusion to Job – he tried to deter him from his holy service, to his own ignominy and to Hugh’s glory. Although the temptation was not altogether extinguished, Hugh was so consoled that he could ‘‘rejoice in a temptation that had brought him almost to despair.’’ He was encouraged sufficiently to be consecrated.37 The temptation of Hugh, then, is called blasphemy. It might have led to despair, and is defined rather obscurely as ‘‘thinking something unworthy of God or the things pertaining to Him.’’ What are these ‘‘unworthy thoughts?’’

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One thing is clear: temptation is wholly interiorized, and there is a connection between blasphemy, unworthy thoughts, and despair. Inner temptations, even more unspecified than in the Vita Hugonis, can be found in other twelfth-century Lives. In a Vita Girardi (written about 1153),38 about a hermit-monk of Saint-Aubin who died in 1123, we read about Girard, who had been a priest before entering the monastery. When the malignus spiritus saw how the saint conquered all vices, he exerted all his wickedness to combat him. And first he wearied him with vacillating and idle cogitations during prayer. When the saint did not yield an inch, but on the contrary was more determined in his prayer and his tears, he added vain images and delirious dreams and so disturbed his mind that in the midst of the brothers he explained by which schemes the Devil attacked him, and with much contrition he asked them to pray for him. The abbot of the monastery, a prudent man experienced in holy scriptures, in a sermon exposed the frauds of the Old Enemy, and by expounding the multifarious lessons from Holy Writ and the examples of many holy men who manly withstood the devil and vanquished him with the help of God, he succeeded in freeing God’s servant from the present danger. So the Lord made with the temptation a way to escape so that he was able to bear it (cf. I Cor. 10,13).39 Could the temptations, the vain cogitations, of Girard be of the same sort as the unworthy thoughts of Hugh of Grenoble? Girard, by explaining his temptations to his brothers, took the proper measure, and was reassured by his abbot, as Hugh was by Gregory. The same consolation does not seem to have been available to Robert of Arbrissel, one of the famous wandering preachers of the eleventh century, whose Life was written by Baudri of Bourgeuil shortly after his death in 1116.40 Baudri does not even describe the comparable inner conflict of Robert as a diabolical temptation but as something completely interiorized. About the time when Robert retired to his life as a hermit, Baudri writes: Who could tell by how many brutalities he raged against himself? . . . For, apart from what can be seen outwardly . . . there was an inner conflict in him, his mind cried out, there was an inner sobbing; it was a cruel injustice, not to be ended by any remedy; many whispered that it was too much and beyond the endurance of weak flesh. He contended with God in incomparable moans and offered himself as a sacrifice.41 One will note the reminiscence, in Robert’s litigavit cum Deo, of Jacob’s fight with the angel, or of Job’s contending with God. These almost inaudible biblical figurae offer a context for interpreting the saint’s struggle. Girard’s abbot, by clearly evoking the examples of Scripture, does what Robert’s and Hugh’s hagiographers do. They provide a framework in which these tempta-

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tions become meaningful. We are not told what the idle cogitations or delirious dreams of Girard consisted of, or what was the content of Robert’s inner conflict. Are these cogitations and this conflict comparable to the ‘blasphemy’ of Hugh of Grenoble? The least we can say is that the vain cogitations of Girard, or the inner conflict of Robert, or Hugh’s ‘‘blasphemy,’’ articulate an inner domain. But what can this blasphemy, Hugh’s ‘‘unworthy thoughts about God,’’ possibly mean? In the Vita of Hugh of Marchiennes (1102/3–1158) comparable thoughts are discernible once more, and at least for once their content is made explicit. This Vita Hugonis was written by a friend shortly after the saint’s death, in the years between 1158 and 1164, and presents a saint who, in accordance with modern interpretations, may well have been suffering from depression.42 His contemporaries would probably have interpreted the phenomena on which our modern diagnosis is based as the same sort of temptations that afflicted Hugh of Grenoble, or Robert of Arbrissel, or Girard of Saint-Aubin. Although despair is not mentioned, Hugh suffered temptations repeatedly, consisting of unwanted thoughts and anxieties. Hugh was born in Tournai in 1102/3, and studied in Tournai, Rheims, and Laon, before entering the monastery of Saint-Martin in Tournai, where he became prior. In 1148 he was elected abbot of the monastery of Marchiennes. The hagiographer pays much attention to Hugh’s recurring crises. After a description of his exemplary behavior, in which his avoidance of singularitas and his obedience to the common rules is emphasized, the first crisis is introduced as a divine measure to prevent him from swelling with pride, while at the same time sustaining him by revealing how much he would have to endure for God’s glory.43 After a premonitory vision in which some form of martyrdom was announced, he was tempted to return to the world, by the thought of the love of his family, of the beauty of the world, its richness, the weakness of his flesh and his age, the severity of monastic discipline, so much so that his soul was in anguish.44 When he had overcome this temptation and thought himself secure, he suffered another attack: considering his labors, unable to think of the recompense, he began to entertain thoughts about divine providence and grace that he did not want to have. Not that he did not believe what he should believe, but he suffered from these bitter and obtrusive birds of the father of many nations, those who fly to Heaven and descend to the abyss, because they want to scrutinize the inscrutable profundity of God’s judgments. He could not avert these thoughts from the altar of his heart and from his thought, however much he wanted to.45 Until the end of his days, Hugh was occasionally assaulted by these thoughts, but he fought them by ‘‘focusing on confidence, grace, and the will of God,’’ and by reading books where these themes were treated:46 an alternative to Girard’s and Hugh of Grenoble’s confession.

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Some years later, after Hugh had impressed everyone by his firmness at the death of his mother and the murder of his brother, there was a new crisis, introduced by a reference to Sir. 18,2: ‘‘when a man has completed, then he just begins,’’ a common view of monastic life as a never-ending itinerary.47 Thoughts came up in his heart that were very contrary to his sanctity and to his will. He was fatigued unto his soul, could not sleep or eat, lost all consolation. ‘‘By this sort of torment our Paul was buffeted by an angel’’ (cf. II Cor. 12,7), again a reference by which the hagiographer makes sense of temptation. Hugh continued to go to Mass and this food comforted him, and in the end this temptation made him stronger.48 Once more, three years before he died, Satan renewed his attack and, again, this means that he was struck by physical pain, but also by sadness, the weight of his vigils, and by fearful thoughts. In his last year he was tormented by the thought of his sins. The result was ‘‘total sorrow, distress of his spirit, pusillanimity of his heart, great sadness in his mind which showed on his face and in his manners.’’ God took away from him all earthly consolation. But now we read that in all this he did not say anything foolish (stultum) against God. On the contrary, while he could hardly think or speak or act anything profane, he was always intent on the opus Dei.49 And his anxieties did not prevent him from consoling his monks, up to the very end. As the editor of the Life, Platelle, says, there is nothing particularly edifying in the description of Hugh’s tormented interiority.50 But the hagiographer saw no reason to leave the saint’s temptations out of his description of a life that was ‘‘an example of right living, a mirror of sanctity, a model of religion, a norm of justice.’’51 How, then, could the doubts, inner conflicts, despair, of Hugh of Marchiennes, Robert of Arbrissel, Girard, Hugh of Grenoble, be acceptable as part of the mirror of their sanctity?

Why integrated in hagiographic writings? Alexander Murray has examined the passage quoted above from the Life of Hugh of Grenoble, about the beginnings of the saint’s temptations. He concluded that it enables us to add a dimension to the image of Gregory VII ‘‘as a man of adamantine faith.’’52 According to this passage in the Vita Hugonis, Gregory could help the young Hugh because he was ‘‘experienced in these things,’’53 that is, he knew doubt. This nuancing of the image of Gregory, a nuancing strengthened by letters of the pope, however interesting in itself, of course, is not what matters here as much as Murray’s interpretation of Hugh’s temptation. He relates this temptation to the well-known doubts of another eleventhcentury monk, Otloh of Sankt-Emmeram (c. 1010–70), who at the end of his life in his autobiographical De tentationibus suis narrates the temptations of his youth.54 The Devil first tried to deter Otloh by suggesting that he had entered the monastery prematurely, without the advice of his parents. He then proceeded to make him despair concerning the possibility of being forgiven for

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his sins, and to have him blaspheme divine justice, that is, by discussing God’s judgments. Finally, Otloh even doubts the truth of Scripture and God’s existence. Otloh thought that these things were so unheard of that he did not dare to tell his brothers about his doubts – the procedure that Girard adopted and that should have helped Otloh as well. He eventually resorted to prayer and was cured. Murray points to eleventh-century developments in learning: ‘‘The born Christian of that pre-scholastic age, in a word, was more exposed than his successors to the raw problems that confront the intelligence as it begins to read and think about its religion, in a learned tradition heavy, as Latin literature was, with past attempts to solve religious problems.’’55 Undoubtedly, intellectual developments played a significant role in the career of Otloh as in that of many other monks and saints. An intellectual career could easily end in crisis and conversion. Bruno the Carthusian had been master at the cathedral school of Rheims before he became a hermit. Herimann, in his Liber de restauratione S. Martini, gives us a vivid impression of how such a crisis could come about. Odo of Tournai was a schoolmaster who, preparing his lectures on Boethius’ treatment of the problem of free will, remembered that he had recently bought, just as any intellectual might do, an interesting book to complement his library, Augustine’s book on the subject. But as he preferred the writings of Plato to those of Augustine, he had put it on the shelf. Now, thinking that he might find something of interest in it, he had his servant bring it to him and was soon fascinated with Augustine’s language. Reading it with his pupils, he was then moved by a passage from book III, where the soul is compared to a slave deprived for his crimes of his prior dignity,56 and, according to a short description in a biographical letter, ‘‘began to hate what he had loved and to love what he had hated,’’ gave up his career, and founded the community whose beginnings Herimann describes.57 Robert of Arbrissel had been studying at the schools in his native Brittany and at Paris, before his conversion, and, as we saw, Hugh of Marchiennes had studied at the centers of twelfthcentury learning.58 It remains remarkable, though, that doubt and despair, the fruits of these intellectual developments, are integrated into hagiography. This cannot be the result only of the hagiographer’s wish for truthfulness. Guigo could have passed over Hugh’s doubts, as he passed over most of Hugh’s episcopal activities. Walter Daniel suppressed Aelred’s physical temptations; he was criticized for the omission, and in his defense he argues that the demands of the genre required it.59 The Saint’s Life is, after all, not a modern biography, and the hagiographer did not have the modern biographer’s pretensions of psychological veracity – if there is such a thing at all. With all his respect for truthfulness, the hagiographer was constructing a model for his readers. He shows how the saint ‘‘like a second Noah, compacted the ark of his life within the breadth of a single cubit.’’60 What is the place of temptations – of the sort Hugh and Otloh suffered – in this ark?

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We may better understand the place of inner temptations in the vitae by considering some other monastic writings, in some of which, as we have seen, the reading of Saints’ Lives was recommended. Guigo, the author of the Vita Hugonis, in his Meditationes articulates the connection between blasphemy and despair that we found for instance in the Life of Hugh of Marchiennes when he says: by despairing of the sick, one is blaspheming the doctor.61 Blasphemy is thus seen as despair about forgiveness. Did Hugh’s temptation to have unworthy thoughts consist of this same doubt about the possibility of being forgiven? In Otloh’s ‘autobiography’ the Devil tempted Otloh just by driving him to despair about forgiveness, then to ‘‘blasphemy of divine justice,’’ and then to doubting even ‘‘the knowledge of Holy Scripture and God’s being.’’ While in the other temptations he had taken refuge in Scripture, now Scripture itself was doubted. The Devil appealed to Otloh’s awareness of the gap between what people say and how they act, a gap that he declares applicable to the authors of the Bible.62 In the reconstruction of his monastic experience, contrary to what Otloh thought initially, there was nothing new in this thought, as he had a divine interlocutor make clear to him when he finally resorted to prayer: his doubts are integrated into monastic tradition. Scripture provides the weapon, as Christ showed when the Devil tempted him: although He was full of knowledge of words, He only used the words of Scripture: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, Non tentabis Dominum Tuum.63 Temptations, Otloh is told, are useful in showing the malice of the Devil, and human fragility and constancy. If one has fallen but is converted, one will know how to have compassion with others. These are the reasons why God permits human beings to be tempted, ‘‘although you, blinded through the invidia of the Devil by infidelity and desperation, think unuseful and unjust things about God.’’64 Temptation, then, is interpreted as part of a divine program. Although it may be new for Otloh, in fact it is as old as the psalms. ‘‘Beware that you won’t be as the one of whom the psalmist says: the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. The Devil wants to cut off the road to forgiveness, that is faith, by inspiring blasphemous thoughts about the rightness of divine judgment, or by making people pervert the intention of Scripture, or in the end by depriving them of acknowledgment of My being.’’65 There is a clear connection here between the danger of unbelief and blasphemy, which results from reasoning about God’s judgments and leads to despair. Maybe Otloh, when he speaks of perverting the sense of Scripture, is alluding to the dangers of the ars dialectica.66 This would confirm Murray’s interpretation of doubts as a consequence of intellectual developments, which resulted in an increasingly problematical relationship between faith and reason. For Anselm of Canterbury, this relationship was defined by the priority of belief. The anxieties of his meditations and prayers are not the outcome of his reasoning about God’s judgments, but result from his sense of the utter

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dependence of human beings on a divine order in a universe from which no escape is possible. As he writes in Cur Deus Homo: ‘‘If those things which are encircled by the heavens wished not to continue to exist beneath the heavens, or wished to get away from the heavens, they would nonetheless be able to exist only beneath the heavens and be able to come away from the heavens only by coming toward them. For no matter from what place or to what place or by what route they would go, they would still be circumscribed by the heavens.’’67 In this divinely ordered universe, only ‘‘a single look which is contrary to God’s will’’68 would defy any human possibility of reconciliation, and, as Anselm’s interlocutor says: ‘‘Unless faith consoled me, this reason alone would make me despair.’’69 However, faith is never questioned, despite Anselm’s rational rigor. The fool of his Proslogion who denies God’s existence was an artificial-rational fool, who provided Anselm with a starting point to present his unum argumentum – of which, for that matter, God’s rightness in punishing or pardoning sinners proves to be a consequence. The same fool, who questions God’s being as he does his judgments, had entered monastic existence in Otloh’s case, but in a possibly very disruptive way. He does not so much transgress a divine order by his meaningless utterings,70 as he threatens, by his Devil-instigated reasoning, to cut off the way to salvation: faith. Otloh integrates the disquieting intruder by having him interpreted as part of a long tradition of temptations. He, or rather his divine interlocutor, begins with the testing of the angels, which was necessary to prevent even the good angels from trusting in themselves.71 The list continues with figurae from the Old and New Testament and from a long monastic tradition. In this way, temptations, even the inner temptations of unbelief and despair, are shown to be part of monastic life. Some seventy years after Otloh wrote his De temptationibus suis, around 1138, William of Saint-Thierry, who had strong opinions in the ongoing debate about faith and reason, wrote his Speculum Fidei.72 This Mirror of Faith was composed to guide the young brothers to allay their fears provoked by this debate. William felt compassion with them, although their anxiety would also have pleased him, because, as we shall see, this anxiety turns out to be a proof of their faith, an argumentum fidei. Of course faith, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, has priority over reasoning. The believer will first accept faith, and then try to understand it. Skeptics who conclude that he who does not believe cannot help himself are wrong.73 One should enter the sheepfold and not discuss the admission.74 William seems to address outsiders, homines animales, people who live according to the flesh, dialecticians like Abelard. But in the context of his other works, William distinguishes homines animales as beginners from homines rationales as advanced and homines spirituales as perfect monks, and these terms also designate recurring stages in the life of each monk.75 Thus the homo animalis may be a beginner, and the reasoning may be only a natural part of the monastic itinerary, where two temptations constantly threaten the life of the monk: the concupiscentia carnis and the blasphemia Spiritus.76 The latter, a significant variation of the usual ignorantia,

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is a temptation to think about God ‘‘things that one does not want to think.’’77 It is the temptation to reason about divine things. This reasoning comes under misleading covers, not stating, but suggesting.78 It leads one to question God’s existence – as does the fool in his heart – or His knowledge or providence, or the reasons for the incarnation of Christ. Reasoning, the fervor rationalis, is thus integrated as the material of inevitable temptation. Absence of this temptation may be a sign of spiritual laziness – except for some really simple people, to whom God talks directly. They take a short cut, compared with the others, who know the temptations and are strengthened by their struggle against them.79 At the same time, these temptations are the more dangerous because they tempt men to look for reasonable answers, where the only adequate reaction would be to follow the example of Christ to which Otloh had referred, who, tempted by the Devil, only answered that one should worship God and no one else.80 As we have seen, the new weight of dialectics as applied to the realm of the divine was an influence in the new emphasis on doubt and despair. Apart from this influence of dialectics, the element of despair – despair of divine forgiveness – in monastic writings may correspond with what we find elsewhere. This despair may gain in significance when we consider the appearance in western Europe of apocryphal stories about Judas, whose lack of confidence in the possibility of forgiveness was more disastrous than his treason of Christ.81 The oldest known Latin version of this story dates from the twelfth century, even though it became widely known only in the thirteenth century as part of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, in the story about the apostle Matthias, who replaced Judas after the latter’s suicide. The better-known Life of Gregory, ‘‘der gute Su¨nder,’’ may be just a consciously constructed story of a counter-type: in the case of Gregory, who like Judas unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, it is precisely the triumph over despair and the firm belief in the possibility of redemption that distinguishes Gregory from Judas. It is not only in these stories that despair is a central issue. The problem of sin in general and blasphemy against the Holy Ghost was the subject of explicit treatment in theological debates. These debates may be connected with pastoral concerns, originating from the problem of how to deal with sin confessed, when penitence was considered a necessary condition for forgiveness.82 Following Augustine, theologians saw blasphemy against the Holy Ghost as impenitence leading to despair, and, less emphatically, as its counterpart, presumption: the belief in the superfluity of forgiveness.83 Odo of Tournai, who, as we saw, underwent a radical conversion after an intellectual career, urged to do so by a monk of the monastery of Anchin, wrote a treatise De Blasphemia in Spiritum Sanctum, where he sees blasphemy as the ultimate impenitence, the will to sin, even at the moment of death.84 Richard of Saint-Victor, apart from his frequent allusions in his exegetical treatises to despair as the lowest point on a ladder from where the monk should begin to ascend again, at the request of a friend wrote a De spiritu

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blasphemie, in which blasphemy is connected with impenitence originating in despair. The importance of doubt, despair, and blasphemy, as the most inner temptations, can be seen as the result of intellectual developments, or as part of pastoral concerns. This importance is reflected in the stories about Judas just cited. At the same time, these temptations are constituent parts of interiority. Whatever their theological or spiritual value, and whatever the solution proposed and, of course, realized by the saints, vain thinking and doubts and despair make a fissure in the flawless sculpture that is the saint, where inner and outer were – until then – coherent, as undistinguished as God’s judgments and human acceptance of them. Only in this fissure, in the distinction between divine judgments and human reasoning about them, which leads to despair, do they create a room for the inner self. The saints would find consolations, the loss of which would, in later centuries, lead to that ‘‘ungeheure Spannung, in welcher zu leben das unentrinnbare und durch nichts zu lindernde Schicksal des Calvinisten war.’’86 Subsequently the anxieties of these saints were almost reassuringly made part of the monastic itinerary, by the hagiographers, and by Otloh as well as by William of SaintThierry or Richard of Saint-Victor. Proponents of the emphasis on self-scrutiny as different as Hugh of SaintVictor or William of Saint-Thierry may have thought of older or more traditional Saints’ Lives when they wrote about the need to follow the example of the saints. But the intimate dimension of some Saints’ Lives accorded with more general developments. Some hagiographers ventured to integrate doubt and despair in their Vitae, as recognizable elements in the monks’ lives. This did not commend their saints to popular devotion or may, in the case of Hugh of Marchiennes, in combination with a lack of miracles, even have been an obstacle to canonization – and to the inclusion of his Life in the official hagiography of Marchiennes.87 Their monastic readers, however, used to the endless vicissitudes of their monastic existence, may have found some ‘‘spiritual nurture’’88 in these Lives and some solace in impressing this seal on themselves.

Notes 1 In his Saint Anselm, a Portrait in a Landscape, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, R. W. Southern lays more emphasis on the development of Eadmer’s project from Intimate Portrait to a Saint’s Life than he does in his earlier monograph, Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963. 2 Southern, 1990, 418. 3 Ibid., 419–20. See also M. Staunton, ‘‘Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi: A Reinterpretation,’’ Journal of Medieval History, 23 (1997), 1–14, who not only emphasises the hagiographic character of the Life, but also draws attention to the aspect of the Vita as a meditation on Anselm’s life in the light of church tradition, focusing on the themes of the saint’s response to the call to office and of his exile. 4 L. Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben im 10. Jahrhundert (Beitra¨ge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 1), Leipzig, Teubner, 1908, distinguishes Legend, Vita, and Biography,

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according to whether the author has known the saint or not. In the Biography, whose author has a direct acqaintance with his subject, there is a presentation of individuality. This individuality, as W. Hug, Elemente der Biographie im Hochmittelalter: Untersuchungen zur Darstellungsform und Geschichtsbild der Viten, unpublished dissertation, Munich, 1957, was one of the first to emphasize, is made to meet the requirements of the ordo to which the saint belonged. Of course, these questions are connected with the larger problem of what has been called the ‘discovery of the individual’ or the ‘discovery of self’; see C. Walker Bynum, ‘‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’’ in idem (ed.), Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, 82–109; and J.-C. Schmitt, ‘‘La ‘dećouverte de l’individu’: une fiction historiographique?’’, in P. Mengal and F. Parot (eds), La fabrique, la figure et la feinte: Fictions et statut des fictions en psychologie, Paris, Sciences en Situation, 1989, 213–36. The concept of interiority as it will be explored in this chapter, that is, in a limited, monastic context, does not exhaust the meaning of ‘inner life’ or ‘individualism,’ of course, as can be seen from recent work by W. I. Miller, ‘‘Deep Inner Lives: Individualism and People of Honour,’’ History of Political Thought, 16 (1995), 190–207; or from A. J. Gurjevitsch, Das Individuum im europaïschen Mittelalter, trans. from the Russian by E. Glier, Munich, Beck, 1994. While ‘the discovery of the individual’ or of interiority is very often linked to the cultural e´lite, both these authors make clear that an ‘inner life’ is not the privilege – if such it is – of an e´lite and draw attention to the possibility of individualism in the life of ‘ordinary people.’ On the other hand, in yet another way the theological and philosophical elaboration of the concept of persona was instrumental in the development of a notion of subject. See A. Boureau, ‘‘Droit et theólogie au XIIIe sie`cle,’’ Annales ESC, 47 (1992), 1113–25. Southern, 1963, 333. Southern, 1990, 424. Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, 1,2: ed. R. W.Southern, The Life of Saint Anselm by Eadmer (Nelson’s Medieval Texts), London, Nelson, 1963, 4. Ibid., 1,5: 9. Ibid., 2,8: 70–1. For an interpretation of Anselm as very much politically astute, see S. N. Vaughn, Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan: The Innocence of the Dove and the Wisdom of the Serpent, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987. Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, 1,11: 20–1. Ibid., 1,22: 37–40. Walter Daniel, Vita Ailredi, 57: ed. F. M. Powicke, The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel (Nelson’s Medieval Texts), London, Nelson, 1950, 61. For this and the following see Th. J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, 74–81. For the importance of the moment of death as transitus in hagiography, when ‘‘event’s and liturgy’s time’’ are reconciled, see P. Henrie¨t, ‘‘Mort Sainte et Temps Sacre´ d’apre`s l’hagiographie monastique des XIe–XIIe sie`cles,’’ in M. Derwich (ed.), La vie quotidienne des moines et chanoines re´guliers au Moyen Age et Temps Modernes (Actes du Premier Colloque International du LARHCOR), Wroclaw, Institut d’Histoire, 1995, 557–71. Bernard of Clairvaux, De gradibus humilitatis, 14,42: ed. J. Leclercq et al., Sancti Bernardi Opera, Romae, Editiones Cistercienses, 8 vols, 3, 1957–77, 49. Walter Daniel, Vita Ailredi, 5: 12: ‘‘personalitas idemptitatem parit, singulis unam ipsamque omnibus similem.’’ Cf. E. Birge Vitz, ‘‘Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum and Medieval Autobiography,’’ in idem, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire, New York, New York University Press, 1989, 11–37: ‘‘Abelard does not present himself as an original or unique character, but as greater than others in every respect.’’ Walter Daniel, Vita Ailredi, 3: 7. Ibid., 9–10: 18–20. Anselmus, Proslogion, 1: ed. F. C. Schmitt, Sancti Anselmi Cantuarensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, 1, Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt, Frommann, 1968, photomechanical reprint of the 1st ed., Seckau/Rome/Edinburgh, 1938, 97. Walter Daniel, Vita Ailredi, 40: 48. See P. Sicard, Diagrammes me´die´vaux et exe´ge`se visuelle: Le Libellus de formatione arche de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Bibliotheca Victorina 4), Paris, Brepols, 1993. See also E. Jager, ‘‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject,’’ Speculum, 71 (1996), 1–26.

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22 Hugh of Saint-Victor, De Institutione Novitiorum Liber 7: ed. Patrologia Latina [PL], 176, 924–52, here 932D–933D. 23 Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, 1,19: 29–30. 24 Southern, 1990, 85. 25 Richard of Saint-Victor, De exterminatione mali et promotione boni, 1,13: ed. PL, 196, 1080D. 26 In the dedicatory introduction to his Golden Letter, William stated the cited reasons for writing his Speculum Fidei: ‘‘quod in consolationem suam et in adjutorium fidei facere me compulit fratrum quorumdam plus anxia quam periculosa necessitas.’’ See J. Dećhanet, Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux Fre`res du Mont-Dieu (Lettre d’Or) (Sources Chre´tiennes 223), Paris, Cerf, 1985, 132. 27 Of course there has always been the problem of admirable unattainability and imitability in Saints’ Lives. The nature of imitation of the saint is a complicated affair, as is implied even in the exhortation in Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Institutio Novitiorum, as cited above (see note 22): what is projected in the saint should be depressed, hidden in the reader, and vice versa. 28 Guigo, Vita Hugonis: ed. PL, 153, 759–84. See also the French translation by M.-A. Chomel, Guiges le Chartreux, Vie de Saint Hugues, e´veˆque de Grenoble, l’ami des moines (Analecta Cartusiana 112–13), Salzburg, Institut fu¨r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1986, with an introduction and bibliography by B. Bligny. I have explored the element of temptation in this Vita before in ‘‘Schaduwen in het monnikenkleed: de verzoekingen van Hugo van Grenoble,’’ Madoc. Tijdschrift voor Medie¨vistiek, 5 (1991), 158–66. 29 Guigo, Vita Hugonis, 2,9: 768. 30 Cf. C. Brittain Bouchard, Spirituality and Administration: The Role of the Bishop in Twelfth-Century Auxerre, Cambridge, MA, Medieval Academy of America, 1979. Cf. the contribition of Nip to this volume. 31 Guigo, Vita Hugonis, 3: 768D. Cf. Hugh of Saint-Victor, Institutio novitiorum, 1: 927A, or ibid., 9: 943B–D. 32 Guigo, Vita Hugonis, 3,10: 769B. 33 Ibid., 3,11: 770C. 34 Ibid., 4,15: 772BC: ‘‘Ad quod ille, non a mulierum tantum, sed a virorum quoque vultibus religiosae mentis avertendum respondit intuitum; asserens (quod experientia sua potest quisque conjicere), per communionem humanae mutabilitatis atque compassionem, fieri ut affectiones conspecti frequenter ad conspicientem inaestimabili velocitate pertranseant, et, verbi gratia, de irato iratus, et de tristi tristis, et de lasciviente fiat lasciviens; quas passiones satis esse habere quemquam proprias, non in se transcribere taliter alienas.’’ 35 Ibid., 3,14: 771CD. 36 Ibid., 2,6: 766C–767A: ‘‘Ubi dum, consecrationis statutum opperiens diem, commoraretur, in ipsis quodammodo divinae servitutis initiis, et in primis sacrae militiae tirociniis, gravissimam hostis antiqui impugnationem, rudis et talium inexpertus, incurrit; quae sanctam ipsius animam, usque ad illam aegritudinem qua et decubuit moriturus, die noctuque, nunc acrius, nunc mitius, non destitit excruciare. Quia enim sanctae conversationis et illustrium operum insignibus meritis, magnam in populo Dei famam, magnam fuerat habitaturus et gloriam, ne forsitan extolleretur, angelum Satanae, sicut et beatus Apostolus, qui se colophizaret, accepit. Sic etiam apud prophetam Zachariam, Jesu sacerdoti magno, veri Salvatoris mysterium praeferenti, Satan stabat a dextris, ut adversaretur ei. Nec hoc mirandum, cum conditorem et rectorem omnium Deum, humana carne vestitum, impiis ausibus tentare praesumpserit; et postremo, ostensis totius mundi regnis cum gloria sua, ‘Haec, inquiens, omnia tibi dabo, si prostratus adoraveris me,’ idolatriae etiam scelus persuadere conatus fuerit. Sicut ergo ipsi Domino incredibili praesumptione idolatriam, sic et ejus servo suggerebat viperea machinatione blasphemiam, scilicet ut de Deo, vel de his quae ad Deum pertinent, aliquid cogitaret indignum. Sed sicut a Domino, sic, eodem juvante, ab ejus servo victus at confusus abscessit.’’ 37 Ibid., 2,7: 767A–C. 38 Vita Girardi: ed. Acta Sanctorum [AASS], 4 Nov., Brussels, 1894, vol. 63, 493–501. See J. Dubois, ‘‘Une oeuvre litte´raire a` Saint-Aubin d’Angers au XIIe sie`cle: la vie de saint Girard,’’ in La litte´rature angevine me´die´vale (Actes du colloque du samedi 22 mars 1980), Paris, 1981, 51–62. 39 Vita Girardi, 1.5: 494–5: ‘‘ ad eum impugnandum omnem dolum et totius malignitatis suae convertit argumentum. Et primo quidem erraticis et vanis cogitationibus pectus illius tempore orationis fatigabat. Postea vero cum ille minime cederet, sed e contra orationi et lacrimis attentius insisteret, praedictis cogitationibus vanas imagines et deliramenta somniorum adiungens, eius mentem adeo concussit ut publice coram conventu fratrum qualibus a diabolo artibus impugnaretur, exponeret et orationem pro se fieri a fratribus cum magna cordis

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42

43

44 45

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contritione deposceret; cui abbas ipsius coenobii nomine Girardus, vir prudentissimus et plene in scripturis sanctis eruditus, sermonem faciens et hostis antiqui fraudes detegens ac Scripturae sacrae multifaria documenta sanctorumque virorum, qui viriliter resistentes diabolo, eum Deo auxiliante vicerunt, exempla proponens, famulum Dei meruit ab instanti periculo liberari. Fecit ergo Dominus beato Girardo cum tentatione proventum, ut posset sustinere.’’ Baudri of Bourgueil, Vita Roberti de Arbrissello: ed. PL, 162, 1043–58. See J. Dalarun, L’Impossible saintete´: La vie retrouveé de Robert d’Arbrissel (v. 1045–1116), fondateur de Fontevraud, Paris, Cerf, 1985; idem, Robert d’Arbrissel, fondateur de Fontevraud, Paris, Albin Michel, 1986. Baudri of Bourgueil, Vita Roberti, 2.11: 1049D–1050A: ‘‘Ibi, quantis inhumanitatibus in se totus saevierit . . . quis digne recenseat? Nam praeter ea qua extrinseca videbantur . . . quidam intrinsecus in eo erat conflictus, quidam mentis rugitus, quidam penetralium singultus, quem autumare posses crudelem et impium cui nullum incidere poterat terminale remedium, quem multi susurrabant imbecillitati luteae esse impossibile et nimium. Litigabat enim ejulatu incomparabili cum Deo, et totum se vovebat pro sacrificio.’’ Vita Hugonis Marchianensis (d. 1158), Pre´sentation, e´dition critique et traduction française H. Platelle and R. Godding, Analecta Bollandiana, 111 (1993), 301–84. See also H. Platelle, ‘‘La Vie d’Hugues de Marchiennes (d. 1158): Les diffe´rentes facettes d’un document hagiographique,’’ Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques, Acade´mie Royale de Belgique, 6e se´rie, 3 (1992), 69–97; idem, ‘‘La Mort Prećieuse: La mort des moines d’apre`s quelques sources des Pays Bas du sud,’’ Revue Mabillon, 60 (1982), 151–74. Vita Hugonis, 8: 328: ‘‘Talia tamen non humiliare illum poterant sed inflare, nisi manus Dei tetigisset eum et repressisset, ne extolleretur. Et rursum inter tot mala que pertulit cito potuisset deficere, nisi Dominus revelasset auriculam servi sui et ostendisset ei novitio adhuc et rudi quanta in posterum oporteret eum pati pro gloria sua.’’ Ibid., 9: 328. This is, of course, a recurring theme in hagiography, beginning in the Vita Antonii. Ibid., 10: 330: ‘‘Nam considerans labores suos et premia non preponderans de providentia et gratia Dei cepit aliquid cogitare quod nollet. Non tamen hoc modo quicquid inde credendum esset fideliter firmiterque non crederet, sed aves illas patris multarum gentium acres nimis et importunas patiebatur. Ipse sunt que volitantes usque ad celos et descendentes usque ad abyssos, profundum iudiciorum Dei inscrutabile perscrutari volunt, quas a sacrificio cordi sui et intentione penitus abigere non valebat cum volebat.’’ On the ‘‘birds’’ see the comment of Platelle in the note, 378 and in Platelle, 1992, 92–3. Ibid., 10: 330. Ibid., 15: 340: ‘‘nimirum hoc est quod scriptum est: ‘Cum consummaverit homo, tunc incipit.’ ’’ Ibid., 15: 342: ‘‘Nam ecce in festivitate sancti Michaelis, pre nimia spiritus intentione et extensione in anteriora, infirmitate opprimitur gravi et cordis et corporis. Exanitur pene usque ad fundamentum in ea. Ascendunt cogitationes in cor ejus valde illius contrarie sanctitati, voluntati inimice, et quas nec recipere nec respicere solitus erat, iam ab his sese vendicare prevalet una hora. Assueto luci, tenebris insueto, et ipse tenebre quante erant! Et tactus dolore cordis intrinsecus fatigatur usque ad animam. Aufertur somnus ab oculis eius, fatescit inedia, omnem penitus requiem, omnem amittit consolationem. Hoc genus tormenti quo noster hic Paulus etiam hac vice colaphizatur ab angelo, non tamen ut a missis vacaret, solita stipe usus et illius esus edulio quod gustatum adfert vitam et gustato confortabatur. Quippe fide adiutum tentatio illa non absorptum reddidit, sed probatum.’’ Ibid., 25: 362–6: ‘‘Egressus est sermo a Deo, absque cuius nutu nihil sit in terra, et sua ab antiquo solita infirmitate cum tentatione pervaditur. . . . Recogitabat enim annos suos in amaritudine anime sue, memoria ei ad hoc ultra modum vigente, urgente tentatione. Quippe omnia sua per eam et bona et mala ei representabantur, multiplicabantur dolores de malis et de bonis elationes annullabantur. Et cum maxima mala illius maxima bona diceres aliorum, inde magis arctari, quod vel digna non fecit que debuit, vel modum qui decuit non servavit in dignis. Inde dolor universus, inde angustia spiritus, inde pusillanimitas cordis et tristitia magna, quam gerebat in animo, preferebat in vultu, ostendebat in habitu. . . . Abstulit ab eo Deus omnem mundi consolationem ante mortem suam et renuebat consolari anima eius, ut esset de illis qui in celis consolabuntur. . . . In omnibus tamen patientiam tenens, nunquam stultum aliquid contra Deum locutus est. Et cum aut nulla, aut rara cogitare, fari et facere facile posset que sunt mundi, tamen operi Dei tam memor et sedulus insistebat, ut non intermitteret quicquam.’’ Ibid., Introd: 308.

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51 Ibid., Prol.: 312: ‘‘exemplum bene vivendi fuit, speculum sanctitatis, forma religionis, norma iustitie.’’ 52 A. Murray, ‘‘The Temptations of St Hugh of Grenoble,’’ in L. Smith and B. Ward (eds), Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson, London, Hambledon Press, 1992, 81–101. 53 Guigo, Vita Hugonis, 2,7: 767C: ‘‘beatus papa, utpote in rebus his nec rudis, nec inexpertus.’’ 54 Otloh of Sankt-Emmeram, Liber de tentationibus suis et scriptis: ed. PL, 146, 29–58. On Otloh’s liber see M. Banniard, ‘‘Vrais aveux et fausses confessions du IXe au XIe sie`cle: vers une ećriture autobiographique?’’ in L’Aveu. Antiquite´ et Moyen Age: Actes de la Table Ronde organise´ par l’Ecole Française, Rome, Ećole Française de Rome, 1986, 215–41. 55 Murray, 1992, 100. 56 Herimannus, Liber de restauratione S. Martini Tornacensis, 4: ed. G. Waitz (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores 14), Hanover, 1883, 276. 57 Vita Odonis: ed. PL, 160, 1130A: ‘‘Postquam vero libri B. Augustini De libero arbitrio et vera religione in manus ejus venerunt, statim mutatus in verum alium, coepit odire quae dilexerat, et diligere quae prius oderat.’’ See about Odo, Ch. Dereine, ‘‘Odon de Tournai et la crise du ceńobitisme au XIe sie`cle,’’ Revue du moyen aˆge latin, 4 (1948), 137–54; I. M. Resnick, ‘‘Odo of Tournai and Peter Damian: Poverty and Crisis in the Eleventh Century,’’ Revue Beńe´dictine, 98 (1988), 114–40. 58 More generally, entry into monastic life as a child, as in the high days of Benedictine monasticism, gave way to conversion to monastic life at a later age, after some career in the world, as a knight, or as we saw in the case of Girard, as a priest. See H. Grundmann, ‘‘Adelsbekehrungen im Hochmittelalter: Conversi und nutriti im Kloster,’’ in J. Fleckenstein and K. Schmid (eds), Adel und Kirche: Gerd Tellenbach zum 65. Geburtstag, Freiburg, Herder, 1968, 325–45; J. Wollasch, ‘‘Parente´ noble et monachisme re´formateur: Observations sur les ‘conversions’ et la vie monastique aux XIe et XIIe sie`cles,’’ Revue historique, 264 (1980), 3–24. About other scholastic careers ending in crisis and conversion see L. K. Little, ‘‘Intellectual Training and Attitudes Towards Reform (1075–1150),’’ in Pierre Abe´lard, Pierre le Veńe´rable: Les courants philosophiques, litte´raires et artistiques au milieu du XIIe sie`cle (Colloques internationaux du Centre national de la recherche scientifique DXLVI, Abbaye de Cluny 1972), Paris, CNRS, 1975, 235–49. 59 See Walter Daniel, Epistola ad Mauricium: ed. Powicke, 1950, 76. On this passage see Heffernan, 1988, 103–13. 60 Walter Daniel, Vita Aelredi, 40: 48: ‘‘quomodo, tanquam alter quidam Noe, archam vite sue in unius cubitis latitudine constrinxit.’’ 61 Guiges Ier, Prieur de Chartreuse, Les Me´ditations, 119: ed. par un Chartreux (Sources Chre´tiennes 308), Paris, Cerf, 1983, 140: ‘‘Blasphemas medicum desperando aegrum. Tam facilis enim est eius sanitas, quanta illius in medendo potestas et benignitas.’’ 62 Otloh, Liber, 1:30C: ‘‘Postquam autem insidiator calidissimus me ad desperationis illatae consensum nequivit pertrahere, conatus est per alia fraudis suae argumenta ad justitiae divinae blasphemiam me deflectere, non deterrendo et improperando, sed quasi condolendo et compatiendo afflictioni meae.’’ Ibid., 1:32A: ‘‘tunc impugnatione tali diutius torqueri me sentiebam, per quam et de Scripturae sacrae scientia et ipsius Dei essentia prorsus dubitare compellebar. . . . In aliis per sacrae documenta Scripturae aliquatenus roboratus, contra illata mortis jacula fidei speique armis decertavi; in ista autem omni dubitatione et mentis caecitate circumseptus, si aut ulla in Scripturis sacris veritas sit ac profectus, aut si deus omnipotens constet prorsus dubitavi.’’ Ibid., 1:33AB: ‘‘Unde putes et auctores scripturarum antiquarum religiosa quidem honestaque dicta composuisse, sed non secundum eorumdem dictorum qualitatem vixisse. . . . Alioquin si aliqua persona aut virtus Dei omnipotentis esset, nequaquam tanta confusio atque diversitas in rebus cunctis appareret.’’ 63 Ibid., 1: 39B. 64 Ibid., 1: 39CD: ‘‘Eadem utilitatis causa, eadem pietatis cura semper fuit, et semper erit Deo super omnes quos tentari permittit, quamvis vos homines, efficiente diaboli invidia infidelitate et desperatione obcaecati, inutilia et impia de Deo arbitremini.’’ 65 Ibid., 1: 41BC: ‘‘Attende, o captive, ne tu sis ille de quo dicit Psalmista: Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus. Diabolus quippe satis agnoscens universos confugientes ad me veniam promereri posse, omnigenis delusionibus retrahit eos ab ipsius aditu veniae, hoc est a fide, immittens videlicet fraude solita hujusmodi cogitationes, ut aut indignum mihi videatur sceleratos quosque justificare . . . aut etiam judicia blasphemare audeant mea; seu ut

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75

76 77 78

79

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Scripturae sacrae dicta intentione subvertant sinistra; ad extremum vero ut . . . de certissima substantiae meae priventur agnitione.’’ Ibid., 1: 41C: ‘‘seu ut Scripturae Sacrae dicta intentione subvertant sinistra.’’ See I. M. Resnick, ‘‘Scientia liberalis: Dialectics and Otloh of St Emmeram,’’ Revue Beńe´dictine, 97 (1987), 241–52. Anselmus, Cur Deus Homo, 1,15: ed. Schmitt, 1968, II, 73: ‘‘Cum vero non vult, quod debet, deum, quantum ad illam pertinet, inhonorat, quoniam non se sponte subdit illius dispositioni, et universitatis ordinem et pulchritudinem, quantum in se est, perturbat, licet potestatem aut dignitatem dei nullatenus laedat aut decoloret. Si enim ea, quae caeli ambitu continentur, vellent non esse sub caelo, nullatenus possent nisi sub caelo esse nec fugere caelum nisi appropinquando caelo. Nam et unde et quo et qua irent, sub caelo essent; et quanto magis a qualibet caeli parte elongarentur, tanto magis oppositae parti propinquarent.’’ The translation is by J. Hopkins and H. Richardson, Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, 4 vols, 3, Toronto, Mellen Press, 1974–6, 73. Ibid., 1,21: 89: ‘‘Si videres te in conspectu dei, et aliquis tibi diceret: aspice illuc; et deus econtra: nullatenus volo, ut aspicias; quaere tu ipse in corde tuo, quid sit in omnibus, quae sunt, pro quo contra voluntatem dei deberes illum aspectum facere.’’ Ibid., 1,22: 90: ‘‘Nisi fides me consolaretur, hoc solum me cogeret desperare.’’ See M. B. Pranger, Consequente Theologie: Een studie over het denken van Anselmus van Canterbury, Assen, Van Gorkum, 1975, 15. Otloh, Liber, 1: 41D: ‘‘Sic quoque oportuit eos (sc. angelos) probari, ut et quid in me et quid in se essent posset denudari.’’ Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Deux Traite´s sur la Foi. Le Miroir de la Foi. L’Enigme de la Foi: ed. and trans. M. M. Davy, Paris, Vrin, 1959. Ibid., 9: 32: ‘‘Non querat rationem sed implorat miserationem.’’ Ibid., 11: 34: ‘‘Venit enim ad ostium fidei superbus et elatus, et dum vocatur ad credendum et invitatur ad ingrediendum, stat et disputat contra ostiarium, cur, alio admisso, alius excludatur; donec justo judicio ostiarii clauditur ei ostium, et de admissis et exclusis disceptans, ipse inter exclusos invenitur.’’ See for instance in his Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei 4,1,140: ed. Dećhanet, 1985, 254: ‘‘Sciendum vero est, quia cum de carnali vel de animali sensu, vel de rationali scientia, vel de spirituali sapientia disserimus, et unum hominem describimus, in quo . . . haec omnia diversis temporibus possibile est inveniri; et tria hominum genera, singula secundum statuum horum proprietates, in professione religionis, in cellis militantia.’’ See also William’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, ed. J. Dećhanet, Guillaume de Saint-Thierry: Expose´ sur le Cantique des Cantiques 13 (Sources Chre´tiennes 82), Paris, Cerf, 1962, 84: ‘‘Tres ergo status esse orantium, vel orationum, manifestum est: animalem, rationalem, spiritualem.’’ William of Saint-Thierry, Speculum Fidei, 28, Davy, 1959: 48: ‘‘Sunt etenim due in homine temptationes, seu vitia ex pena peccati ipsi concreta nature, concupiscentia carnis, et blasphemia Spiritus.’’ Ibid., 28: 48: ‘‘cogitans etiam sepe de Deo, que non vult.’’ Ibid., 20: 42: ‘‘Nam etiam ferventiores in religione animos, sed teneriores adhuc in fide, attemptare sepe solent hujusmodi de fide temptationes, non occurrendo in faciem venientes, sed latenter quasi a latere insidiantes, et quasi vestem fidei a tergo vellicando, non dicentes: Est, est: Non, non; sed forsitan et forsitan susurrantes.’’ Ibid., 35: 54: ‘‘Simplex fidem sapit, sed non lucet et est a temptationibus remotior. Hec autem etsi nonnumquam cum labore sapit, lucet tamen et est contra temptationem tutior. . . . Et licet sancte simplicitatis compendio sepe a simplici prevenitur et ipse tamen a fonte gratie, qui omnibus patet, non repellitur.’’ Ibid., 29: 50: ‘‘De blasphemia vero temptanti diabolo ac dicenti: Hec omnia tibi dabo, si procidens adoraveris me, nonnisi scutum veritatis vel auctoritatis doctor veritatis opposuit, dicens: Scriptum est: Dominum Deum tuum adorabis, et illi soli servies. . . . Non enim respondendum est aliquatenus spiritui blasphemie, vel colloquendum cum eo, sed tantum scutum ei fidei opponendum.’’ For the following see F. Ohly, Der Verfluchte und der Erwa¨hlte: Vom Leben mit der Schuld (Rheinisch-Westfa¨lische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Vortra¨ge 27), Opladen, 1976, esp. 27–31. For the Sententiae attributed to the ‘School of Laon,’ for example, as an answer to demands by the pastoral clergy, see V. I. J. Flint, ‘‘The ‘School of Laon’: a Reconsideration,’’ Recherches de Theólogie Ancienne et Me´die´vale, 43 (1976), 89–110. For twelfth-century thinking about sin see

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R. Blomme, La doctrine du pećhe´ dans les ećoles theólogiques de la premie`re moitie´ du XIIe sie`cle, Louvain, 1958. See J. Jacobs, Aus bewusster Bosheit: Literarischer Reflex der Su¨nde wider den Heiligen Geist in der deutschen religio¨sen Dichtung der 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main, Lang, 1983; F. Ohly, ‘‘Desperatio und Praesumptio: Zur theologische Verzweiflung und Vermessenheit,’’ in H. Birkhan (ed.), Festgabe fu¨r Otto Ho¨fler (Philologica Germanica 3), Vienna, Baumu¨ller, 1976. For the systematization of thinking about blasphemy in the scholastic period see E. D. Craun, ‘‘ ‘Inordinata Locutio’: Blasphemy in Pastoral Literature, 1200–1500,’’ Traditio, 39 (1983), 135–62; C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, Les pećhe´s de la langue: Discipline et e´thique de la parole dans la culture me´die´vale, trans. from the Italian by P. Baillet, Paris, Cerf, 1991, 173–80. Odo of Tournai, De Blasphemia in Spiritum Sanctum: ed. PL, 160, 1111–18. Richard de Saint-Victor: Opuscules Theólogiques: ed. J. Ribaillier (Textes Philosophiques du Moyen Age 15), Paris, Vrin, 1967, 121–9. On the importance of the theme of gradation in some of Richard’s works see I. van ‘t Spijker, ‘‘Learning by Experience: Twelfth-Century Monastic Ideas,’’ in J. W. Drijvers and A. A. MacDonald (eds), Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East, Leiden, Brill, 1995, 197–206; idem, ‘‘Exegesis and Emotions: Richard of St Victor’s De Quatuor Gradibus Violentae Caritatis,’’ Sacris Erudiri, 36 (1996), 148–60. M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur Religionssoziologie 1), 1920, 1st ed., repr. Tu¨bingen, Mohr, 1986, 114. See H. Platelle and R. Godding, in the introduction to the Vita Hugonis: 309. The Vita of Hugh of Grenoble was included, however. Ibid.

10 Literary genre and degrees of saintliness The perception of holiness in writings by and about female mystics Werner Williams-Krapp Women perceiving themselves to be in extraordinary, i.e., mystical, contact with the Deity or saints were a source of major irritation for the Church throughout the late Middle Ages. Since Divine Scripture and the Lives of many canonized saints attested to the fact that such experiences were indeed possible – even though extremely rare – the cognitio dei experimentalis could not be a priori condemned as complete folly. In the German-speaking world, upon which I shall concentrate, mysticism among women had reached such popularity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the Church hierarchy even delegated prominent scholars such as Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso, and Johannes Tauler to deal with what was considered not only a spiritual anomaly but also a serious threat to Church authority and teaching. This ‘epidemic’ of mystical spirituality was definitely far more widespread than the mystical literature we possess would suggest. For example, Albertus Magnus reports of investigating a large group of women and men in the Swabian Ries area from 1270 to 1273, whom he had condemned as heretics because the women claimed to actually have had sexual intercourse with Christ, dicunt se carnaliter cognosci a Christi, or to have nursed the Christ child. Whereas we know for certain that the women of the Ries were condemned for their mystical, paramystical (or whatever) experiences,1 we are only rarely informed about how prominent female mystics were actually viewed by their contemporaries, that is, what degree of saintliness was attributed or allowed to be attributed to them. No female mystic of the German-speaking world was canonized during the late Middle Ages, which is hardly surprising, considering that the most influential theologians of the time mistrusted such primarily female ‘nonsense’ and usually pressed for restrictive measures in dealing with women who refused to take the sound advice of their spiritual mentors.2 Whereas Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler attempted to dissuade women from ascetic and spiritual excesses using primarily philosophical and theological argumentation, the theologians of the late fourteenth and the entire fifteenth century had far less tolerance for what they considered the aberrant behavior of women mystics. Alarmed by the precedent set by the canonization of Bridget of Sweden,3 which they feared

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would only encourage an interest in the mystical spirituality that they hoped to repress, leading theologians such as Jean Gerson sought to put an end especially to female inclinations toward mystical spirituality once and for all by propagating restrictive measures. Bids for canonization of women mystics were categorically rejected. Gerson condemned what he considered to be a vulgarization of true mystical spirituality, claiming it to be a completely egotistical and therefore actually an extremely harmful form of piety. He warned that no disease could be more damaging than the desire for revelations. He even saw potential signs of the coming of the Antichrist in the spread of mysticism. Gerson’s viewpoint was clearly communis opinio within the learned clergy.4 In spite of these rigid positions, mystical spirituality flourished in the German-speaking world well into the fifteenth century and beyond among the religious as well as the laity. Since the possibilities of a saintly vita activa were extremely limited for women (Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia being a principal exception), the prime avenue to sanctity as defined by ecclesiastical authorities open to pious women – especially to those in cloisters – was a spectacular vita contemplativa. However, even this option was not terribly promising for a woman mystic, even if she had been attributed an aura of holiness in her lifetime. These limitations were so rigidly set that among women mystics of the late Middle Ages only Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena actually became prominent canonized saints, but only because of their political prominence and influential sponsors.5 In the past several years there has been a wealth of discussion about the genres used in mystical literature and their relationship to traditional hagiography. This debate has unfortunately not been terribly productive, since the argumentation is ultimately based on the assumption that the Middle Ages had developed and internalized a normative concept of genre much as our own. This assumption is tempting because there is undoubtedly a relatively developed consciousness for genre classification in the Latin literature of the learned world and even a certain degree of genre-awareness in vernacular literature. However, when, for instance, Christine Ruhrberg postulates a clear difference between vita and legenda she ignores the widespread medieval usage of these terms:6 vita and legenda are used interchangeably in manuscripts containing Latin or vernacular literature. I shall return to that a little later. Of course, I do not propose to discuss literature without the concept of genre, but I believe that there are two major considerations that must first be taken into account if we are to understand the exceptional quality of mystical literature: the opportunities for literary innovation that were possible when authors were not shackled by the restraints imposed by the learned world, and second, the lack of awareness of, or the obvious general disinterest in, classifying texts according to genre among authors, scribes, and readers of vernacular literature. Both considerations can be seen as two sides of the same coin.

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Closely connected to the problem of genre is another aspect that cannot be ignored when analyzing medieval literature. Even though we possess an impressive body of primarily vernacular literature written by, for, and about German women mystics, those works and the manuscripts in which they are transmitted have only seldom been consulted in order to ascertain how the experiences of these female virtuosi were perceived by their contemporaries. Could mystical and paramystical experiences suffice as evidence of saintliness in the eyes of the readers? Did women mystics and their promoters actually aspire to official sainthood, or did they have other categories in mind, forms of sanctity independent of Church approval? Were categories of holiness established by a female religious subculture, independent of Church scrutiny? It is impossible to answer these questions within the scope of a chapter and I am by no means suggesting that there are simple answers. However, my approach will be a simple and fundamental one: analyzing the genres used in mystical writings by taking contemporary classifications seriously – no matter how they may conflict with modern literary taxonomy – and consulting the manuscripts containing the biographies (in a very broad sense of the word) of women mystics in order to gain further insight into what degree of sanctity was awarded to non-canonized mulieres sanctae and what role genre plays in the formation of such perceptions.7 Perceived sainthood was not dependent on canonization or even a proposal for canonization. People held to be holy could be venerated by vast numbers of people long before the Church would even consider canonization proceedings, that is, if it considered them at all. There are, as we all know, countless ‘saints’ who never existed but were nevertheless integrated into the liturgical calendar. In Germany, for instance, Saint Afra and Saint Sebaldus, the patron saints of Augsburg and Nuremberg respectively, were wholly fictitious but venerated widely in the Southeast. Therefore, being awarded a feast-day in a legendary per circulum anni constituted the unmistakable designation of sainthood, even if the ‘saint’ was invented and/or venerated only locally. Having studied 300 vernacular legendary manuscripts and countless printed editions,8 I have arrived at the conclusion that there was a rather clear consensus on what was considered to be true sainthood – even among the illiterati – for which official canonization was definitely not a prerequisite. It is important to know that vernacular legendaries were almost always produced by members of the clergy. However, even the only German legendary composed wholly by a woman includes only ‘official’ female saints.9 In German vernacular legendaries, which were an immensely popular form of literature in the late Middle Ages, also among the laity, only three female mystics of the late Middle Ages were ever included: Bridget, Catherine of Siena, and the non-canonized Gertrud of Helfta, who is to be found in a small group of manuscripts of the by far most popular German legendary, Der Heiligen Leben.10 It is important to note that all three legends were later additions to this collection. In other words, even though it was possible to add the Lives


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of saints of very dubious credibility and provenance, German women mystics simply did not make the grade – even in nunneries where their vitae were available in the library and could easily have been integrated or attached to a legendary manuscript. This fact alone I consider to be compelling evidence for a categorization of degrees of saintliness that was firmly established in the minds of scribes and readers. What were the prerequisites for such a categorization? Of course an established cult was necessary. For the authors and compilers of vernacular legendaries the major criterion for the inclusion in a legendary was a Latin vita that clearly drew upon the learned traditions of literary stylization, conventions, and motifs of hagiography. It was the veritas latina of the scholarly world and its e´litist literary traditions that formed the basis for the elevation of a religiously exceptional individual to sainthood. A vita or revelationes in the vernacular simply lacked the necessary authority and credibility attached to hagiographic writings composed by the literati. A comparison of the veneration accorded Gertrud of Helfta and Mechthild of Magdeburg, her contemporary in the same monastery, is an excellent example for this fundamental ‘law of hagiology.’ Of the five books making up the Latin Legatus divinae pietatis, only the second one was authored by Gertrud herself, the rest by an unnamed highly educated sister in Helfta. In the first book of the Legatus this anonymous sister wrote a Gertrud-vita in the classical tradition of scholarly hagiography. For instance, in the praefatio she promises indulgences for merely reading the Legatus, followed by a claim that the text’s veracity had been confirmed by seven noted theologians.11 Gertrud is then portrayed as constantly citing the Bible and liturgical hymns in Latin in her everyday speech, a very typical element of traditional hagiography. Clearly there is a case being made for sainthood. And as her inclusion in a German legendary suggests, this strategy was obviously in part successful. Even though Gertrud was canonized only in 1739, she appears to have been venerated as a saint already in the late Middle Ages – at least in some circles – without any ecclesiastical cult confirmation. This could not have been possible without the approval and encouragement from some members of the clergy. In the German translation of the Legatus from the beginning of the fifteenth century, from which her vita in the legendary is derived, the translator has already generously awarded Gertrud the title of saint throughout the text.12 Gertrud’s co-sister in Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, did not fare nearly as well in the eyes of the clergy. Although the author of the most remarkable work by a German woman mystic, Mechthild had already been relegated to complete obscurity only half a century after her death.13 The Flowing Light of the Godhead is written completely in the vernacular and is a highly innovative work sui generis. It is, however, not in any way structured as a vita, even if elements of Mechthild’s biography offer a certain framework for the narrative.14 Furthermore, and most importantly, it is clearly the work of an illiterata. The learned elements abounding in Gertrud’s Legatus are almost

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completely missing in Mechthild’s work, even in the sparsely circulated Latin translation of The Flowing Light. Only one complete manuscript of her work survives. The rest of the manuscripts contain only more or less generous excerpts, amidst other texts dealing with mystical spirituality. Mechthild’s name is mentioned only rarely in the manuscripts. Even the chief translator of her work from Low German to Alemannic, Heinrich of No¨rdlingen, sent a manuscript of Mechthild’s work to the mystic Margarete Ebner without mentioning the name of its author.15 So it seems that The Flowing Light of the Godhead was considered an inspiring and unconventional piece of mystagogical literature, but its language, its use of the first person, and untraditional literary structure and content obviously did not convey the message to readers that its author ought to be seen as a saint or even a potential saint, even though she is called die heilig (saint) in the heading of two manuscripts.16 However, the terminology used by medieval authors and scribes in genre attribution for mystical literature is not very specific. If the work offered some form of biography, not just episodes in a life, it could be described as leben (vita), offenbarungen (revelationes) or leben und offenbarungen, or in the case of the so-called Sister-books leben der swester (Life of the sisters); in certain cases even legende (legenda) was deemed appropriate. The terms heilig (sanctus, sancta) and selig (beatus, beata) are especially used in an inflationary way in manuscripts containing the biographies of mystics and merely signify a degree of holiness that is meant to assure the reader that the work is truly worthy of her or his interest. It appears that these designations are often simply awarded by scribes uncritically and do not reflect any true degree of veneration. The decisive difference between the vita of a mystic and a true Saint’s Life in this respect is the fact that mystics may be called heilig or selig in the heading, but not necessarily within the work itself. Of course I cannot completely exclude the possibility that individual scribes might actually have considered Mechthild a saint, but the manuscript evidence does not support such a consideration. The specific character of the manuscript circulation of Mechthild’s work can also be seen as an excellent example of what I shall call a ‘categorization’ of mystical writings and, in conjunction with that, of women mystics altogether. I deduce the existence of a category ‘texts dealing with mystical spirituality’ on the evidence of countless manuscripts collecting anything dealing with female or male mystics, supernatural experiences, mystagogical texts written by men or women, mystical songs and poetry, etc., in some cases even treatises warning women of the dangers of visions. In German scholarship such manuscripts are called ‘‘mystische Sammelhandschriften’’ (mystical collections). These text ensembles suggest that even mystical vitae in the hagiographic tradition were considered to be primarily didactic and edifying in nature or even catechetic in an e´litist sort of way, and not meant to be Lives of purported saints. Furthermore, most mystical vitae do not contain miracles, which are vital for canonization procedures and are – even for the uneducated – essential validations of true sainthood. The Lives of mystics


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report only very rarely of miraculous deeds done for others. The purported holiness of mystics was therefore imperceptible, except for observable states of rapture or certain physical evidence (such as stigmata). Their communication with God or the saints could therefore easily be interpreted as madness or as instigated by the Devil. An adjunct to the category ‘mystical literature’ were the vitae of women mystics for whom a learned member of the clergy had written a Latin biography for the literate community with the obvious purpose of promoting canonization. It could be assumed that if any female mystic would be found worthy of being integrated in a legendary, she would have to belong to this group. However, remarkably, except for Gertrud, none of these purported saints attained any noticeable degree of prominence; they were so unknown that even serious scholarship has only recently discovered them. The most prominent of these mystics is certainly Dorothea of Montau in former East Prussia, who was canonized in 1976, after tenacious lobbying by refugees from East Prussia after the war. Dorothea was a laywoman who gave up her problematic marriage in order to devote herself completely to mystical spirituality, ending her life as a recluse on public display, immured within the cathedral of Marienwerder. After her death in 1394 her mentor, the university-educated Johannes Marienwerder, initiated a campaign for her canonization that began in 1404.17 He authored a scholarly Latin vita as prescribed by the Holy See and even wrote to friends asking them to propagate vernacular versions of Dorothea’s legend in their sphere of influence.18 However – as I mentioned at the beginning – the powers determining Church policy in the early fifteenth century were not inclined to promote a woman mystic to sainthood, so Dorothea remained a locally venerated ‘saint’ in East Prussia. She was almost completely unknown in the rest of the German-speaking world in the fifteenth century. It is interesting to note that the highly educated Marienwerder writes of Dorothea only as venerabilis (meaning in Latin hagiography ‘worthy of sainthood’), which he then translates to selig (beata) in the German version of her legend. In a Nuremberg manuscript of her German vita she is die selige sant Dorothea. The Latin vita of Christina of Stommeln was written by her close confidant Peter of Dacia, who clearly considered her worthy of sainthood. He personally observed her raptures, in which she mostly battled against demons who tortured her mercilessly. An abbreviated version of Peter’s vita was translated into German and added to a legendary manuscript that was compiled in the early 1300s in Zu¨rich after the manuscript had already been in use for a time. The vita definitely did not belong to the original concept of this legendary. Beyond that no vernacular texts document an interest in Christina in the Middle Ages.19 The Latin Vita et revelationes of Agnes Blannbekin, a Viennese mystic also declared to be venerabilis in the headings of her manuscript circulation and who was apparently never seriously considered for canonization by the Holy See, reached a certain degree of notoriety by being placed on the index of the

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Church in 1747, after having been rediscovered a few years earlier. One of the main reasons for this damnation was Agnes’s vision in which she claimed to have tasted and swallowed the foreskin of the Christ child. Agnes remained an obscure figure who seems to have been hardly known in the Germanspeaking world.20 Elsbeth Achler, a Franciscan tertiary from Reute near Lake Constance who lived a life of brutal austerity, was closely likened by her biographer, an enthusiast for Church reform named Konrad Ku¨gelin, to Catherine of Siena. His Latin vita, which unfortunately has been lost and can be reconstructed only through its translations into German, includes many episodes that seem to have been directly inspired by Raymond of Capua’s Legenda major.21 Elsbeth, although locally venerated to this day, attained the official status of beata only in 1766. Needless to say, none of the women mystics whose vitae or revelationes were written only in German ever got even this far. A note: the now so famous Hildegard of Bingen can be found neither in Latin nor German legendaries. Moreover there is hardly a mention of her in vernacular literature. Elisabeth of Scho¨nau, whose book of visions was partially translated into German as an adjunct to an extensive legend of Saint Ursula, never appears in a hagiographic context herself, even though in the headings of the German translations she is given the title heilig. But again, this is not to be interpreted as a designation of true perceived sainthood. All this leads to the important question: why were there not more Latin vitae written for the many women mystics? Why were even their mentors generally satisfied with only a vernacular version? More specifically: was it actually of noticeable importance to most pious enthusiasts interested in mystical spirituality whether or not the vitae of mystics propagated sanctity as defined by ecclesiastical authorities, thus making them worthy of being included in official legendaries? As far as I can see, it was not, at least not in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This may be due to the clashes between secular powers and the Church in the late Middle Ages with its general disdain for mysticism among women. The mystic Margarete Ebner was, for instance, on the side of Ludwig the Bavarian against the Pope. Even the generally low degree of education within the clergy could be responsible for the disinterest of an e´lite in official confirmation by the Church. It seems that pious women and those interested in exceptional spirituality were ‘categorized’ in this case as well. The status of beata, for which the Church had not as yet laid down any clear guidelines for its implementation, was used not only by illiterati to designate potential saints based on a loose, i.e., not codified, definition that they had given to that status.22 The religious e´lite who enthusiastically embraced and actively supported mysticism obviously did not care what the powers in Rome or Avignon thought of the truly blessed among them. This can be illustrated in the attitude shown by the aforementioned Heinrich of No¨rdlingen, who kept close contact with a number of women mystics whose experiences he considered to be of divine origin. On the one


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hand the highly enthusiastic Heinrich encouraged women mystics, who for him were definitely of saintly stature, to diligently record their experiences; on the other hand he himself never took the step of writing Latin vitae necessary for possible canonization review. Heinrich, who was even on the side of the Pope in the clash with Ludwig the Bavarian, clearly felt himself to be an active part of a spiritual e´lite (Gottesfreunde) whose piety and lifestyle he assumed were anathema to the Church hierarchy in the first half of the fourteenth century. This e´lite was, however, comprised primarily of illiterati, for whom only vernacular literature was appropriate. Exactly for this reason the vernacular had simply become the language of mystical spirituality. Even a university professor and renowned philosopher such as Meister Eckhart had to revert to German in order to properly participate in the discourse dealing with asceticism and mysticism. This ‘illiterate’ e´lite as well as its educated activists did not need or seek Church approval of its most prominent figures. Nevertheless, the vitae of women mystics in the vernacular are, as with the Latin vitae, inspired by traditional hagiographic models. The primary model was undoubtedly the Vitaspatrum, in which the lives and teachings of the desert fathers and mothers, extreme ascetics committed to a radical vita contemplativa, were compiled. The Vitaspatrum were translated into German in the first half of the fourteenth century, and all evidence suggests that this was done at the behest of a mystically inclined e´lite in northern Switzerland.23 The highly influential mystagogue Heinrich Suso, who considered the teachings of the Vitaspatrum to be the nucleus totius perfectionis, fervently encouraged Dominican nuns – whose interest in mystical spirituality had prompted Suso’s writings in the first place – to study the Vitaspatrum and apply its teachings to their own lives.24 It is important to note that even though the Vitaspatrum tells of the blessed lives of many ascetic virtuosi, only a handful ever attained the status of true sainthood (for instance Anthony, Paul the Hermit, Mary of Egypt). The rest, who also had no miracles attributed to them, seem to have been afforded the status of quasi-sainthood, much as the women mystics of the late Middle Ages. The vernacular vitae of women mystics – be they written by the women themselves, their confidants, or as a collaborative effort – are quite diverse, even though they all follow the same basic hagiographic model taken from the Vitaspatrum. Siegfried Ringler has aptly named this genre ‘Gnadenviten’ (vitae of Godly grace), for as opposed to legends used for canonization appeals in the late Middle Ages, they do not tell of heroic or miraculous deeds performed for the benefit of others, but rather of an often brutally austere and pious life and the spiritual rewards afforded by God for this behavior. For Ringler ‘Gnadenviten’ are mystagogy in the form of hagiography and therefore not intended to be read and understood as true legends.25 As much as I can agree with Ringler’s general analysis, his definition of the genre is in my opinion too restrictive in that it excludes other possible literary strategies and ignores the aspect of how such a work was actually interpreted by contemporaries after it had gone into circulation. For instance, the possibility that

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these women or their confidants were actually propagating an e´litist, i.e., Church-independent, form of personal sainthood when recording their divine experiences cannot be completely excluded. Typical examples for Gnadenviten are the vitae of the Dominican mystics Elsbeth of Oye, Margarete Ebner, Christine Ebner, and Adelheid Langmann, as well as the odd vita of a Dominican priest couched as a female mystic, Friedrich Sunder. All of them offer biographies focusing almost completely on mystical experiences and strict asceticism. The possibility of ever being given the title of saint by scribes was least likely if the ‘Gnadenvita’ was written in the first person, simply because this was completely out of the question in traditional hagiography. This is the case with Margarete Ebner, who at the behest of Heinrich of No¨rdlingen wrote a sort of mystical autobiography, which was probably revised by a member of the clergy. In one manuscript (as well as on her gravestone) Margarete is called beata, the German equivalent selig appears in another. This could possibly be interpreted as a concession that Margarete was not perceived as a putative saint, even by her co-sisters. In the main manuscripts of the revelations of the Swiss Dominican mystic Elsbeth of Oye, which are written in the first person, she is simply called swester, not even selig obviously seemed appropriate.26 That mystical vitae and Saints’ Lives were generally considered to be different genres can also be clearly seen in the case of the Vita of Heinrich Suso, which, as I see it, was, as opposed to the ‘Gnadenviten,’ clearly intended to be a purely mystagogical work written for a female audience telling, in the third person, of the exemplary quest for spiritual perfection of a ‘servant of the eternal wisdom’ (who can, of course, be identified by his readers as Suso himself)27 in order to offer spiritual guidance to those tending toward brutal asceticism and a mystical spirituality that consisted of an actual communication with holy persons. It is a gross misunderstanding of Suso’s Vita if it is considered to be the first German autobiography or a work encouraging fantastic visions or harsh ascetic practices. Just the opposite is the case. Martina Wehrli-Johns has recently proposed yet another interpretation, insisting that the Dominican order was attempting to get Suso canonized on the basis of the Vita.28 There were, of course, attempts made to have Suso acclaimed a saint in the German Southwest in the late fifteenth century,29 but, remarkably, in none of the twenty-nine manuscripts of Suso’s Vita is he ever called Saint Heinrich. Furthermore, the Vita is almost always transmitted in manuscripts amidst an ensemble of mystical texts and never in a legendary, or even together with other Saints’ Lives, which is similar to the cases of women mystics.30 An interesting and relatively popular genre of ‘mystical biography’ is the Sister-books (Schwesternbu¨cher), which have also been called convent chronicles in American research.31 We possess nine Sister-books from the fourteenth and one from the fifteenth century.32 As a rule they are collections of short extraordinary episodes in the lives of the original sisters of Dominican convents in


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the southern German-speaking area, who are portrayed as outstanding monastic role models. In some cases more complete biographies are also included. The works are rightfully considered to be an adjunct of mystical literature, since the divine rewards given to these sisters are often of a very similar nature to those mystical experiences of sisters for whom extensive vitae were composed. However, remarkably none of the women in the Sister-books are ever portrayed as candidates for sainthood: they are almost exclusively called selig, which, by the way, can also simply be translated as ‘‘the late.’’ This may be to a great extent due to the fact that the Sister-books were patterned after Gerard of Frachet’s Vitas fratrum, which chronicles the origin and development of the Dominican order with a large number of entries documenting the exemplary behavior of the early friars and the divine rewards given to them in return.33 None of these friars – except Saint Dominic himself – was ever even considered for canonization, for the divine blessings were not meant to lionize certain individuals but to show how amply God bestowed his favors on the entire order. It therefore appears that literary, i.e., genre tradition very strongly determined the perception of holiness in the Sister-books. It is interesting to note that a number of motifs in the Sisterbooks generally considered to be typical behavior of ‘hysterical’ women mystics – such as uncontrollable tears or visions of the Christ child – are also to be found in the Vitas fratrum.34 This understanding of the Sister-books by their female authors and readers can be corroborated by the manuscript circulation. Sister-books are almost always either transmitted as the only text in a manuscript or in a collection of other Sister-books and similar texts. That they could also be considered convent chronicles can be demonstrated by their classification in the extraordinary library of the Dominican nunnery St Catherine’s in Nuremberg, where 352 vernacular manuscripts were catalogued in the middle of the fifteenth century and classified according to content.35 For instance, the category J was reserved for manuscripts dealing with hagiography in the widest sense of the word. The category N was reserved for codices dealing with historical and monastic matters. Whereas in category J we find the legendaries and Lives of individual saints, including, by the way, Catherine of Siena, Dorothea of Montau, and even the prophecies of ‘saint’ Hildegard of Bingen, the very conscientious librarian placed all the Sister-books in category N.36 Let me briefly summarize my observations: in literature dealing with the mystical and paramystical experiences of blessed individuals, the genre in which biographical material is related obviously played a decisive role in how and to what degree holiness was perceived. The absolute prerequisite for even being considered to be of saintly stature in the ecclesiastical sense is a vita that conveys associations with traditional hagiography to the reader. Most compelling is a Latin vita composed by a learned member of the clergy. However, because of strong reservations about women mystics in academic circles, none of these putative saints except Gertrud of Helfta ever received such recognition. The contents of vernacular legendaries and the legends

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added in the process of their circulation offer excellent corroboration for these general observations. Women mystics with only vernacular vitae were not given any form of official consideration for possible sainthood by the Church, even if a cult of sorts had developed locally or within an order. However, it appears that ecclesiastical recognition in any case was of little or no importance to the mystically interested e´lite of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The manuscript circulation of vernacular mystical vitae shows that there were no definitive criteria for how holiness was perceived among the illiterati. In some manuscripts of a vita a mystic can merely be called sister and in others elevated to the status of beata or even sancta. However, a vast number of manuscripts clearly demonstrate that even the vitae of those to whom spontaneously saintly qualities were attested by enthusiastic scribes were not actually perceived as true saints, since their biographies were seen as works belonging to a flexible body of literature dealing with mystical spirituality in its widest sense. The broad tradition of the ‘mystische Sammelhandschrift’ attests to a distinct ‘categorization’ of this literature in the late Middle Ages. It was a ‘category’ of vernacular literature primarily created by women to which learned men almost always contributed. Even though Church authorities did not look favorably upon women experimenting with radical forms of spirituality, because of the possibility that it could lead to problematic forms of independence from Church institutions and doctrine, the vast popularity of mystical literature shows that this restrictive attitude had little effect on reducing the great appeal of these forms of personal piety to women,37 for mystical spirituality offered opportunities of achieving a degree of saintliness not dependent on extraordinary deeds and, moreover, on the official approval of the Church.

Notes 1 H. Grundmann, Religio¨se Bewegungen im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen u¨ber die geschichtlichen Zusammenha¨nge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religio¨sen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und u¨ber die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der Mystik, Berlin, 1935; repr. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 4th ed., 1977, 402–38. 2 W. Williams-Krapp, ‘‘ ‘Dise ding sint dennoch nit ware zeichen der heiligkeit’: Zur Bewertung mystischer Erfahrung im 15. Jahrhundert,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Literatur und Linguistik, 20 (1990), 61–71; P. Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffa¨lliger Frauen im Mittelalter und Fru¨hneuzeit, Zu¨rich, Artemis, 1995; repr. Hamburg, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997, 109–19. 3 Dinzelbacher, 1997, 26–8. 4 L. Volken, Die Offenbarungen in der Kirche, Innsbruck, Verlagsanstalt Tyrolia, 1965, 87–90. Martin Luther and John Calvin continue this tradition of mistrust by ridiculing women mystics (90–3). In the fifteenth century women mystics could be threatened with extreme punishment (including excommunication) if they dared to write about their experiences; see Dinzelbacher, 1997, 110–12. 5 A. Vauchez, La saintete´ en Occident aux derniers sie`cles du Moyen Age d’apre`s les proce`s de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, Rome, Ećole Française, 1981; now also available in English: Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell, introd. R. Kieckhefer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 407–12 and 420.


217

6 C. Ruhrberg, Der literarische Ko¨rper der Heiligen: Leben und Viten der Christina von Stommeln (1242–1312) (Bibliotheca Germanica 35), Tu¨bingen and Basle, Francke, 1995, 157–9. Ruhrberg sees the genre difference primarily in the length of the text. 7 For the methodology used in this article see W. Williams-Krapp, ‘‘Die U¨berlieferungsgeschichtliche Methode – Ru¨ckblick und Ausblick,’’ Internationales Archiv fu¨r Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 25, 2 (2000), 1–21. 8 W. Williams-Krapp, Die deutschen und niederla¨ndischen Legendare des Mittelalters: Studien zu ihrer U¨berlieferungs-, Text- und Wirkungsgeschichte (Texte und Textgeschichte 20), Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer, 1986. 9 The legendary Das Buch von den heiligen Ma¨gden und Frauen was written by the Cistercian nun Margaretha ‘‘dicta Regula’’ in Lichtental near Baden-Baden and contains 57 Lives of female saints; cf. K. Kunze, ‘‘Alemannische Legendare (I),’’ Alemannisches Jahrbuch 1971/72, Bu¨hl, Konkordia Verlag, 1973, 20–45, here 29–38; Williams-Krapp, 1986, 363–5; E. Feistner, Historische Typologie der deutschen Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters von der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts bis zur Reformation (Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter 20), Wiesbaden, Reichert, 1995, 292–306. 10 Williams-Krapp, 1986, 256, 258, 310. The Gertrud-vita in the lost manuscript J XXII from St Catherine’s in Nuremberg was frequently used in the ‘‘lectio ad mensam’’; see P. Ruf (ed.), Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz, Band III/3: Bistum Bamberg, Munich, 1939; repr. Munich, Beck, 1961, 639–50 ‘‘von sant Druta.’’ In S. Ringler’s article ‘‘Die Rezeption Gertruds von Helfta im Bereich su¨ddeutscher Frauenklo¨ster,’’ in M. Bangert and H. Keul (eds), ‘Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht’: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, Leipzig, Benno-Verlag, 1998, 134–55, the German vita is not considered. 11 Cf. K. Ruh, Geschichte der abendla¨ndischen Mystik. Band. II: Frauenmystik und franziskanische Mystik der Fru¨hzeit, Munich, Beck, 1993, 314–37. 12 O. Wieland, Gertrud von Helfta, ein botte der go¨tlichen miltekeit (Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 22, Erga¨nzungsband), Augsburg, Winfried Werk, 1973. 13 Cf. Ruh, 1993, 290–1. 14 Ibid., 255–6. 15 In a letter accompanying a copy of Mechthild’s work that he sent to Margarete Ebner in 1345, Heinrich writes: ‘‘Ich send euch ain buch das haisst Das liecht der gothait.’’ See Margarete Ebner und Heinrich von No¨rdlingen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik, ed. P. Strauch, Freiburg and Tu¨bingen, J. C. B. Mohr, 1882; repr. Amsterdam, P. Schippers, 1966, 246. 16 Only in the Colmar manuscript is she called ‘‘sant mehthilden.’’ Excerpts from The Flowing Light are almost always to be found in the context of other mystical works, generally without naming Mechthild as the author. Even the Einsiedeln manuscript does not divulge her name at the beginning of the text. Furthermore, Mechthild never mentions her own name in The Flowing Light; it appears only in a few chapter headings, which were added later, most probably in Basle. See H. Neumann (ed.), Mechthild von Magdeburg, ‘Das fließende Licht der Gottheit,’ Band II: Untersuchungen, erga¨nzt und zum Druck eingerichtet von G. Vollmann-Profe (Mu¨nchener Texte und Untersuchungen 101), Munich, Artemis, 1993, 201–6. At the end of book VI in the Einsiedeln manuscript a scribe characterizes ‘sister’ Mechthild as a medium between God and mankind; no mention is made of mystical or paramystical experiences and no attempt is made to attribute sanctity to her: ‘‘Dise schrift, die in disem buche stat, die ist gevlossen us von der lebenden gotheit swester in Mehtilden herze und ist also getru´welich hie gesetzet, alse si us von irme herzen gegeben ist von gotte und geschriben mit iren henden’’; see ibid., Band I: Text (Mu¨nchener Texte und Untersuchungen 100), besorgt von G. VollmannProfe, Munich, Artemis, 1990, 251. 17 A. Triller, ‘‘Marienwerder, Johannes,’’ in K. Ruh et al. (eds), Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., vol. VI, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 1987, 56–61. 18 W. Williams-Krapp, ‘‘Nikolaus von Nu¨rnberg (I),’’ in ibidem, 1124–6. 19 Cf. Ruhrberg, 1995, 329–45. 20 Cf. P. Dinzelbacher and R. Vogeler (eds.), Leben und Offenbarungen der Wiener Begine Agnes Blannbekin (d. 1315) (Go¨ppinger Arbeiten zur a¨lteren Germanistik 419), Go¨ppingen, Ku¨mmerle, 1994. 21 Cf. W. Williams-Krapp, ‘‘Frauenmystik und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert,’’ in J. Heinzle et al. (eds), Literarische Interessenbildung: DFG-Symposion 1991 (Germanistische Symposien, Berichtsba¨nde 14), Stuttgart and Weimar, Metzler, 1993, 301–13, here 307–10. 22 Vauchez, 1981, 85–103.

218


23 U. Williams, Die alemannischen Vitaspatrum: Untersuchungen und Edition (Texte und Textgeschichte 45), Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer, 1996; K. Kunze, U. Williams, and P. Kaiser, ‘‘Information und innere Formung: Zur Rezeption der ‘Vitaspatrum,’ ’’ in N. R. Wolf (ed.), Wissensorganisierende und wissensvermittelnde Literatur im Mittelalter: Perspektiven ihrer Erforschung. Kolloquium 5.-7. Dezember 1985, Wiesbaden, Reichert, 1987, 123–42. 24 Cf. W. Williams-Krapp, ‘ ‘‘Nucleus totius perfectionis’: Die Altva¨terspiritualita¨t in der ‘Vita’ Heinrich Seuses,’’ in J. Janota et al. (eds), Festschrift Walter Haug und Burghart Wachinger, 2 vols, 1, Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer, 1992, 405–21. 25 S. Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklo¨stern des Mittelalters: Quellen und Studien (Mu¨nchener Texte und Untersuchungen 72), Munich, Beck, 1980, 353–9. 26 In Nu¨rnberg, Stadtbibliothek, Cod. Cent. V, App. 99, Christine Ebner is called ‘‘Die selige Cristen Ebnerinn.’’ 27 The manuscripts frequently mention his name. His Vita is often simply titled as Der Seuse. In the library catalogue of St Catherine’s in Nuremberg he is called ‘‘der selige pruder Seuse’’ in manuscripts of Das Bu¨chlein der ewigen Weisheit. 28 M. Wehrli-Johns, ‘‘Das ‘Exemplar’ – Eine Reformschrift der Dominikanerobservanz? Untersuchungen zum Johannesmotiv im ‘Horologium’ und in der ‘Vita’ Heinrich Seuses,’’ in V. Mertens et al. (eds), Predigt im Kontext, Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer, 2002, in press. 29 Cf. A. Walz, ‘‘Der Kult Heinrich Seuses,’’ in E. M. Filthaut (ed.), Heinrich Seuse: Studien zum 600. Todestag 1366–1966, Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Verlag, 1966, 437–54. 30 Cf. W. Williams-Krapp, ‘‘Kultpflege und literarische U¨berlieferung: Zur deutschen Hagiographie der Dominikaner im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert,’’ in A. Schnyder et al. (eds), ‘‘Ist mir getroumet mıˆn leben?’’ Festschrift fu¨r Karl-Ernst Geith zum 65. Geburtstag (Go¨ppinger Arbeiten zur a¨lteren Germanistik 632), Go¨ppingen, Ku¨mmerle, 1998, 147–73, here 168–70. 31 Ringler, 1980; S. Bu¨rkle, Literatur im Kloster: Historische Funktion und rhetorische Legitimation frauenmystischer Texte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Bibliotheca Germanica 38), Tu¨bingen and Basle, Francke, 1999. For an English introduction to these works see G. Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Studies and Texts 125), Toronto, Pontifical Institute, 1996. 32 The only Sister-book written in the fifteenth century is the Scho¨nensteinbacher Schwesternbuch, authored by the Dominican historian Johannes Meyer. It is remarkably never considered in scholarship dealing with this genre; edited in Johannes Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens. I, II und III Buch: ed. B. Maria Reichert (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Dominikanerordens in Deutschland 2), Leipzig, Harrassowitz Verlag, 1909. 33 Gerardus de Fracheto OP, Vitae Fratrum ordinis praedicatorum necnon cronica ordinis ab anno MCCIII usque MCCLIV. . . : ed. B. Maria Reichert (Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum Historica 1), Leuven, Charpentier & Schoonjans, 1896. 34 Bu¨rkle, 1999, 162–70. 35 Ruf, 1939, 570–637. 36 Ibid., 633–4. For example, in the To¨sser Schwesternbuch the sisters are always described as ‘‘selig’’; the title given the work is das bu¨ch der seligen swestern predier ordens von dem closter To¨sse; see F. Fetter (ed.), Das Leben der Schwestern zu To¨ß beschrieben von Elsbeth Stagel . . . , Berlin, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1906, 1. 37 An excellent example for the continuing popularity of mystical spirituality after the fourteenth century is the highly unique ‘mystical diary’ (1418–20) of the Nuremberg widow Katharina Tucher. See U. Williams and W. Williams-Krapp (eds), Die ‘Offenbarungen’ der Katharina Tucher (Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte 98), Tu¨bingen, Niemeyer Verlag, 1998.

Index

Achler, Elsbeth see Elsbeth Achler Acta Sanctorum 12–13, 41 Aelred see Life of Aelred Agnes Blannbekin 211–12 Alexius: criticisms 111; cult of 98–9, 100–2, 104, 106–7, 111, 126–36; dramatic portrayals 112, 113, 136; as exemplar 103–4; legend 95– 6, 97–8, 104, 112; legend (development) 107–10, 113; legend (dissemination) 98–9, 101–7; and Mary veneration 108; patron of Boniface monastery 98–9, 100, 101; relics 127, 130, 131; texts (early) 93–4, 95, 96–8, 100, 126; texts (medieval) 94, 98–100, 101–2, 103–4, 107, 108–10, 125–6, 127–36; texts (post-medieval) 110–11, 112; texts (vernacular) 103, 104–6, 129–36; visual portrayals 106, 112–13, 127, 129, 130, 132, 135, 136; visual portrayals (frescoes) 106, 128; wife 108–9, 128 altars: and relics 29–30 Ambrose: and relics 29–30 ancestor worship 27–8 angels: and sainthood 150, 152 Anselm: on faith and reason 196–7; see also Life of Anselm Apollonius: as a Christian saint 88; cult of 79, 88; divinity of 84–5; see also In Honor of Apollonius the Tyanean architecture: and eschatology 153–4; of St Michael’s Monastery 153–5, 158–9; see also building Arnulf of Oudenburg: biography 59–60; canonization 65–6; confusion with Arnulf, bishop of Metz 59, 60–1; legends 61–2; Lives 58, 59–60, 62, 65, 66, 73; miracles 62–6; patron of brewers 61–2; as peacemaker 64–5, 66; sacred places 73 Athanasius: Vita Antonii 82, 87–8, 185, 190 Augustine of Hippo: on angels 150; on the house of God 149; on relics 29, 32–3

Benedict XIV, Pope 4, 8 Benevenuto of Eugebio 170

Bernward of Hildesheim: art commissioned 145; canonization process 156–9; concept of saintliness 146–7, 148–51; concept of temple building 146, 150; and Henry II’s coronation 155, 156–7; preparations for sainthood 155; relations with Mainz 154–5, 157; and St Michael’s Monastery 145–8, 150, 151, 152–5 Blannbekin, Agnes see Agnes Blannbekin blasphemy see inner temptation body see human body Bollandists see Acta Sanctorum Bonaventura: concept of the body 171–2, 176; De Imitatione Christi 173–4; Legenda Major 172–3 Boniface church 98, 126 Boniface monastery: dedication to Alexius 98–9, 100, 101; legendary donations to 98, 101–2, 127, 134 brewers: patron of 61–2 building: and penitence 150–1; as a route to sainthood 146, 147, 149, 150–2; see also architecture burial customs 27–8, 30; see also graves

Calybita, John see John Calybita canon law: on sainthood 3–4, 7–8, 49 canonization see sainthood chastity: and sainthood 51; and uncorrupted corpses 31; see also virgin martyrs China: ancestor cult in 27–8 Christ see Jesus Christina of Stommeln 211 Christine of Markyate 103 church building see building churches see house of God convent chronicles 215 coronation: of Henry II 155, 156–7 creation: Franciscan concept 174, 175, 177, 178 cults: of Alexius 98–9, 100–2, 104, 106–7, 111, 126–36; of Apollonius 79, 88; of Eleutherius 44–5; of Gerlach of Houthem 45–7; needed

220

Index

cults (cont.) for sainthood 10, 209; see also ancestor worship; martyr cults; sacred places; sarcophagus saints

Greek culture see Hellenic culture Guigo the Carthusian see Life of Hugh of Grenoble guilt see penitence

De Contemptu Mundi 164–5, 166, 176, 179 De Imitatione Christi 173–4 De Miseria Humanae Conditionis 164–5, 166, 176, 179 defensores see local saints despair: in medieval religious thought 198–9 Dorothea of Montau 211 doubt: and intellectual developments 195; see also inner temptation dramas: about Alexius 112, 113, 136 dualism 175 Dymphna of Gheel 48, 50

hagiography: discourses 13, 42, 47, 84–8, 173; historical value 5; inner temptation in 189–90, 191–9; interiority in 186, 187–90; social agency in 5–6, 15–17; sources 12–13; textual analysis 5–6, 13–16; see also saints; vernacular legendaries; vitae Heinrich of No¨rdlingen: support for women mystics 210, 212–13, 214 Heinrich Suso: vita 214 Hellenic culture: in Philostratus 83–4, 87, 88 Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor: coronation 155, 156–7; and St Michael’s Monastery 147, 152 Hieroen see Jeroen historiography: of the human body 163–4; models 5–6; selection of sources 4–5; standards 3–4 holy see sacred house of God: allegorical interpretations 149 Hugh of Grenoble see Life of Hugh of Grenoble Hugh of Marchiennes see Life of Hugh of Marchiennes human body: concept of Francis of Assisi 167–9, 172–3; early Christian views 29; historiography 163–4; medieval concept of 28, 164–7, 170–5, 176, 177–8; see also incarnation; sex; uncorrupted bodies

Eadmer: Vita Anselmi 185–6, 187, 188–9 Ebner, Margarete see Margarete Ebner Egypt: burial customs 28, 30 Eleutherius, bishop of Tournai 44–5 Elsbeth Achler 212 eschatology: and architecture 153–4 Eucharist: Franciscan concept 174–5 Euphemianus: legendary donations to Boniface monastery 98, 101–2, 127, 134 exemplars: saints as 8, 10–11, 41, 42–3, 44, 45–6 Fall see original sin female religious see women fictional saints see legendary saints founders see local saints Francis of Assisi: concept of the body 167–9, 172–3; conversion 167; Rule 168; vita 172–3 Franciscans: concept of the body 170–2, 176, 177–8; concept of creation 174, 175, 177, 178; concept of the Eucharist 174–5; concept of imitatio Christi 168–9, 171–2, 173–4; concept of incarnation 174–5, 178; concept of love 174; concept of suffering 179; pastoral theology 175–6; teachings on sex 176–7; see also Bonaventura Gandersheim: rights to the convent 155, 157 genres see literary genres Gerlach of Houthem 45–7 Gertrud of Helfta: claims to sainthood 209 Girard of Saint-Aubin: temptation of 192, 193 Gistel Abbey: foundation of 68, 69 Gnadenviten see vitae: vernacular Godehard of Hildesheim: canonization 157–8 Godelieve of Gistel 59; canonization 69; Lives 67–9, 70–1, 73; miracles 69–71 graves: sacred power of 31–2, 47, 48–9, 49–50, 66; see also burial customs; sarcophagus saints

icons: saints as 11–12 imitatio Christi: in Franciscan thought 168–9, 171–2, 173–4 In Honor of Apollonius the Tyanean: genre 81–2; hagiographic characteristics 82–3, 84–8; objectives 87–8; performative function 86–7; sources 79–80; stylization of 85–6; summary 80–1; virtutes in 87 incarnation: Franciscan concept 174–5, 178; medieval concepts 166 incorruptible see uncorrupted individuality: and interiority 187–8 indulgences: and relics 33–4; see also penitence inner temptation: in hagiography 189–90, 191–9; strategies against 197–9 Innocent III see Lothario de Segni intellectual developments: and doubt 195 intercession: by saints 9, 73–4; see also miracles interiority: concept of 186, 187–8; in hagiography 186, 187–90; see also despair; inner temptation Jacobus de Voragine 42–3; see also Legenda Aurea Jeroen of Noordwijk 47–8, 50 Jesus: relics of 33, 34

Index John Calybita 98, 100, 126 Josephus Hymnographos: Alexius canon 95, 126 Judas: despair of 198

221

mystical writings: categorization of 209–11; language of 213 nuns see women

knight saints 45–7, 103–4 Lambertini, Cardinal 4, 7 Landrada 38–9, 44 Legend of Saint Godelieve 67–9, 70–1, 73 Legenda Aurea 41, 42, 105, 132, 198 Legenda Major 172–3 legendaries see vernacular legendaries legendary saints 38–9, 41–2, 47–9, 50–2, 208 Life of Aelred 185–6, 195; interiority in 187–8 Life of Anselm 185–6, 187, 188–9 Life of Antony 82, 87–8, 185, 190 Life of Apollonius see In Honor of Apollonius the Tyanean Life of Bernward 156–8 Life of Hugh of Grenoble 185–6, 189; inner temptations in 189–92, 193, 194, 196 Life of Hugh of Marchiennes 185–6, 195, 199; inner temptation in 193–4 literary genres 81–2; medieval concepts 207–8, 215–16 Lives of saints see vitae Lives of the Sophists 83–4, 85 living saints 10–11, 41, 45–7 local saints 41, 44–5; as potential saints 151 Lothario de Segni, De Miseria Humanae Conditionis 164–5, 166, 176, 179 love: in Franciscan thought 174 Lull, Ramon: concept of the body 177–8 Lutgart of Tongres 10–11 Mainz: Bernward of Hildesheim’s relations with 154–5, 157; bronze Cathedral doors 154–5 Margarete Ebner 214 marriage see sex martyr cults: development of 29 martyrs see virgin martyrs Mary: relics of 33; veneration of 108 Mary of Oignies 10, 39–40 Mass see Eucharist Mechthild of Magdeburg: claim to sainthood 209–10 merit: and salvation 146, 148–50 Michaeliskloster see St Michael’s Monastery miracles: of Arnulf of Oudenburg 62–6; of Godelieve of Gistel 69–71; required for sainthood 3–4 Mirror of Faith 189, 197–8 missionaries see local saints monastery building see building mulieres sanctae see living saints

Oda of Sint-Oedenrode 48, 50, 51 Odrada 48, 50 original sin: effects on the body 165, 166, 171–2 Otloh of Sankt-Emmeram: inner temptations 194–5, 196, 197 Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor: and St Michael’s Monastery 146, 152–3 parishes: development of 17 pastoral care: Franciscan practice 175–6 patrons see local saints penitence: and sainthood 150–1; see also indulgences Philostratus: and Hellenic culture 83–4, 87, 88; Lives of the Sophists 83–4, 85; see also In Honor of Apollonius the Tyanean pilgrimages: to graves 32 Pinius, Joannes 96 postmodernism: limitations of 5–6 ‘power stations’ of the holy 9, 27, 46–7, 49–50, 65, 66 relics: of Alexius 127, 130, 131; of ancestors 27; authentication of 33; division of 32–3; early history 29–30; and indulgences 33–4; post-medieval attitudes 34; real presence of saints in 29, 30; and sacred places 73; sacred power 31–2; in St Michael’s Monastery 145, 153, 158–9 reliquary statues 33 resurrection: Chinese and Egyptian concepts 28; Christian views 29, 30 Robert of Arbrissel 192–3, 195 sacred places 15; development of 38–9, 71–3; as ‘power stations’ 9, 27, 46–7, 49–50, 65, 66; and relics 73; see also graves St Michael’s Monastery (Hildesheim): architecture 153–5, 158–9; foundation 145– 8, 150, 151, 152–5; and Henry II 147, 152; and Otto III 146, 152–3; relics in 145, 153, 158–9 sainthood: and angels 150, 152; and chastity 51; of founders 151; and penitence 150–1; requirements 3–4, 7–8, 9, 10, 43, 49, 209–10; through building 146, 147, 149, 150–2; of women mystics 209–12, 214 saintliness: concept of Bernward of Hildesheim 146–7, 148–51; and literary genres 215–16; medieval concepts 8–12, 43– 4, 49–52, 208, 216; see also vestigia

222

Index

saints: definition 3; as exemplars 8, 10–11, 41, 42–3, 44, 45–6; as icons 11–12; as intercessors 9, 73–4; legendary 38–9, 41–2, 47–9, 50–2, 208; real presence in relics 29, 30; uncorrupted bodies of 30–1, 166, 179; universal 41, 42–4; veneration 39–41, 44–5; see also cults; hagiography; knight saints; living saints; local saints; miracles; relics; sarcophagus saints; vitae salvation: and merit 146, 148–50 sanctity see saintliness ‘sante vive’ see living saints sarcophagus saints 41–2, 45 Schwesternbu¨cher 214–15 sex: Franciscan teachings 176–7 sexual abstinence see chastity sin see indulgences; original sin; penitence Sister-books 214–15 social agency: in hagiography 5–6, 15–17 sources: of hagiography 12–13; selection 4–5 Speculum Fidei 189, 197–8 statues: reliquary 33 suffering: Franciscan concept 179; see also imitatio Christi Suso, Heinrich see Heinrich Suso temple building see building temples see house of God temptation see inner temptation textual analysis 5–6, 13–16 theater see drama topolatry see sacred places transubstantiation see Eucharist Umiliana dei Cerchi: concept of the body 170–1 uncorrupted bodies: of saints 30–1, 166, 179

universal saints 41, 42–4 veneration see ancestor worship; cults; saints: veneration vernacular legendaries: women mystics in 208–9 vernacular vitae 209–10, 213–14 vestigia: and inward qualities 168–9, 171 virgin martyrs 9; see also chastity; Godelieve of Gistel Virgin Mary see Mary virtutes: in In Honor of Apollonius the Tyanean 87 vitae 12–13; categories of 41–2, 185; concepts of the body in 170–5; required for sainthood 8, 209–10; thirteenth-century growth in 40– 1, 42–4, 45, 50–1; vernacular 209–10, 213– 14; of women 12–13, 209–14; see also Acta Sanctorum; In Honor of Apollonius the Tyanean; Legenda Major; Legend of Saint Godelieve; headings beginning with Life Vitaspatrum 213 Walter Daniel see Life of Aelred wells: as sacred places 65, 71, 72, 73 William of Saint-Thierry: Mirror of Faith 189, 197–8 women: in the Acta Sanctorum 12–13; concepts of the body 170–1; veneration of Alexius 103; see also Alexius: wife women mystics: Church attitudes to 206–7, 212–13; possibility of sainthood 209–12, 214; in vernacular legendaries 208–9; vitae (Latin) 12, 13, 209, 211–12; vitae (vernacular) 209–10, 213–14; see also Sisterbooks

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